(Public statement by The Yoruba Party in the UK on Kiriji Armistice day, 23 September 2024)

The ancient Berbers were the first to put into writing the existence of an ethnic group that was known then as ‘Yoruba’. The ancient Berbers inhabited the North West coast of Africa, a place now known as Morocco. Their genetic history is of a mix of West Africa and Europe. Morocco is at one end of West Africa, Yorubaland is at the other end; one accessible to the other by sea. The first contact between Black Africa and White Europe was between inhabitants of North West Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. Spain, not Mali, not Egypt, introduced Islam to West Africa, and to Yorubaland, as chronicled by the famous Berber Muslim School (ie Muslim west). Yoruba history has no Sudan connection whatsoever. The Yoruba found Islam a chore to learn, read and write, hence they called it Imale (imo = knowledge + le = difficult).

Muhammad al-Idrisi (1099 - 1165) made the first known written reference to the ‘Yoruba’ people in ‘The book of pleasant journeys into faraway lands’ (also known as ‘The pleasure of him who longs to cross the horizons’). His was one of the first Arabic books ever printed. Idrisi was a Berber born in Morocco. He was not an Arab. Idrisi was educated in the Muslim west and Christian Spain but wrote his geography in Sicily under the reign of the Norman King, Roger II. Idrisi was a traveller, geographer and cartographer. He travelled extensively in the north of West Africa and drew a map of the region. Interpreters of his maps claim that he drew them upside down. Therefore, they inverted his maps so that what would have been the West African Atlantic coast was now North African Mediterranean coast.

Ibn-Battuta (1304-1370) chronicled the existence of the ‘Yoruba’ people in ’The gift to those who contemplate the wonders of cities and the manual of travelling’ (also known as ‘The book of journeys’). Ibn-Battuta was a Berber born in Morocco, and educated in the Muslim west. He was an obsessive traveller who claimed to have spent 29 years travelling over 75,000 miles visiting North Africa, Middle East, China, India and East coast of Africa. Ibn-Battuta travelled on the River Niger, which he mistook to be the Nile, to Timbuktu and Gao. He described the rain forests of West Africa. Ibn-Battuta did not himself write about his adventures. He dictated them to Abu Inan Faris relying on memory as well as plagiarising the work of others.

Ahmad Baba (1556 - 1627) in his treatise on the jurisprudence of slavery alerted the world to the existence of the ‘Yoruba’ people, ‘unbelievers, remaining in their unbeliefs’, and to the transatlantic slavery. He mentioned the Yoruba as one of a number of ethnic groups of West Africa. Baba was a Berber although born and educated in the Timbuktu area. He was a jurist/scholar not a traveller like Idrisi and Ibn-Battuta. Because of his political activism, Baba was exiled to Morocco where he spent 12 years on open arrest, which enabled him to research and write his many books. He publicised the scholarly achievements of West African Muslims by compiling a huge biographical dictionary of scholars from West and Northwest Africa. Many self-identified Black West Africans at that time had been producing serious Muslim scholarship for at least a century.

The true story therefore is significantly different from what we have been fed by Fulani lovers and boastful Islamists. The fact is that the ‘Yoruba’ name had been in use for centuries before the Yoruba encountered the Fulani. The Fulani did not give the Yoruba their name any more than the Yoruba gave the Fulani their name. The Yoruba named themselves. Period!