The early English to Yoruba translators were ‘Saro’, freed slaves or descendants, who emigrated to the Yorubaland from Sierra Leone after their education in that country. It therefore should be of no surprise at all that the ‘Saro’ were interested in Yoruba word or words for ‘slave’, and for the ‘slavery’ to which they had been subjected. The ‘Saro’ considered themselves to be English men albeit in a black skin. The ‘Saro’ translators were adult English speakers, English-cultured and English-educated, who learnt Yoruba as a second language from non-English speakers. Ajisafe Moore, a ‘Saro’, in his book: The laws and customs of the Yoruba people, published in the early 1920s, considered Iwọfa and Eru to be the appropriate Yoruba word equivalents of the English word ‘slave’. He was wrong in both cases.

By Iwọfa the ancient Yoruba meant the act of voluntarily entering (iwọ) into servitude (fa) as a contractual obligation. Apprenticeship was a form of Iwọfa; a person worked for a master craftsman for a length of time in order to be taught the trade. Servitude was exchanged for training in the apprenticeship system. The practice was common in old England where it was known as ‘indentured servitude’. Trade-by-barter was a form of Iwọfa; if a man wanted to build a house and he lacked the means, he would offer as payment, work on the farm of a builder who would construct his house for him in exchange. Servitude was exchanged for goods in the trade-by-barter system. Bartering was common in old England, and legal. To translate ‘slavery’ to Iwọfa thus was a mistranslation.

Yoruba is a logical language. If the word Ẹru were to mean ‘slave’, then it would convey within it the slave experience, that is to say, ‘capture’, ‘purchase’ and ‘sale’; the word Ẹru contained no such connotations. The word Ẹru was comprised of the prefix ‘ẹ’ and the verb ‘ru’, where ‘ẹ’ meant ‘you’ and ‘ru’ had one of three possibilities: to raise (as in ruyọ, ‘smog making’); to violate (as in rufin, ‘law breaking’); or, to ferment (as in iru, ‘seed processing’). If the word existed at all in the old Yoruba, by Ẹru the ancient Yoruba would have meant a state of disorder or eruption or violence. To translate ‘slave’ to Ẹru thus was a mistranslation.

If the ancient Yoruba did not have a word for something, then that something did not exist in their world. The ancient Yoruba did not write hence their language, of necessity, was a descriptive language. The ancient Yoruba rarely, if ever, used primary words, a common feature of the English language; what a Yoruba word meant was typically obvious. A ‘slave’ was a person who was the property of another person, who had no personal freedom or rights and, who was forced, like a beast of burden, to work unpaid and to obey its owner unconditionally. There was no Yoruba word for ‘slave’, which meant that ‘slave’ and ‘slavery’ were unknown in the ancient Yoruba world.