Protocols
It is a great privilege to address this august gathering on a matter of great importance and some urgency. The highest praise among the Yoruba is to say that an individual is Ọmọlúwàbí, not Olowo or Ọlọrọ, desirable as these stations in life are. That in itself says a lot about the Yoruba ethos.
When therefore on one occasion, in the midst of one of our occasional intellectual sparring sessions, my host today, Ọmọlúwàbí Francis Adewale made a princely point and said that it is not enough to be right, one has to be effective as well,
I thought that it was such a critical observation that our society may experience a positive revival if we began to operate that paradigm.
Like the renowned jurist, Justice Kayode Esho (CON) who while at the Supreme Court once said “Woe unto corrupt judges. I am not happy to have a corrupt bench. It is a deadly thing” my host today can be quite blunt. That is at least partial explanation for his effectiveness. When I grow up, I will be as blunt!
Now to the subject of our discourse today.
The Yoruba say ‘Ìdálú nì’ṣèlú’ in recognition of the truth that everything owes something to its origins, even states. The adage also acknowledges the power of social engineering which applies to all societies. Nigeria, from its creation to the present, is no exception to this axiom. Nigeria, a composite of more than 300 ethnic nationalities, is not the idea of any one of those ethnic nationalities.
Indeed, the country that we now call Nigeria and its machinery of state is in many ways the proof of that profound observation that ‘Ìdálú nì’ṣèlú’. Nigeria was created by the British, with the English in particular leading the enterprise. The British Foreign Office, the British Colonial Office and the Royal Niger Company originally administered the three territories which became consolidated into one country.
If a person held shares in the Royal Niger Company in those days, that person would receive a dividend of 6% per year. Chamberlain disclosed that he held £3,000 worth of Royal Niger Company shares.
Yoruba territories in the new country that the British created had barely emerged from a whole century of internecine wars which left the landscape ravaged with countless Yoruba people being sold into both the trans-Saharan and trans-Atlantic slavery. The British reached some compromise with the French and they agreed on a map that “captured” Nigeria as distinct from, say, Benin Republic or Togo. That map, were it to be drawn by a Yoruba person, would never cut off the Yoruba of today’s Benin Republic or Togo. But the map was not drawn by a Yoruba person or any African. It was drawn by Europeans for Europeans. Nigeria has since its creation been fulfilling the very objectives set by its architects and those objectives hardly are in consonance with the aspirations of the ethnic nationalities that constitute the country.
Indeed, there's ample evidence over more than a century that the Nigerian state and those that operate it are at variance with Nigerians. What passes for policy often reflects what other supranational institutions want for Nigeria, and those are hardly ever good for Nigerians.
But enough for now on the Nigerian state. Let us spare some time to consider culture and cultural values. Culture refers to the shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviors, and artifacts that characterize a particular group or society. It encompasses the tangible and intangible aspects of a people's way of life, including language, religion, art, music, food, and social norms. Culture is not static neither is any one culture good for all time. As Tennyson, the English poet rendered it:
“The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfils Himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.”
On the other hand, cultural values are the deeply held beliefs and principles that guide a culture's behavior and decision-making. They represent what a culture considers to be important, right, and desirable. Cultural values are often implicit and unspoken, but they shape how people in a culture interact with each other and the world around them.
For the purposes of our collective exercise today, we will take the concept of Ọmọlúwàbí as our starting point.
Professor Femi Taiwo, historian and philosopher currently at Cornell University has observed that the word Ọmọlúwàbí did not feature in the first two known dictionaries of Yorùbá into English. There are two probable reasons for this: one is the sheer difficulty of rendering the meaning in English and the second is that the dictionaries we have are not self-referencing of our language but extraverted documents that work for the translator more than for the people conducting ratiocination in the language itself.
Culture is, to make a complex matter simple, the broader framework within which a group of people like the Yoruba live, while cultural values are the specific principles that underpin that culture. Cultural values provide the foundation for a culture's norms, behaviors, and beliefs. If culture is the hardware, cultural values are the operating software. Values are, borrowing the words of Arthur Koestler, the ghost in the machine.
Now to let our thoughts loose to pasture. Due to time restrictions, I will relate some Yoruba ideas here that have parallels in European mythology. I will also relate some Yoruba ideas that have no European equivalent. The Yoruba have the twin tutelary spirits of Iranti and Igbage. The Greeks have Prometheus and Epimetheus. If one listens closely to regular conversations in Yoruba these days, it will be clear in a short while which influence is stronger. An occasion such as this requires us to remember. There is a place for forgetting but that place is not here.
Nuance is everything to the Yoruba and nuance is conveyed in many ways but especially through tones. In any dialect of Yorùbá for example, “Pẹ̀lẹ́” may be male or female. Which pẹ̀lẹ́ is being referred to is a function of the proficiency of the speaker and of the listener in the language. The occasion on which ‘pẹ̀lẹ́’ is deployed also determines the propriety or otherwise of the word. It is forbidden to use the wrong pẹlẹ in the house of grief, for instance, because the Yorùbá believe that mutual differences should never make us wish another person dead.
Again, in Yorùbá storytelling, there is the common practice of anthropomorphizing animals. Yet, the storyteller, whether a grandmother in her home at Ìláṣẹ̀ or a famous writer like D.O Fagunwa or Amos Tutuola, maintains a divide between the feral and the cultured. There is no school where the theory of this practice is taught but the values of our culture make it so that the two do not mix. Ògbójú Ọdẹ may go on an adventure into Igbó Irúnmalẹ̀ but he may not bring home an antelope wife or even his dear friend, Ìfòyẹ́. The implications for society are many but I wish to pause here for the present time so we can proceed to thought experiments regarding Nigeria and the values we hold dear.
The Nigerian State and Yoruba Cultural Values in Intersection - The Age of Òòbẹ̀
Some impacts of the Nigerian state on our values are benign. We now trade with our neighbours without having to pay the old taxes and thereby we have become marginally wealthier. We marry across ethnic boundaries and so we have both extended and deepened our gene pool. Our professionals and academics work in services across the country and we must admit that this is not a bad thing at all, after all “kárìn kápọ̀ yíyẹ níí yẹni.” But perhaps the more noticeable impacts of the Nigerian state on Yorùbá cultural values have not been benign nor are they entirely unanticipated.
These impacts are like meteoric strikes that leave visible craters of what could have been an extinction event. But, sometimes, they are so subtle that we don't consider that there has been any impact at all. The Yorùbá adage that says “bí a ò bá r’ádán, à maa f’òòbẹ̀ ṣẹbọ” is perhaps a way of looking at the more subtle intersections between the Nigerian state and Yorùbá cultural values.
For example, under the 1960 Independence Constitution of Nigeria, the preservation and curation of antiquities were the responsibilities of each regional government. This makes sense because the people who have lived in a given geographical location for, say, 3000 years as the Yorùbá, the Bini, the Ijaw and the Ibibio have done, are likely to know the value of the artifacts in those places. Somehow, by the time the Nigerian state adopted the 1979 Constitution and even the 1999 Constitution, the Federal Government took over antiquities so that even when European raiders began to send back various artifacts to Nigeria, it became a contest between various local interests on who should take custody of the artifacts.
This is the case at the moment with Benin Bronzes. Also, and particularly regarding the Yorùbá, the negative impact of the Nigerian state and it's presumptive hold on antiquities is playing out as we speak in the ruinous excavations of the necropolis for the departed Alaafin by marauders in search of lithium and other rare earth metals.
Bàrà, the necropolis of Ọ̀yọ́ Ilé is now unrecognisable, with no protection or efforts at its preservation by the Nigerian state that allowed vandals to overrun it. I have been to Egypt and to South Korea where the necropolises of their departed kings are preserved by all the apparatus of the state. Those locations today earn tourism revenue for Egypt and South Korea. If any individual is caught loitering near those locations, that individual is liable to prosecution and to fines and even imprisonment.
The Yorùbá have a world view that accommodates the living, the departed and the unborn. If the designated resting places for past Alaafin, so designated for the past 800 years, can be so violated, we should stop whatever we are doing and ask how much psychic damage we have allowed to occur because we could not be bothered by whatever goes on in the name of governance by operators of the Nigerian state. If today some group of people take earthmoving equipment to Westminster Abbey and dig up all the dead there because geologists found gold deposits in the soil, it is safe to say that this will be regarded as extreme provocation by the English. But here we are, acting like everything is hunky dory! And this is how a culture suffers terminal atrophy. It starts with substituting òòbẹ̀ for àdán until a generation comes along that does not know the difference.
As broached earlier, some impacts leave craters that the culture has to live with. Some of the more recent ones may serve to illustrate what we should pay attention to. The Western Nigeria Television service, now turned into the NTA is an example. Another is the University of Ifẹ taken over by the Nigerian state. Both these institutions are prime examples of how high-minded projects informed by the Yorùbá ideals of Ìlọsíwájú and Ọ̀làjú become veritable ẹdun arinlẹ̀. Superficial analysis would arrive at the conclusion that both of these projects were hamstrung by well-meaning military administrators who wanted better funding and national spread for a good idea. But radical research inevitably leads to Frederick Lugard's idea of what the uppity Yorùbá must not be allowed to do.
Educate them, says the Lugardian mind, but in carpentry and in geology at the highest. Don't let them realize that they can educate their young in their mother tongue and don't let them produce the first television station in Africa ahead of South Africa (where Edward Lugard was an operator and where apartheid found its fullest expression anywhere on earth). Don't let them produce a female television anchor and program manager ahead of the United States. And so on.
Again, the annals of our recent history inform us that in 1967 young Brigadier R.A Adebayo was military governor of the Western Region. A young Mr. Bola Ige was working with him as commissioner for Agriculture and Natural Resources in the same old Western Region. Together these men executed one of the most forward-looking projects in tropical Africa. They carefully conceived and executed an urban forest reserve and gene bank and they called the same Agodi Ogunpa Forest Reserve. Today, all 70 acres have been stripped utterly bare, with the topsoil gone and the subsoil exposed. Over 25 rare species of trees from as far away as Australia, India, Burma and Sri Lanka are now gone, perhaps forever. Eucalyptus torelliana, Terminalia superba, Terminalia ivorensis, Terminalia catapa, Nauclea diderichii, Ficus exaperata, Tectona grandis, Gmelina arborea, Khaya grandifolia, Ceiba pentandra, Milicia excels, Anthocaphalus cadamba, Alstonia bonnie, Albizzia labbeck, Triplichyton selerexylon, Bombax buonopozense, Cedrela odorata, Morus alba, Funtumia elastica, Albizia zygia, Antiarii toxicaria, Celtis zenkeri, Cola gigantea, Cordia millenii and Mansonia altissima among others, all gone because some young Turks thought it wiser to wipe out this enormously rich bequest of the Western Region Government to future citizens of the region. The elders thought that by investing huge resources in this forest reserve and making a Gazette for its preservation, there is thereby a legal guarantee that it would remain a gift in perpetuity to mankind. They thought that by creating a modern ecological conservation area that our ancestors called ‘igboro’, the cultural handshake with our cultural future would cement a thoughtfully executed transition to modernity. Those with no sense of history, nor environmental awareness, whose main propellant is money, obliterated the dream.
Of the twenty-two farm settlements in Yorùbá land, none is today operational as was designed. This is what happens when Nigeria happens to great things. The Nigerian state does not ask simple questions such as ‘what is an anthem?’ or ‘why did nature endow me with the third largest bitumen and tar sand deposit in the world?’ and neither does it mind that the brightest minds from all corners of the country are leaving for foreign lands in droves. Hemorrhage is a word unknown in the public dictionary of the Nigerian state but if the bleeding is into the veins of a few private interests, and the public will be none the wiser? Well, transfusions are great things! A Call to Resilience
On the day God created the Yorùbá, two other forces were created – Ìwà and Ìtìjú. This is why, in whatever milieu the Yoruba find ourselves, we find our bearings using our relationship with Ìwà and Ìtìjú. The compass with which we find our bearing is called Àsà. The Ìgbà or the times do matter but not so much as the degree of dignity that the people carry themselves with. Please bear with me today as we assess our present condition as a people in light of our history and the collective aspiration of our people into the future.
What the Yoruba call Àsà, a phenomenon for which the closest English expression is perhaps cultural values is so significant that we are likely to be excused when we say it is central to the Yoruba world view. Àsà covers a vast terrain in our collective consciousness and, perhaps more importantly, in our collective unconscious. Yet, in the cosmic consciousness of the Yoruba, we know that there are larger realities such as Iwa and Itiju, preternatural elements without which existence is chaotic and negative. When the Yoruba say that ìdọ̀bálẹ̀ kìí ṣe ìwà, this is another way of saying that externalities do not define essence. Yoruba culture makes this When a man known for temperance destroys a relationship in a fit of anger and the elders say ‘Lágbájá, o sì ṣèèyàn jù báyìí lọ o’, they are doing their best to plead with the individual not to descend into the feral, animal kingdom.
There are fixed non-spatial points of reference in the Yoruba cosmos. At one end is Ire and at the opposite end is Ibi. A daily iterative process takes the individual and the community forward toward Ire or the good and away from Ibi or the evil. Whatever takes cognizance of Ìwà or ‘character’ and ‘Ìtìjú’ a quality that is closer to diffidence and humility than it is to ‘shame’, are the things that bring us closer to who we are and where we are meant to be in this world. What takes us away from Ìwà and Ìtìjú are the very things that are guaranteed to destroy us. If a person is described as alainiwa or alainitiju, that person is not just being abused, that person is being described in terms that are existentially damning but not necessarily in absolute terms. There is no foreclosure on redemption for the alainiwa or the alainitiju in the Yoruba world. It is possible for that person to retrace his/her steps and to find both Iwa and Itiju. A community is judged based on the preponderance of the number of people with Iwa and Itiju in it.
When D.O Fagunwa described a town as Ìlú Èrò Ẹ̀hìn he was presenting us with a figurative landscape of alainiwa and alainitiju. Yes, such places exist and if we are going to be brutally honest with ourselves, we should ask if we are not, all of us, currently passport carrying citizens of Ìlú Èrò Ẹ̀hìn?
On a much brighter note, I recall that somewhere on the hills of Yemẹtu in Ìbàdàn, there is a beautiful little villa on whose fence are inscribed two simple words “Ilé Ria”. This is a classic example of Yorùbá understatement. In not so many words the owner of the premises has stamped a particular identity on that structure. I have never stopped to ask about the name of the owner but the house has never failed to give me joy even as I am neither the owner nor am I related to the owner. Perhaps the Ijẹṣaphilic strain in me (that part that loves iyan in all its sumptuous glory, garnished with egusi soup) is the part responding to this visual and verbal gift to the whole world. With two simple words, architecture is given a lift into the realms of history and of discovery. A man from Belgium or Argentina may not know which branch of the Yorùbá family the owner is from but an average Yorùbá person born before 1970 immediately understands that one “Òṣómàáló” lives there. That is one of the beautiful things that the Nigerian state has not managed to damage yet. The diversity in our dialects, and their ineffable beauty. So, I ask you here present, when was the last time that you read a novel or even a short story entirely in the Ijesa dialect?
I put it to us all that if we fail to have these aspects of our lives memorialized in our literature, we lose the moral argument to the Boer who built an entire university in Stellenbosch just so that Afrikaans, a language derived from Dutch, and less than 300 years old, can have a monument and a home. We, and our offspring in the future, can host events in Ofokutu Hall for the next 1000 years if the hall is maintained and we would have done well. But if we allow radio presenters to be the last users of the improbably rich Ijesa dialect, we would have failed and we must not fail. Not with the technologies available to us for text and speech preservation and replication. We must not fail.
I believe that God has a sense of humour and a magic barrel of whys and why nots even if Albert Einstein thinks that God doesn’t play dice. The magic barrel is for us, not Him, and we might as well take it for a spin. Anything can happen.Why, for example, does it appear as if the Yoruba, a people to be found on every continent on this planet, are also one of the most endowed with resources at home? If, for example, we brought the right kind of drill here or anywhere in Ijeshaland, it is actually a question of when, not if we will strike gold. Why is the Ijesha school and public library system, one of the best anywhere in the world between the 60s and the 80s, a shadow of itself today? And why is the topic for discourse today not framed differently? Why, for example, is the topic not Yoruba Cultural Values: Impacts on the Nigerian State? If, as physicists tell us, action and reaction are equal and opposite, should we not be able to frame the topic thus? The answer is that we actually can and indeed we should.
Permit me to take one last spin at the magic barrel. Professor Femi Taiwo has observed that up till now, as a people, in the 21st century, we do not yet have a self-referencing dictionary of the Yoruba language. If we are serious, should we not start from there – or at least with a dictionary of each of our Yoruba dialects.
The latest scholarship on Yoruba history using archeology, linguistics and forensic science suggests that we have been here as a distinct culture from about 300 BC. Professor Akinwumi Ogundiran in his new book, The Yoruba: A New History, 2020 makes this point abundantly. The Nigerian state on the other hand has been here since 1914, only a little longer than a century. The intersection of the Yoruba and our values with Nigeria has thrown up many elements some of which are good, some bad and some downright ugly. The important thing is to remember that Yoruba values transcend geography. They are values which have held across the Sahara and across the Atlantic. They have ensured that the Yoruba joy of life and spirit of celebration has survived epochs of depression and eras of bondage. When the Yoruba hunter disappears into the primeval forests armed with his poetry of craft and roots – it is to remind himself of who he is because forgetfulness is not our way.
The adversaries of the Yoruba people like to say that the Yoruba are a recent invention of the British, that there were no common ties between the people of the Yoruba coast and the savannah up north, that the Western Yoruba have nothing in common with the Eastern. I will not waste our time here trying to debunk these falsehoods. Rather I will cite two instances from our history in which two central figures resolved the same situation using similar reasoning. Ogedengbe Agbogungboro and Balogun Ibikunle may not appear to have the same ties but both stand out for their nuanced understanding of Yoruba society. I suggest to us all that if today, Ilesa and Ibadan have very distinct characteristics among all Yoruba cities, it is partly because these cities are organic manifestations of a sense of society which is so rare among the Yoruba today.
Amity as the Center and Circumference
The Yorùbá say àgbà kìí wá lọ́jà k’órí ọmọ tuntun wọ́. This is another way of stating that the burden of effecting correction in society is the burden of the elders in society, not the responsibility of the youth or the children. But what do we do when ìkókó and màjèṣín occupy positions of authority? When we come to the kind of pass to which we have come as a people, it is time to begin course-correction using first principles!
Ire o!
Ire kabiti!
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