If the word is new to you, a Babalawo is a priest of Ifá, the Yoruba tradition of knowledge and divination. He’s the one who holds the knowledge, works the system, and makes the final call on what it means for the person in front of him.

I grew up watching Babalawos in Nigerian films, always wondering the same thing she wondered. How does he know? What is the system he’s working from? What does it take to become someone people bring their hardest problems to?

My generation has lost most of this tradition. For many Yoruba people today, the Babalawo has been reduced to a caricature, a figure from films associated with dark arts, superstition, something to distance yourself from. The colonial and missionary project did its work thoroughly. What was once the most trusted knowledge system in the community, the person you brought your hardest problems to, became something to be embarrassed about. We were taught to look away from it, right at the moment the rest of the world was building its future on the same logic our ancestors used for centuries.

I found part of the answer to my childhood question in the last place I expected, inside the architecture of artificial intelligence.

Ifá is a Yoruba spiritual and philosophical tradition practised in West Africa for centuries before European contact. At its centre is a divination system through which a trained priest, the Babalawo, accesses a vast corpus of accumulated wisdom to counsel the people who come to him. The mechanism is precise. The Opele is cast, or sacred palm nuts are thrown, and the resulting pattern maps to one of 256 possible configurations called Odù. Each Odù carries a body of knowledge, stories, proverbs, medicines, and guidance built across generations. The Babalawo reads the pattern, identifies the Odù, and draws from that knowledge base to speak to whatever the person in front of him is carrying.

256 configurations. Each one is built from a series of two-state outcomes, repeated across positions until a full pattern emerges. One state or the other, again and again, until the configuration is complete.

That is binary logic. The same logic that runs every computer ever built and every AI system operating today. Two states, on or off, repeated across positions to produce meaning. Europe credits Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who worked out binary mathematics in the late 1600s and published it in 1703. The Yoruba were encoding knowledge in binary configurations through Ifá long before that, and they arrived at it on their own.

I want to be precise here, because this is where the story usually gets distorted. Leibniz did not take binary from Ifá. There is no evidence he ever encountered it. What the history actually shows is more interesting. It shows two civilisations, an ocean apart, independently discovering that complex meaning can be generated from the repetition of a two-state choice. West Africa got there first, by centuries, through a spiritual system most of the world has never been taught to take seriously.

When two cultures with no contact land on the same foundational logic, the logic is deep. And the credit for human insight has been handed out far more narrowly than the insight itself ever was.

In 1910, a German explorer named Leo Frobenius arrived in Ile-Ife and came across a set of bronze and terracotta heads so refined, so anatomically precise, that he could not accept they had been made by Africans. The work was too good. So he decided he had found the remains of Atlantis, the lost Greek civilisation, and announced that the sculptures proved a superior race had once settled in West Africa. European experts followed him with the same explanation. The heads could not be African, so they had to be Greek, Roman, or Egyptian. Anything but the work of the Yoruba people standing right in front of them.

They were wrong, and it took decades for the scholarship to catch up. The Ife heads were made by Yoruba artisans between roughly the 12th and 15th centuries, during a period of prosperity built on trade across the Niger. By 1948, even the British press had reversed itself, with the Illustrated London News running the bronzes under the headline that African art was worthy to rank with the finest work of Italy and Greece, calling the makers the Donatellos of medieval Africa. The same artisans were casting in bronze and copper at the same historical moment Renaissance masters were working in Florence.

Look at what happened there. The evidence of a sophisticated African civilisation was physically in front of trained European scholars, and their worldview was so rigid that they invented a lost continent rather than credit the people who made it. Faced with the evidence, they protected the theory instead.

This is the pattern I want you to watch for. The Yoruba civilisation that produced Ifá had cities, trade networks, governance systems, and a philosophical tradition complex enough to encode human experience into a 256-configuration knowledge system. None of that needed validating by an outsider then, and it doesn’t now.

The Odù don’t interpret themselves. The system doesn’t counsel anyone on its own. Between the ancient knowledge and the person who needs it stands the Babalawo.

Becoming a Babalawo is not a certification you acquire quickly. It is a years-long apprenticeship under a master, sometimes a decade or more, in which the student learns to hold the entire corpus of Ifá in memory. All 256 Odù. The thousands of verses, proverbs, medicines, and stories attached to each one. The patterns that repeat across configurations. The judgment required to know which strand of a particular Odù speaks to the person sitting across from you, in this moment, with this specific question, carrying this specific weight.

The training is about developing the depth of knowledge and human understanding required to interpret the system responsibly. A Babalawo who memorises the configurations without internalising the wisdom has learned to produce outputs without understanding what they mean. That distinction was what the apprenticeship existed to protect.

The Ifá tradition would recognise exactly what is happening in organisations right now.

Millions of people are using AI systems that are, structurally, not so different from what the Babalawo administers. A vast corpus of human knowledge, encoded in a system that produces outputs in response to inputs, drawing on patterns accumulated across an enormous body of experience. The system is extraordinarily capable. Without the right person interpreting it, it is also extraordinarily easy to misuse.

The tradition wouldn’t ask whether you can access the system. Everyone can. It would ask whether you’ve developed the depth of understanding required to interpret what it gives you responsibly.

That means knowing your domain well enough to catch what the system gets wrong. You understand how these models are built, what they optimise for, where their blind spots live, and what they’re structurally incapable of knowing. And you’ve developed judgment through real use, real failure, and real reflection, instead of prompting your way to outputs and calling it expertise.

I asked my mother who could even become a Babalawo. She said it was usually the children or family members of an existing Babalawo, or someone taken on as a protégé because they were trusted. They had a name for the ones in training. “Omo Awo”, the child of the secret, the one being initiated into knowledge not yet theirs to hold. Awo translates as secret, but in Yoruba it names what is sacred, what takes discipline to hold, what can only be learned slowly. The knowledge was guarded the way a pharmacist guards the dispensary, out of responsibility for what a potent thing does in untrained hands.

The Omo Awo spent years learning before anyone let him counsel a single person. The stakes made the patience non-negotiable. Someone walks in carrying a real problem, makes a decision based on what the Babalawo tells them, and lives with the consequences forever. If the man reading the Odù doesn’t fully know what he’s doing, the person across from him is the one who pays for it.

Your organisation makes decisions based on what your AI systems tell you. If the leaders administering those systems don’t know what they’re doing, the people downstream pay the price.

The Ifá tradition understood something we are still learning. The power of a system is only as responsible as the person interpreting it. The system doesn’t carry the accountability. The Babalawo does.

You are the Babalawo now. The question is whether you’ve done the training.

That’s what Orí Intelligence is here for.

Orí, in Yoruba, means head. The physical head, and also the spiritual one, the divine consciousness each person carries, their intuition, their destiny, the inner knowing that guides their decisions when everything else is noise. In Ifá philosophy, honouring your Orí means developing your own judgment rather than outsourcing it.

That is the most important thing I can teach you about AI.

I’m a Yoruba woman who grew up watching Babalawos in films and asking her mother what they knew that ordinary people didn’t. I’ve spent years inside AI systems, building with them, shipping products with them, learning the hard way what they can and cannot do. I work in Responsible AI because who administers these systems, and whether they are prepared to do it well, is one of the most consequential questions of our time.

Every issue of Orí Intelligence delivers one thing: what you need to become a more informed, more confident, more responsible leader in a world being reshaped by AI faster than most leadership programs acknowledge. It won’t be tips or breathless coverage of whatever model dropped this week. It goes to the deeper layer. What AI actually is, where it came from, how it fails, how to lead people through it, and how to stay human inside it.

I’m teaching backwards. Everything I share is something I’ve already learned, tested, or paid for. If I haven’t done the work myself, I won’t pass it on as advice.

This newsletter is for the executive who has been quietly anxious about falling behind and is done pretending otherwise. For the leader who wants to use these tools responsibly but isn’t sure what that means in practice. For anyone who has felt that something important is being lost in the rush to automate everything, and wants language for that feeling.

And for anyone who has never seen their culture reflected in a conversation about artificial intelligence, and who deserves to know that the intelligence inside these machines has ancestors.

Orí was here first.

Welcome.