Ose Nsukka

Do you know how crazy it is that some of the tribal identities we are so fixated on were engineered by Oyinbo? Let’s use the “Yoruba peoples” tribal identity as an instance. The Yoruba tribal peoplehood was artificially engineered for easier colonial administration. We were not a monolithic group. The Ẹkiti, Òndó, Ìjẹ̀bú, Ẹgba, Ìjẹ̀ṣà, Ìgbómìnà and others were not always “Yorubas.” If you time-travelled to 1825 and insisted that an Ẹgba person was Yoruba, they might not only be confused — it is likely that they could be offended. Treating Yoruba as an ancient, primordial tribe is anachronistic and historically indefensible. It is well documented that the word “Yoruba” was an exonym — a tag given by outsiders. Ahmad Baba of Timbuktu used “Yariba” around 1613–1615 for the Oyo. Northern traders (Hausa and others) applied it specifically to the Oyo peoples. In fact, there is no evidence of self-use of the word Yoruba by the precolonial Oyo peoples themselves as a broad ethnic label, and none whatsoever among the non-Oyo groups. During the Kiriji Wars (1877–1893), the Ẹkiti-Parapọ alliance (Ẹkiti, Ìjẹ̀ṣà and allies including elements of Ìjẹ̀bú, Ẹgba, Ìgbómìnà and others) fought the Ibadan military state (heir to Oyo imperial power) for autonomy. It was not Yoruba fighting Yoruba — they were independent nations fighting to protect their sovereignty. So how did everyone become Yoruba? The colonialists homogenized all of us by mechanically standardizing the Ọ̀yọ́-Ìbàdàn speech into a uniform, artificial written language called Yorùbá Àjùmọ̀lò. Samuel Ajayi Crowther’s 1843 Vocabulary of the Yoruba Language (and subsequent Bible work) was based on the Oyo dialect. To save money on printing Bibles and schoolbooks, European recategorized distinct languages as “local dialects.” Then, through Lord Lugard’s Native Authority system after the 1914 Amalgamation (formalized in the Native Authority Ordinance of 1916 and later revisions), the British state turned this missionary work into a tool of governance. Our ancestors became stuck in rigid “tribal” census categories, they appointed standardized rulers to collect taxes, and turned sovereign citizens of independent city-states and republics into predictable, manageable colonial subjects. Yes, this identity is real today. But its reality is relatively modern, administrative, and politically charged, not primordial. Many of us mistakenly wear our tribal identity as though it were a sacrosanct, eternal or primordial delineation: it is not. Like the Yoruba tribal categorization, many others are just neat little folders they fostered to organize us. If it was a bond formed for your enemy’s convenience, then it is malleable enough to be reformed for strategic survival, defense, and collective prosperity.