Wande Abimbola was born in 1932 in Oyo State, Nigeria, into a family with Ifa priesthood in its lineage, and trained as a babalawo, an Ifa priest, from childhood alongside his later academic education. That dual formation, insider ritual training combined with a Western academic career, first at the University of Ife, later Obafemi Awolowo University, where he became a professor and vice chancellor, and afterward at Boston University in the United States, gives his scholarship a standing distinct from earlier ethnographic accounts of Ifa written by outside observers such as William Bascom.
His 1975 Sixteen Great Poems of Ifa and 1976 Ifa: An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus present translated and analyzed portions of the Ifa oral corpus for an academic readership, work regularly cited as foundational in later scholarship on Yoruba religion because it combines a trained priest's understanding of the material's internal logic with the documentary discipline of academic publication.
His academic writing draws directly on his own ritual competence as a babalawo, allowing him to explain the internal logic of divination procedures and verse interpretation in ways an outside observer without that training could not readily reconstruct, a distinction scholars of Yoruba religion have noted repeatedly when comparing his work to earlier accounts.