December 1, 2015 – Igbo Ora is a town in Oyo State, South-west Nigeria, situated 80 kilometers north of Lagos.
The population of the town is approximately 80,000 people. The unusually large number of twin-births in the region has earned the town a nickname, “The Nations Home of Twins”.
There is hardly a family here without a set of twins. The town’s high incidence of twins has continued to baffle fertility experts, underscoring a more regional twin trend.
Apart from being known for having twins, Igbo Ora is also known to be one of the largest charcoal-producing town in Nigeria. According to an octogenarian, Pa Kehinde Jimoh Akinwumi, Igbo Ora derived its name, from verbal challenge posed to a friend. According to him, there were two friends; one lived in the town while the other lived in the forest.
The latter occasionally comes to town to pass time with his friend. He got so used to this that sometime he would not feel like going home. One day, his town-dweller friend asked him to go to the forest he bought (igbo o ra).
Ever since, the saying became a household name with which the town is identified. Those are the boldly written words that a first time visitor to the ancient town of Igbo Ora is bound to see as they pass through its main entrance. A little further into the town at the roundabout is a sculpture of a woman, a mother of twins with a baby strapped to her back and another on her chest with a girdle, while the twins raise up their hands in an ecstasy of jubilation.
This phenomenon of a large number of twin-births is not unique to Igbo-Ora; it has also been observed in the town of Kodinji in India and Candido Gödel in Brasil.
In Igbo-Ora, research has suggested that the multiple births could be related to the eating habits of women in the region. Though no direct relation between dietary intake and twin births has been proved, a research study carried out at the University of Lagos Teaching Hospital has suggested that a chemical found in Igbo-Ora women and the peelings of a widely consumed tuber (yams) could be responsible.
Yam consumption may be one explanation for the town’s largesse, yams contain a natural hormone phytoestrogen which may stimulate the ovaries to produce an egg from each side.
Igbo-Ora’s residents appear nonplussed about their twin phenomenon. Some like Pa Akinwumi support the yam theory and point specifically to the reputedly high estrogen content of Agida, the local name for yam tubers.
“We eat a lot of Okro leaf or Ilasa soup. We also consume a lot of Agida. This diet influences multiple births,” he said. Others are not so sure. “The real cause of the phenomenon has not been medically found,” said a Senior Consultant Gynecologist with the University Teaching Hospital (UCH) in Ibadan.
“But people attribute the development to diet,” he continued, adding that studies have shown that yam can make women produce more than one egg which can be fertilized. Chief Nursing Officer at the hospital, who records a monthly average of five twins for every 100 births, puts it all down to genetics.
Their birth is a good omen. “Twins are treated with affection, love and respect. But while many African cultures see twins as blessing, they often believe twins also have divine powers and the ability to harm those who cause them displeasure. In pre-colonial times, some communities used to kill twins and occasionally their mothers, believing a double birth was an evil portent and that the mother must have been with two men to bear two children at once.
In Yoruba land and indeed in large swathes of sub-saharan Africa, twins are also believed to possess one soul. This belief accounts for a whole series of distinctive, and in some cases macabre rituals that are often country specific. If one twin dies in a Yoruba family, the parents order a wooden figure called an “Ibeji” to be carved, to take the place of the dead twin. The half soul of the deceased twin is thought to live on in the Ibeji carving, which is clothed, “fed” and carried by a mother exactly in the same way as the living twin. When living twins reach maturity they take responsibility for the Ibejis care. A Scottish missionary is credited with ending this practice.
Meanwhile, a twin who dies in Malawi is buried with a piece of clothing belonging to the surviving sibling. But when a twin dies in South Africa, the surviving twin is made to lie face down on his sibling’s coffin the night before the burial, to mourn his death and say goodbye properly. Another variant has the surviving twin being made to lie face up in the freshly dug grave the day before his sibling is buried.
If not, communities fear that the surviving twin will pine away so much for his dead sibling that he will also die.
Amongst the Yoruba, one of Nigeria’s dominant ethnic groups, also present in Benin, Ghana and Togo, and Ivory Coast, it is customary for a mother who loses her twins to take part periodically in ritual ceremonies where she dances with both Ibeji figures, either one in each hand, or both tucked into her shirt. Anthropologists say the elaborate rituals surrounding twins go back to the days when mortality was very high for twins due to increased chances of premature delivery, compounded by the problem of inadequate healthcare in traditional societies. The rituals were destined to help communities come to terms with the loss of the babies.
There is of course the possible explanation that the large number of twins being born here could simply be a matter of genetics. One could hardly get to a household at Igbo Ora town in Oyo state, without seeing a set of twins. The indigenes believe that a kind of okra leaves, locally known as Ewe Ilasa, is capable of making women who use it give birth to twins.
Honestly at the mere mentioning of Taiye or Kehinde in the public place could trigger a simultaneous response from more than four people. In other words, the names, being what twins are called (the former for the one who came first and the latter for the one who followed) in Yoruba land, unusually have more than one claimant in this land.
If you gather about 200 people, 60 per cent of them is likely to be twins, one of the indigene told our reporter “I am a twin and my twin brother’s wife is also a twin and she has a set of twins. My younger brother Alaba has two set of twins too but I don’t have twins yet. I believe that my new wife will deliver twins by god’s grace” he said boldly.
Pa Akinwumi, the septuagenarian buttresses this point to our reporter that the signs that the town is blessed with twins are everywhere.
“ Delivering twin babies is our industry here. We are the ones producing more twins than any other towns in Nigeria, and that is what our study reveals because of the symbolic reason that we prepare Okra leaves as soup more than any other soup,” he said.
He noted further that: “there is no man or woman in this town who does not know how to eat Okra soup. We cook the leaves called ewe Ilasa (Ilasa leaves) more of which we consume than any other soup. If you go to the market on market days, you will see how twins’ mothers carry their twin babies and dance around demanding for money.
Hardly will you go to any house without seeing at least a set of twins. In fact, you could see three sets of twins in a house.
Therefore, if you are calling Taiye, you need to be specific so that we can know whether it is the senior or junior one, or else all of the twins could rush to you to answer. It is a funny thing and we shall soon have twins fill the town. It is God’s gift; it is just blessing we cannot explain. It is incredible.
“In order to convince this reporter of his claim, the old man took him round the town, visiting about 20 houses where they have a set of twins, triplets, or two sets of twins of different age, similar and different sexes.
A mother of twins simply called Iya Ibeji (a mother of twins) observed that nursing twins is quite hectic, especially at infancy. She said, “feeding the twins and taking care of them is not easy at infancy, but it only gets better when they are growing up. When they become big men and women, say medical doctors or engineers, one can now be proud of them because they have become big men and women – important personalities in the society. Then you will appreciate them as people will envy them and you would have forgotten the stress you have gone through.”
She spoke on the idiosyncrasies of twins: “their best foods are beans and corn meal. While growing up, they wear the same clothes and put on the same shoes. The fact is that some mothers die while taking care of them because of the stress and many other things they undergo while the children are very young. Breast-feeding them is very tasking for the mother. Hardly does the mother have time for herself. Twins always cry at the same time and fall sick again at the same time, or one after another. And the mother has no choice but to take care of them sometimes to the detriment of her health.”
Our research also revealed that twins, according to the town’s traditional belief, are regarded as special creatures and therefore should be treated like gods.
“We have our own traditional way of taking care of twins. We buy them the same clothes, shoes, bangles, and do same hair styles for them. We equally treat them like gods and therefore build shrine for them in the corner of the living room where we use items like palm oil, tubers of yam, and dry beans (Ekuru) for ritual every day, especially when one of them is sick or dead. When one of the twins dies, an effigy which will serve as a replacement of the deceased is carved and placed in a corner where some rituals are carried out on it every day so that the living one is not dragged along to the grave.”
Spokesperson believes this is compulsory, for many twins had been snatched by death just because the rituals were neglected.
We gathered that though Christianity and education have taken away all these things, that does not mean that some people are not doing it.
“Some still have the belief that mother of the late twin must dance round the town based on conditions prescribed by soothsayers or diviners called ‘babalawo’ since they are considered to be strange people who came into the world on their own in addition to belief that they have different spirit that goes with them hence they cannot be harmed.
Another mother of twins, Kehinde who was breastfeeding her 7 months old twins when we visited equally agreed that breastfeeding a set of twins is not an easy job. “It is not easy my brother,” she moaned pointing to them and adding, “you can imagine how they both cry for breast at the same time. Besides, they cry a lot if they find out that they are wearing different clothes. It’s like they are spirits, for one would cry if she sees his twin brother wearing clothes different from his. So, you must wear the same clothes for them or else they will keep on crying and this could lead to sickness for them.
While one may rejoice with them for being on world map, it seems they got their priority wrong. With illiteracy and poverty ravaging their land, their preoccupation must not be how to make more twins but how to embrace family planning.
To get out of poverty, one cannot downplay the role of family planning, suggesting the need for family doctors in this ancient settlement.
However, one looks at it, the fact remains that in Yorubaland, emergence of twin is expected to bring about total turn around for the good of the family.
“Won so ile alakisa d’ile onigba aso. But in Igbo Ora, the opposite is the case. One then wonders, why the emergence of twin calls for celebration.
Contributed by Ogundipe Ademola
