Every weekday, Imam Abdul Wasiu Ibrahim steered his 2003 Mercedes-Benz C-class along an untarred, dusty road in Aule community in Akure, the capital of Nigeria’s Ondo State. 

Inside the car, five children sit crammed together, playing and giggling on their way to school. 

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People who see the Islamic cleric drive the kids to and from school assume they are all his. But only one is his child. Two are the children of a traditional spiritual practitioner in the Yoruba religion. The other two belong to a pastor, who sometimes takes the Imam’s place when he is too busy. 

The three fathers are neighbours who support each other and sometimes celebrate religious events together. It’s a rare display of coexistence in a country where religious intolerance and violence are common.

“My motivation is that there is only one God. He created everything and everyone – not only Muslims,” Imam Ibrahim says.

But their friendship is not just personal; it reflects an extraordinary culture among the Yoruba, an ethnic group in southwestern Nigeria, where religious pluralism is woven into family life and passed down through generations.

The culture is traced to a spiritual system called “Iṣẹ̀ṣe,” an indigenous tradition with multiple spiritual expressions. Long before Islam and Christianity arrived in the 14th and 19th centuries, respectively, Iṣẹ̀ṣe was the dominant spiritual system among the Yoruba.

Rooted in belief in a supreme creator (Olódùmarè), intermediary spirits (Òrìṣà), and ancestral presence (Egúngún), the........

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