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| Ob of Benin |
I am
a Republican, not a Royalist. But, in a country in which we have all conceded
the coexistence of Republican and Royalist values, it should be considered
quite unseemly to watch one set of the interacting values being rough-handled,
muddied or treated with improper decorum without feeling a need to intervene on
behalf of rectitude.
I
have been so challenged since the eruption of the controversy ignited by the
Alake of Egbaland, Oba Adedotun Gbadebo, who allowed himself to do a ranking of
Yoruba Obas that placed the Oba of Benin as third in the hierarchy.
Oba
of Benin In one sense, as Chief David Edebiri, the Esogban of Benin,
immediately retorted, it is wrong to rank the Oba of Benin among Yoruba Obas
because the Oba of Benin is not a Yoruba and therefore cannot be placed on a
list of Yoruba Obas.
I call it ‘in a sense’ because the Esogban’s position may be dispu
ted on the
grounds, as will soon be clear, that there is too much siblinghood between
Yoruba and Benin traditional rulers for the ethnic difference between them to
be rendered in cast-iron terms.
The
special relationship between Yoruba and Benin obas, not unlike the relationship
between Benin and Onitsha kings, or between Lagos and Edo kings, makes it all
the more impolitic to do a ranking of the Benin monarchy in Yoruba royal
affairs without abiding by certain inter-subjective and shared norms.
And
let me note, very quickly, that it is the presence of such norms that makes
it quite normal for Chief Edebiri to put the Oba of Benin as Number One
without appearing to contradict himself. In his response to the Alake,
Chief Edebiri has argued, quite simply, that the term oba was not used to
describe Yoruba kings until the Oba of Benin got there.
This
may well be disputed. Except that it has the merit of being close to
verisimilitude when he argues that the king of Ibadan was called Olu, the king
of Abeokuta was called Alake, the king of Oyo was called Alafin; only the
Benin monarch was Oba. With the backing of glotto-cultural studies, however, we
should be able to impute that the term, oba, is a root word shared by both the
Yoruba and the Edo languages and that among the sixteen kings that reigned in
Ile-Ife before the arrival of Oduduwa’s party, many had oba as prefix to their
names.
To
say this amounts to jumping ahead of the argument a little. But let me
add, for those who are not familiar with this piece of anthropology, that
Oduduwa, the acknowledged founder-ancestor, the progenitor of the Yoruba
nationality, was a stranger who met a historical line of obas in Ile Ife, the
last of whom was Obatala, the leader of the Igbo, the autochthons, later
deified as god of creativity or creation, sometimes synced with Orunmila, for
wisdom. Make your pick.
Let
me also add that, from the studies of the Ifa divination system made by several
scholars, as imbibed from traditional Ifa devotees, it is those sixteen elders
whom Oduduwa met in Ife that provided the sub-structure of Ifa as a formal
system of wisdom into which people could be initiated in the way that we
all go to tertiary institutions to learn philosophy, jurisprudence and
mathematics.
Or
mathemagics, if you like. It is of very grave significance in this
narrative that we should acknowledge that the Ifa Divination system, before the
intervention of Islam, Christianity, and Lord Frederick Lugard’s balkanization
and regionalization of traditional gnosis, was based on the existential
patterns or prowess of the sixteen elders, or kings, who formed the planks upon
which the wisdom of the people, by ritual accretions, was organized.
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| Odia Ofeimun-Poet |
Every
good student of Ifa should know that in the Edo Divination system of Igwega,
two of the sixteen elders have been displaced by Edo personages who are not to
be found in the Ife version as designed by Agbonmiregun, the Master, who went
from Ekiti to Ile Ife and established the rounded system of Ifa Divination as
passed by other masters between the Edo, Nupe, Igala and Yoruba devotees. It
can be imagined that, as a matter of ritual, they gathered at Ife, which was
quite the centre of their world, for a divination that transcended ethnicities
but was based on a common worship of the earth mother, Efa.
All
the forest peoples, from Dahomey to the Cameroon mountains, across the Nri of
Igboland and past Ogoja, were devotees of one form or other of Ifa Divination.
The historian, Ade Obayemi, has imputed that so many concepts in Yoruba Ifa,
which some devotees may regard as mumbo jumbo, are actually Nupe terms that
proper glotto-cultural analysis and translation could redeem.
This
partly explains why Benin Kings could induct or abduct and adopt Igbo medicine men
who became part of the common national culture, as Egharevba, the Benin
historian vouchsafes. What a linguistic, glotto-cultural analysis tells us is
that, in Ile-ife, before the dispersal occasioned by Oduduwa’s emergence, the
Yoruba language, as one among many in the Kwa language complex, was once
the same language with others including Igbo and that they still share common
root words beyond the simple ones like Omi and miri.
So
if Chief Edebiri’s resort to linguistic analysis won’t help a resolution of the
ranking of the Yoruba obas, what will? I suppose it is the discomfort of trying
to answer such a question, and the fear of being wrong-footed in a bid to
dabble into what appears to be quite esoteric, that has warded off many of the
dignitaries who have been asked by journalists to respond to the controversy.
Some of them think it a needless controversy that could detract from more
worthwhile issues of the moment. True, there are crying problems that our
society needs to face and resolve. Some political entrepreneurs who require a
united front in order not to disperse collective energies have been quick
to advise against worsening of the already existing inter-ethnic divisions in
our midst. Somehow, they do not consider that to ignore the controversy or down
play its driven logic, could harden the ranking that has been attempted
and, to that extent, make it quite affirmable with the accretion of time.
Of
course, those who are already convinced of its veracity and have lived in the
shadow of its ritualized affirmation, all their lives, would want the ranking
to remain as they know it. Hence, they act bored by the controversy and would
therefore wish that we move on quickly to other matters. Unfortunately, (or
fortunately, depending on how you see it) the controversy won’t go away.
At
any rate, this is not the first time it has visited or reared its head. The
ranking, as it happens, is so deeply rooted in the ethnic unconscious of some
people that there is good reason for the palace in Benin City to wish, with
each eruption of the controversy, to put the records, or lack of records,
straight. It happens to be the case that the ranking of the obas takes on a
life of its own within every effort to build a sense of common nationality
among Yoruba people.
Every
bid by the Yoruba to unite under a common leader or in conformity with a
presumption of common ancestry, has always yielded one form of such ranking or
the other. It has become part of a modernist or modernizing project which
nation-builders escape only when they are able to put the knowledge industry at
the centre of their quest. Especially, with the establishment of the Egbe Omo
Oduduwa on home ground in 1948, the business of building up such a knowledge
industry, creating a formal historiography to get it right, has been part of
every bid at nation-building.
With
bounding successes in research and publications, everything seemed to be going
fine before the regression that came with political crisis in the sixties and
the virtual abandonment of the enlightenment project that Obafemi Awolowo is
still rightly praised for.
Frankly,
it has since boiled down to the old saw about putting things in books if you
want to hide them from Africans. Otherwise, too many scholars, Yoruba and
non-Yoruba, in our midst, unrecognized by a thoroughly philistine,
anti-enlightenment elite, have sweated their lives out researching and
correcting the whimsical, myth-suffused folklore and the ultra-parochial
rendering of the past, that many of our leaders regard as history, with a
capital H.
The
result is that, with so much cultural illiteracy abounding, we all go mucking
around with woolly and crooked thoughts about ourselves and our neighbours to
the detriment of social and political projects that could save our part of the
world from backwardness and decay. Specific to the ranking of the Yoruba obas:
So
deeply ingrained is the ranking among not only the Obas, but many
Yoruba big wigs! The palace in Benin City has had to be effusively
vigilant, on perpetual watch, as it were, rebutting every indication of a
resurgence of the claim.
It
happens to be a claim that many, including Professors of History, lacking the
requisite cultural literacy have humoured with shrugs and incipient concordance
in order not to be wrong-footed by popular opinionating.
Surely,
being only too willing to wish the sleeping dog of history back to sleep
whenever it is roused by controversy, they wittingly or unwittingly, contribute
to allowing the already stated position to remain the unspoken but reigning
truth of the matter.
The
implication, even if unintended, is that they withdraw enthusiasm from the need
to clear the mushy debris of insupportable folklore that masquerades as
history. They contribute to the death of historical consciousness in
our part of the world.
What
must be borne in mind in the case of the Alake’s recent pronouncement on the
ranking of Yoruba obas, is that it happened during a visit by the newly crowned
Ooni of Ife, Oba Enitan Ogunwusi, who has been making commendable
representations on behalf of Yoruba unity since his elevation to the throne.
His definitive un-jinxing of the hiatus between the Ife and Oyo monarchies, by
a visit that dammed several decades of distancing, has raised enormous and
quite salutary vibes across the country.
Much
beyond Yorubaland. One wishes that it was actually always the case that we had
obas, like him, who would stop distracting their people with arguments about
the past that divide rather than bring people together. As such, it was
to be expected that visits between kings of different communities swearing
descent from a common ancestor would yield some brag, and even some luxuriating
in sheer grandiloquence, for the sake of ethnic pride and national
self-glorification.
Quite
understandable. In such situations, all traditional cultures in the world,
seeking to have their day in the sun, have tended always to confer even
other-worldly features on their monarchs as a form of self-promotion for the
tribe, nation or race. In particular, new Obas have tended to attract a hyper
inflation of oriki and other panegyrics in order to match the character sketch
of an igbakejiorisa, a virtual divinity.
Such
moments in history inspire what, in his essay on The Monarchical Tendency in
African Political Culture, Ali Mazrui describes in the context of the quest for
aristocratic effect, the personalization of authority, the sacralization of
authority and the quest for a royal historical identity. In the case of the
Ooni Ogunwusi, until the Alake’s ‘goof’ which the Benin Palace has rebutted,
something ethereally all-accommodating, sanguine, and salutary seemed to be
attending to his forthright bid for unity wherever he went.
Now,
clearly, what has been pulled out of the bag by the Alake, even if returned to
the bag, can no longer spell in a way that will make all comfortable.
It
calls to be taken in hand and dealt with in a manner that will not continue to
put the Nigerian Project at the mercy of poorly designed ethnic projects.
Indeed, now that the Alake, through his media spokesman, has insisted that his
ranking of the obas is bam on the mark, and not retractable, it calls for a
serious engagement of the issues beyond reliance on work-a-day folklore.
To
be sure, his insistence may be quite benign in the context of intra-ethnic
muscle-flexing which may cause only mild grating, such as when the Alafin of
Oyo haggles with the Ooni over decades, as to who is superior. But when the
matter goes inter-cultural, applied in a multi-ethnic situation, it can get
truly pernicious, with grave repercussions; enough to unsettle the balance
of respect between neighbours.
This
is especially so when all the verifiable propositions to the contrary are
dismissed without a second thought; such that the cooping of ethnic
self-assurance, on the one hand, is turned into a means of thumbing noses at or
down-grading neighbours who, on the other hand, have been no less illustrious
from antiquity to the present.
The
core issue is that, whether intended or not, the ranking of the obas across
ethnic boundaries implies an attempt at a form of suzerainty of one ethnic
group or nationality over another.
By
imputing a vertical ordering of sorts, it puts a dubious historical stamp
on sheer fictions that could be truly disorienting. In an age when, as we know,
aspiring internal colonialists begin the quest for assimilation or
overcoming of others by, first, having to invent whimsy as a verity of
times and tides, it can get quite far reaching.
Who
needs to be told that such tides must be stemmed before they harden into
inscrutable canon! Or, let me put it this way: that as someone with an
instinctive intellectual empathy with all ethnic groups craving for self-governance,
seeking unity in their ranks or working to disperse the succubus of a
unitarized federalism that rampages across and assaults our God-given and
highly creative diversity, I would seriously invite all Nigerians to abhor the
over-parochial presumption that seeks to put others down in the process of
crafting a new sense of self for any ethnic nationality.
Who
can tell what could be made of a cunningly designed myth of ethnic
super-ordinance as a means of turning the freeborn into a non-citizen in his
father’s house? This is not just a matter of rhetoric. It raises questions, not
to be taken lightly, in the face of a new Ooni, preaching unity of the Yoruba
people, at a time when dithering Yoruba elites, annoyingly self-deprecatory in
normal times, have been finally goaded by hard times, to reach the point of
agreeing to join in forging a united economic front around the Odua
Investments; with Lagos joining the fold. It begins to serve as a warning or a
threat, however, when a paramount Oba, such as the Alake, claiming fourth
position in the hierarchy of Yoruba Obas, chooses to flaunt one myth that has
been permanently disputed by a neighbor for as long as it has surfaced. Even
for people who do not normally care about such things, it begins to grate, when
it is realized that such ranking is based on myths that cannot even bear
forensic scrutiny.
Let’s
face it: between the Edo and the Yoruba, those who wish that all of us should
live by myths can be seen as strategically roughening up the insuperable
distinctiveness of the Edo people within a notion of the siblinghood of their
palaces.
What
they may not realize, and therefore need to be told, is that it gets truly
atavistic, when others claim you as sibling only in order to degrade or
down-grade what you are. It has the same kind of feel as the myth which makes a
distinction between Hausa Bakwai and Hausa Banza with a peculiar cunning of
history built into it. It could be worse when it comes from a very unnecessary
wish to assimilate others while negating their interests through a cold
indifference to facts, thus turning whimsical mythology into history.
The
good part is that, in an age when History is being displaced by so much can’t,
ignored and muddied by those who prefer to re-invent the past as a means of
achieving modern ambitions at other people’s expense, there are criteria of
ascertainment of knowledge which can be deployed to test the veracity of
narratives.
No
matter how cleverly or high-mindedly such narratives try to overcome what is
already known or knowable, the point is that they can be defeated by invoking
the awesome wealth of information at the behest of contemporary knowledge
industries. I dare say that on this matter of the ranking of the obas, the
saving grace is that all the information needed to decide one way or the other
can be found in debates that have been going on, for decades, among historians
and anthropologists, disquisitions between cultural philosophers and the search
for balance between literary critics.
In
my book, In Search of Ogun: Soyinka In Spite of Nietzsche, (published in 2014)
I have pooled together a number of the strands in order to indicate the
necessity for movement away from metaphysical dead ends and the parochial
dredge of many of the arguments which over privilege inward-looking ethnic
issues rather than their universalistic implications.
The
point is that ethnic solidarity may be quite a good workshop for developing
values that are relevant for wider activism in the promotion of shared human
values, but the latter must always be properly minded to obviate the tendency
for self-apprehension to be turned into the case of a snake eating its own
tail unto death. I see it as a case for unveiling supposedly esoteric or secret
knowledge, making public property of arcane issues of cults and conclaves, such
that, for instance, we can appreciate the reality of Yoruba people who may
worship a deified Edo personage; Edo people who are devotees of a Yoruba god;
and the treason of history which can confront people of different ethnic
groups, even enemy nationalities, with the reality of a common ancestor.
In
Soyinka In Spite of Nietzsche, I contend with principles and values
that promise astute approaches to management science and management of society
by looking through and beyond positions that are derivable from the gods our
ancestors worshipped. I am concerned that it is because we do not always keep
the right perspectives on such matters that, adding the ranking of obas, we run
into major altercations. For the purpose of this write-up, my intention is to
dwell less on metaphysics and issues of cultural philosophies. I wish to engage
current issues by recalling and engaging one of the many altercations
that came to a head in 2004, yielding a big blow-out between Ooni Olubuse and
Oba Erediauwa, after the latter’s publication of his autobiography, I REMAIN,
SIR, YOUR OBEDIENT SERVANT in which he devoted a chapter to ‘The Benin-Ife
Connection’.
In
that particular chapter of the book, Oba Erediauwa questions the veracity
of the two versions of the origins of the Benin monarchy that came from Egharevba’s
authoritative and highly regarded A SHORT HISTORY OF BENIN. In the first
edition, Egharevba wrote: “Many many years ago, Odua (Oduduwa) of Uhe
(Ile-Ife), the father and progenitor of the Yoruba kings sent his eldest son
Obagodo – who took the title of Ogiso – with a large retinue all the way from
Uhe to found a Kingdom in this part of the world”
.
…”And in the fourth (and now current) edition of the book, the late author
wrote: “Many, many years ago, the Binis came all the way from Egypt to found a
more secure shelter in this part of the world after a short stay in the Sudan
and at Ile-Ife, which the Benin people called Uhe…The rulers or kings were
commonly known as “Ogiso” before the arrival of Oduduwa and his party at Ife in
Yorubaland, about the 12th century of the Christian era”.
Anyone
reading the two versions in the first and fourth editions will be tempted to
agree with Erediauwa that there were interpolations that amounted to a bias in
the narrative. One may not agree with Erediauwa’s claim that Egharevba’s “Edo
ne’kue (Edo-Akure – partly Benin partly Yoruba….) blood in the man manifested
itself” or that the editors, “the experts in the Ibadan University contributed
to the contradictions”. But it is too obvious that something happened to the narrative
that is quite out of sync with the authority on display. Erediauwa simply
avers that “the earliest rulers or kings in what is today Edo or Benin were
known as “Ogiso”.
The
first was known as Ogiso Igodo and the last (of the thirty one or so of them)
was Ogiso Owodo, the father of Ekaladeran who became known as Oduduwa in Ife.
In essence, Oduduwa came after the Ogisos. Not before. According to Erediauwa,
the idea of a Benin Prince choosing a title in order to be king did not even
begin in Benin History until after Oduduwa’s youngest son, Oramiyan, fathered a
child, the dumb one, in Benin, who literally gave himself a name when on
winning a game of akhue he gave a shout of victory, OWOMIKA,”my hand has struck
it”, his first intelligible speech.
The
Benin people corrupted the name and it became Eweka. Also, it became tradition,
thereafter, for every king-to-be to go to Use, the site of the game of akhue,
to choose a name before climbing the throne. So to say, Egharevba, whom we all
owe so much, got it all mixed up. As Edo traditions have it, Ogiso Owodo
was advised by the oracle to have his son Ekaladeran executed for being the
source of the unhappiness in the land during his reign. Unaware that he was
being deceived, he sent the public executioner, Oka Odionmwan, to do the job.
But
the executioner decided to have pity on Ekaladeran and “on reaching the
outskirts of the city” let him off. From there the prince wandered into the
world, settling alone, first in Ughoton, where the elders gave him
hospitality, before he moved to a village on the outskirts of Ile-Ife. When his
Igodo people first learnt of his being alive and went searching for him, they
found him living as leader in one of the stranger settlements outside the main
bowl of Ife. ‘Oke Ora (Ora Hill) between Ile Ife and Ilesha’, insists Ade
Obayemi. Although Adebanji Akintoye in his A HISTORY OF THE YORUBA PEOPLE, does
not attend to the claim that Oduduwa came from Benin, he posits that it was
from the settlement outside the Bowl of Ife that Oduduwa moved down into the
city with his party to occupy one of the key stranger quarters, pooling them
together until he became leader of all the stranger elements. He moved against
the autochthons, and seized power.
The
seizure of power is acknowledged by all the authorities on Ife history.
It led to the exile of Obatala and his party of autochthons; it led to famine
as can be imagined if the earth tillers go on awwol. Even after the crisis
appeared resolved and Obatala returned, he had to function under Oduduwa’s
authority. Many of his followers, like Obameri, moved to Oduduwa’s side.
Diehard supporters of Obatala like Obawinrin who could not take it and
continued to fight, were beaten out of the Ife Bowl into Igbo Igbo of the rain
forest.
As
Erediauwa puts it: “It is a historical fact, known I believe to present-day Ife
people, that the original settlers whom Ekaladeran (Oduduwa) met moved away
from Ife to a place called Ugbo, a very ancient Ilaje town in Okitipupa area.
Ife elders, especially the traditional title holders, must know the rest of the
Ugbo episode as it affects Ife and Oduduwa because Ife people today perform a
ritual festival that re-enacts the events that caused the original settlers
including their village head to flee from Ife and Ekaladeran (or Oduduwa) to
become the head of the community”.
For
that matter, it is claimed by some contemporary Nigerian historians that many
of the areas which answer Igbo in their names across Yoruba land were redoubts
of resistant groups belonging to the Igbo, led by Obatala. Adiele Afigbo, not
by any chance a frivolous historian, has argued that the expulsion of the Igbo
from Ife was not just myth but history as the movement of Igbo people from the
western side of the Niger to the eastern side of the river was a consequence of
that fracturing, terrorism, a virtual mfecane, that took place with Oduduwa’s
overcoming of the indigenes. In the end, both Obatala and Oduduwa were deified
and some kind of patching up of the narratives have been attempted by successive
generations to hide the fact that there was a grand fissure. But that is where
myth comes into its own. Such that on page 57 of his book, Adebanji Akintoye,
without dwelling on how it was possible, comes to the conclusion that “It is on
the soil of Yorubaland that Oduduwa was born and raised; it is only in that
soil that his roots can be found”.
We
may well shrug. Such an understanding obviously led Ade Ajayi in a Vanguard
inteview on May 16, 2004, to insist that although more researches still need to
be done, “people can’t just wake up one day and say that Oduduwa must have been
a Benin Prince that they wanted to execute, ran and ran to a village and you
call Ife a village?” Ade Ajayi adds: “Who is the Oba of Benin to come and tell
the Yorubas what they should believe about themselves? I think it is very very
wrong and impertinent to assume that you know more about the Yoruba people than
the Yoruba know about themselves. On what basis? What information could he
have? When he says from his studies, what did he study? What books? Is it in
the colonial days or before then or its the books written by educated Yoruba
people of the 19th century?”
What
cannot bear scrutiny, because it must crumble, is Egharevba’s Obagodo
hypothesis which attempts to impose a theory of Yoruba origins on the kings of
Igodomigodo in a period that shares parallel sorties with the era of the first
sixteen kings of Ife before the arrival of Oduduwa.
That
era, of which Obatala was the last of sixteen kings in Ife and Owodo, the
father of Oduduwa, was the last of thirty one kings in Igodomigodo, ought
to be properly matched, not confused, if only because it puts in proper
perspective the arrival of Oduduwa’s son, Oramiyan, and his three lunar months
as ruler, that changed the name of the city from Igodomigodo to Benin, before
the city was renamed as Edo by the great great grandchild, Ogun Ewuare, in the
15th century. At any rate, talking serious history, rather than
mythologies, no self-respecting historian, in our century, buys the hoary
stuff about the Yoruba progenitor coming from Egypt, Mecca, the Sudan or whichever
zone is supposed to provide aristocractic effect or ancient, sacralized,
historical identity that affirms greatness of a people.
Whether
in Johnson’s History of the Yoruba, Biobaku’s valiant efforts or F. Ade Ajayi’s
embarrassingly un-researched put-down of Erediauwa’s narrative as uninformed,
they amount to the purveyance of a Hamitic thesis, a local variant of
which I have called the Obagodo hypothesis, which have been smashed by
dedicated Yoruba historians since I. A. Akinjogbin and his co-revolutionary
historians.(See CRADLE OF A RACE) They have long moved beyond all the romantic
historicism of the earlier foragers in oral traditions.
Ade
Obayemi, in particular, was among the first radical dissenters from the
received myths who realized that Oduduwa could not have come from outside the
world of the Niger Benue confluence. Keen dredgers of the history of Ile Ife
like Isola Olomola, reached the same conclusion: Ife was a centre that
attracted people from far and wide before Oduduwa came amongst them and
literally scattered the system of cooperative governance under the chairmanship
of Obatala who would later be deified as god of creation or creativity, a lover
of wine whose devotees are advised against alcohol.
The
question no one has answered is how it was possible for Oduduwa to have been
born in Yorubaland and still be described as a stranger by all Ife traditions,
by Ifa, and those who like Olubushe II, accept the romance that Oduduwa came
from Mecca, Egypt, Sudan or from the sky, with a chain. What cannot be
escaped is that not knowing where Oduduwa came from is at the heart of the
matter. Rejecting, instead of researching, what must now be called
the Erediauwa thesis which argues that Oduduwa was a Prince of Igodomigodo,
does not help matters.
Once the
ranking of the obas in Yorubaland comes into the picture, the issue gets
over-loaded. The Erediauwa/Benin story just happens to be the only one
available that tells Oduduwa’s story with some certitude. Reject it or not, it
still does not affect the critical aspect of the narrative which indicates that
Oduduwa actually sent his youngest son, Oramiyan, to Igodo whether in response
to a distress call or because he saw a vacuum and decided to fill it.
Oramiyan’s
three months in Benin was too full of troubles that he could not resolve. He
left in annoyance, damning the people as a people of intrigues and quarrels,
Ile-ibinu, which only a child born amongst them could tackle or accommodate.
But he left a pregnant woman behind whom Oduduwa had to send procurers and
minders for until she delivered. The child turned out dumb and could not speak
until that famous game of akhue when he gave a shout of victory that earned him
the name, Eweka, which started a dynasty.
What
all the traditions, and therefore History, vouchsafes is that Oramiyan, on his
return journey made stop overs at various stations but pooled his forces
together at Kaltunga/Oyo where he begat the Alafin, and started another
dynasty. He eventually returned to Ife and and became the king after the death
of Oduduwa. Shall we say, he rounded the circle. From Ife back to Ife. What is
not denied by any authority is that all the Kings of Benin, Oyo and Ife,
thereafter had the same ancestor.
Unless,
ethnic pride, sheer narrative mischief and ugly cult disorders enter the
picture, how is it possible in the narration of the folklore, myth, or history,
to rank the three dynasties and not follow the order in which they were established
and acknowledged at Ile Ife! Which odu of Ifa tells us a different story other
than the one that accepts the chronology just adumbrated! So, there is no
denying it: whether you believe the Ekaladeran story or not, you have to accept
that Oduduwa sent his youngest son who thereafter displaced all the older sons,
overtook them, and made them invisible to the claims of history.
Those
who are not Oramiyan’s children may well kick and seek another ranking that
puts them in the picture. But they have no locus because it is actually
Oramiyan’s children who built the empires that survived the ravages of history.
Among those children, as has always been accepted by ALL AUTHORITIES, the Benin
Monarch came first. To do a somersault about it and seek to make Eweka appear
like the third in the hierarchy is simply jiggery pokery, rigging, and sheer distortion
of History.
When
Ade Ajayi says that Oba Erediauwa’s “own father used to attend and meet at
the conference of Yoruba obas regularly during colonial rule”, he is quite
right. Ajayi adds, truculently however that Oba Akenzua,
Erediauwa’s “own father did not object to this but he (Erediauwa) from
his own point of view of politics thinks it is a departure from his own status
…..” and ” that Ife monarchy is derived from Benin monarchy”.
The
truth of the matter is that even if anyone rejects the fact “that Ife Monarchy
is derived from Igodo monarchy”, it changes nothing about the reality that the
Monarchy in Benin City is still Number One among Oduduwa’s children. I mean:
let it be assumed that Oduduwa came from Egypt, Mecca, Sudan, Ethiopia (where
the Oromo Region has a nationality fraction called Oromiyas) or from Orun, as
heaven or a place we do not know, with a chain made of iron if not some other
metal, it does not change the fact that the dumb one who learnt to talk by
naming himself OWOMIKA, ‘my hand has stuck it’, the first Benin monarch after
the Ogisos, was the first child of Oramiyan whose children built the empires
that our part of the world remembers.
No
question about it: there is the other significant issue that whoever becomes
the Ooni of Ife is closest to the Opa Oranyan, and therefore must be deemed the
preserver of the family grain, the shrine of nativity.
A
special place may therefore be reserved for him in the celebration of the
family business which monarchy always is, in every culture where it exists. It
does not however remove from the eldest child the imprimatur that age provides.
At
any rate, Edo culture has been, for centuries, a strict upholder of the
principle of primogeniture and therefore some remove from parleying with those
who have no respect for the firstborn adult male in the matter of monarchical
rule. The reality is that whenever the Oba of Benin sat among Yoruba
obas, he knew he was the eldest. He did not have to say it for it to be true.
Those who deny him his place may stand on ethnic arrogance, which is hollow.
