By Maroof Asudemade

This piece is a response to Yeye Bamidele Ademola-Olateju ‘s profound description of Orunmila as ‘the mathematician who counted the world. Two things amaze me in Yeye’s writings: the literary elegance and the less tendentious nature of her writings.

There is something admirable about the impulse behind the description of Orunmila as “the mathematician who counted the world.” After generations in which African intellectual traditions were casually dismissed as superstition, folklore and primitive belief, there is an understandable desire to reclaim the sophistication of our ancestors and to insist that Africa possessed systems of thought worthy of serious intellectual consideration long before colonialism arrived.

But in our legitimate effort to correct the distortions of colonial scholarship, we must be careful not to create new distortions of our own. This is what I mean.

Orunmila does not need to be transformed into a mathematician before we can appreciate his intellectual greatness. Indeed, there is a danger in the increasingly fashionable tendency to take every sophisticated feature of an indigenous African knowledge system and translate it into the vocabulary of modern Western academia. If a traditional system contains numerical patterns, we call it mathematics. If it contains observations about nature, we call it science. If it contains moral reasoning, we call it philosophy. If it contains methods of social organisation, we call it democracy. Sometimes such comparisons are useful. But sometimes they reveal something uncomfortable about us: the lingering assumption that our intellectual traditions become respectable only when they can be made to resemble categories that the West has already legitimised.

The claim that Orunmila was “first and before anything else, a mathematician” therefore deserves much greater scrutiny.

There is no doubt that Ifa contains remarkable mathematical structures. The sixteen principal Odu and their combinations into 256 Odu constitute an elaborate system of classification and symbolic organisation. UNESCO describes the Ifa divination system as possessing an extensive corpus of texts and mathematical formulas, with its 256 Odu divided into numerous verses that preserve aspects of Yorùbá history, language, beliefs, cosmology and social experience. Isn’t that extraordinary?

But mathematics contained within a cultural system does not automatically establish the historical profession or biography of the person associated with that system. We must distinguish between the mathematical sophistication of Ifa and the historical claim that Orunmila personally invented its mathematical architecture. The distinction is not pedantic. It is fundamental.

To say that sixteen multiplied by sixteen produces 256 is mathematics. To say that the existence of this structure proves that Orunmila was an ancient mathematician requires an entirely different kind of evidence. We do not possess sufficient historical evidence to make that leap with the certainty displayed in the original argument. The same problem becomes even more apparent when the Yoruba numerical system is brought into the discussion.

Yoruba numeration is undeniably sophisticated. Its vigesimal structure, its use of twenty as a numerical base, and its employment of addition, subtraction and multiplication demonstrate an impressive linguistic and intellectual treatment of number. Expressions such as ogún, ogójì, àádọ́ta and ẹ̀ẹ́dógún reveal a numerical grammar very different from the decimal system familiar to most modern people. But where is the evidence that Orunmila designed it? There is no reliable historical basis for that assertion.

A numerical system does not necessarily have an identifiable inventor. Languages evolve. Counting practices develop. Commercial activity, measurements, bodily counting, social organisation and cultural conventions can all influence the emergence of numerical systems. The fact that a system is sophisticated does not mean that a single genius sat down one day and designed it. To say that “someone designed it” is therefore not equivalent to demonstrating that Orunmila designed it. This is where intellectual enthusiasm must yield to historical discipline.

There is another, even more fundamental difficulty with the argument that “before he was deified, Orunmila was a man who thought.” Perhaps there was an historical person behind the Orunmila tradition. That possibility cannot simply be dismissed. Oral traditions often preserve memories of real people while transforming, embellishing or sacralising their lives across generations. It is entirely reasonable to investigate whether the figure of Orunmila contains historical layers. But possibility is not evidence. We cannot turn a theological tradition into a modern biography merely because we prefer the biography.

Within Yoruba religious thought, Ọrunmila is far more than a clever man who was eventually mistaken for a god. He occupies a profound place within the cosmological and spiritual architecture of Ifa. He is associated with wisdom, knowledge, destiny and divination. To reduce him to an ancient mathematician in order to rescue him from the category of “mythology” may actually misunderstand the tradition we claim to be defending.

The irony is that this attempt at intellectual rehabilitation may itself contain a colonial assumption: that a historical human being is somehow more intellectually respectable than a sacred figure. Why should that be so? Why must Orunmila be converted into a mathematician before we can take him seriously? Why must Ifa become “science” before we acknowledge that it represents an extraordinarily sophisticated indigenous system of knowledge?

Ifa deserves to be studied as Ifa. Its corpus represents an enormous accumulation of poetry, narrative, ethical instruction, philosophical reflection, social observation, cosmology and ritual knowledge transmitted across generations through an extraordinary oral tradition. The achievement is not diminished because it does not conform neatly to the methodological boundaries of a modern university department. Indeed, there is something far more intellectually honest, and perhaps far more impressive, in acknowledging that Ifa represents a different epistemological tradition.

The argument that Ifa constitutes “empirical knowledge production” also requires caution. Its verses undoubtedly preserve observations about human behaviour, social relationships, conflict, prosperity, misfortune, morality and the consequences of choices. In that sense, they represent accumulated cultural experience. But accumulated traditional knowledge is not automatically empirical science.

Science has particular procedures involving systematic observation, hypothesis, testing, replication and falsification. Ifa operates within a different epistemological and spiritual framework. To insist that it must be called science before it can be respected is to impose an external standard upon it. We should neither romanticise Ifa nor demean it. We should understand it. And understanding requires us to resist both colonial contempt and nationalist exaggeration.

The comparison with Pythagoras is therefore unnecessary. Pythagoras himself exists at the complicated intersection of history, philosophy, mathematics and legend. Ancient traditions attributed extraordinary knowledge to him, just as traditions surrounding many revered figures elsewhere accumulated layers of sacred narrative. But Orunmila does not need to become a Yorùbá Pythagoras. Yoruba civilisation does not require a local equivalent of a Greek intellectual hero before its own intellectual achievements can command respect. That impulse itself deserves interrogation.

Perhaps the real achievement is considerably larger than the claim that one man invented a mathematical system. It is that generations of Yoruba intellectuals, priests, poets, scholars and custodians developed, organised, memorised and transmitted an immense body of knowledge through an oral system of extraordinary complexity. The 256 Odus are not merely numerical combinations. They serve as gateways into an enormous corpus of verses, narratives, proverbs, ethical teachings, prescriptions and interpretations.

That is a civilisation thinking. That is a civilisation remembering. That is a civilisation organising experience into a system through which successive generations could interrogate life, morality, destiny and the human condition. And perhaps that is precisely where we should locate Orunmila’s greatness. Not necessarily in the claim that he was a mathematician in the modern sense, but in the intellectual tradition with which his name became inseparably associated.

We should reclaim our ancestors, certainly. But we should reclaim them honestly. We should challenge the colonial habit of reducing African knowledge to superstition. We should expose the arrogance that assumes sophisticated intellectual systems could not have emerged in Africa without European instruction. We should study Ifa rigorously, document its corpus, analyse its numerical structures, investigate its history and subject its claims to serious scholarly inquiry.

But we must not replace colonial dismissal with romantic invention. There is no need to manufacture an African Pythagoras. There is no need to force Orunmila into the laboratory, the mathematics department or the philosophy faculty merely to make him worthy of our admiration. Orunmila does not need to be a mathematician. Ifa’s intellectual sophistication is enough.

Our ancestors do not become greater when we make them resemble the intellectual heroes of another civilisation. They become greater when we learn to understand them on their own terms. The real task of decolonisation is not to prove that our ancestors were secretly doing exactly what Europeans later called mathematics, science or philosophy. It is to recover the confidence to recognise that they were thinking profoundly about the world long before anyone arrived to give their thinking a European name.