The Yoruba Four-Day Week

Yoruba ritual time runs on a week of four days, the ose. It is not a subdivision of anything: the round simply repeats, and it does so continuously, which means it never lines up with a seven day week and never has to. Each of the four days belongs to an orisha or to a group of them, and that assignment is what the week is for. The day fixes when a particular shrine is served, when its devotees attend, and, historically, when the market that shared its name was held.

The usual assignments name Ifa and Orunmila, Ogun, Sango and Obatala, and other orisha are attached alongside them, so that a day of Obatala may also carry Sopona and the ancestral masquerades. The order of the four and the names given to them vary between towns, which is what one would expect of a system that was regulated locally rather than by any central authority, and any list presented as the Yoruba week is really the list of a particular place.

The market cycle is the part of the system an outsider would notice first. Neighbouring towns held their markets on different days of the round, so that a trader could work a circuit of four and be somewhere different each day. Ritual time and economic time were the same time.

A reader who looks up the Yoruba calendar today will usually meet Kojoda: a reckoning that keeps the four day week, groups the weeks into a year of ninety one of them, opens that year in early June at the Ifa festival, and numbers the years from a remote epoch, so that a recent year is given as something over ten thousand. It is worth separating what is attested from what is reconstructed, because the two are almost always presented together.

The four day week is old. It is in the earliest written records of the language, it governs the market cycle, and it is described in every substantial ethnography of Yoruba religion. The assignment of days to orisha is old. The traditional agricultural and festival year, ordered by the festivals of particular towns, is old.

The numbered Kojoda era is not. It is a twentieth century construction, associated with Yoruba cultural revival and taken up energetically by diaspora Ifa organisations, and it supplies a continuous era to a tradition that reckoned by cycles, by reigns and by festivals and had no era at all. That does not make it worthless. It is a real thing that real communities keep, and it belongs in the record as what it is: a modern reckoning built on an old week. What would be wrong is to let the year number pass as though it had been counted since the epoch it names.