By Kayode Emola
There is no doubt that as the clamour for a sovereign Yoruba nation increases, many people are looking to the traditional royal institutions of Yoruba, wanting to know what their stance on the matter is. Those who are familiar with Yoruba history know that we are a people with several monarchical houses, and we take great pride in these institutions.
However, these royal institutions lost their stature when the European colonisers arrived, usurping their power and carving up Africa like a piece of meat, giving no regard to the pre-existing thrones and kingdoms. Naïvely, our traditional rulers fell victim to the Europeans’ trickery, and as a result, we ended up being coalesced with other people groups who do not share our way of life.
Yoruba is not the only victim of this; several other African countries were also afflicted with this grievous rearrangement. The result is that we were given new traditions, religion, and education, sometimes conflicting with what our ancestors had grown up with. This was not solely due to the trickery of the Europeans but also abetted by willing native collaborators, sworn enemies of their people, who engineered this situation all across Africa.
Many people around the world today are familiar with the title of the “Prince of Wales”, the title given to the immediate heir to the throne of Britain. However, not many people are aware of the meaning of this title or its historical origins.
The original bearer of this title, the Prince of Wales, was traditionally the ruler of Wales. Llywelyn ap Gruffudd was the last known royal of Welsh blood to hold it, until his death in 1282. Due to a family feud and internal struggles with the lesser princes of Wales, he was betrayed to King Edward I of England.
After Llywelyn’s death, Edward I sought to take over the entirety of Wales, to bring it under English rule. The nobles of Wales rejected this idea, stating that they would never pledge allegiance to a royal who was not born in Wales. In response, King Edward cunningly sent his pregnant wife to Caernarfon, so that she would give birth to their fourth child on Welsh soil. This child later became King Edward II of England and Wales.
During the reign of King Edward II, the Welsh language was banned and subsequently began to die out. The traditions of the Welsh people began to fade away and the Welsh identity became a thing of the past. Once the English kings consolidated their power in Wales, they changed the law to remove the requirement that the heir to the throne of England and Wales must be born in Wales.
For us in Yorubaland, the 19th century saw a period where our traditional institutions began to die out due to colonialism. The powers retained by the colonising nations meant that our traditional rulers no longer had the all-encompassing influence over the people that they once did. When colonialism ended in the 20th century, not only were these powers not returned to the traditional institutions, a sinister attempt was made to ensure that our traditions were forgotten, our language was extinguished and, most importantly, our true identity erased. In order to achieve this, we were given a new, Nigerian identity, reminding us of our perpetual captivity.
It has taken Wales nearly 1,000 years to recover their stolen identity. The Welsh government is striving to ensure that at least 1 million people are able to speak Welsh by 2040. Learning in the Welsh-medium is now encouraged from primary to tertiary education and all official communiqué in Wales must be bilingual.
A significant portion of Yorubaland fails to see the danger in forever losing our identity, content as they are with their current state of subjugation. Many see it as a burden to communicate with their children in Èdè Yoruba, let alone take the time to teach them the language. Since the year 2000, the Nigerian school curriculum has no longer considered a pass in a native language (Yoruba, Igbo, or Hausa) to be a pre-requisite to gain admission into the university, as previously was the case.
The Fulani are strategically positioning themselves to ensure that the whole of the south of Nigeria is occupied by their people, and astoundingly some Yoruba people are aiding them. Worst of these is a traditional ruler in Iwo, who, from historical events, ought to know better. Many others who are not royalty, but benefitting from governmental corruption in Nigeria, are also aiding and abetting the enemy, as they work to wipe the cultural memory of an entire race.
Whilst some may dismiss this as impossible, my advice would be to look at the situation in present-day Turkey. This nation was the headquarters of the Ottoman empire that ruled from Asia Minor down to North Africa for nearly 700 years. During this time, they sought to ensure that every trace of the Christian religion they encountered was entirely wiped out. Huge swathes of indigenous ethnic nationalities were obliterated, with their lands repopulated by the Arab community, thus making the Arabs the new ethnic majority.
We cannot permit the Fulani to inflict this same fate on our people. We, the Yoruba, need to devise a concrete plan to ensure that our culture is preserved. We must cherish our language, our traditions, and our way of life. We must ensure that each new generation’s upbringing is steeped in our heritage so that they fully grasp the importance and sanctity of that which makes us Yoruba.
I see many Yoruba people today more focused on damaging their fellow brothers for what they think they might gain. My solemn cry to such people is to open their eyes to see that there is a common adversary here, and it is not their kinsman but rather those who are planning to rob the indigenous inhabitants of their land. We should take it as our moral imperative to be our brother’s keeper, to be concerned for each other’s welfare, and to hold hands together in harmony so that we may fight together as comrades for the common good of our people.
