Who Are the Yoruba?

The Yoruba are documented indigenes of a homeland bounded to the east and north by the River Niger and to the south by the Atlantic Ocean. The Yoruba are a single ethnic group, present when the world began. In the beginning there was the sky (Ọrun) on one side and water (Omi) on the other side. Ọbatala came down from the sky with soil which he spread on the water to make land. There are several variations of this story depending on where you lived in the Yorubaland, but the underlying essence was always the same, that at the beginning of time, the world was a water world, and that it all began at Ile Ife. What makes this account authentic and observational is the fact that Ile Ife is not riverine or on a flood plain to confuse the chroniclers. This Yoruba story of creation has been confirmed by modern scientific evidence. Johns and Wing (Nat. Geosci. 2000 13, 234-247) who studied oxygen distribution on land and sea found that the earth indeed started life as a water world.

The Yoruba originated in one specific location, Ile Ifẹ, and they, and no other, were the original occupiers of the land (Ilẹ Baba wa). The claim that the Yorubaland was the cradle of origin of man is supported by modern scientific evidence. Durvasula and Sankararaman (Sci. Adv. 2020 6(7):eaax5097) who studied genes obtained from modern day Yoruba people found that the Yoruba descended from a yet to be named hominid that might have lived a million or so years ago. The Yoruba hominid was separate and distinguishable from the Neanderthal (found in Eastern Europe) and the Denisovan (found in Siberia). Other evidence suggest that the Yoruba were the first humans to change from hunter-gatherers to farmers.

The ancient Yoruba

A skeleton found at a rock shelter at Iwo Eleru, near Akure, in 1965 by Thurstan Shaw and his team was a Late Stone Age individual with iron-age occupation. The skeleton was carbon-dated to 11,200 BP. Iwo Eleru (‘cave of fire’) got its name from farmers who lit fires in the shelter. The Iwo Eleru skeleton confirmed that the Yoruba descended from ancient, archaic humans, distinct and unrelated to any other.

Stone figurines found at Esie, a village in northern Yorubaland, by a hunter in 1775 were arranged in a circle with men, women, children and animals sitting or kneeling. Some held musical instruments. Some held farming tools. The impression is of a community gathering for a meeting or for a ceremony or festival. Over 1,000 stone figurines have so far been found in the Esie area. It was estimated that the soapstone figurines were carved between the 12th and 15th. Centuries using wood carving tools.

The Ife ‘bronze’ statues were accidentally discovered in 1938 at the Wunmonije Compound in Ile Ife. The figures were detailed, exquisite, lifelike portrayal of human features. They were casted using a ‘lost wax’ casting technique. The complex casting technique involved 4 separate stages: creation of a clay model, covering it with wax, encasing it in clay, then melting away the wax to create the mold to cast the molten metal (copper) alloy. The casting technique suggests that the ancient Yoruba had knowledge of metallurgy and foundry. It was estimated that the casts were made between the 12th and 15th centuries.

The Yoruba language

Language spoken by the Yoruba has been classified as a subcategory of Defoid, which is a subcategory of the Benue-Congo group. The Yoruba language apparently is related to the non-Yoruba languages on the grounds of the use of intonation to make lexical and/or grammatical distinctions, the use of prefixes and suffices as modifiers, and the use of compound verbs. Yoruba-speakers make up at least 50% of the group yet the group is inexplicably not named after the Yoruba. There are Yoruba-speakers indigenous to 4 countries. Where  in West Africa Yoruba is not directly spoken, variants of it are spoken.

The Yoruba spoke a language that was a unique ‘writing’ language conceptually different from the languages of their neighbours. The typical Yoruba word – noun, adjective, adverb etc – was constructed from a verb base. The verb itself was constructed by simply adding a vowel to a consonant. For example, the verb ‘da’ meaning ‘to create’, was formed by adding the vowel ‘a’ to the consonant ‘d’. From the verb ‘da’ in turn was constructed ‘Ẹda’ meaning the creation, and ‘Ẹlẹda’ meaning the creator. The ancient Yoruba by these means were able to use spoken words to memorialise everything, including their history, laws and philosophy.

The Yoruba Charter on Human Rights.

Traditional Yoruba collectivist or communitarian philosophy provided the individual with three basic or fundamental rights, namely, the right to be, the right to do and the right to have.

1. The right to be was comprised of the right to life, the right to love and affection, and the right to education and training (that is, the wherewithal to succeed in life).
2. The right to do was comprised of the right to work and earn, and the right to freely express one’s self (‘as the elder has wisdom, so does the child’), to move, to associate and to assemble.
3. The right to have was comprised of the right to marriage and family life, the right to fair hearing (‘the elder who decides after hearing one side, does injustice to both sides’), the right to be treated with dignity, and the right to develop to one’s full capacity.
    

The Yoruba Dream

The Yoruba believed that, because the success of the one was the success of the whole,  Ayanmọ (the individual’s endowment) best triumphed in a society where there was

1. Democracy (defined as the ‘rule by the people’),
2. Equality (‘man sees snake, woman kills snake, outcome is all the same to snake’), and
3. Freedom.
    

The Yoruba Individualism

The Yoruba believed that society succeeded only when the individual succeeded. According to the Doctrine of Omoluabi (meaning the child forges his/her own alternative), everyone is

1. Autonomous
2. Self-responsible
3. Unique
4. Yet part of the whole (Kinship Corporate)