The sign greeting visitors at the entrance of Igbo-Ora in southwest Nigeria welcomes people to a place unlike anywhere on the planet: “Twins Capital of the World.”
The rather sleepy-looking town boasts of having the highest concentration of multiple births of any place on the globe.
To celebrate its self-proclaimed title, the town hosts an annual festival, now in its second year, that draws hundreds of sets of twins from around the country.
Photo: AFP
Donning different traditional clothes and costumes, the twins — male and female, old, young and even newborns — sang and danced at the latest edition on Saturday last week to the appreciation of an admiring audience.
“We feel elated that we are being honored today,” Kehinde Durowoju, a 40-year-old twin, told reporters as he hugged his identical brother, Taiwo. “With this event, the whole world will better appreciate the importance of ibeji [twins] as special children and gifts from God.”
Around them, twins moved in procession to show off their colorful outfits as magic displays and masquerades also entertained the crowds.
Population experts have said that the Yoruba-speaking southwest has one of the highest twinning rates in Nigeria.
Statistics are difficult to come by, but a study by British gynecologist Patrick Nylander between 1972 and 1982 recorded an average of 45 to 50 sets of twins per 1,000 live births in the region.
That compares with a twin birthrate of 33 per every 1,000 births in the US, US National Center for Health Statistics data showed.
Igbo-Ora is the epicenter of the phenomenon in the west African country.
Residents in the town, about 100km north of Nigeria’s biggest city, Lagos, have said that almost every family has some twins.
Traditional leader Jimoh Olajide Titiloye knows all about this special quirk.
“I am a twin, my wife is a twin and I have twins as children,” he told reporters. “There is hardly any household in this town which does not have at least a set of twins.”
He said the festival was aimed at promoting Igbo-Ora as “the foremost twins tourism destination in the world” and that efforts were underway to get the town listed in the Guinness Book of Records.
Oba Lamidi Adeyemi, the Alaafin of Oyo, a prominent Yoruba ruler, said that the festival “is a celebration of culture and recognition of ibeji as special children in Yorubaland.”
The birth of twins usually “heralds peace, progress, prosperity and good luck to their parents,” he said, adding that parents should always take good care of them.
However, while twins are seen as a blessing by many today, that has not always the case in parts of southern Nigeria. In pre-colonial times, twins were often regarded as evil and were either banished to the “evil forest” or killed.
Scottish missionary Mary Slessor is widely credited with helping to curb the practice in the late 19th century.
Scientists have not said definitively why Igbo-Ora has such a high number of twins, but local residents have a theory that it is down to the diet of women in the town.
“Our people eat okra leaf or ilasa soup with yam and amala [cassava flour],” community leader Samuel Adewuyi Adeleye told reporters.
Yams are believed to contain gonadotropins, a chemical substance that helps women to produce multiple eggs.
“The water we drink also contributes to the phenomenon,” Adeleye added.
Fertility experts are skeptical — and point to another explanation, saying that there is no proven link between diet and the high birthrate, with the same food being consumed across the region.
“It’s a genetic thing,” said Emmanuel Akinyemi, the medical director of Lagos-based Estate Clinic. “I think the gene for multiple births is in the region and this has been passed on from generation to generation.”
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion