A Handle on History

(Review of Professor Adebanji Akintoye’s A History of the Yoruba People, Dakar: Amalion

Publishers, 2010; Premier Hotel, Ibadan, Nigeria. April 22, 2010)

By Wale Adebanwi

Protocols

We are standing in the crucible of history.

Our recognition or appreciation of this fact is of secondary importance. The fundamental point is that by

participating in this process of history-making that disguises itself as history-writing, we are engaged with

that unending enterprise that is the march of history. Therefore, the author of this book, Professor Adebanji

Akintoye, in making history through the writing of history, provides us all with an opportunity to be part of

that engaging enterprise called History.

We cannot fully predict what coming generations would do with, or say about, this book. But we can

say with certainty that, just like Samuel Johnson’s The History of the Yorubas, written more than a century

before it, this and coming generations would have to use this book as a departure point to understand how

those who are self-identified as the Yoruba evolved. While some have argued that to Johnson’s History of

the Yoruba is due “the principal glory of Yoruba historiography”1, indeed to Akintoye’s A History of the

Yoruba People must go the credit of the comprehensive modern redefinition of that historiography of a

people described by William Bascom2, the late Professor of Anthropology at the University of California,

Berkeley, as “one of the most interesting and important peoples of Africa”.

In acknowledging this today, we are honouring a perpetual tradition, which the Yoruba people eagerly

celebrate: The link between the ancestors who went before, those who are here now and those who will

come after. Against that backdrop, let me confess that there is so much to say about this great book, but

little time to say it here today. My task therefore would be merely to point to a few of the critical issues

raised by the book, appraise its value in the context of the disciplinary historical studies of the Yoruba and

more and then place the book in the larger spectrum of the ideals and principles that history offers in

contemporary times.

A History of the Yoruba People represents an important milestone in the process of capturing the past.

In the introduction to the book, the author describes his overriding purpose as follows: “I offer [this book] in

the humble hope that it will contribute something to the growing knowledge of Yoruba History in particular

and the History of Black Africa and Black people in general, that it will provoke further interest in Yoruba

and African History, and, above all, that it will increase the Yoruba people’s love of, and romance with, the ir

impressive and fascinating heritage”. A monumental task, we must concede. But let me say ahead that

Professor Akintoye elegantly delivers on his epic promise. Therefore, this book cannot but fulfil all the

expectations he has for it, and more.

There are several questions that this book raises that we cannot address within the limits of this review.

For instance, what is the purpose of history? How do we unpack the several strands of the “past” to arrive

at a present consensus? What is the purpose of the past for the present and the future? What intentions, or

perhaps, intentionalities, structure and propel the enterprise of history and the craft of the historian?

For a book that has taken about three decades to write, it is understandable that the author decides not

only to write history, but also to make history in the process. There are two fundamental ways in which Prof.

Akintoye achieves this.

First, his is the first comprehensive attempt to account for the entire History of the Yoruba from creation

since Revd. Samuel Johnson’s late 19th Century effort, entitled, The History of the Yorubas from the

Earliest Times to the Beginning of the British Protectorate3, which was reconstructed by his brother, Dr.

Obadiah Johnson, and published nearly a century ago (1921). Several other limited attempts have been

made by both lay and academic historians, Yoruba and non-Yoruba, and many more which are limited to

the history of the sub-groups or specific issues or explicit historical trajectories in Yorubaland. But none of

these matches the ambition of this book. Before Johnson, Bishop Ajayi Crowther had tried to face the

immense task, before he eventually abandoned it to evangelical exertions. Even Chief Obafemi Awolowo, it

was reported, had that ambition, but a long and arduous struggle to save Nigeria and eventually death,

denied him of the opportunity. Earlier as Premier, his government had created the Yoruba Historical

Research Scheme charged, among others, with (re)writing Yoruba history. This effort, led by the respected

historian, Professor Saburi Biobaku, unfortunately collapsed after a few years. Perhaps, these examples

sharply demonstrate the magnitude of Professor Akintoye’s monumental accomplishment.

Two, this book directly contests and shifts the focus of Yoruba history away from what many have

called the Oyo-centric account of Samuel Johnson. While other academic historians have over the last

eighty years or so, commented on the limitations of Johnson’s pioneer effort to write a comprehensive

history of the Yoruba, it is the present author who has taken up the historic task of actually (re)writing that

history comprehensively and attempting to transcend the limitations of an accomplished and great lay

historian that was Samuel Johnson.

Where Johnson avoids the creation myth that positions Ife as the sacred locus of Oduduwa’s original

descent and the orirun (creation-source), Akintoye, justifiably, restores Ile-Ife to its proper place as “ibi

ojumo ti mon wa’ye” (where the dawn emerges). Where Johnson justifiably situates Ibadan, described by

some as the “Yoruba Sparta”, as the “Salvationist” core, in military terms, of the Yoruba people in the late

19th and early 20th centuries and places Ibadan at the very centre and as the symbol of the “neo-Yoruba”,

and also as the spatial representation of the possibilities inherent in the Yoruba future, Akintoye recognizes

Ibadan’s key role in Yoruba history but refuses to dramatize it like Johnson or weave the future of the

Yoruba around the emergence and (mis)fortunes of Ibadan. However, there is no doubt that indeed, as

Johnson notes, Ibadan became the centre of Yorùbá modern history from the 1830s. But Ibadan’s

emergence as the new hegemony after the collapse of Oyo Empire with its strong military presented a

contradictory challenge. As Johnson4 states, Ibadan was as much “a protector as well as a scourge in the

land . . .” in that era.

Akintoye’s A History of the Yoruba People also reflects the differences, and perhaps contradictions,

between the academic historian (Akintoye) and the lay historian (Johnson). Where Johnson emphasizes

the discord and dissention among Yoruba sub-groups, particularly in the 19th century and the disunity

among them, symbolized, for example, by the split between the Oyo-Yoruba and the non-Oyo Yoruba, he

also prayed for the return to “universal peace with prosperity and advancement” and the welding into one of

“the disjointed units under one head”, “as in the happy days of [Alaafin] ABIODUN5. On his part, Akintoye

emphasizes the “immemorial” unity and the singularity of the common identity of the Yoruba, despite minor

disarticulations through the ages. Where Johnson, in contradictory ways, tries to reconcile Ibadan’s history

and role with the Victorian gospel of Christian modernity, enlightenment and civilization appropriated for

and domesticated in the Yoruba, while externalizing Islam in Yoruba history and future, on the contrary,

Akintoye places the two world religions, Christianity and Islam, in historical perspectives and situates the

tensions and contradictions evident in the Yoruba encounter with the Christianity and Islam without

ideologically privileging one in the visions of Yoruba future.

In a sense, some critics may accuse the author of presenting an Ife-centric approach to Yoruba history,

with emphasis on other eastern Yoruba sub-groups such as the Ekiti, the Ondo and the Ijesa, but indeed,

this can be seen in broader light as an attempt to provide a more nuanced account of the roles of the

different groups in the making of history which is largely silenced by Johnson’s narrative which is

constructed around Oyo. Where Johnson’s The History understandably ends at the “beginning of the British

Protectorate”, Akintoye’s A History takes it further into late 20th century which foreshadows the 21st Century.

If this were all that the author achieves with the book, the book and its author would still have entered

the pantheon of history without question. However, it is because the book achieves far more than this that

recommends it far beyond this age. With grace and scholarly articulacy, with rare cultural lucidity and

politically-conscious fluency that combines the edifying confidence of the Arokin with the artistic panache of

the Opitan, with the long-term coherence of the consummate academic historian and the grounded

dexterity of the lay narrator who recognizes the fundamental linkage connecting the past through the

present to the future, Prof. Akintoye has delivered to us a compelling narrative that we cannot but engage

with.

As I have stated, this book is more than a 21st century attempt to (re)present a comprehensive history

of the Yoruba and contest the Oyo-centric account of Johnson while shifting the focus to a broader and

more eclectic account. It is a far more nuanced, evidentially-sensitive, systematic account.

At a broader level, the author contests very old and recent accounts of the emergence of the Yoruba

category and identity which insist, on the one hand, that the Yoruba identity was invented in the late 19 th

century and early 20th century as part of the project of Missionary Christianity, led by the Church Missionary

Society (CMS) and its retuning freed slaves, including the Saros, who were eager to indigenize or

Yorubalize Christianity and Christianize the Yoruba. This has been articulated brilliantly by Professor JDY

Peel, in his magisterial work, Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba6. This project included the

production of a Bible (Bibeli Mimo) in a uniform native language during the 19 th century7; the author also

contests, on the other, the argument that the Yoruba identity was popularized by the emergent Yoruba elite

in the urban areas who appropriated the history and narratives of the foundational ethos constructed

around Oduduwa and the founding city of Ile-Ife (p. 57) or the greatness and splendour of the ancient Oyo

Empire.

What is Prof. Akintoye’s specific response to these accounts?

Perhaps, one critical purpose of Prof. Akintoye in writing this book is to emphasize and “prove” the

“immemoriality”, or, the “timelessness”, of common Yoruba identity and its constancy through several

centuries, despite mutations and contestations - including internecine wars, constant migration, and the

colonial experience. Yet, and some might see this as a contradiction, the author insists that that

“immemoriality”, what the Yoruba call “igba iwa se”, is grounded in memory and the “timelessness” can be

understood within the Gregorian calendar. I am certain that more qualified scholars, particularly historians,

anthropologists and archaeologists - and maybe political scientists, whose discipline equips them with the

scholarly conceit to trust in their own capacity to interpret history better than the historians - would take up

this issue and, even, challenge it. But it suffices here to say that, the idea, the construction, and the

re-construction and the modern projection, and by that fact, the consolidation of common Yoruba identity,

as other scholars have noted, can be grounded in the work of missionary Christianity which made use of

returnee slaves, like Bishop Ajayi Crowther and Samuel Johnson, local converts who became educated,

and several others, to spread the idea and ideal of commonality among a people who largely recognized

their origin in Ile-Ife but had failed for centuries to give that a pride of place in their cross-sub-ethnic group

relations. Only about sixty years ago in this city, the Ijebu and the Ibadan dramatized this sub-group rivalry.

I have argued in my own work, following the illuminating insight of Professor Peel, that the height of the

consolidation and the modernization of that common identity and its political instrumentalization in the other

half of the 20th century was a project led by that finest of African state builders, Chief Obafemi Awolowo,

and his lieutenants. The creation of Egbe Omo Oduduwa no doubt finally resolved, consecrated and sealed

the myth of Oduduwa progenitor-ship, and promoted Oduduwa against all other rivals within the founding

myth, particularly Obatala. We should be particularly glad that the city in which that project was executed,

the great city of Ibadan, is where we are meeting today.

However, while conceding that some of these processes and historical events contributed to the

consolidation and expansion of the Yoruba identity and commonality, and the fact that most Yoruba

sub-groups for several decades identified themselves as Ijesa, Ijebu, Oyo, Ekiti, Igbomina, etc, the author

dismisses the claims that this meant that common Yoruba identity that we have come to know in modern

times is a recent invention. He emphasizes, perhaps controversially for some scholars, that “very strong

group or national consciousness pervaded all aspects of Yoruba civilization” throughout history. Concludes

the author, “The end result was that the Yoruba people emerged from the nineteenth century into the 20 th

as a strongly united people, poised to take full advantage of the powerful inputs of a growing world

economy.”

The author also dismisses different claims about migration from a far away territory to their present site,

from Archdeacon J. Olumide Lucas’s already discredited attempt at placing the origin of the Yoruba in

Egypt, using dubious linguistic evidence, to Prof. Saburi Biobaku’s thesis about an ancient kingdom of

Meroe in eastern Sudan from which they emerged, or others who claim that the Yoruba were one of the ten

“lost tribes” of Israel; or the perspective dominant in Moslem historiography popular around old Oyo which

places the origin of the Yoruba in Mecca through “Lamurudu” or Nimrud.8 Affirmed Akintoye, “It is on the

soil of Yorubaland that Oduduwa was born and raised; it is only in that soil that his roots can be found”.9

Akintoye takes specific historic events, contextualizes them by providing reasons why they happened,

how they happened, and their significance. It is such an exceedingly well-organized historical mode that

makes it easy to agree with the author or disagree with him. In the best traditions of the academic historian,

he even provides the basis for any discourse on the rightness or wrongness of his evidence, his

interpretation and the dynamics and significance of historical events.

But this book cannot be read in a one-dimensional way, otherwise the complexities that are raised by

its attempt to offer an evidential narrative may be lost. For instance, while on the one hand, the author

destabilizes the centrality and primal place that Oduduwa occupies in the narrative of Yoruba ancestry in

the popular ways in which this narrative is constructed, on the other hand, he rearticulates Oduduwa’s

centrality in ancient Ile-Ife and consequently in Yoruba history and emphasizes Oduduwa’s organizing role

in the (re-)conceiving and the (re-)enactment of the old and the imagining of “new possibilities and

prospects” (p. 62) in Yorubaland. In some ways, this becomes an ancient template for the challenges of

mid-20th century Yorubaland in the context of colonial Nigeria. Argues the author in connection with the

historical moment of the emergence of Oduduwa:

“Fortunately, in the midst of all the rubble, there was one man who understood the great need of the

moment and, by understanding the need, came to an understanding too of the concept – even though (as

far as we know) he does not seem to have had any precedent to go by. His name was Oduduwa.”

So how did a man, Oduduwa, who was a late comer to the centre of power struggle in Ile-Ife become

the king and later, the progenitor of tens of millions of people? What have the pattern of settlement and the

appropriation of pre-Oduduwa Ife’s socio-economic and political ethos got to do with the evolution of the

Yoruba people as one of the most urbanized people in Africa? How did the location of the main market - as

the economic life-centre of traditional Yoruba territorial organization - near the king’s palace – which was

the centre of political power – evolve? In this well-written book lie the answers to these and many other

historico-spatial and epistemic puzzles.

Prof. Akintoye takes this magnificent story from the earliest times through the concrete and mythical

founding narrative of Oduduwa, through the evolution of the Yoruba identity, through the age of

iron-smelting in Western Sudan which inaugurated a new era of great economic and social transformations,

to the evolution of the elu pattern of settlement from about 1000 AD. He uses all these to explain how the

Yoruba constantly revised and renewed their culture through the reconciliation of cultural beliefs and

practices with new encounters.

There are several other critically important historical issues that Prof. Akintoye takes on, including the

consequences of the 19th century, which is the greatest historical epoch that largely redefined Yorubaland

and Yoruba history. It was the century of the collapse of the Oyo Empire, the Yoruba civil wars, the

emergence and dominance of Ibadan as the bridge between the dying epoch and the emerging one, the

European incursion and the subduing of the Yoruba, as well as other ethnic groups in what has been

turned into a territorial contraption called Nigeria, the triumph and spread of Islam represented in one

instance by the Fulani imposition in Ilorin, and then the drive towards the cultural hegemony of Christianity

and the embrace of education with the associated development of a “standard” Yoruba and the production

of Yoruba orthography, and the emergence of modern Yoruba nationalism that sought to reconcile the

“modern” Yoruba with both the cruel and the ennobling legacies of the past. It was in the 19 th century that

Yorubaland changed forever. Yoruba people surrendered the past in that century and embraced the future.

Akintoye calls it “a great century of change, transformation and progress” (p. 362). The implications of all

these for the present century are clearly evident.

All the tensions in this momentous age were allowed to come through in the book. Understandably

perhaps, Prof. Akintoye dwells considerably on Ilorin and its implications for the Oyo Empire and Yoruba

future. From the 19th century till date, Ilorin has always represented not only a metaphor for the final

collapse to the great Oyo Empire, but a nagging reminder of how internal conflicts and personal struggles

for power can create the conditions for the destruction of a people and the seizure of their common weal by

outsiders.

Akintoye’s important political message in regard of Yoruba history in relation to Nigeria is this: “The

fundamental roots of the Nigerian problem are to be found in the composition of the country, and the nature

of the structure that the British had bestowed on it” (p. 404). The author’s account of recent Nigerian

history, against this backdrop, would perhaps be one of the most contentious issues in the book. I will leave

that to the coming debate.

There are several questions that Akintoye uses this book to pose indirectly. And he obviously demands

answers. For instance, in a Yoruba country where questions of the transcendental importance and uses of

education, good health, rural-urban planning, etc. were settled in a politically-organized and strategically

implementable manner by 1959, why should the Yoruba enter the 21st century as if they were a people who

need to be preached to about why it is crucial that every primary school in Beyerunka in Ibadan, or in

Ajegunle in Lagos be one from which a neuro-surgeon, a Nobel laureate in literature, or a chief justice can

emerge?

One of the most significant things that come out of this book is about Yoruba attitude toward finality and

fullness. It is a very ironic attitude, which is why religious fundamentalism or any form of extremism, is

rejected by the Yoruba. Prof. Akintoye provides some of the historical grounds for this in the book, but I am

not sure whether he would agree with my interpretation. My argument is this: Yoruba opposition to “finality”

and by extension fundamentalism, is evident, for instance, in “Orunmila” (Baba Ifa). In his full appellation,

he is taken to be “Orunlomeni ti o la”. In a way, you can say that even as far back as many centuries ago,

the Yoruba already anticipated postmodern ideas. There is a certain ambivalence in Yoruba culture and

history that challenges finalities. In the end, Orunmila symbolizes the incapacity of mankind, despite the

best efforts through religion, to account for who will ultimately be judged by God as “qualified for Heaven” -

that is, qualified for Salvation. Whereas, mainstream Yoruba Islam and Yoruba Christianity exhibit this

cultural tentativeness in their religion, despite the affirmations - that is, the residual nature of final

decision-making about who will be saved, which is the exclusive preserve of God or Allah – yet,

fundamentalist Islam and extremist Pentecostal Christianity, in some respects, seem to have seized upon

this exclusiveness, reserved for God, and invested it in human agency. I have no time here to pursue the

complicated consequences of this in both local and international contexts.

However, on the other hand, Olodumare and Odu Ifa, and Odu-to-da-iwa (Oduduwa) with “odu”

meaning “fullness” and “totality” also points to another important heritage in Yoruba culture and history. It is

sufficient to say here that the Yoruba conception of totality and fullness, in contradistinction to the

ambivalence inherent in “Orun lo me ni ti o la”, signals a permanent and fundamental essence in the culture

that predisposes the people towards a constant and perhaps unachievable fullness and totality. I will like to

suggest that this is what makes the Yoruba society a permanent work-in-progress and, when appropriated

in present times, makes the people one of the biggest, if not the biggest, African ethnic-nationality where

the search and struggle for a better life is a fundamental, critical and unending project – even where the

larger postcolonial state, such as Nigeria, remains sick and sickening. Therefore, when others say that the

Yoruba people, in the context of Nigeria, are “noise-makers” or “trouble-makers” in the struggle to make

Nigeria a better country, they are missing the element in Yoruba history and culture; that is odu - which

conditions the Yoruba to a permanent striving to achieve fullness and totality, even while foreswearing

extremism and fundamentalism. Americans call this, “to make a more perfect union”.

Another significant thing about this book, as hinted in the chapter on the old Yoruba Diaspora in the

Americas, is perhaps to remind the Yoruba of the duties they owe to the black race. As one of the largest

ethnic-nationalities in Africa, one with the strongest surviving culture in the Diaspora, and one of the most

progressive in the embrace of modernity, the Yoruba past will be immaterial if it does not constitute a

pedestal and a resource which can be mobilized in the service of the historic task of confronting the worst

collective racial destiny imposed on any race in human history. If we point to a rich past, it must be toward

ensuring a richer future.

As some of the greatest story-tellers have alerted us, and as A History of the Yoruba People again

proves to us, when all the wars have been fought, when all the artilleries of fire and doom have been

deployed, when all the struggles for good and against evil have been accomplished, when the powerful

have destroyed all that is in sight and the powerless have suffered the consequences, it is the story,

the narrative, consecrated as history, that survives us all. As they say in our culture, ba gbon bi

ifa, ba mon pi opele, a hundred years hence or more, there will be some narratives that will sum

up everybody’s role in this age. The accomplished thief of the people’s vote and those who were

robbed of their mandate, no one will be robbed of his or her place in history, for good or for ill,

and no event will be obliterated, eventually, by history - particularly, in this age of boundless

communication.

Finally, the question that this book gently reminds us of, like History itself, is this: when generations yet

unborn, say in a hundred or two hundred years from now, read the narratives of this era of disappearing

hope and expanding hopelessness, an age when the Yoruba history of cultural honour has been so

bastardized such that the fastest and most secure way to be called “honourable” today is to be endlessly

dishonourable, what will history say of your role, what will it say of mine?

I thank you for your attention.

o Adebanwi is an Assistant Professor, African American and African Studies,

University of California, Davis, CA, USA. Email: anadebanwi@ucdavis.edu