The present standing of the Ife office is a twentieth century development and worth telling as one. As Ifa and orisha communities in Cuba, Brazil, Trinidad and North America began, from the middle of the century, to look back toward Yorubaland for authority, they needed something to look at. The Araba Agbaye at Ile-Ife was the most legible candidate: a named senior office, in the city that claims to be where the tradition began, performing a public casting on a fixed date.
The annual casting at Oke Itase became the point of contact. Priests now travel to Ile-Ife for it from across the Americas, and the Odu announced there is circulated within hours to communities that will never set foot in the town. That is a considerable expansion of what a town chieftaincy was for.
It has also made the office contested in a way it was not before. A house in Havana that traces its own line back through Cuban initiators may hold that it answers to that line and to no one else, and the proposition that any single African office speaks for Ifa worldwide is rejected by a good many practitioners on exactly that ground. The atlas records the office, records the reach it now has, and records that the reach is argued about.