Orisha of Storms and the Niger River
Oya rules the winds, the whirlwind, and the storm; the gale that sweeps ahead of Shango's thunder is Oya going first into battle. The Yoruba call the Niger 'Odo Oya', Oya's river, and Samuel Johnson's History of the Yorubas records that at her death she became that great water. Her praise-name Iyansan means 'mother of nine'.
Her praise poetry tells of her power to turn into a buffalo. In the tale most often told, a hunter watches a buffalo shed its hide and become a beautiful woman; he hides the skin and marries her, until years later his household betrays the secret. Oya puts the hide back on, gores the betrayers, spares her husband for their children's sake, and leaves behind a pair of horns as the token for calling her — buffalo horns rest in her shrines to this day.
In the legends of Shango's fall she is the wife who follows him longest. She is closely tied to the egungun ancestral masquerades, and in Cuba and Brazil, where she is honored as Yansan, she keeps the gates of the cemetery; when a storm rises, devotees say Oya is opening the road for the dead.
