Oduduwa is the founder figure of Ile-Ife and the ancestor claimed by Yoruba royal lineages, and the accounts of him are irreconcilable in a way that matters politically. In one version he is an orisha sent down from heaven who created the earth by pouring sand on water — the version that makes Ife the site of creation and its ruler the senior figure in Yorubaland. In another he is a human migrant who arrived from the east, conquered a settlement that already existed under an indigenous population, and established a dynasty — a version that both supports and undercuts different claims depending on who tells it. His sixteen or so children are said to have dispersed to found the other Yoruba kingdoms, which is the charter for the whole system of obas. The rivalry between the Ooni of Ife and the Alaafin of Oyo over precedence has run for centuries and rests substantially on how this story is told, and it flares in the Nigerian press regularly.