ONYEJI NNAJI AND RENO OMOKIRI ON THE TRUE SOURCE AND MEANING OF “YORUBA”

Ajuede.com contributors have one simple rule whenever the treatment of any people’s history is called to mind. We dig history down to the possible oblivious roots. We believe that we are committed to unraveling those forgotten parts of people’s history that actually defined them beyond fancy. Check our publications on people’s history and compare them with those found elsewhere, you will find deeper research sources that other internet sources may not have covered. I believe this was the sole reason why worldpress.com hostees are interested in publishing our history works. Read the Origin of the Jukun, Egypt, Ethiopia, Nubia etc. or the most recent work on The Origin and History of Fulani and read similar documents elsewhere on the internet and see for yourself.

The reason we are so rooted to the deepest resort is that we are committed to bringing out the oblivious points in people’s history beyond the known. Appreciation comments from our audiences have shown to us that they too understand the truth through our works. See comments on the History of Ethiopia, The Origin of the Zulu People, and The Akans, you will see for yourself. The only subject that had attracted detractions has been any time the classified information on the history of the Yoruba is discussed. The worst, the comments had never shown any scholarship evidence other than abuse of the one and only Igbo race. Ajuede.com has contributors from USA, Ethiopia, Israel, Zambia and Nigeria among few others who occasionally send in their works via mail. Spread across the globe, we have the opportunity to reach out to relevant documents within the bound of these areas.

The article, The True History of Yoruba has attracted three continuous abusive detractions. Funny enough, these detractors had depended on the succinct sources that are not older than the colonial days in this part of Africa called Nigeria; ruling out their own rich oral tradition which is much older than the days when the imperialists appeared. The anger-motivated comment, whose writer who claimed anonymous, says,

I immediately knew this writer was Igbo the moment he said Yoru-baa means beg to survive, why are you Igbos so mischievous? Why write a long article based of lies and fabrications? First of all, the appellation YORUBA was created nothing less that 200 years ago, Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther a Yoruba man who codified Igbo Language and provided Igbo with their first crop ( Cassava sticks) gotten from Yoruba land by Portuguese which was the first thing Igbos planted because they were hunter gatherers in ancient times. Samuel Ajayi Crowther gave Yorubas the name YORUBA.        

Not what the writer put up there. Yorubas were known as Ervehs, later changed to Eyeo, later changed Eveo, later to Anago, Later Yoruba. Igbos have immensely used social media for smear campaign against Yorubas and never will never point out their misdeeds in any way shape or form. This writer should do something better with his time!

As the admin of ajuede.com, I wish to clarify this fellow on behalf of this essayist. The first untrue claim here is the saying that Ajayi Crowther codified the Igbo language. The Crowther led missionaries had the assistance of Asaba converts in their mission in the east. At that time the Igbo Bible had not emerged until a few more time when the missionaries (particularly Methodist missionaries) reaching the east from the Calabar costal corners arrived the Igbo heartland of Okigwe. The documentation of the Igbo Bible was occasioned as a way of making easier the preaching of the gospel. Nobody agues the presence of Bishop Ajayi Crowther led missionaries in the east; history only made us to know that he headed straight towards the Benue region. The documentation of Igbo Bible took effect in the Okigwe region, not Onitsha axis.

Another untrue statement is on the “Meaning and Origin of Yoruba”, three online write-ups by active Yoruba writers will help us here. The first source is titled What Does Yoruba Mean? @ Quora.com, written by Gbenga Elutidoyi and published, 22nd December, 2016. The essay reveals that Yoruba was coined from the word, Yoriba, although he did not show the meaning.

Its etymology just like the many histories of the Yoruba is unsubstantiated by historians. The veracity of folklore is believed as a form of patriotism and pride than a standard reference to history. The standard reference book for Yoruba history wasn't written until 1921 by Samuel Johnson and Dr. Obadiah Johnson. Although the Yoruba language is older than the English language which emerged in the 5th century about 1,500 years after the Yoruba language it was codified until the 1930s.

The name is believed to have emanated from indigenous ethnonyms Ọyọ (Oyo) or Yagba - two Yoruba-speaking groups along the northern borders. The name was adopted by Sultan Muhammad Bello (who later became the second Sultan of Sokoto) who referred to Oyo people as "Yariba" in his treatise on the Oyo Empire. Yariba is popularized by Hausa usage and the 19th-century ethnography written in Arabic and Ajami in reference to Oyo people. Yoruba is a variant of Yariba.

Looking at the date of this publication, it is apparent that it was written to defend the content of its counterpart @ ajuede.com. The second source written by Ayomide O. Tayo on the 14th September, 2017 published @ Pulse.ng on the title, What is the Meaning of the Name? says,

A few Yoruba heritage articles and Facebook group believe in the theory that the Yoruba word was formed from a derogatory term used by Hausa-Fulani traders to name people from the South-West.

Yoruba people were seen as tricksters and shrewd negotiators in business. Northerners allegedly started calling them Yaribansa which supposedly means bastard. Over the years the corruption of the word Yaribansa would develop to Yoruba.

This second source brings out what the first source was hiding, “the real meaning of the word Yoruba” which was mimicked by the said Fulani foreigners as “Yaribansa” (shortly, Yoriba). This is the kind of writing Femi Ojo Ade would say is “Still a Victim”. Be patient enough to see the third and, of course, the most scholarly among the three. The True Meaning of the Word Yoruba, published @ ekumogumdescendants.org by Bola Olalekan, on a date unspecified says:

I asked a lot of people to define Yoruba, nobody had a clue so I decided to return to history and I delved into what Yoruba scholars of the past centuries had written. Slowly I began to unravel the mystery of our name.

The first hint I got was from an ordinary search which spouted Yariba. What does that mean?? I carried on, I moved on to the always ready Yoruba dictionary written by Samuel Ajayi Crowther which defines ‘Yariba’ as a bastard and deceitful person.

Another came from the one I found on a scholarly written journal of Dr Taiwo Ayanbolu who insisted Yoruba is a name derived from Hausa language which means deceit. He claimed he found the definition at York Museum in England dating to the 19th century.

Before I go further here, I would like to stress how the name came aboard. It has been recorded that the Hausa-Fulani who had been in contact with the Yoruba even before the rise of Oyo Empire had for some reasons chosen to call us Yariba, or Yaribansa.

Skeptical, uncertain and speculative is the nature of all these sources. One thing that proves it untrue about Yaribasa metamorphosing to the today term, Yoruba, is simply time. The colonial masters arrived the Yoruba water land within the same century when the repatriated slaves returned home; about the same time also the Fulani jihadists led by Osman Ibn Fodio entered the northern part of Nigeria, 19th century. For Yoruba researchers and writers to claim that the entirety of the Oduduwa descendants do not have a collective identity (call it appellation if you like) that defined a people speaking their language is an orchestrated deceit. Two good questions that clarify this falsehood are:

(1) Whose language do Oduduwa children speak before 1800 AD?

(2) What name was the language called?

Answers to these questions would help the Yoruba trace their bearing back to base. 

Before concluding on this very important discussion, it is pertinent that we sample the "beautiful" contribution of Reno Omokiri. He too was faced with this challenge. Probably, he was consulted by someone who had read from ajuede.com post on the origin and meaning of the word, "Yoruba" and was moved to defend his race. Omokiri's view about the whole thing did not truly reflect any explanation different from those cited earlier. For instance, he believed with other members of his race that Yoruba derived her name from the strayed members of Esau tribes, the Fulani. In the Paper, "Reno Omokri reveals the actual meaning of the Yoruba name," published @ Udo-Udochukwu's Blog on no specified date, Reno Omokiri was quoted as follow:

“The Fulani were notorious for raiding tribes of the lower Niger. They called the Igbo Yar’Miri, which is a derogatory name that they still call them in the North (Nyamiri). The Yoruba they called Yar’Iba. I know the meaning of that word and it is so derogatory that I will not reveal it here. It was the British who in search for an ethnic identity for the Omo Oduduwa, took the derogatory word Yar’iba, and mispronounced it as Yoruba.”

Omokiri made a very bias mistake here. it was clear from timing that Omokiri was not correct about the Igbo circumstance here. The term "NYAMIRI" used to address the Igbo never appeared until the days of the Biafran Civil War. At the inception of the war, there was a population of the Igbo stuck in the North because they never believed the possibility of the war; so, they did not leave the north while others were leaving. helplessly, this population ran to one Emir pleading for their lives. The bloodthirsty Fulani insisted that they must be killed, but the Emir refused. To please them, the Emir promised the mob that the Igbo will be left to die on their own. So it happened that when days passed without food or water, the people became famished and they requested for water in the native tone, "Nye anyi miri", translated to mean, give us water.

Nobody offered them water to drink. With time they died one after the other without the northerners laying hands on them. Therefore it remains that, after the civil war, the Northerners used it as a designed insult to tell the Igbo the condition that befell their brothers who ran to the Emir for refuge. The derogatory meaning of Yariba which Omokiri refused to speak of has been explained in the quotations above.

Now, speaking of the name the Yoruba called themselves in the beginning of time, Omokiri claimed that, “The actual name for the Yoruba or Omo Oduduwa is Omoluabi which means a word evolved from omo-ti-olu-iwa-bi, meaning the child that the lord of character begat.” This is wrong and he knows that too well. Omoluabi is an appellation drawn from the language of the gods. it cannot stand for the collection of people generally termed Yoruba. The Igbo for instance refer to themselves as "Nwa Afo", "Nwa di ala" etc; translated to mean, womb child and son of the soil respectively. These appellations cannot stand for the nation of people called the Igbo. If Omoluabi, as Omokiri asserts, was the collective name for the Yoruba nation in the beginning of things, then there was a misplacement of features that characterised a Yoruba man. For instance, the term Omo is used to introduce one's origin among the yoruba in the manner as Aba and Ama are used by the Kikuyu and the Zulu respectively to denote origin other than nationality. In the same view also, the Igbo use Umu, Ama and Nwa to denote origin other than nationality. When nationality is referred to, Omokiri is simply a Yoruba while I am Igbo. 

What I expected Omokiri to do, since he decisively joined this highly valued discourse, was to first tell us which language the said Omoluabi spoke those days of ignorance. If they spoke the very Yoruba used today, then he should tell us what the language was called. From all I know as a contemporarily historian, no people speak the language of their civilizers as their local dialect. It may be their official language; but the language that defines their identity is their local dialect. To any language analyst, there is no difference between “Yorubaa” as the Igbo myth reveals and the claimed “Yariba”, except for tonal difference resulting from mother tongue influence. As long as the word remains, the Yoruba must have had a collective identity that defined them as a people belonging to a same ancestry; and this identity, if it did not spring from the Yoruba language, must have its root in the language of the communities in the neighbourhood. 

The Igbo called themselves Igbo in reference to a set of people of a same language feature dwelling in the closer or distant place. This was the nonconforming position I stood with Bishop Matthew Kukah when he claimed that the word Igbo came from the colonial masters. Olauda Ikwuano was sold to slavery as early as the 17th century at much tender age, yet he could precisely speak of his tribe as Igbo or Ibo confusedly, even untutored. Language difficulty also made the ancient Egyptians, speaking about their original home in a place they refer to as inner Af-rui-ka, called it Yebo. And to be précised they speak of “Heliopolis,” (the city of light). The same place the Sumerian writers refer to as Eridu. We have discussed these under the title The Lost City of the Sun. Read Ivan Van Setimer’s Black Women of Antiquity; the copious publications of Zacharia Sithim; also books like The Egyptian Book of the Dead; Reminiscence etc. and see that the colonial masters had no hand in giving the Igbo, Yoruba or Benin their names.

We have explained the origin and the meaning of the word “Yoruba” and the original name of the Yoruba father, Oduduwa alongside the situation that took him to Ife; all these were discussed under the title, The True History of the Yoruba. We also noted that Oduduwa and Idu left the same day to inhabit their present abodes after a fight between Oduduwa and his elder brother Nri (the very person whom the Yoruba myth refers to as “Obatala”). Their home was called Ihe (the city of light). When Oduduwa and Idu left, they founded their different homes and called it after their original source. They called their towns Ife (Anambra Igbo) and Uhe (Okigwe Igbo) respectively. In the traditional setting, the Igbo call Benin Idu for that was their ancestral father.  And from the works of Osare Omreghe and A. G. Leonard, Eze Nri had the sole duty of performing the spiritual coronation of Benin kings.

Finally, should any Yoruba person say that he does not know the meaning and origin of the word that turns out to be his identity, then he should read better books on Yoruba history. Euba’s essay, “Ifa Literary Corpus as Source-Book of Yoruba History” in Alagoa (edt), 1990 is one among them. He may not find much, but he will find issues concerning the war between Obatala and Oduduwa. Ruth Finnegan’s Oral Literature in Africa will also help. The mistake people make is trying to find African antiquity within the frame work of the colonial masters. African antiquity is buried within the consort of incantations, traditional practices, names, artefacts etc. not just direct utterance. To get at the root is to seek indebt understanding of all these and sieve out the needful at any given time. The worst situation among the Yoruba writers we have sampled their works is their neglect of the most authentic source of their tragedy of name; the oral tradition. None of the writers mentioned his connection with the Yoruba oral tradition or those of her ancient neighbours. All they found easy to do was to detract the truth before them because it was written by the Igbo and to look for the shabbiest explanations and claims written from the Whiteman’s perspective. Please, always read well, get the needful information before seeking to know who has written.  

Above all, do know that the Igbo, Benin and Yoruba are locked together by history inseparably. By this I mean that the discourse on the Igbo history cannot be complete without mentioning the Benin and Yoruba. The same thing applies to the history of the Benin and Yoruba respectively. We are brothers possessing a same linguistic identity in the beginning of time. We lived together before the evil days when the separative trouble befuddled the ancient kingdom marked prehistorically as Eridu. Today, the city rests in the Atlantic Ocean; at the very point where catographers map-marked as latitude 0°. The bone of contention here is that the article stated above reveals that the original name of the Yoruba father was ODUDUNWA, meaning the last child of their mother. The second was the claim that Odudunwa was ostracized after the war with his elder brother. Another is that the word ''Yoruba" was derived from the Igbo term, "Yorubaa".

We need your comments on the areas you think this paper has not clarified about the Yoruba name, meaning and origin. Please, your source(s) must be stated. Thanks!