The Ifá Verses They Called 'Folklore'

In 1910, the British colonial administration in Nigeria commissioned a survey of 'native customs.' The 256 Odu verses of Ifá were collected, translated by missionaries who spoke broken Yoruba, and filed in the Colonial Office as 'folktales.' The verses contain: botanical identification of 200+ medicinal plants, legal precedent cases dating to the 15th century, and binary mathematical structure that predates Leibniz by centuries. The filing category was not a mistake. It was a wall.