Taiwo and Kehinde

They were born, twin boys, to a local chief and his petty trader wife from Igbesa, Nigeria. And according to Yoruba tradition, were to be named by their birth order in the universe. Except the universe as it is understood by the Yoruba is very different from the universe as it is understood by my own people. Many Americans would like to believe that the world was either created by a scientific occurrence named to sound like a surprise explosion of confetti at a child’s birthday party or by a God able to calmly observe the genocide of some alongside the triumph of others. But for the Yoruba, this universe includes the creation of many more legends, including those legends of two babies born back to back.

They are called Taiwo and Kehinde, usually in one breath. Kehinde, the child born second, is considered the elder while his twin, Taiwo, the child born first, is considered his junior. Given the same names whether born female or male, the Yoruba believe that Kehinde calls on his elder status to send Taiwo out of the womb first. Taiwo, meaning “having the first taste of the world,” acts as a lookout, signaling to his twin to join him upon approval of their new surroundings by crying. This is the naming process of twins — called ibeji – who are highly regarded by the Yoruba, a people who also happen to have the highest dizygotic twinning rate in the human world.

I once read about a set of twins from Kogi State, also named Taiwo and Kehinde, who married the same woman. Called the “strange ones” by the Daily Sun newspaper, the twins had lost their mother at the age of four. By ten they had left their home and together had settled in Aiyetoro Gbede where they worked as laborers. It was here that they met their wife, a woman they shared between them to the horror of their father and other members of the community. The local bard, a man named Okilo, told the newspaper:

If you asked one of them a question, the two will answer at once, saying the same word. They urinate on the same spot. They were very identical and so you cannot differentiate them. They had only one wife whom they were always going out with. They loved her so much. They reigned as strange twins in this village and died the same year.”

Furthermore, their wife would disclose that when it came to lovemaking, both men — her husbands — “had sexual urge the same time and expressed love, sex and romance the same way” making them “interesting lovers.”

Despite being happily married and fathering two children between them, their own father insisted that they divorce the woman that they shared and remarry properly. He wanted the twins to live a normal life according to what was socially acceptable and pressured them until they acquiesced. Following their return to their birthplace in Ayegunle Gbede, both brothers attempted to live a normal life in accordance to the desire of their father. They attempted to commit to several women but were largely unsuccessful and it soon became clear that “normal” was never to be part of Taiwo and Kehinde’s lived experience.

According to their son, shortly after the twins returned to their hometown, “strange things” began happening to them, the strangest thing of all being their early deaths, occurring less than a year apart from each other. Family members and people in the community would attribute their mysterious passing to the forcible separation from their wife. What other logical explanation could there be for why Kehinde, after being bitten by a snake while farming, would refuse medical attention or treatment or why Taiwo, after losing Kehinde, would constantly talk about joining his twin before eventually becoming sick and dying less than a year later?

Two women identified as the stepmother and aunt of the twins would step forward and explain to the newspaper reporter their own version of events, adding matter-of-fact explanations which made sense in their Yoruba universe: “The reason for that unusual closeness and attachment was because they came with one placenta at birth and against our tradition of dividing it into two before burial, theirs was not divided. Thus, naturally, they began acting as an individual.”

The belief that twins had extraordinary power or that they were worthy of our worship as divine beings took me some getting used to. The few twins I had encountered in my childhood were subject only to normal treatment, other than the initial impolite staring that came with the peculiarity of seeing two people standing in front of you with the same exact face. For the Yorubas, however, the birth of twins — once feared and seen as a sign of evil — is now considered a cause for celebration, festivity, and ritual offerings.

The power of twins in Yoruba culture is said to come from their ability “to bestow happiness, health and prosperity upon their family . . . [as well as] disaster, disease and death.” Thus, parents show twins greater care than their other children.

And although these beliefs are largely seen as remnants of the rural past in contemporary urbanized Lagos where tradition often falls to the wayside to make room for popular culture, occasionally the old beliefs jump back into view. More than once, my husband who considers himself non-superstitious has attributed his ability to deliver a correct judgment in situations where I clearly would have been wrong to his being a twin and therefore having special power that allows him to “see” things before they occur.

Named Taiwo, my husband is one half of the fraternal set of twin boys I began this essay with, born in the early eighties in Lagos to two rural to urban migrants from Ogun State. And like every Taiwo before him, he is the one who it is said from birth is more curious and prone to adventure. True to this belief, my husband would find his way to China at the age of twenty-eight after unsuccessfully applying for visas to Cuba, Ukraine, and the Czech Republic, a process that ultimately saw him lose all his savings. Over time, the adventure in life would belong to him while his twin, Kehinde, would remain home in Lagos, urgently awaiting word from his junior brother who had emerged into the world moments ahead.

It was Taiwo who would become a ping pong expert at a university student in Xining, Taiwo who would learn the plight of the autonomous people of China after befriending a Tibetan student, Taiwo who would travel to Inner Mongolia with another Yoruba to see the land of the north, and in finding themselves unable to communicate with the people they found there, would stay inside their hotel watching television and eating fried rice. While Kehinde, a civil servant assigned to an anti-vandalism taskforce, dressed himself nightly for duty and waited for word from his adventurous twin.

If the power of twins was real then it seemed to manifest itself especially when Taiwo found himself in situations of breakdown or failure. Like the time he was stranded in Thailand for three days after being deported from China for having overstayed his visa. It was a plane malfunction that grounded the Kenya Airlines flight he was on at the Suvarnabhumi Airport and he and the other passengers were put up in a five star hotel in Bangkok. He would talk excitedly about it later: the assorted buffet of noodles, curries, Western faire, and fresh cut fruit in pleasing shapes; swimming leisurely with a white man whose Japanese wife and mixed race son looked on from one of the lounge chairs at the edge of the hotel swimming pool.

But Kehinde? He could only dream of the life his twin described, his own joy highlighted by moments spent sitting with friends at an outdoor bar in Lagos nursing a Guinness. In fact, most of his days would be eclipsed by the days Taiwo had as if Taiwo had his own private sun to shine down on him. It had to be related to what Yorubas believed about twins, I thought. And I became so convinced that one evening I would argue with my husband, our voices traveling from the bedroom to the kitchen, about whether their own particular birth order had anything to do with it.

To him it didn’t, and he would end the disagreement by insisting that everyone had their own destiny.

The Taiwo I married would remain somewhat of a legend back home in his community in Lagos. They would remember him as the one who found his way to China and back. And less than a year later, brought a short, pregnant mixed race American woman who had her own way of understanding the universe to his childhood home to meet his mother. For me, this would be the beginning of a journey that would shape my own way of seeing and being in the world, and serve as my unofficial entry into what comprises the vast landscape of Yoruba belief systems, cultural identity and values, and everyday life.

Signs, references, and the many names that Yoruba people have for things animate and inanimate would all be incorporated into the fabric of my marriage to Taiwo. And during the course of our becoming familiar and intimate with each other, these questions of tradition, culture, myth, and strange magic would continue to come up, forcing me to redraw the unmagical frames of my own house: oceans were not just for remembering the transport of slaves but were alive with charms used to make one rich or more powerful; spirits could take on human form in the same way that humans could shapeshift into animals; and two babies born back to back were not just former companions from the same womb but carriers of special powers, one always looking out ahead.