Yoruba traditional authorities, including the Ooni of Ife, conferred on Abimbola the title Awise Agbaye, spokesperson for Ifa to the whole world, recognizing a public representative role for Ifa beyond any single community. He was an active advocate for Ifa's 2005 recognition by UNESCO as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, part of a wider effort to secure international standing and protection for the tradition.
His public role has also bridged Ifa's practice in Nigeria with related orisha traditions carried into the Americas through the Atlantic slave trade and still practiced today in Cuba, Brazil and the United States among other places, where Abimbola has been a recognized figure connecting diaspora practitioners to Yoruba sources. This entry describes his published scholarship and public religious and academic role; it does not reproduce or describe the content of Ifa initiation or of specific odu verses, which remain proper to trained practitioners and are recorded elsewhere in this atlas only as gated, unquoted material.
The title's creation reflects a broader effort within twentieth and twenty first century Yoruba religious leadership to establish institutional structures capable of representing Ifa internationally, comparable in function, though not in form, to the way other global religious traditions maintain recognized spokespeople for interfaith and public engagement.