Memo to the Mint Fresh Olubadan

DIALOGUE WITH NIGERIA By Akin Osuntokun

Ibadan is easily the most historically utilitarian Yoruba city. It is the fountain head of the social political transformation of Yorubaland and in certain respects Nigeria itself. Think of the iconic educational institutions like the first tertiary educational establishment in Nigeria, the University of Ibadan, the one time contender for the topmost secondary school in Nigeria, Government college; the once rated fourth best college of medicine in the commonwealth, University college hospital, UCH and the Ibadan polytechnic. As capital of the Western region, it was seat to the most accomplished regional government in the history of Nigeria, that of Chief Obafemi Awolowo and his successor Chief Ladoke Akintola. However in demonstration of its revolving door penchant for the tragic irony of heroism and anti-heroism, the seed of the political crisis that snowballed to consume the first republic was planted and nurtured in the ancient city.

The theme of the 1960s crisis relived the earlier historical precedence of the conspicuous spark that lit the 19th century long implosion of the Oyo empire. Antithetically, within that tragedy came the most glorious role Ibadan played in pre colonial Yoruba history (checkmating the incursion of the Fulani into Yorubaland in 1840). It was a classical illustration of the Yoruba capacity for self-redemption and renewal. What Professor Wole Soyinka called the “the phenomenon of Yoruba cultural resilience as part of the lessons of the very mystery of human creativity”. He had once wondered out aloud what makes Ibadan tick? I stopped short of drawing his attention to the Ibadan foundational odu Ifa called Òsé Méjì. My hesitation was rewarded in a recent encounter with Kayode Esuola’s fulsome elaboration of the meaning of Òsé méjì for the understanding of Ibadan. He begins with the premise that Ifa remains the most systematized and authentic source of clarifying significant
Yoruba matters, in all aspects of life.

Specifically, Ose Meji confirms the Ibadan stereotype of political violence and free for all. According to this odu:
•Tori ba da’ni, ka so p’ori dani
•Tori ba gb’eni, ka so p’ori gb’eni
• Ewo ni ka sowo, sowo ka ma kere dele?
• Sese Olongo, Iri Ebiti
• A difa fun Orunmila
• Ifa o maa s’owo ijakadi kiri kari agbaye
• O jijakadi titi lo Eba Odan (Ibadan)
• Igbo reere a n le janduku si
• Ile Oba di meji won a jija agba
• Oba di merin o lee f’enu k’araa won Ebo ni won ni ki Baba o se
• Orunmila gb’ebo nbe o rubo Nje, Alara da mi o s’ogun, sese olongo, edu o le ja, sese olongo
• Ajero da mi o s’ogbon, sese olongo, edu o le ja, sese olongo
• Owarangunaga dami o s’aadota, sese olongo, edu o le ja, sese olongo
• Oba leyin ajori dami o sa’adorin, sese olongo, edu o le ja, sese olongo
• Oro Ibadan di lodi lodi, eyin o rifa awo ki bi ti n se.
• (Ifalosee Taye ati Kehinde, 2020), Akinbola 2020, Fawole 2020).

Interpretation:
• ‘Settlers who established Ibadan were often violent bound emigres from other Yoruba clans.
• Because they came from different Yoruba clans, they could not agree on common values, so they engaged in constant conflicts and looted one another.
• The settlers later ended up in four political units headed by Alara (from Oyo), Ajero (from Ekiti), Owarangunaga (from Ijesa) and Obaleyin Ajori (from Ijebu).
• Their lack of coercion aggravated power tussle amongst them. • Their society became amorphous. • Orunmila, who is the carrier of the voice of Olodumare, visited the land and declared that it was only through violence and free for all it would be prosperous.
• All these refer to settlers in Ibadan, not indigenes.
• Ibadan will continue to attract settlers, so, political violence and free for all violence will never cease in the polity’

It is this proclivity for free for all violence that has been harnessed and channelled into a formidable republican military state.
The late Premier of the Northern region, Sir Ahmadu Bello recounted the relevant history of Ibadan in his autobiography ‘My Life’ thus
“In 1817 a man called Afonja was governor of Ilorin then an important Yoruba town and part of the domains of the Alaafin of Oyo. He broke away from his master and declared himself independent. Feeling a little insecure, he made friends with a Sokoto mallam one Alimi; the latter called together numbers of Muslims, including Yoruba Muslims, to form an army to defend Ilorin from the inevitable attack. They say that Alimi, who was in many ways similar to the Shehu, a man of piety and learning, only lent his name and great influence to this force. Others say that he was an ambitious adventurer only interested in carving out a kingdom for himself…Then the Muslim auxiliaries became out of hand.

Afonja enlisted Yoruba help to drive them out, but not only did they fail to do so but Afonja himself was killed and his body was burnt in Ilorin market. From that time an almost continuous state of war existed between the Emirs of Ilorin and the chiefs of the Yoruba especially those of the new town of Ibadan. These wars went on with varying success and at one time it appeared as though the ancient prophecy that the Fulanis would dip the holy Koran in the sea would come to pass. A Fulani column penetrated south of Ibadan but the fortune of war turned against them and the chance never came back…These wars had reached no conclusion or proper settlement when they were interrupted and have always caused soreness between the two races.

This is still not cured and much of the difficulties of the past few years must be regarded in this light however much it may be denied in certain quarters”. In this narrative, Ahmadu Bello followed in the tradition of the perspective that magnifies the negative personification of Ilorin in Yoruba history while understating the commensurately significant response of the Ibadan/Yoruba army to the historical emergency.The year was 1840 when the Ibadan led army decimated the Ilorin/Fulani expansionist aggressors at Osogbo. It is instructive that Bello never mentioned the name of the town and the year his forbears met their nemesis. But he remembered the prophecy of dipping the Koran in the Southern ocean. I have always wondered what this abortive prophecy had to do with naming the waterfront boulevard in Victoria Island Ahmadu Bello way.The Fulani offensive at Osogbo confronted the Yoruba society with the possibility of their regional incorporation into the Sokoto caliphate. Note the oblique reference by Bello to Alimi as a probable reincarnation of Shehu Usman Dan Fodio.

If Ibadan was the Yoruba saviour in 1840 it nearly became the anti-hero with the besotted Islamic brotherhood flirtation of olubadan Abbas Aleshinloye with the Sokoto caliphate a century later in 1936. Where individualistic valour ends and mercenary selfishness begins has remained the bane of a tendentious strand of Yoruba political history. Here was Aleshinloye seeking the blessings of the Sultan of Sokoto for his aspiration to establish a Yoruba Islamic caliphate in a bizzare echo of the Afonja debacle in Ilorin. In ‘Toying with the Caliphate’ Isaac Ogunbiyi and Stefan Reichmuth recalled a letter written by the olubadan Aleshinloye to the Sultan as follows ‘The claim to full caliphal dignity for the whole of Yorubaland comes in the olubadan’s letter to the Sultan of Sokoto. Here he introduces himself as ‘the one to whom God has awarded a caliphate over the land of the Yoruba of Nigeria, by name c Abbas, amir al-muJmin [sic] whose title is olubadan’.This suggests that the undated letter was written after the British Resident Ward Price had upgraded the title of the Baale to ‘king of Ibadan’ (olubadan) in 1936.The claim to caliphal authority might therefore have been intended to entrench and boost the newly invested status and to gain external recognition and partnership from the Sokoto Caliphate and perhaps also from the wider Islamic world.

Another probable motive for this move to have the tacit acknowledgement of the Sokoto Caliphate was apparently the prospect of securing the services of a malam versed in ‘the secrets of God and the knowledge of hisab al-jadxval’. In view of the polarisation of loyalties arising from the conflict between the olubadan and his chiefs, it would appear that he would no longer completely trust even the indigenous malams and scholars. A malam coming from Sokoto as requested in his letter would not be tainted by local partisanship and could be trusted to provide the olubadan with powerful protective devices.

It has always been my contention that rather than the myth of the perpetually scheming and innate political sophistication attributed to the Fulani and the defunct Sokoto caliphate in Nigeria, the prostrate political position of the South vis a vis the North, results from the omission of the self inflicted injuries of Southern political leaders and the conniving open ended British mentorship of the former. It was Nnamdi Azikiwe who was baying for one Nigeria against the oft expressed preference of Ahmadu Bello and the North to stay out of the proposed country on the realistic basis of near irreconcilable sociocultural differences. It was not the North that instigated Chief Obafemi Awolowo to follow suit with a single minded devotion and resolute pursuit of the ambition to govern Nigeria; prioritising the mirage of a problematic Nigerian Prime Ministership over the optimal certainty of the Premiership of Western region. From the account of the British High commissioner to Nigeria, Cumming Bruce, the agenda of the Northern region sponsored July 1966 counter coup was to wreak vengeance and thereafter part ways with Nigeria under the secessionist slogan of Araba. Up till 1966, the impulse of the North has mostly been to leave rather than stay in Nigeria. It was not the Fulani who pressurised Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu to unreflectively reject the substantial concessions of the Aburi accord once it did not absolutely capture the document signed in Ghana. It was not Ahmadu Bello who discouraged the enlistment of the Yoruba in the rank and file of the Nigerian army thereby rendering itself captive to the protective custody of the North and hindered its latitude to take an independent course of action in the balance of terror denominated politics of 1966 to 1970.