Ifa is practised well beyond its Yoruba homeland in present day Nigeria and Benin. The transatlantic slave trade carried Yoruba religious practice to Cuba and Brazil, where it took institutional root and from where it has since spread through migration to the United States and Europe, and the later twentieth century saw substantial deliberate re-engagement between diaspora communities and Yoruba practitioners in West Africa.
This matters to a reference page for a practical reason: the same figure may be named, spelled and ordered slightly differently depending on which branch of that history a source belongs to, and a difference in spelling is usually a difference in transliteration rather than in substance. Yoruba is a tone language and most sources in English drop the diacritics, which multiplies the variants further.
The diaspora also produced related but distinct oracles alongside Ifa rather than in place of it. In Cuba the sixteen cowrie system read by priests of the orishas exists beside Ifa read by babalawos, sharing much vocabulary with it while being a different practice with a different priesthood.
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.
Okanran Meji's verses and its use in consultation are held by initiated practitioners and are not reproduced here.