Oba Adedayo Olusina Adekoya ( Erinsiba 1), Legusen of Legusenland, the traditional ruler of Ode Ule, Ogun State is a doctor, a thoroughbred herbalist and head of African traditional religion worldwide-Isese Agbaye. He told GBENGA ADERANTI that he sometimes resorts to divination to seek solution to the problems of his patients.
What is your group all about?
Isese is the religion of our ancestors, the umbrella body of All African religions, beliefs, practices, norms and folklores. The African religion is Isese Agbaye, it is the origin of all other religious practices.
You said government has not been fair on issue of religion, what is this talk all about?
First of all we want fairness; it is not fair to ignore some people. Secondly, equity, whatever the data anybody bandies around we know we constitute the majority is this country. So when you concentrate attention on a section of the religion in the country and this attention is unfairly given, we feel cheated and we want fairness.
The moral issues that are troubling the country are based on religious teachings. You would not find any an Isese person after swearing with what he or she believes in telling lies. This is because you know that whatever you said will be counted against you. So, if an Isese person swears in the name of Sango, the god of thunder or in the name of Ogun the god of iron, or in the name of Amadiora and went ahead to do the wrong thing, that person will surely get punished. If we inject our indigenous religious beliefs into our national life, corruption will end in Nigeria.
In order words, to reorganise our national life and make progress, we need to inject Isese into our system. Our foundation is Isese, we should build on it.
But Isese is Yoruba word, why Yoruba when there are other African languages?
That is the problem we are having in Africa today. We’re all speaking the same language but we seem not to recognise this. We’re speaking Huse language. Go and write Igbo language in Yoruba alphabet, you will understand it pure and simple. In Igbo language, when you say nti (ear in Igbo language) that is eti (ear in Yoruba language), when you say imi (nose) in Igbo language) that is Imun (nose in Yoruba language), onu (mouth in Igbo language) that is enu (mouth in Yoruba language), tell me, what is the difference? So the first set of words or vibrations that we believe first came in sssh. Sssh is nobody’s language, it is language for everybody, around the world.
Do you know the meaning of Yoruba? Yoruba is actually an Arabic word, ‘Yar bawa’ that is the daughter of bawa, that was what the Fulanis were calling the people who were preventing them from colonising what we now call South West of Nigeria.
I’m not a Yoruba man as a matter of fact. I’m an Ode man. You find ugbo in Ilaje, you find ugbo in Ijebu, that is where they call Ijebu Ugbo not Ijebu Igbo as the place is popularly referred to. You find ugbo in Akwa Ibom, you find ugbo in Ibo land, we are the same people. In other words, go to any indigenous shrine in the world, you’re going to meet something that is very common, that is a stone, meteorite that came from the sky. You are also going to find a container; Are we not the same people? We are speaking the variance of the same language, that is Huse language. That religion does not belong to Yoruba alone; it belongs to all of us. You find people in Kalabari in Nigeria, the same people you find in Kalahari Desert in Southern Africa, speaking the same language, the same tradition, the same culture, are we still different people? People have migrated and they are speaking variance of the same language, based on environment they have migrated to a long time ago, that does not mean they are different people. We’re all the same people.
People would want to ask why would some people come together to review ‘dead practices’ like isese?
They are living practices. If 70 per cent of Nigerians are practising something, then, it is not dead. When you say something is dead, it means nobody is practising it. Look at the source of the two latter religions, that is the Christianity and Islamic religions they all derived from the sacrifice Abraham made and was documented in the Bible. Now Judaism derived from that. It was in Deuteronomy they said when Abraham went into the bush or forest and he finished that sacrifice, instead of using his son as advised, he used a ram but there was a stone on which he slaughtered that ram that stone is a meteorite which is what Yoruba people call edan ara.
Islam and Christianity thrive on faith and you see the manifestation in miracles and other forms of super natural things. Do you have this in Isese?
Isese is all encompassing. I was describing to someone how priests and priestesses manifest when they are taken-over by the spirit, they predict, tell you things. If some people went ahead to package the presentation in such a way that suits their needs in a particular system, I think you will not say the thing did not derive from somewhere. That you modified it does not mean it did not come from a place. Although that place that it was coming from may not be able to claim direct authority. They are all modifications of Isese and I can assure you that as an Isese person, healings happen, miracles happen.
Many Nigerian believe in Isese, yet they have failed to openly identify with it, what could have been the reason?
It is not that people don’t want to associate themselves; it is because the mode of organisation is very different from the western mode of organisation.
In the western mode of organisation, you would want to show off, Isese is very humble, Isese is not glamorous.
You went abroad when you were young that means you’re from an aristocratic background?
Sincerely speaking and with all sense of humility, yes.
Could you tell us about your family?
I could trace my generation to 35 generations and the most recent is Kalejaiye Adeokun, he was mentioned in Rev Johnson’s book, ‘The History of the Yoruba People’. He was my great grandfather. He was a warrior, a trader, he was stupendously rich.
Was your father a traditional ruler?
His father was but he was not. My father was supposed to be the Alaye Ode but he refused, he now told his uncle to assume the throne.
You said you brought back your ancestors’ crown 222 years after it was taken to Ile Ife, how did you do this?
By accident, by divine design that was going on that I was a tool.
How did your crown come back?
It was while I was working for Isese people that Sese Eefun crown that was taken to Ife in 1792 was returned. The crown was taken for sanctification because 140 people died which was too much blood. They were supposed to do the sanctification for a maximum of 21 days and return the crown but I don’t know why they didn’t bring it back and since that time, Ode Ule had its crown at Obatala shrine in Ile Ife. But somehow, something started pushing me that I should go there, that is the only way I can explain it.
The Sese Efun crown that went to Ife, was the one I brought back as Oba Amero in 2005. Between 1792 and 2005, the thing was there. I didn’t know, I was just doing my own.
As the Chairman Council of Arts and Culture (in Ogun State), the Isese people wrote to me that they wanted to be using June 12 Cultural Centre (in Abeokuta) for their meetings. I said if we call the place a cultural centre the people should have a space to do their meeting without charging them money. That was how the marriage between me and them started.
From there, we started the Nigeria Holy Land Project, whereby we now declared Nigeria Holy Land of Isese. People now started coming on a pilgrimage here from abroad and we go to them on cultural exchange. We go abroad to teach them about our values and things like that and they too come here for their spiritual uplifting. We have been doing that. It was while we were going on pilgrimage we went to Ife, we declared Ife the Holy City so we used the platform of Professor Wande Abimbola’s Orisa World Congress in 2011 as first pilgrimage. We were able to inject that principle into the pilgrimage to Nigeria, the holy land of Isese, Ile-Ife the holy city and some other shrines in Yorubaland where people should visit. We initially had the Isese headquarters in Brazil but we now had to move it to Nigeria because there is no sense in us saying we’re going on pilgrimage to Brazil for something that started here, so we came to the source. That was how everything fell into place and I became Oba Isese Agbaye, as well as Oba Amero Obatala. It was during one of the visits that the idea of returning Sese Efun crown struck my mind, the rest is history.
What was growing up like?
Right from the time I was a child I was told by my mother that whenever they wanted to wake me up in the morning ‘I would say don’t wake me up, the king is sleeping. Don’t you know that nobody wakes an Oba up when he is sleeping?’ that was when I was 18 months old. It was the same time I took 18 kernels of ikin ifa which I gave my uncle to keep for me.
I remember that as a child people were always coming around me, they would eat, we would play. It reached a stage and my mother said to me: ‘Look oga, you know we are teachers, we’re salary earners’. She said she was not chasing my friends away’ but I should please limit the number of people who were coming to our house. A that time I was already entering secondary school. I went to HSC but I had to retake my Advance level GCE because I was determined to read Medicine. We had no physics, chemistry and biology teachers and those were the subjects I was doing. I had to go to The Polytechnic Ibadan to retake my A level papers and from there I gained admission to the University of Ife to read Medicine. I was among the first set of medical practice managers.
After working I started Lose Clinic, I later went to Germany. I worked in the best hospitals in the Western Europe. By the time I came back, I stayed at Ode Remo, back then the whole place was in a shambles, I felt concerned because by virtue of my training at Ife, you’re supposed to be an instrument of social change. So in the whole of this area right now, there is no place that does not have its own health centre or comprehensive health centre because I engineered a lot of things.
Some traditional rulers feel they are superior to their colleagues, this is causing serious wrangling, what can you say about this?
Ifa will tell you nobody is superior to anybody but if you are now feeling superior, you are inferior. I know where my own crown came from we don’t have to argue about that. All I know is that things change, we are at the confab now, who knows what will come out of that? If somebody had said 50 years ago that Legushen crown would come back they would say forget about that, but things change. Look at the former Soviet Union, could anybody have said in 1960 that it would break up? No. That is why Isese says you should not think you are either superior or inferior to anybody; just be yourself and relate with your creator and do everything good to make the world a better place.
Why are you jettisoning medicine?
I’m not jettisoning medicine, I still practice. The thing is that first of all, if I was in the government practice, I would have retired by now, secondly, in the private practice, what I was doing in this area was just ‘sacrificial philanthropy’, sacrificing my time, my everything. I was supposed to start my practice in Lagos, but I just said there was no hospital in Ode, the nearest was 40 kilometres away, the General Hospital at Shagamu. I just said I had to go for it and I went for it. I came here and started it and by the time I spent 10 years here, I had seen more than 250,000 patients. I now found out that pushing myself to do all that thing was not enough that I had to make sure we create the infrastructure people would come in to use and with Isese people supporting me, I was able to do all these.
Does that mean as a traditional ruler you still attend to patients?
Yes, i still do it.
You are a traditionalist and a western medical practitioner, how do you cope?
I do both traditional and western medicine. We call it in medicine integrated medicine that is what World Health Organisation calls it. I practise both.
How effective is the traditional medicine?
Very effective.
You said it is possible to do caesarean operation using traditional method; could you explain this?
Yes I mentioned it that instead of doing a caesarean for a woman that has abnormal presentation. If you soak a ring in the necessary herbs and (make the) necessary preparation, just overnight, it is already working and you point it to the pregnancy that is the application.
We (western) educated people call it is miracle, it is not miracle, it is normal. Because we don’t understand the process does not mean it is miraculous. People don’t understand how these things work and we are not ready to investigate all those things and we want to keep telling ourselves that until we are sure of how it works we are not going to accept it, it is wrong.
Have you had any cause to consult ifa to solve medical problem?
That is what we call integrated medicine, we consult regularly and it has been very effective and efficient because most of the things we use chemical for may actually not be that the chemistry was wrong, it could be a spiritual thing. What we call spiritual is what we cannot understand, but these are physical forces that we cannot yet perceive, so because we cannot perceive them we say they are spiritual. Somebody just discovered gravity because that was the first time they discovered that there must be some forces drawing those things down, he says; ’I have discovered it,’ does it mean such things have not been existing before? It is just that we have not reached the level of identifying those things. When there is going to be earthquake, animals that have senses would have picked the vibration and would have left. The last tsunami, it was the sick animals that were caught, all of them (healthy ones) had left the area. Some villagers around the area where tsunami had always been happening know the signs, they went underground. That we have not been able to develop censors to a particular thing does not make it spiritual, it is still physical.
