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The historical and sociopolitical narratives of the Yorùbá nation is an interesting and thought-provoking one since the unraveling of the multiple historical circumstances that threw up the Yorùbá as a significant factor in colonial ad postcolonial politics in Nigeria. Permit me therefore to commence by paying glowing tribute to two avatar of Yorùbá history and culture scholarship, the late Professor J. O. Atanda and Professor Toyin Falola.
Our gathering here today has a double signification: We are here to preserve the works of late Professor Atanda by also preserving the memory of who we are as a people and what we have been mandated by history itself to achieve wherever we find ourselves. When Professor Falola was the guest of Splash FM early this year to deliver a public lecture, his concern was with the Yorùbá cultural invasion of the Atlantic world, and a critical enumeration of the many significant achievements that have practically redefined and reconfigured the cultural landscape of Haiti, Brazil, Cuba, Brazil, etc. In this keynote today, I will attempt to domesticate my inquiry within the Nigerian context and the historical mandate the Yorùbá has to inflect the politics and development of this state. I am a Yorùbá person. And so like Toyin Falola, Joseph Atanda, and so many other Yorùbá pioneers, I owe my heritage the benefits of my intellect, curiosity, endowments and scholarship to facilitate her onward progress.
In this keynote, I will be doing three key things. First, I will be outlining the nature of the Yorùbá republican spirit and its critical significance in the structuration of the Yorùbá worldview and influence. Second, I will be reflecting a bit on those contemporary dynamics that have led to some sort of internal fragmentation of the Yorùbá spirit, especially within the divisive political context of post-independence Nigeria. And lastly, I mean to interrogate the challenges of unity and disunity bedeviling the Nigerian national project of integration, and how the Yorùbá nation can ever hope to get the best of themselves and of the situation.
Introduction: The Lessons from Aáwé, My Birthplace
Permit me to commence with an autobiographical note. This is not just a mere anecdote. My deep experience as an Aáwé boy has very fundamental implications for my thoughts about what is ailing the Yorùbá nation and how we could go about rectifying it. Aáwé is a town in the Afijio Local Government Area in south-western Nigeria. It is about two-miles South-East of Oyo, the headquarters of the Oyo Province of the western region. I have often said that Aáwé is a little town built by little men with huge foresight on a future made strong by education. But this little town played a significant role in both my character formation and my intellectual development. I grew up within a small town whose fidelity to the Yorùbá cultural dynamics overshadows whatever else we may say about it.
There are two significant cultural issues that framed my early cultural interest in Yorùbá history and my intellectual interest in local governance and Yorùbá politics. The first is the first hand demonstration of Ali Mazrui’s triple heritage thesis. As a typical African community, Aáwé embodies the convivial values of a normal village but it also has more to say than just any other convivial town in Yorubaland. My grandfather, a Christian, got married to the daughter of an acclaimed local chieftain and an Imam. We had the good fortune of achieving the harmonious relationship between the two religions around the framework of tradition and culture. In other words, as the two religious faiths got more entrenched within our communal space, adherents began defining their relationship to the traditional beliefs around the imperative of values and culture but excluding the “idolatrous” practices defined by traditional rituals. I therefore grew up in a community of other loved ones and the dynamics of shared values which Mazrui encapsulated in the triple heritage thesis.
The philosophy of defense that serves Aáwé as a mechanism against domination has its own advantage, apart from saving a town from the ravages of war. Aáwé became a beacon of hope for other war-weary people all over Yorubaland. Aáwé became a town of refugee which required immense leadership and governance strategies to keep together people of diverse and often unruly dispositions. It would make for a serious scholarly research to inquire into the democratic framework that enabled the leadership of ancient Aáwé to achieve progress from a diplomatic management of difference. With difference infused within its cultural outlook, Aáwé became a mosaic of multi-coloured perspectives on challenges and possibilities; a cultural study in complexity management. This diversity, no doubt, led to the enlargement of the collective intelligence and the capacity for adaptability.
This enlarged intelligence made it possible for the succeeding generations of the Aáwé aborigines to embrace Christianity, for instance, late in the 19th century as well as grasped the immediate benefits of western education as a complementary dimension to their ubiquitous farming. Education therefore led to what we can now call a third migration away from Aáwé to Lagos. Farming of course suffered immensely from the loss of able-bodied people. However, in the final analysis, it turned out that the people were investing in their own future. And this future was defined around the continuous creation of a human capital pool of Aáwé indigenes, especially those who left Aáwé early in search of the Golden Fleece, and those who stayed behind to keep the home front from collapsing under the weight of compulsive emigration. The earlier generation of migrants served as house helps to elite the corps of Nigerians and European expatriates.
In those days there were few vehicles in Lagos with domestic fowls practically littering every open space. The fowls were sometimes run down by impatient “Oyinbo” drivers majorly in Ikoyi and Lagos Island. The Awe helps insisted, to everyone’s consternation, that there was nothing unhygienic in cooking and eating these dead fowls. This was where they got the nickname “Awe Aje Oku’die” (Awes who eat dead fowls). What kept the Moslems and Christian groups intact was their shared belief in the cultural unity of Aáwéland founded many centuries ago under the Aruwewe tree in the Egba forest where it got its aboriginal name.
Aáwé also taught me the value of local governance. Aáwé’s historical greatness therefore lies in its capacity to tie its indigenous capital pool into a cultural collective dedicated to Aáwé’s cultural renewal and developmental rehabilitation in the face of complex modern exigencies.
