Ibrahim,
Thank you for the rejoinder and the clarification. This fascinating topic has a way of going in different directions, and one can easily lose the original purpose without conceptual clarity. I think TF used the term "nation" as a placeholder for something else we have not clearly defined or named in African Studies. This illustrates why and how colonial terms and archival records are inadequate for talking about the history and experiences that preceded those records. I prefer to use the mouthful "community of practice" when discussing pre-1860 regional configurations that may look like "nation" but are not quite the same.
I will add that a version of the Bajayida Legend originated in the 15th century as a product of the efforts by the Hausa city-states to establish self-preservation, cultural identity, and united political action against the rising power of the Songhai Empire in the West and the turbulent transformation of the Kanuri Empire into the Borno Empire in the East. An earlier version of that legend might have existed as far back as the 13th century.
Maybe The Yoruba: A New History might convince you that a version of Oduduwa Legend matured in Ile-Ife in the 13th century as part of the efforts to consolidate the political revolution that Ile-Ife championed in the 11th century. That legend defined what I've called a Yoruba community of practice (CoP). It was a regional integration strategy that involved the creation of the Ife Empire. We can call it Okunness, Olukuminess, Yorubaness, Oduduwaness, or Ifeness, but we don't know the name they gave it. The sources that led to that conclusion are in the book.
Between 1830 and 1832, Alaafin Majeotu and the people of Oyo-Ile used this same Oduduwa Legend to talk about the origins of their ancestors in Ile-Ife (as recorded by Hugh Clapperton and Richard Lander). The palace officials in Benin City also operated within this Oduduwa Legend framework in the 1490s when they referred to Ile-Ife as the "Place of Sunrise" where their Mighty Lord (Ogané) resided.
The Oduduwa Legend has provided the charter for regional political reorganization and recovery in periods of crisis, uncertainty, and fragmentation for several centuries. It happened in the late sixteenth century when Oyo, Ilesa, Ijebu-Ode, and Benin dominated the Yoruba political landscape. Samuel Ajayi Crowther and Obafemi Awolowo tapped into the elasticity of that legend for different reasons in the 19th and 20th centuries, respectively. The contemporary Yoruba Nation advocates are doing the same.
Again, I will emphasize that Ekiti, Egba, Ijebu, or Igbomina are not nations. They are speech communities in the Yoruba language continuum. They are also contested labels like Yoruba itself. Like every identity, they are situational, contextual, performative, and reductionist. I agree that Yoruba gained currency as an ethnonym in the 20th century in the context of the Christian missionary and European colonial projects. But the Yoruba-speaking peoples had responded to that ethnonym by the sixteenth century (if not earlier) before Songhai scholar Ahmad Baba al-Massufi (1556–1627) used the term in his book Mizra in 1615. Others from the coastal direction called them Olukumi or Okun.
"Aku" or "Eku" is the Oyo dialect version of the "Okun" greeting in the Yagba, Ijumu, Ekiti, and Ijebu dialects. Oyo is a much younger Yoruba dialect than the others. Our historical linguistic data shows that Ijumu is one of the oldest Yoruba dialects. In fact, it was in the Confluence region that the ancestral Yoruba language developed ca. 3000-2500 BC.
Our narratives are always constrained by the questions we ask, the sources we use, or how much we choose to say. JDY Peel used missionary records to write about the development of the Yoruba nation as a product of the Christian missionary (colonial) project. His sources limited how he framed his questions. The problem with his book is that he tried to telescope that 19th-century project to the timeless past. In contrast, the Yoruba as a self-aware cultural identity (or community of practice) preceded the missionizing project that produced those sources. Olatunji Ojo ["'Heepa' (Hail) Orisa: The Orisa Factor in the Birth of Yoruba Identity." Journal of Religion in Africa 39, no. 1 (2009): 30–59] and Andrew Apter ["Yoruba Ethnogenesis from Within." Comparative Studies in Society and History 55, no. 2 (2013): 356–87] reached conclusions different from that of JDY Peel when they turned to the Orisa practice (not Christianity) to write the history of Yoruba identity formation. My findings also differ from Peel's because I am not tied to those missionary records.
You may have the final word on this. Thanks for facilitating the conversation. I hope our exchanges help remind this forum that we need more historians to work on early African history. Our efforts towards decolonizing African history must involve defining what we mean by "nation" (or banishing the word altogether) and exploring other "archives" to make sense of the deep-time African history.
Akin Ogundiran
UNC Charlotte
On Sunday, May 28, 2023 at 1:47:57 PM UTC-4 Ibrahim Abdullah wrote:
Akin:
Thanks for the roll back to that distant past—Yoruba antiquity. I was actually responding to TF's claim about a Yoruba and Hausa nation but you read me upside down! I said there was no Yoruba or Hausa nation before 1500. I couldn't have said there was a Hausa nation around that period when I know that the concept of Kasa Hausa—Hausa Land—was invented in the nineteenth century.
Your roll back is persuasive; but I remain unconvinced about Yorubaness as widespread and seemingly dominant as a result of a process that started around the 11th century. If such a process was indeed unfolding since the 11 century——why was it militantly contested in the 19th century and beyond?
In the 1940/50s Ijbeu Ode, Comrade Osoba tells me, it was common among folks to say they were IJEBU not YORUBA. This is Ijebuland, Awo's backyard, the political architect behind the invention of Yoruba in the twentieth century.
The evidence I rely on is not just Polyglotta Africana. The view that Yoruba is a twentieth century invention was popularised by J.D.Y. Peel—Religious Encounter and the Making of Yoruba. What Peel argued in the case of the Yoruba has been advanced by David Northrup for Igbo. Both Peel and Northrup are using Polyglotta and the slave trade inventory of those who were exported and from where.
None of these sources present the voice of the slaves/ex-slaves to speak for themselves.
The evidence of Yoruba in America, Brazil, and Cuba is also inventory of export and the spoken language.
Now the evidence in nineteenth century Freetown is different. Polyglotta does not deal with Yoruba as a catch all marker of those captured in what goes for the contemporary South West in Nigeria. In Polyglotta Yoruba exists amongst others—Ekiti/Ijesha/Egba/Ondo/Yagba/Ife/ Ijumu. These people were interviewed and they got to say who they were and where they came from.
If Yoruba had been dominant and all encompassing as your roll back claims——why these contestations?
There are memorial tablets in nineteenth century churches referencing these identities. There are gravestones which clearly spell out these identities—Yagba/Ijesha/Egba et al. These memorial tablets and the gravestones are the closest evidence we have of the individual/ collective voice(s) of those who were transported as slaves referencing their identity.
Yes, identitiies are this and that; maleable and ever changing. We find Lacumi and Nago for Yorubas in the Diaspora outside Africa; in Sierra Leone, those you referenced as Saro— this is what they were called only when they returned to Nigeria —a generic marker that did not reference difference. In nineteenth century Freetown Yoruba was just one marker. The diaspora term in Sierra Leone was Oku/Aku. Ade Ajayi claims this must have come from Oyo Yoruba—supposedly from their greeting! I have hunch that it came from the Okun Yoruba cluster—they landed in the 20s when the term AKU became the popular marker for those who would today belong to the South West.
I hear you about archeology and oral tradition. The question remains what evidence do you privilege in reconstructing the past and why? Your roll back might help us understand Yorubaness; but it remains unhelpful in making sense of identities in nineteenth century Freetown
Ibrahim,
I was responding to the one-line statement in your intervention where you acknowledged the possibility of the Bayajida Legend being used to unite the Hausa city-states in the 14th and 15th centuries. In contrast, you stated with certainty that the Oduduwa legend came into existence in the 19th century. This suggests that the Yoruba city-states only existed in the 19th century.
This debate about Yoruba identity always gets mixed up with different things that lack historical credibility or are deficient in deep-time thinking. So, let's consider the following:
1. The idea of the nation-state as we know it today is a 19th-century European invention everywhere, not only among the Yoruba or Hausa. The same applies to Europe.
2. Across Africa before the 19th century, there were other configurations of identities that were regional and multi-lingual, and which united several political units. Sometimes, empires served as the configurations of such regional integration. The Mali Empire and the Ife Empire are good examples of such configurations of multi-lingual and multi-political integration going back to the 13th century.
3. The oft-repeated statement that the Yoruba identity is a 19th-century invention is based on the power of repetition, not on any historical evidence. By the way, you can't use documentary sources created in the nineteenth century to understand the deep history of a people. This is already a resolved methodological issue in African historiography. So, I won't flog that dead horse issue here.
4. There was a pan-regional identity that Ile-Ife created in Western Lower Niger as early as the 13th century, the culmination of a process that began in the 11th century. That regional identity-making process was multi-lingual and included the Yoruba- and Edo-speaking social groups as well as Nupe individuals. I explained that process in The Yoruba: A New History.
5. Anyone involved in oral historical or archaeological research would tell you that there was not a clear Ekiti, Egba, Ondo, or Ijesha identity before the nineteenth century, as you stated. Those identities congealed as part of the opposition to the Oyo Empire and other political and economic events in the 18th and 19th centuries. This partly explains why those Saro ancestors opposed the Yoruba label in the nineteenth century.
6. Also, bear in mind that identity is multiscalar. In an eighteenth-century Jebba or Nikki market, an Egba-speaking trader from the Ake kingdom would have been called Yoruba, not Egba. The same person would be Egba in Ikere-Ekiti, and he would be Ake in a Gbagura (in Egba-speaking territory) market.
7. Pollyglotta Africana is a valuable nineteenth-century document. It is useful for understanding the new community-formation and identity-making processes that the various Yoruba-speaking people in Sierra Leone were creating during the mid-nineteenth as displaced liberated captives. However, we must refrain from using it to flatten the deep-time Yoruba history. Let's turn to archaeology, historical linguistics, art history, oral traditions, and historical ethnography to avoid that tendency of time flattening.
Thank you,
Akin Ogundiran
UNC Charlotte
On Saturday, May 27, 2023 at 7:37:21 AM UTC-4 Ibrahim Abdullah wrote:
Akin:
There was No Hausa or Yoruba nation-state before 1500. The category Yoruba--encapsulating the current South West--is a recent twentieth century invention. The evidence from Pollyglotta Africana is clear--the liberated Africans from that area rebelled being labeled Yoruba when they were clearly Ekiti/Egba/Ife/Ondo/Ijesha. Iwe Irohin was for awon Yoruba ati Egba--this was 1853.
Ibrahim, And there were no Yoruba city-states and a vast number of kingdoms in the 12th and 13th centuries that the Oduduwa story of origins served?
Akin Ogundiran
On Friday, May 26, 2023 at 11:38:00 AM UTC-4 Ibrahim Abdullah wrote:
The Bayajida/Oduduwa trope were not invented to serve any national purpose--there was no Hausa or Yoruba nation when they came on stream. Yoruba as the marker for the so-called Yoruba race was invented by Crowther and missionary crowd in nineteenth century Freetown. The Hausa Bayagjda legend probably emerged during the formation of the city states in 14/15 centuries. And these were not nation/nation/states.
Noticeably, this essay, thought-provoking but not necessarily a sacrosanct perspective, cleverly evaded a known nexus and diffusionist influences between a much older cultural tradition known as Ancient Egypt and its geographically proximate Greek neighbor that is acclaimed as the fountain of Western Civilization.
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Sincerely,
Victor O. Okafor, Ph.D. Professor and Head
Department of Africology and African American Studies
Eastern Michigan University
Food for Thought:
"The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." -- Frederick Douglass
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