UNESCO proclaimed the Ifa divination system a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2005, and it was subsequently carried onto the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Nigeria was the state party behind the nomination.
The listing is useful to a reference work for what it describes rather than for the honour it confers. It characterises Ifa as a system resting on an extensive corpus of texts and on a procedure of signs interpreted by a trained diviner, and it draws a distinction that matters: Ifa does not depend on a practitioner receiving an oracular message directly. The apparatus produces a sign; the sign indexes remembered material; a trained person applies it. That is a different thing from spirit mediumship, and the difference is structural rather than a matter of degree.
The listing also records something the atlas would otherwise have to assert on its own authority, namely that the practice is living, that it is held by identifiable communities in West Africa and across the diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean, and that transmission is a live concern rather than a historical one.
Ogunda Meji is one of the sixteen principal figures within that corpus. The corpus itself, the verses standing under each figure and the interpretation given in consultation, are conferred by initiated practitioners and are not set out here.