VANGUARD NEWSPAPER
Yoruba have never been one -Awujale
Periscope May 16, 2010
By Kolade Larewaju
Oba Sikiru Kayode Adetona, the Awujale of Ijebuland
TALKING POINT–YORUBA IS A FIGMENT OF IMAGINATION
Posted by By Femi Odedeyi at 3 July, at 23 : 08 PM Print
NUHU RIBADU: YORUBA IS AN INVENTION; A FIGMENT OF IMAGINATION!
Nuhu Ribadu's June 8 speech at the Ahmadu Bello University concluded with a false conclusion thus: "The reality of modern Nigeria is one that challenges us to drop any other identity aside from that of Citizen in our effort to rescue the ship of state from this stormy sea of chaos."
This false conclusion cannot but be so since his entire speech was also based on a false premise—to wit: "Exclusive ethnic identities are inventions of our political advocacies and relevancies. Nigeria was a stretch of land hosting many city-states and cosmopolites, where in the south-west the Ijebu and the Egba people didn't consider themselves as one, talk less of as Yoruba".
For when Ribadu asked us to "drop any other identity aside from citizenship…." The question to address is whether any identity is incompatible with citizenship such that it must be dropped? Identity is not a consequence of citizenship as identity does not determine one's citizenship. A Yoruba can be a citizen of any country in the world, for whatever reason, yet such citizenship requirement would not be based on losing that Yorubanness. All of those naturalized citizens of America, for example, are not required to lose their Ethnological identities before they can be accepted as American citizens.
Citizenship is almost a matter of historical happenstance whereas identity is natural. Citizenship is not an "identity" except on matters of formal legal identification/recognition whereas "identity" is a question of social/cultural existence. To advocate dropping of "identity" in favor of "citizenship" is to negate citizenship itself, for there can be no citizen without a social/cultural existence.
Being a Yoruba is not inconsistent with being a citizen of Nigeria or of any country. A Yoruba, who "drops his/her identity" to become a "Nigerian citizen" has already denied his/her inclusion in the human world, and by asking that identity to be dropped, Ribadu is actually saying such a person does not exist.
In the attempt to foist this denial, Ribadu stood history on its head and actually played on our intelligence (he is a former intelligence operative, anyway) He stated: "We are gathered under this shade today because somebody found the wisdom to lay the foundation for this institution. Ahmadu Bello University……. Our diversity in this prestigious institution, across ethnicities, religions and regions, stimulated by remainders of the legacies of Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardine(Sardauna) of Sokoto, after whom our institution is named, instills an all-inclusive spirit in us such that we end up as tolerant and understanding wherever we find ourselves in private and public engagements."
When Nuhu Ribadu uses Ahmadu Bello, a former Sardauna of Sokoto as the purveyor of a legacy of "diversity", "tolerance", history is being turned on its head. For such "legacies" were of the domination of the rest of the geo-political space called Nigeria publicly expressed on October 12 1960 thus: "This New Nation called Nigeria, should be an estate of our great grandfather, Uthman Dan Fodio. We must ruthlessly prevent a change of power. We use the minorities in the North as willing tools, and the South, as conquered territory and never allow them to rule over us, and never allow them to have control over their future."
Sardauna and his party agreed to independence only if the North had a parliamentary majority, which Britain acceded to via the manipulation of the census figures both before and immediately after independence; the various violence visited upon the opposition in the North, under his watch—such opposition elements not mainly of the Fulani Nation; the role his party(and himself) played in the illegal declaration of the State of Emergency in the Western Region, being personally present in the House of Representatives as a "witness" etc etc. These are practical manifestations of dominance, which belies Nuhu Ribadu's attempt to whitewash Ahmadu Bello and push his "legacies" as a necessary foundation of any discourse about "diversity" and "tolerance" in Nigeria.
Nuhu Ribadu did not speak in isolation from the intellectual paradigm of the Fulani School of History. The Ahmadu Bello University which he touted as the "institution that instills an all-inclusive spirit…" is the political home of that Fulani thought process anchored by the late Bala Usman, a supposedly radical, "leftist" historian and political activist of the Aminu Kano school of thought. He it was that began a curious expatiation of history that tends to deny everybody of everything thereby making them nothing but in the process ascribing a "Nigerianism" to them. This "Nigerianism" is a reflection of the vision of Usman Dan Fodio who had sought to conquer what is now known as Nigeria and place it under the Sokoto Caliphate that he created and which Ahmadu Bello stated in the quotation above.
Earlier on, in 2005, Bala Usman had this to say about the Yoruba(among other Nationalities, but I will use the Yoruba as the example) "The fact is that, the earliest record we have of the use of the very name "Yoruba " was in the Hausa language and it seems to have applied to the people of the Alafinate of Oyo . This came from the writings of the seventeenth century Katsina scholar, Dan Masani (1595-1667), who wrote a book on Muslim scholars of the "Yarriba". But it was from a book of the Sarkin Musulmi Bello , written in the early nineteenth century, that the name became more widely used. The Bishop Ajayi Crowther , the Reverend Samuel Johnson , and his brother Obadiah Johnson , among others, came, in the nineteenth century, to widely spread this Hausa name to the people who now bear it, in their writings". He went on to say that "The Yoruba ethnic identity, like almost all the others in Nigeria , is a product of the formation of Nigeria in the late 19thand 20th centuries. This process was not simply one of the integration of communities speaking related dialects. It involves the incorporation of people speaking different languages."
As a historian, one would naturally expect Bala Usman to be more concrete in his assertions, but in the rush to rubbish any Nationality except the Fulani, he did not do so. He actually cited some historians as his sources. Before proceeding on Bala Usman, it is necessary to go into some assertions of these sources and see whether they stand up to scrutiny. He quoted Obaro Ikime thus:"Nigeria is not a self-contained geographical unit….In spite of the openness of its borders, however, there is a compactness about the Nigerian geographical environment which encouraged greater movement and interaction of peoples within it than with people outside it. The compactness comes principally from two factors. The first is the complementarity of the Sudan Belt and the Forest Zone with the intervening transitional Middle Belt dominated by the Jos Plateau .".
The problem with the above assertion by Obaro Ikime is that, at least for the Yoruba, the "compactness about the Nigerian geographical environment" is not self-limiting, in the sense that the Yoruba are not only found inside Nigeria, but are also indigenously found in the Benin Republic and Togo, such that the interactions among the Yoruba in these countries belies the theory of "compactness"; for if there was such compactness inside Nigeria, there is also such compactness among the Yoruba inside and outside Nigeria. And by the way, same goes for the Fulani outside Nigeria's borders, which partly accounted for those in Northern Cameroons to vote to stay with their kith and kin in the North.
He then proceeded to quote Anene: "no objective criticism of the boundaries of Nigeria should leave out of account the realities of political and economic conditions which prevailed in the boundary zones at the time the boundaries emerged…If the results of the negotiations are viewed against the background of these conditions one cannot escape the conclusion that the boundaries represented, to a suprising degree, the realities which existed at that time."
Again, the above assertion is not true, at least to Yoruba history. Both internal and external boundaries of Nigeria did not conform to the historical process of the Yoruba society. The "allocation" of present day Kwara and Kogi states to the North is against the boundary relationships between the Igbomina, the Ekiti who were summarily "allocated" to the North and the rest of Yorubaland. The Nigerian-Benin border suffered similar fate as the Yoruba in these countries were summarily allocated to the then colonial forces.
Having said that, let's now consider Bala Usman's own assertions as cited above.
In " A History of the Yoruba People" by Prof Banji Akintoye, he wrote on pages 6- 7 thus: " during the later stages of the Stone Age, as farming turned wandering folks into settlers(from about 4000BC) the scattered spread of farming people living in the West African region slowly began to get differentiated into related clusters and groups speaking proto-languages consisting of dialects that were related to one another…………..This linguistic evidence suggests that the Yoruba, Igala, Edo, Idoma, Ebira, Nupe, Kakanda, Gbagyi and Igbo belonged to a cluster of languages now called Kwa sub-group of languages by modern scholars, belonging to a larger family of languages now called the Niger-Congo(or Nigritic) family of Languages……….Over thousands of years, the groups in this cluster slowly separated as they developed distinctive characteristics, probably the last language group to separate being the Igala and Yoruba…….. the clear implication of all this is that the origin of the Yoruba people as a linguistic and ethnic group belongs in the process of slow differentiation of proto-groups which occurred in the Middle Niger and around the Niger-Benue confluence, beginning about 4000BC and continuing for thousands of years…………… it is therefore, in this area, that we must find the first home of the Yoruba as one people—the area close to the Niger-Benue confluence and further up the Niger, where southern Nupe and the far northeastern Yoruba groups—theYagba, Jumu,Ikiri, Oworo, Owe, and Bunu(now collectively called the Okun Yoruba by some scholars—and the northernmost Igbomina, live today."
Further on, he wrote "About the earliest settlements of Yoruba farming people in the forest, there are bodies of traditions in most parts of Yorubaland. Such traditions are found in nearly every town with a long history of existence in its present location……"……. "the traditions concerning these early settlements are integral to the traditions of the founding of the Yoruba kingdoms. When in a period from about the tenth or eleventh century AD(the period usually regarded as the Oduduwa period of Yoruba history), various groups went out (mostly from Ife) to establish kingdoms in the Yoruba forests, they came upon some pre-existing settlements everywhere and it was among these settlers that they established kingdoms. The traditions are unambiguous that the early settlers and the groups that came among them to establish kingdoms belong to the same ethnic stock, speaking dialects of the same language and sharing many other cultural attributes."
From the above, it is very clear that Bala Usman's "history" is like that of Mungo Park, the Englishman who discovered River Niger for the English but who was credited with discovering it in an overall manner—yet Mungo Park himself admitted that the "natives" showed him the way. In like manner, Bala Usman has now generalized a " discovery" of a "pre-existing social/political/cultural organization" solely for the consumption of the Fulani as a new "discovery for humanity"; as if the Yoruba had no idea of self-expression.
If we are to accept this Fulani School paradigm, it had been shown that Language constitutes the first expression of the cultural/social expression of a people. If people, as "citizens" are therefore to be cultural citizens, what then is the language of "Nigeria"? If we take English Language, that makes "Nigerians" English—but we know they are not. Any other language from within Nigeria can only happen as a result of forcible negation of the other Languages and therefore their socio-cultural existence, which will lead to open conflagrations—which even the colonial overlords did not attempt except only informally and which is breeding its own resistance in all spheres. Besides, it was only in 1961 that Southern Cameroons voted in a plebiscite, to remain part of the Cameroons while the Northern part voted to be part of Nigeria where they now constitute Adamawa, Taraba and parts of the North East Zone. So, if we are to accept Usman and Ribadu's logic, who were they before the 1961 plebiscite? Definitely not Nigerians!! Nigeria formally came into being in 1960.
And if it is argued that Hausa is the dominant Language of the North and not Fula/Fulfude, we must realize that the Hausa do not wield power in the North; no Hausa can be emir; the Hausa had been "downgraded" to a second-class status even in their own territory, by the Fulani power structure. So, yes, it is possible for a conqueror to appropriate a cultural value of the conquered. This is done to ensure permanence of the conquest and not a reflection of the inter-dependence of both the conquered and the conqueror.
This is the foundation which Nuhu Ribadu is building on when he now says "Exclusive ethnic identities are inventions of our political advocacies and relevancies. Nigeria was a stretch of land hosting many city-states and cosmopolites, where in the south-west the Ijebu and the Egba people didn't consider themselves as one, talk less of as Yoruba".
It is clear that Nuhu Ribadu "omitted" the Fulani in his examples, for he had assumed the "oneness" of the Fulani but denied same for the others. He also clearly forgot or did not know about the main thrust of the Yoruba "war to end all wars"—the Kiriji War—a war, fought within the context of a foreign invasion that had destroyed Oyo Ile and which then aimed to unify all of Yorubaland under one Government and which pitted the Monarchists against the Republicans, which tendencies abound in different forms among the various sub-groups in Yorubaland and which truce was arranged and signed on September 23, 1886. It must be noted that British intervention denied the Yoruba the opportunity to establish a form of Constitutional Monarchy through the armistice—a particular fall out which was the usurpation of that prospect by the British, since they ended up as the "political" authority as the colonial power while retaining some form of "traditional" power of the Obas. This also led to the skirmish between the AG government with its Local Government Reforms and the traditional system.
Furthermore "Nigeria" is not the only country in Africa with a "stretch of land hosting many city-states and cosmopolities? Uganda(with the resistance of the Buganda), Zimbabwe, even South Africa had to recognize its own "stretch of land…" via official recognition of all the indigenous Languages. And, of course, the entire question in the Sudan is a reflection of the "stretch of land….." Hence to now claim that Ethno-National advocacy are "inventions…." is patently false. The "stretch of land…." is not a natural outgrowth of or in Nigeria, for Nigeria came into being as a deliberate political/military decision which cannot, in any way, be considered a natural phenomenon.
This "Nigeria" that Nuhu Ribadu is so hung up on, has undergone several variations since Independence in 1960. The Independence Constitution as well as the 1963 Republican Constitution gave the Regions substantial Autonomies such that derivation was the principle under which the relations between the Center and the Regions were regulated, even up to the Regions having their diplomatic interest centers in the Nigerian Missions in the UK and US. Hence it was possible for the Western Region to devote more of its resources to areas like education and employment which it felt were of more benefit to its society. At one time, it was even able to advance a loan to the center for the center to "balance" its finances. And all Nigerians from all regions were citizens of Nigeria—and the commonwealth!!
By the time the military took over in 1966, this decentralization was overturned and replaced with a military-imposed Constitution with its variations up till the one presently being operated, such that the Unitarization of Nigeria began in earnest as at that time. And still, the Peoples who make up this Unitarized Nigeria are the same peoples that made up the De-centralized Nigeria.
So, the question Nuhu Ribadu and the Fulani School of History must answer is this: when talking about "citizenship…" which of the two "Nigerias" is he or are they talking about? The Federal or the Unitary? Especially so since neither of the two placed any barrier on citizenship.
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