It is my father’s birthday on 11 December. This update is dedicated to his memory, and to let him know where he now is that I remain resolutely committed to the pen.
Yorubaland is bordered to the north and east by the River Niger. The tail of the Yorubaland extends along the Atlantic coast as far as Ghana. The Yoruba have occupied this land uninterrupted since the beginning of time. Yoruba legend has it that the world was only water at the beginning of time with no land in sight. Eleda, the creator, sent Obatala with a quantity of soil to create land amidst the water. Junjie Dong, a researcher at Harvard University, on 9 March 2021 published new evidence, which fully supported the Yoruba legend that the earth indeed was once a water world. The scientists based their findings on unique rock samples found in Western Australia’s Panorama district. The Yoruba version of creation is the only version of creation to date for which there is direct scientific evidentiary support.
Evidence presented in February 2022, at the Wheeler Institute’s ‘African History through the lens of Economics’, revealed that the Yoruba were the first humans to transition from hunter gatherers to farmers, and that it was from there that farming spread to the world. The transition was possible because the Yoruba had mastered aspects of chemistry, such as ceramics, which enabled them to make tools. The transition to farming meant urbanisation, conventions, governance, laws and trade etc. It was long known to European travellers, in the 1400s at the very latest, that the Yoruba were urban dwellers. In 1933, Bascom calculated the index of urbanisation in Yorubaland to be between that of the USA and Canada. The population distribution was comparable to that of France. The population density in Ogbomoso, for example, was 43,000/sq mile.
The Yoruba country was a secular state. The Yoruba were pantheists. They did not believe in one universal God. The Yoruba had no gods. The Yoruba did not worship. Instead, they venerated their historical figures to who they gave the generic name Orisa. The Yoruba ‘published’ their essence in a compendium, the Odu, which comprised of 256 verses of logical and deterministic language that the Babalawo committed to memory. The Babalawo used a probabilistic device, the Opon, to access each Odu verse as required, to circumvent the inadequacy of the human brain and to ensure uniformity of the answer. The well-known Ifa was the combination of the Odu and the Opon.
The Yoruba divided their country into autonomous, self-governing city states, the Ilu. There was no central Yoruba authority. Instead, the Yoruba operated a loose form of confederacy. At the heart of the Yoruconstitution was a democratic monarchy, the Constitutional Oba. Each city state had a Constitutional Oba. The monarchy was not hereditary. Commonly, a number of ruling houses provided the monarch in turns. A ruling house nominated a monarch when it became its turn, and not at any other time. The monarch did not rule. He/she was simply the spokesman for a ruling Council of nobilities, the Oloye. The Oloye were heads of communities, crafts and trade groups. The Oba was accountable and beholden to the Council, not the other way round. The Council had the power to impeach the Oba. Unlike monarchy elsewhere, the Yoruba monarch did not own land other than his own personally acquired plot of land.
The economic philosophy of the ancient Yoruba was ‘Kinshipism’ (or Kinship Corporatism). The economic philosophy was based on the belief that it was the economic efficiency of the individual ‘family’ that made the community achieve harmonious economic functioning. In essence, members of the same ‘family’ worked closely together. Individuals acted in concert with one another. Individual economic desires accorded primarily with the ‘family’ needs. The primary sector was mainly agrarian with men as the principal workers. The secondary sector was mainly food-processing with women the principal workers. There were no housewives in those days. The tertiary (service) sector was based mainly in the markets. At the heart of Yoruconomics was individual enterprise and competition (ie traditional individualism) but overall ownership was by the ‘kinship corporate’.
The Yoruba adjudicative system was tribunal; inquisitorial rather than adversarial as in the European systems. The object was to get to the bottom of the dispute. Judgement was more often than not negotiated and agreed by the disputants themselves. There was no legal profession third party to interfere but ‘adjudication friends’ were ‘appointed’ if the adjudicator felt one was needed to get a level playing field. The law was convention, customs, and tradition; taught to all from childhood. Every elderly person was a potential adjudicator. There was no appellate system since the disputants themselves negotiated and agreed the outcome. Offences against the state, that is, criminal law, did not really exist. There was therefore no need for a police force or for prisons.
The Yoruba made one of the greatest discoveries of all time in medicine, the use of vaccination to prevent disease. Vaccination is arguably the greatest success of preventive medicine. Charles La Condamine, a French explorer reported in ‘Histoire de l’inoculation de la petite verole’ that the West Africans had practised smallpox (sopona) and other vaccination since time immemorial. Indeed, sopona is a Yoruba orisa. Virologists have speculated that smallpox evolved from an African rodent poxvirus 10 millennia ago. Cadwallader Golden, physician and natural scientist, wrote in ‘Medical Observations and Enquiries’ that slaves brought smallpox and vaccination to the Americas. Onesimus, a Yoruba slave, mitigated the impact of a smallpox outbreak in Boston (USA) when in 1721 he taught the Yoruba sopona vaccination (igbere) technique to American physicians. In 2016, Onesimus was voted one of the ‘Best Bostonians of All Time’. European practitioners learnt details of the Yoruba vaccination technique from Cotton Mather (Onesimus’ slave owner) who corresponded it to the Royal Society of London. The European learned societies by the 1860s had endorsed the Yoruba practice of smallpox vaccination and were licensing physicians to carry out the technique.
The Yoruba are a unique people who but for their incorporation into Nigeria by the British in 1914 would today have taken their place in the highest league of the world’s nations. When between 1954 and 1959 Yorubaland was self-governing as Western Nigeria, development was ahead of that of South Korea and Singapore. Education and healthcare were provided free for children. Established as the first on the continent of Africa were the Western Nigeria Television Service (WNTS), an Olympic standard Liberty Stadium, the Cocoa House skyscraper, and innovative commercial relations with several countries including Israel and the USA. The WNTS was a critical milestone in the history of television.
There are 50 million Yoruba in Nigeria, the largest monoethnic group on the continent of Africa. The Yoruba have the largest Diaspora of the African peoples - up to 50 million in Brazil, 5 million in West African countries, similar numbers in Cuba and the Caribbean. It is self-evident from all the aforesaid that the Yoruba are fit to have an independent modern country of their own outside of the Nigeria bubble.
Support the Yoruba: sign, spread, donate, share, retweet http://chng.it/QJp8yJ6hPs More than 8,500 have now signed. Target: 10,000 signatures by the end of December 2022. Signatures cost nothing! And you don’t even have to be Yoruba to sign!