Truth be told, the Yoruba have regressed on many fronts. This is not difficult to discern, for the signs are boldly inscribed all over. Certainly, we are drastically reduced in strength and grievously lacking in internal cohesion. Sad still is the near hopelessness of the whole predicament.
A latest manifestation of our hopeless condition is the way we hurriedly subscribed to Sunday Adeyemo’s (aka Sunday Igboho) impulsive radical approach to Yoruba nationalism. It’s not that many don’t see this impulsivity and the danger it portends, but because our refined approaches would not take us out of the woods. Let it be marked boldly, our condition isn’t that forced upon us outright by the Nigerian state. Ours has been an unfortunate condition brought about by the reprehensible activities of disgruntled elements amongst us occupying positions of importance.
Of course, when a team that is hopelessly marooned for long in the wild desperately seeks a way out after applying all known methods of navigation and escape to no effectual end, in the wearisomeness of the jungle escapade, a silly method from a mad fellow might not provoke a rebuke. After all, we all know the rules of the jungle are everything but civil.
Sunday Adeyemo’s precipitate response of the violent mode to the ‘state-condoned excesses’ of the Fulani herdsmen are a spectacular dimension to the expression of collective angst of the Yoruba people. That his moves make a spectacle that draws applause from the Yoruba section of the Nigerian population doesn’t make it right, really speaking. In civilized climes or under normal conditions, that would not have just been considered bizarre but a grave assault on civility. What ironically gains ‘rightness’ for Adeyemo’s uncivil actions is in the combined factors of the unrighteousness of the Fulani herdsmen’s lingering acts of brigandage and the criminal silence maintained for too long by the Nigerian state.
Very sad situation! But two questions would remain agitating in the mind of a sane Yoruba: How did we get here? How do we get out of here?
In response to the first question, it is the opinion of this writer that the present state of the wellbeing of the Yoruba is a typical postcolonial condition found across Africa. Not the making of the Yoruba people just as no African caused the condition to be anywhere in Africa. It was beyond the reach of any African. How we all got ‘here’ remains an act of eternal injustice committed against innocent Africans by the imperialist missions in Africa.
On the contrary, to get out of ‘here’ isn’t out of our reach. It certainly isn’t impossible. The Yoruba are naturally endowed to rupture the structures that has been used in enslaving them and which threaten to remain perpetually so. What consistently works against this unique capacity for social emancipation and progress is nothing but the disuniting propensities of a few elements among the Yoruba. These elements are responsible for the disunity among us and the increasing tendencies to remain disunited. It is the disuniting acts of the few elements among the Yoruba that feed the maniacal penchant for the domination of the Yoruba using the Nigerian state apparatuses and the Fulani racial assaults, which is the latest of the crude measurements of the success of the Fulani domination agenda.
The Yoruba are endowed with a culture and history that can unite them. Unfortunately, both the culture and history are being de-empowered by the retrogressive elements among us. Some notable Yoruba obas and politicians who recklessly promote alternative Yoruba culture and history, insisting through illogical reasoning and forced arguments – all for their parochial interest – that the alternates must take the place of the pristine are key figures in this class.
Unfortunately, the excesses of these promoters of alternative Yoruba culture and history have led to the formation of different schools of thought on Yoruba culture and history in the past, present and future. Their persistent encouragement of this ugly trend has left the Yoruba in a quandary such that discordant tunes of culture and history are being played to the vast population of the Yoruba already in disarray of being in an African postcolony.
The latest verbal assault on the most exalted traditional rulership of the Yoruba from Sunday Adeyemo aka Sunday Igboho is just a reflection of the miseducation going on unabatedly in the schools of warped thought founded and promoted by the supremacist Yoruba obas and politicians working in collaboration with them.
Though Sunday Adeyemo has made a rebuttal on the assault and apologized, one must wonder whether the assault was a fallout or part of the orchestrated offensives against the stool of the Ooni. Indeed, it has been a very very long seasonal movie with different sides to it. Perhaps Adeyemo’s recent assault was designed as a prelude to yet another dimension to the long-span movie before it was aborted. Who knows? Time will always tell. But it’s really unfortunate.
Cases of assaults on the most exalted throne of Oduduwa call for long term views and evaluations of the Yoruba state of existence and the prospect of evolving a befitting Yoruba nation. What kind of dream do we nurture at present? From what seat of consciousness and sub-consciousness do our dreams derive? Who are likely to be our dream interpreters and executors? What measure of mental capacity for social reconstitution and ordering can our celebrated brigands of today command should they eventually emerge as the ultimate deciders of our fate?
Our embrace of brigandage of today has shown that what will eventually happen might never have been thought off, at least we might never have predicted the exact shape and color of it. But then we can help a lot to pave the way for a Yoruba country with lesser internal contradictions if we teach the right cultural and historical education to all the Yoruba. But will the supremacist Yoruba obas and their collaborators from the partisan political circle allow this to happen?
As matter stands today, Sunday Adeyemo deserves credit for forcing many in Nigeria today to turn massive attention to the menace of the Fulani herdsmen. Yet we must recognize the damage already done to his psyche through cultural and historical disorientation. No thanks to the sponsors and promoters of Yoruba alternative culture and history! Millions of Yoruba youth like Sunday go about without correct sense of culture and history. Yoruba obas who twist facts of Yoruba history and turn culture and tradition on their heads to project themselves above the Ooni are well-known even if their intentions are hidden. Expectedly, brigands get easily attracted to such obas since as rascally obas they deliberately attract to themselves brigands and the likes. Of course, without shady characters who will be ready to do their dirty biddings? How would they create fear in the minds of people who can really discern their white lies and challenge their perilous exploits?
As Sunday Adeyemo’s unguarded utterances reveal his much touted individualized radical nationalism for the wellbeing of the Yoruba as ill-conceived and traceable to the supremacist scheme of the known assailants of the stool of the Ooni, lovers of the truth of the Yoruba culture and history must be poised to take the promoters of alternative Yoruba culture and history headlong. Sunday is certainly a victim of wrong cultural and historical education. He deserves to be pitied for earning quick honour but throwing it away at once.
If lies are allowed to remain unchallenged for too long, they will be mistaken for the truth by the uninformed and uncritical. These schemers with inordinate ambitions don’t deserve silence again. Enough of their misleading of elements like Sunday Adeyemo! Enough of their complication of our process of unification! Enough of their frustration of our liberation moves!
Arimiyahu Adeyemo Adewoyin
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