Ogbe Weña

In the land of Zambia there was a very powerful witch king, Karamazó, with a fearsome cauldron (Endoki), who wanted to conquer the kingdom of the Fang and reach as far as Ife.

The Obá of Ife was an Awó of Orunmila and his name was Lamujerin; he made osode and Ogbe Weña came out, which marked a religious war for him and told him to give a goat to Orunmila with all his godchildren. He called on all the Yoruba, Dahomey, Ashanti and Mandinga, and on his Congo godchild Mawambo Eshu Alawana, son of Elewa.

When the goat was given, Ogbe Weña came out again in the itá, and each Awó marked an ebbó. When Mawambo's turn came, he marked goat's blood, Iyefá, river mud and rose apple seeds. With that they prepared an iyé, a powder, that they all prayed over. Beside the river Ayaná, when they blew it into the air, Karamazó fell from his horse and Mawambo cut off his head; his cauldron fell apart. The secret is the rose apple seed, which serves to destroy the prenda.

An Awó osainista lived with his son, but because of their tempers the son parted from him, and the father withdrew to other lands. In time the son became a great osainista and wiped out every mayombero in his region, winning every war he took on.

He learned that in a far-off town there lived an osainista more powerful than he was, and he traveled to challenge him, crossing rivers and rough country. When he reached the hill where the man lived, the rain began, and the wind and the thunder, and he was already ill. Beaten by the weather, he decided to take shelter in the osainista's own house.

When he knocked, he heard a voice saying: come in, my son. The voice was not altogether strange to him: that osainista he had come to face was his father.

Some children, led by a small daughter of Olofin, were poking into everything in the world. They came to Olofin's sacred boxes and opened one where sickness (Aron) was kept; when they woke it, the epidemic came out and the children began to suffer.

Obbatalá went to Orunmila, who saw this Ifá for him and told him that the only healthy animal was the cow (Malú). He told him to take hairs from her tail, make a braid, cleanse the children with it and mix their necklaces. And so they were saved, one by one.

Olofin said: you saved them, but from today sickness will attack children more than grown people. That is why Orunmila and Obbatalá are the protectors of children in epidemics, and the greatest sarayeye is the one with the cow tail (Ariku Malú).