By Ayodele Johnson

To visit Igbo-Ora in the southwest Yoruba state of Oyo is to walk into a phenomenon of unlimited twinning births. And to discover this is to be a fly on the wall looking at different households as they get on with daily life. Among them, you will find at least one twin stretching around one end of a couch.

It is why every year in central Ibarapa where you will find Igbo-Ora, a day is set aside for festivities to mark such a rarity. The town’s dizygotic twinning rate of 45 per 1,000 live births makes it the Twin Capital of the World. This year’s festival happened on Saturday 14 October and the highlight usually is the showcasing of tweenies glistening in fine robes added to a mix of the spiciest fanfare.

“My mother is a twin; my Mom gave birth to twins; I sitting here am a twin; I also gave birth to twins; and one of my siblings also gave birth to twins,” reads the response from a participant of a study to help reveal the factors that encourage twin births among the women. It was published online 3 December 2020 by the National Library of Medicine and featured a number of theories concerning genetic makeup and spirituality.

Since twinning is so commonplace in Igbo-Ora, there has to be some sort of reason. No consensus has been reached concerning why and no medically supported proof either. It is just the claim by Igbo-Ora residents that their extreme fertility comes from their lifestyle, so off to take a look at some of these.

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The Slippery Ilasa Soup

In Oyo state, yam flour (amala) is a prominent food source made from either yam or cassava flour, and even unripe plantain. These are the multiple avenues through which they are produced. After this comes the ideation around the best soup to accompany it. In Igbo-Ora, it is the very slippery Ilasa soup, which basically means okra.

Just like how there is a debate between Ghanaians and Nigerians concerning who cooks the best jollof rice, there seems to be a difference between Igbo-Ora chops and competing versions.

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“If your wife knows how to cook it, and make love,” says another respondent from the study, “you will have twins.” And thoughts like this are what gives strength to the belief that the food intake of women hugely inspires their birthing of twins, yet it is debated. Why this is the case is because other residents living in the communities surrounding Igbo-Ora also eat Ilasa and amala but they do not birth as many twins.

Ancient Twin Bond

It ties in with the emergence of a lineage of twins, which supposedly means a high likelihood of the individuals giving birth to twins. This is how a section of Igbo-Ora sees it when talking about the reason for so much twinning going on around them. For instance, city officials now see avenues for exploring tourism potential and therefore, state support of the World Twins Festival has become a governmental goal. But for the indigenes of Igbo-Ora, there is no such formal connotation attached to the celebration. For them, it is simply keeping up with important traditions that directly link with their existence. It is thought that the descendants coming together will bring about more of the same, which is actually quite possible since the record of intermarriage between Igbo-Orans and outsiders has been low.

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Igbo-Ora’s Special Water

Maybe time will eventually unravel all the remarkable endowments that are present in Igbo-Ora as everything seems to have a divine connection. Like the water that people drink, bath and cook with – they seem to possess fine characteristics that spur on the dizygotic twinning rate that has been noticed so far.

“You see, about the ilasa soup matter, whenever we go to Lagos to celebrate with them, we carry the ilasa soup things and keg of water, because the water in Lagos is not like Igbo-Ora’s; it can’t cook ilasa well.”

Here are more comments leading to a mystery – so, unravelling the phenomenon of Igbo-Ora is obviously to be resolute about taking a journey into the future. For now, all remain shrouded in the cloud.

Ayodele Johnson

Ayodelé is a Lagos-based journalist and the Content and Editorial Coordinator at Meiza. All around the megacity, I am steering diverse lifestyle magazine audiences with ingenious hacks and insights that spur fast, informed decisions in their busy lives.