Ooni, Alaafin and Yoruba’s endless war

By Lasisi Olagunju

A race of giants. The Yoruba had been producing monumental men and women long before Nigeria became a country. Professor Adelola Adeloye’s ‘African Pioneers of Modern Medicine’ (1985) has a list of eleven Nigerians who qualified as medical doctors between the 19th century and 1901. Ten out of the eleven were Yoruba. Check out their names and the dates they qualified: William Davies (1858), Nathaniel King (1874), Obadiah Johnson (1884), John Randle (1888), Orisadipe Obasa (1891), Leigh-Sodipe (1892), Oguntola Sapara (1895), R. Akinwande Savage (1900), C. C. Adeniyi-Jones (1901) and W. Cole (1901). Those are the Yoruba ten.

Chief Obafemi Awolowo, in his autobiography, described the Yoruba as “a fastidious, critical and discerning people.” As trailblazers, their enviable record of being pioneers goes beyond medicine; it is in every field. Again, look at these lines distilled from A. G. Hopkins’ ‘A Report on The Yoruba, 1910′ published in 1969: Henry Carr, born in Lagos in 1863, was the son of a freed slave with Egba provenance; he got a B.A. in 1885 with honours in mathematics and the physical sciences and played pivotal roles in early Lagos’ political life. Obadiah Johnson was the son of a liberated slave from Oyo who was born in Sierra Leone in 1849, took a B.A. in 1879, went back to school in England, qualified as a doctor in 1884 and returned to Lagos in 1886 to play great roles in the history of medical practice in Nigeria and in the cultural history of the Yoruba. Christopher Sapara-Williams, son of an Ijesha man with strong Egba connections, was born in Freetown in 1855. He was called to the English Bar in 1879 becoming the first Nigerian to become a lawyer. “He settled in Lagos in 1888, established a thriving legal practice, and became prominent in the political and social life of the town.” E. H. Oke was a senior official in the Legal Department of the Lagos government of the early 20th century. He authored ‘A Short History of the United Native African Church: Part 1, 1891 to 1903’ published in 1918. Adegboyega Edun (1860-1930) “was a Methodist minister and schoolmaster who became Principal of the Wesleyan Boys High School in Lagos from 1893 to 1902, when he was appointed Secretary to the Egba United Government. W. T. G. Lawson was the son of a (Yoruba) government interpreter in Sierra Leone. He qualified as a civil engineer and was Assistant Colonial Surveyor in Lagos from 1879 to 1886, when he retired from government service.” Of course, you and I know that Yoruba’s legacy of firsts was carried over into the 20th century; we are in the 21st and the facts are still here, notorious.

A people with this pedigree should normally be above petty squabbling. But that is not so with the Yoruba; they drop the elephant and go after crickets. You would want to ask what their problem is. My friend and Punch columnist, Abimbola Adelakun, told me yesterday that it was “the curse of enlightenment”; the afflicted knowing enough to paralyse themselves. They have the dubious blessing of what my teacher, Professor Adebayo Williams, recently described as a “squabbling and dissolute elite.” They routinely fight themselves over nothing.

On Monday, August 18, 2025, a needless statement was dispatched from Oyo to Ile Ife over a chieftaincy title given to an Ibadan man by the Ooni of Ife. Just as it happened in c1793 in Apomu market, the statement from Oyo has turned out the spark needed by those angling to rekindle the blaze that burnt the past.

The Yoruba are supposed to be the well-clothed moin moin, but they behave more like akara, naked and caked. They are daily exposed to the elements by their knack for division, friction and discord. They get bent and broken by what Vera Schwarcz calls the “accumulated weight of outworn habits.” It means very little that they are well-taught and knowledgeable with more than two centuries of advantage over their neighbours. They rarely collectively profit from their endowments. It is a curse.

I am an Oyo-Yoruba. I have watched in horror as some Yoruba persons, self-interested actors, use the opportunity to say what had always been unsaid, and should be unsaid. You would think this house is another Tower of Babel, or the very abode of Eris, the Greek goddess of strife and chaos. Nothing that binds the family together has been left unquestioned. Some have even extended the war to the Yoruba language and its dialects. They sweat to define what is standard and substandard; what is superior and what is inferior and the implications for the users.

For 100 years (1793 to 1893), the Yoruba fought the Yoruba, neighbour plundered neighbour, brother sold brother into slavery. It took a superior power from outside, the British, to impose peace on that race of discord. If Nigeria disintegrates today and each ethnic group goes its way, the Yoruba will most likely resume their internecine wars almost immediately. That is my conclusion after weeks of watching and monitoring reactions to the unfortunate simmering supremacy spat between people who claim to support the palace of the Ooni of Ife and that of the Alaafin of Oyo, and their tributaries.

What I have seen and heard in the last three weeks evokes unsettling echoes of the Yoruba civil wars of the late 18th and the 19th centuries when obas, princes and generals turned their energies inward and left the nation vulnerable to external forces. You hear and read some comments and gasp. Even where you thought you would meet wisdom, you got there and saw its opposite sitting regal, holding court. You would think the resolution of a supremacy war between the Alaafin of Oyo and the Ooni of Ife is the elixir that would cure today’s security-sick Yoruba, fix their terribly bad roads and feed their hungry. They excitably keep the ember of war glowing. Wisdom has not whispered to those doing the fanning that when brothers waste their strength and dissipate energies fighting each other, strangers seize the inheritance. It happened in the 19th century. Then, as now, the struggle was less about destiny and deliverance; it was more about pride and prejudice with devastating consequences for the collective.

The Yoruba energy and intellect fascinated the white man right from the first contact. Gary Lynn Comstock of the University of Chicago Divinity School, USA, wrote in ‘The Yoruba and Religious Change’ (1979) that “of all the societies in sub-Saharan Africa, the Yoruba of south-western Nigeria are one of the most extensively studied native group.” Toyin Falola and Ann Genova in ‘Yorùbá Identity and Power Politics’ (2006) call our attention to the fact that as far back as “1897, Samuel Johnson wrote in the preface to his pioneer work, ‘The History of the Yorubas,’ (that) educated natives of Yorùbá are well acquainted with the history of England and with that of Rome and Greece…”

They have all these, yet, they fight dirty in the mud like pigs. Their distant ancestors preached moderation even in ennobling pursuits. They told their young to “never stay too long on the farm like hopeless slaves (and) never stay too long at home like the miserably lazy.” But in matters of power and politics, they are extremists. Today as in the past, they fight civil wars and ignore the glaring reality of their present dire situation. More than it was 122 years ago, today’s Yoruba country is hemmed in by far graver existential challenges: economic, political, security, and a generational crisis of values. Yet, what excites their political and traditional elite is which antiquated throne is senior to, or more ‘imperial’ than others. Wisdom has not told the feuding race that to stoke embers of rivalry between two thrones that should embody unity and wisdom is to indulge in a needless diversion from the urgent work of survival and renewal.

Their fathers said “if we don’t forget the bickering of yesterday, we will have no playmate.” Yet, the Yoruba (groups) remain captive of their history of wars and bloody bickering. They worship the past and pour libations to exaggerated stories and histories. But we’ve been told that “all history is tendentious, and if it were not tendentious, nobody would write it. History is therefore never history, but history-for.” Hidemi Suganami, Professor of the Philosophy of International Relations, opens his ‘Stories of War Origins: A narrativist theory of the causes of war’ with that two-sentence quote. He credits the first sentence to R. G. Collingwood’s ‘The Idea of History’ (1994) and the second to C. Levi-Strauss’ ‘The Savage Mind (La Pensee sauvage)’, published in 1972. Both lines remind the reader of Robert Cox’s much-quoted statement: ‘Theory is always for someone and for some purpose.” And it leads me here to ask why the Yoruba people tell or write (or rewrite) their histories.

The Yoruba forget nothing and remember everything. Professor Toyin Falola, in his ‘A Research Agenda on the Yoruba in the Nineteenth Century’ (1988) notes this fact. He writes that “the twentieth century inherited some of the unresolved issues of the nineteenth century, notably problems of intergroup conflicts; competition for power among individuals and lineages; redefinition of functions and criteria for chieftaincy titles, etc.” He adds that “communities with turbulent experiences have continued to remember these in their relations with others.” What we’ve seen since the latest Oyo vs Ife ‘war’ of words has its root in those “unresolved issues of the nineteenth century.”

H. G. Wells wrote ‘The War That Will End War’ (1914). The title of that book was immediately applied to the First World War as “the war to end all wars.” But the Second World War started eleven short years after the first. The Yoruba started a civil war in 1878 and for the next 16 years killed and maimed one another. They boasted that the 16-year-war was the war to end all wars. They were wrong. The war has not ended, it is still on in 2025; you have it being fought in inter-communal skirmishes; in sub-ethnic and obaship supremacy contests.

I read R. C. C. Law’s ‘Yorubaland and its History’ and the reviews therein of ‘Yoruba Warfare in the Nineteenth Century’ by J. F. Ade Ajayi and Robert Smith; ‘Owu in Yoruba History’ by Akin Mabogunje and J. D. Omer-Cooper; ‘Revolution and Power Politics in Yorubaland 1840-1893; Ibadan expansion and the rise of Ekitiparapo’ by S. A. Akintoye; ‘The Political Development of Yoruba Kingdoms in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’ by Peter C. Lloyd; and ‘Yoruba Towns and Cities: an enquiry into the nature of urban social phenomena’ by Eva Krapf-Askari. R. C.C. Law reviewed those works and zeroed in on Akintoye’s submission that the successful revolt of the north-eastern Yoruba (the Ekiti, the Ijesa, and the Igbomina) against the rule of Ibadan in 1878-93 determined “that no one Yoruba state would (again) attain the position of primacy earlier enjoyed by Oyo.” The present pushing and shoving should be read as an attempt to assert or put a lie to that determination.

If you are implicated in this crisis that started three weeks ago, I urge that you calm down, reflect deeply and ask what benefits will accrue from this dog-eat-dog war of histories. In the present controversy as in all previous ones, I see manipulation and exploitation of history. I see attempts being “made to take political decisions which did not recognize the nineteenth-century changes.” I see history, particularly of the 19th century, being put to different uses by the disparate peoples and interests in Yorubaland. This insight is not mine; it belongs to Professor Falola who notes in the 1988 piece cited above, that “the ‘new Oyo empire’ of the twentieth century benefited from the achievements of the Old Oyo empire before the nineteenth century; (that) Ibadan suffered political decline because of the interpretation that it was a satellite of Oyo with rulers whose appointments were sanctioned by the Alaafin; (that) Ile-Ife ignored its military defeats and humiliation in the nineteenth century and quickly resorted to the Oduduwa myth to attain political prominence and (that) those who had no claim to previous glories, whether on the basis of pre-1800 power or myth, (have) adopted several other innovative strategies.

I am not done with the historian, Falola. He reminds us that in the last century, “traditions played a dominant role” in Yoruba politics, but often not in their purest sense. Rather, what different subgroups stressed were those aspects of history that could best serve their “sectarian and political advantages.” Thus, Ibadan, seeking legitimacy for the Olubadan title and later a crown, popularized the myth of Lagelu, an alleged Ife prince and founder of the city, even though, in Falola’s words, Ìbàdàn’s early settlers were “Oyo-Yoruba refugees.” Oyo itself, after relocating under Atiba to Ago Oja, downplayed the new order while clinging to the grandeur of the old. It still does. The Ijesa, for their part, highlighted their imperial past to assert superiority “over their neighbours (including Ife),” conveniently ignoring myths that would place them in a subordinate lineage to Ile-Ife. Ile-Ife,
as stated earlier, “ignored its military defeats and humiliation in the nineteenth century and quickly resorted to the Oduduwa myth to attain political prominence.” Across Yorubaland, even communities of relatively recent origin have invented traditions to trace their roots to Oduduwa, all in a bid to “derive certain political advantages.” Falola’s conclusion is that such “deliberate distortions of history and traditions” were strategies of survival in the turbulent eras of the past.

If 2025 feels like 1825 in crises and controversies, it would mean that two hundred years of Yoruba education and civilisation are a waste. Unprofitable exertions and meaningless supremacy contests between revered thrones repeat a dangerous cycle. The Yoruba elite should reflect and ask themselves if fetishising history and myths is the solution to insecurity and poverty that wrack their people’s present and imperil their survival. The wise does not fight himself. Enough should be enough.

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