Oya

The first sign is never the thunder. It is the cool that lands on the back of the neck, the way palm fronds flip silver side up all at once, the smell of wet dust lifting off a compound floor that has not taken rain in four months. Then a door slams itself somewhere behind the house. In the old towns of the Oyo hinterland the name gets said before anyone has bothered to look at the sky.

Ọya. The word is built from ó ya, “she tore,” and Yorùbá speakers have never let that etymology soften into decoration. She is the tearing itself: the gust that strips a roof, the funnel that walks across farmland and takes the yams with it, the wind that runs ahead of Shango’s fire and clears the ground for it.

The tradition remembers her as a woman first. She came from Ira, a town in what is now Kwara State in Nigeria, and she married into the palace at Oyo, becoming a wife of Shango, the Alaafin who was afterwards counted among the orisa. Her marriages are told in a sequence that shifts with the teller: Ogun the ironworker before Shango, and the farming deity Oko after him. What holds steady across every version is the temperature of the woman herself. She is not the consort who waits at home. She rides out.

Then there is the buffalo. Ogun was at the river when he saw her, or a hunter was, depending on who is doing the telling. A great horned animal came up out of the water and shed its shape the way a woman sheds a wrapper, and the man who watched it happen followed her into the market and asked to marry her before the day was out. She agreed on one condition, that he tell nobody what he had seen. He kept it for a while. When the secret got loose she said nothing at all, walked out of his compound, took the horns back and went into the water.

That water is the Niger. Yorùbá calls it Odò-Ọya, Oya’s river, and she is its patron. Some accounts put her in it through grief rather than insult, saying she went under after Shango died and came back up an orisa. The buffalo remains her chief emblem, her priests may not kill one, and the horns sit in her shrines where another deity would keep a staff.

Her second domain is stranger, and it is the one that sets her apart from every other orisa. She has authority over the Egúngún, the ancestral dead who return wrapped in layered cloth to walk among the living. The reason given is a dance. Babalú Ayé, the orisa of epidemic disease, was moved by her nerve when she danced for him and handed her command of the returning dead. However it was arranged, the outcome is that the dead answer to a woman made of wind, and her devotees stand comfortably on ground the other orisa keep away from.

She is called Ọya Ìyáńsàn-án, mother of nine, and the accounts of where the nine comes from do not agree. One holds that she was barren for years, was told by a babalawo what to sacrifice, and afterwards bore nine children by Oko. Another counts the tributaries feeding the Niger. Nine follows her either way: nine strips of colour stitched onto a devotee’s maroon cap, nine tines on a copper crown, nine miniature iron tools hung from its band for lightning, for death, for the cemetery.

Copper is her metal, and the fact that it is a red metal is the point. Her colours run maroon and burgundy and wine, with the nine shades scattered through them, and the objects that mark her out are a copper sword or machete and the iruke, a horsetail fly-whisk. That whisk is a Yorùbá emblem of kingship in any hand. In hers it is the instrument that drives the dead.

When people from the Oyo territories were seized and sold across the Atlantic, Oya went with them. In Bahia she is Iansã, queen of the Niger and mother of nine, greeted with the shout Eparrei and fed àkàrà, fritters of crushed black-eyed peas hissing in red palm oil. In Cuba she is Oyá, her sacred objects kept in a porcelain vessel beneath that copper crown, and the caps her devotees wear during ritual work carry the nine colours on maroon. Catholic saints were laid over her where cover was needed: Saint Barbara in Brazil, Saint Teresa of Ávila and the Virgin of Candelaria in Cuba. Inside Yorubaland her worship was for a long stretch confined to country the Oyo Empire controlled. It travelled further as cargo than it ever did as mission.

What she can do follows from what she is. She works at every scale the air offers, from the breath that flips a leaf to the storm front that takes a whole season of farming with it, and the same weather that ruins one compound saves the next by finally breaking a drought. She commands the Egúngún outright, which means she can open and close the traffic between the living and their ancestors. Lightning is hers as well, although whose lightning it really is has never been settled: some tellings give the bolt to Shango and grant Oya only the gale that arrives first, others have her holding the thunderbolt in her own right and declining to give it back.

Her limits are the limits of a temper and a secret. The buffalo marriage ends the instant a man cannot keep quiet, and it ends without a word of argument, because she does not negotiate and she does not return. The taboos ringed around her are unforgiving, and a devotee who eats pumpkin or mutton or stingray has broken something that is not easily mended. Before the sacrifice she was barren, and the tradition makes no attempt to hide that the mother of nine spent years as the mother of none. And for all her force, the wind that clears the ground is not the fire. She goes first and she goes hardest, and something else lands behind her.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Oya in Yoruba religion?

Oya is the Yoruba orisa of wind, lightning and storms, and one of the principal female deities of the pantheon. She came from the town of Ira in present-day Kwara State, Nigeria, and became a wife of Shango, the Alaafin of Oyo. She is also the patron of the Niger River, which Yorùbá calls Odò-Ọya.

Why is Oya associated with the buffalo?

Oya can shift into a great horned buffalo, and the animal is her chief emblem. In the best-known story, Ogun or a hunter watched her rise from the river as a buffalo and change into a woman, married her on the promise that he would keep the secret, and lost her the moment it got out. Her priests are forbidden to kill a buffalo, and its horns are kept in her shrines.

What power does Oya have over the dead?

Oya commands the Egúngún, the ancestral dead who return wrapped in cloth, and she is the only orisa said to hold that authority. The tradition credits it to Babalú Ayé, the orisa of epidemic disease, who granted her the power after she danced for him. Her ritual objects include nine miniature tools that stand for lightning, death and the cemetery.

Why is Oya called the mother of nine?

Her epithet Ọya Ìyáńsàn-án means “mother of nine,” and the sources disagree about the origin. One account says she was barren for years until a babalawo prescribed a sacrifice, after which she bore nine children by the deity Oko. Another counts the tributaries of the Niger. Nine recurs throughout her worship, from the tines of her copper crown to the nine colours on a devotee’s maroon cap.

What is Oya called in Brazil and Cuba?

In Brazilian Candomblé she is Iansã, saluted with the cry Eparrei and offered àkàrà, fried black-eyed pea fritters. In Cuban tradition she is Oyá, her sacred objects housed in a vessel under a copper crown. She was syncretised with Saint Barbara in Brazil and with Saint Teresa of Ávila and the Virgin of Candelaria in Cuba.

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