Voice of Emancipation: Yoruba Peoples’ Journey to Freedom

By Kayode Emola

Before I dive into the journey proper, I believe it would be good for us to understand what freedom actually means. Freedom they say is the power or right to act, speak or think as one wants. No wonder the United Nation articles are always centred around upholding the fundamental human right of peoples across the world regardless of gender, race and status etc. That being said, if freedom truly means the inalienable right to be able to express oneself in the society (s)he finds him/herself, why are so many people around the world being enslaved in their own society by their own country men/women. The only simple reason I can think of today is some aristocrat are not willing to give up the master servant relationship they inherited from the slave traders and the European colonisers. The end result is the mental and psychological trauma many tribal people of the world have had to endure for centuries and sadly still pervades our world today.

Slavery has a way of robbing people of their identity and also has a way of making enslaved people feel that safety in the hands of their oppressors is better than freedom if it means they have to fight for that freedom. I take us back to the journey of freedom by the Israelites out of Egypt. This was the most harrowing walk to freedom ever known to mankind and duly recorded in the Holy Bible. It was not harrowing because it was fraught with difficulties, it was harrowing because over 400 years in slavery had mentally wounded the Israelites that they actually believed the only way for them to be on this earth is to be perpetual slaves to the Egyptians.

Much as the Israelites accepted their fate, the balance of nature meant that Egypt had to be punished for its sins and so whether the Israelites choose to be free or not was an issue already concluded by the heavens. However, I will not dwell on the punishment of Egypt today because of our limited time, I will rather shed a little light as to the journey of the Israelites to freedom. First, Moses had to run into exile for 40 years which is the first of the Israelites wasted years and many more had to live the brutal life of Egypt whilst Moses was in exile. Second, even after they’ve come out of Egypt, a few of them banded together to return the people back to Egypt when Moses tarried on the mountain for 40 days. This act displeased God and he almost wiped out the entire Israelite congregation in the wilderness but for the plea of Moses. Their punishment was another 40 years in the wilderness; one day for a year with all the people over 20 years and above dying in the wilderness without ever getting to the promise land (Numbers 14) including Moses who sadly saw the promise land but could not get their on account of his own error.

Seeing the biblical example of the Israelites on how their journey to freedom was fraught with so many challenges, one would have thought that the Yoruba people of today with vast amount of resources and technology will be able to mitigate these challenges. Alas, this is not the case as we sometimes behave as though we do not know the situation we find ourselves in Nigeria and that we are currently encircled by those who seek to do us harm. We the Yoruba people of Nigeria today find ourselves in a precarious situation similar to the Israelites because we have accepted our fate of being perpetual victims of years of servitude. This has eaten deep into the fabrics of our mind that many of our folks are eager to accept pittance just to continue to sell our people into this modern slavery Nigeria has conditioned our minds into.

God knew that for the people of Israelites to be free, their elders needed to unite with Moses as that would make their journey more smoother. Moses in turn gathered 70 elders across all Israel and gave them the vision and the mission which was to leave Egypt into their own promise land. Everyone knew the goal and everyone knew what was expected, thus it was easier for everyone to play their own part when duty calls. The same cannot be said of the Yoruba peoples journey to freedom today as many are not clear of the task for them to do. I once asked a talented brother last year of the model he was building for our new nation and his genuine answers beats my heart. In his answers, he said “we do not have a coordinated body & he does not want to finish a job only to discover that someone else has completed the same task”. For him, that would just be duplication and waste of resources and for that reason, he pulled out of that great and noble task.

This lack of coordination my Yoruba brother mentioned to me last year is still the factor that plagued us openly just recently when painfully Sunday Igboho Adeyemo was apprehended in Benin Republic. Due to the lack of a coordinated command structure, the Yoruba Obas had instituted their own panel of inquiry and possibly raised lawyers to fight the case in court. The Yoruba socialite had also done the same to show their own solidarity. The worst case scenario were those of us clamouring for self-determination which was supposedly Igboho’s constituency that got him into the predicament. Different factions rather than quickly coalescing together to form a common front to ensure Igboho’s freedom, turned the situation into a beauty contest as some people were fighting to be the first to get him a lawyer. Whilst everyone’s effort is quite appreciated, a simple single structure and a chain of command and adequate communication would have sorted everything out without the need for duplication of effort.

There is no doubt today that the common yearnings of the Yoruba people fighting for self-determination is to see different groups and organisations coming together to form a strong alliance. This will help facilitate our efforts and ensure that the task ahead is not leaning on a particular set of people all of the time. This can only happen if there is mutual respect and tolerance for one another rather than for some people trying to impress others on social media. As it stands, there is no one singular organisation or individual that has the capacity to liberate the Yoruba people from the present yoke being placed on us by the Nigeria state. If the Yoruba people fail to plan to harness all the individual work every organisations has done into one formidable voice, the Yoruba peoples journey to freedom, God forbid might take longer than anticipated if not difficult to achieve.

At this junction, I will urge the leadership of Yoruba socio-cultural and self-determination organisations to come together for the common purpose of liberating their race. If this is done, the journey to freedom would have only just begun in earnest. Until then, I will encourage you my brothers and sisters to continue to stand strong, speak out and together we will make the world hears us. I want to use this medium to thank Yoruba leaders of self-determination and socio-cultural organisations who sacrificed their time to attend a unity meeting on 7 August 2021 where history was made. Part of the discussion centred around the formation of a collaborative platform where individual organisations and skilled persons can utilise their God giving talent for the emancipation of our race. If this project succeed, it would be the one opportunity we’ve all being waiting for to finally take us out of the impending doom starring at all of us both at home and abroad. I hope and pray, that the efforts to liberate our people are not thrown away and the benefits of freedom are actually felt by our people.