"God used betrayal to bring forth this child"
Etymology
Olú fi ọtẹ̀ bí
"God used betrayal to bring forth this child"
Among the Yorùbá, names are not mere labels — they are declarations, prophecies, and histories compressed into a breath. Olúfọtẹ̀bí is one such name: a testimony carried by a child before they can even speak it.
The name tells of two brothers torn apart by a bitter quarrel — a dispute that fractured the bonds of kinship and set one against the other. And yet, in the wake of that betrayal between blood, a child was born. Not in spite of the conflict, but through it. God took the very rupture between brothers and transformed it into the means of blessing.
What was meant to destroy became the doorway through which new life entered the world.
This is the Yorùbá theology of naming at its most potent: a divine irony, a reversal so complete that the child's very existence is proof of God's sovereignty over every scheme of man. To speak the name Olúfọtẹ̀bí is to declare that no conspiracy is final, and that the hand of God writes redemption even in the ink of betrayal.