The writing down of Ifa began in earnest in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Nigeria, D. Onadele Epega and later Wande Abimbola — a professor, a former vice-chancellor, and himself a babalawo — published substantial collections, Abimbola's work in particular establishing Ifa as a subject of academic study while he continued to practise. In Cuba, the libreta tradition developed independently: handwritten notebooks copied from godparent to godchild, recording odu, prescriptions, songs and procedures in a mixture of Spanish and remembered Yoruba, which preserved a great deal and also fixed errors. The internal argument is genuine. One position holds that transcription is the only defence against the corpus dying with its holders. The other holds that a published Ifa removes the necessity of apprenticeship, permits the untrained to claim competence, and exposes material that was restricted for reasons — and that a diviner who reads is not a diviner.