Arewa and Oduduwa More Alike than Unlike
Farooq A. Kperogi
By Farooq A. Kperogi
Twitter: @farooqkperogi
The past few months have ignited impassioned and frenzied political brickbats between the elites of the South and those of the Muslim North. Plus, over the years, the differences between the people of the regions are often magnified and their similarities papered over. In today’s column, I show how this is all elite manipulation.
Centuries before colonialism and the British-supervised formation of Nigeria, much of what we know today as northern and western Nigeria have had robust relational and cultural encounters, evidence of which still endures in the contemporary linguistic and cultural artifacts of the people.
The centuries-long Trans-Saharan Trade between the Arab world and so-called Sub-Saharan Africa, which passed through much of what is now northern and western Nigeria between the eight and the seventeenth centuries, brought traces of Islam and cultural interchanges in both places.
Thereafter, both regions witnessed massive migrations of the Mandinka people from the Mali empire who brought more concentrated expressions of Islam—and monarchies. That is why much of what used to be the Oyo empire was actually ethnically syncretic. Take northern Oyo, called Oke-Ogun in Yorubaland, for example. Several of the towns and villages there were founded by people from Borgu who themselves trace their ancestry to Mali.
For instance, Ogbomoso, a major Oyo town, was founded by a Baatonu (Bariba) prince. The title of the town’s monarch, “Soun,” is a corruption of “Suno,” the Baatonu word for king. Kishi, another major town in Oke-Ogun, was founded by a Baatonu prince by the name of Kilishi Yeruma. Kilishi is the Hausa word for rug (which symbolizes the throne) and Yeruma is the corruption of the Kanuri “yerima,” which means prince. But “Kilishi Yeruma” is a fossilized, time-honored title in all of Borgu, which is a cultural melting pot, for the heir apparent to the throne.
Even the town of Igboho whose son, Sunday Igboho, has become the symbol of “Oduduwa republic,” is ethnically syncretic. Apart from the large number of Fulani people in and around the town who have lived there for centuries, some of whom have become culturally and linguistically Yoruba, there is a major neighborhood there that is called Boni.
Boni is the generic Borgu birth-order name for the fourth son. That is why many Igboho people embrace me as their brother when they find out where I am from even though I don’t speak Yoruba well enough to sustain a conversation in it.
Historical accounts also reveal that during the Trans-Saharan Trade, many Hausa people worked as intermediaries between Arab traders and the Alaafin of Oyo. Most didn’t return to their places of birth, and their descendants are now Yoruba people.
Similarly, we read from the late Professor Abdullahi Smith’s account of the tiff between Afonja and the Alaafin of Oyo that a large chunk of Afonja’s army, called the Jama’a, was drawn from Hausa slaves who escaped from the Alaafin’s palace.
And the Fulani presence in Yoruba land preceded the coming of Mu’alim “Alimi” Salihu to Ilorin by several decades, perhaps centuries. As I pointed out in a past column titled “Ilorin is an Ethnogenesis: Response to Kawu’s Anti-Saraki Ilorin Purism,” some of Afonja’s followers, with whom he fought the Alaafin, according to Abdullahi Smith who quoted the Ta’alif, a pamphlet written in Arabic by an Ilorin Yoruba Muslim cleric about the events of the time at the time they occurred, were Fulani pastoralists who were never Muslims.
The pastoralists had lost their cattle to tsetse fly bites and “had nothing to lose,” according to Smith, so they became Afonja’s mercenaries. One of the Fulani pastoralists whom Alimi couldn’t convert to Islam, was a man named Ibrahim Olufade who spoke perfect Yoruba and Fulfulde and acted as the interpreter for Afonja in his initial interactions with Alimi.
In other words, Fulani people had been bearing Yoruba names in Yorubaland at least a century before Nigeria was formed. I won’t be surprised if descendants of Ibrahim Olufade are now Yoruba (nationalists) if they are in western Nigeria.
My hunch has some basis in real-life examples. One of northern Nigeria’s most celebrated journalists, the late Hajia Bilikisu Yusuf, was descended from Yoruba people who migrated to Kano generations ago. She was one of the most passionate defenders of Arewa that I know.
When the late Mohammed Sule, author of the famous The Undesirable Element in the Pacesetter Series, told me of Hajia Bilikisu’s Yoruba background in Kaduna in the late 1990s, I was incredulous. But he said they were neighbors in Kano and swore that Hajia Bilikisu’s grandfather still spoke Yoruba.
The ancestors of the late Professor Ibrahim Ayagi of Kano were Yoruba. As he himself told the Daily Trust on September 2, 2018, “Unguwar Ayagi was initially inhabited by the Yoruba and Nupawa, who came from outside and settled here. That’s how the place became known as Ayagi. So most of the people in Ayagi are Yoruba, Nupe and, of course, Hausa.”
In fact, a one-time civilian governor of old Sokoto State (i.e., present-day Sokoto, Zamfara, and Kebbi states) traces his ancestry to a Yoruba man. And he governed the heart of the caliphate.
Given this depth and breadth of relational interconnectedness, it is no surprise that northern and western Nigeria share an extensive repertoire of cultural vocabularies that are derived from Arabic, Songhai (because the Malians who brought Islam to Hausa land, Borgu, and Yorubaland abandoned their language and spoke a dialect of Songhai called Dendi), and mutual borrowings.
I will give a few examples. In both Yoruba land and Borgu, the term from an unmarried girl is some version of the word “wondia.” That’s a Songhai word for an unmarried girl. “Bere,” a title of respect prefixed to the names of older people in Borgu and parts of Yoruba land, is a Songhai word. The word “karambani,” which I was shocked to find out occurs in Yoruba, is a Songhai word that is now integral to the lexis of many languages in Borgu.
Asiri, the word for secret in Hausa, Yoruba, Kanuri, Baatonu, and many other languages in Muslim northern Nigeria, is derived from the Arabic “as-sirr” where it also means “secret.” Wahala, which used to be limited to Yoruba and languages in Muslim northern Nigeria but which is now widely used all over Nigeria, is derived from the Arabic “wahla,” which means “fright,” “terror.”
Yoruba and most languages in Muslim northern Nigeria also use “talaka” (talika in Yoruba) to refer to the poor. The word also appears in Mandinka, Songhai languages, Teda, and in other West African polities where Islam is predominant.
Talaka is derived from “talaq,” the Arabic word for divorce. (The chapter of the Qur'an that deals with the subject of divorce is called Suratul Talaq). Talaq is derived from the verb “talaqa,” which means to “disown,” to “repudiate.” In times past (and it’s still the case today in many Muslim societies) if a woman was divorced, she was invariably thrown into poverty. Thus, Tuaregs used the term “taleqque” to denote a “poor woman.” But Hausa, Kanuri, Yoruba, Mandinka, and other West African languages expanded the original Tuareg meaning of the word to include every poor person.
And although the term “alufa/alfa” has now been replaced by “malam” in Hausa, it is still widely used in Yoruba and other languages in Muslim northern Nigeria and owes etymological debt to the Mandinka. It denotes a Muslim scholar but has evolved to other meanings in the languages that use it. It can be a synonym for Muslim in Baatonu and a husband among Yoruba Muslim women.
It is derived from the Arabic “khalifah,” which means a “successor” or a “representative” (of the prophet of Islam). It was first corrupted to “Alfa” by the Songhai-speaking Mandinka from Mali who later exported their version of the word to western and central Nigeria—and to other parts of West Africa.
The ever-present “lafia/alafia/lapia” that dots the lexis and structure of Yoruba and many languages in Muslim northern Nigeria is derived from the Arabic "afiya," which means "health." And “alubosa,” the Yoruba word for “onion,” was borrowed from the Hausa “albasa,” which Hausa itself borrowed from the Arabic “al-basal.”
There are also direct borrowings from the native vocabularies of Yoruba and Arewa languages. To give a few examples, the Yoruba “lakaye” is derived from the Hausa “la’akari.” Seriki, which is even a personal name in Yoruba land, and which often collocates with titles, is borrowed from the Hausa “sarki,” which means king.
Jaara in Yoruba (which has spread to other Nigerian languages, including Pidgin English, where it means a courtesy addition after a purchase) is a loan from the Hausa gyara. Pali in Yoruba is kwali in Hausa.
In a conversation with Dr. Muhammad Shakir Balogun, a polymathic epidemiologist at ABU whose parents are from Offa but who was born and raised in Kano, I also learned that many everyday words in Hausa are borrowed from Yoruba. The examples he gave include ashana [asana], akwatu [apoti], alaakun [alakun], kwana-kwana [pano-pano], gwale-gwale [gbale-gbale], tale-tale [tele-tele], agwaluma [agbalumo], saukale [sokale], awara [wara], atarugu [atarodo], teba [eba], alabo [elubo], ayoyo, agushi [egusi], alala [olele], agogo, keke, kia-kia.
Of course, sharing cultural and linguistic similarities is not a necessary and sufficient condition to unite, but it’s a good starting point. It also helps to remember that while we are different in many ways, we are also more alike than the elites want us to acknowledge.
Related Articles:
The Arabic Origins of Common Yoruba Words
Top 10 Yoruba Names You Never Guessed Were Arabic Names
Ilorin is an Ethnogenesis: Response to Kawu’s Anti-Saraki Ilorin Purism (I)
Ilorin is an Ethnogenesis: Response to Kawu’s Anti-Saraki Ilorin Purism (II)
“Mesu jamba,” a Slur against Ilorin People, is a Linguistic Fraud
"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will
Cornelius Hamelberg
Sigh of relief.
In the kingdom of
the half-empty
and the semi
the full
is what and who
he is.
Amin
This time there was no obvert
no backsliding no
and he himself was not being
or accusing someone else
usually a top dog Nigerian
Dollah Akbar
millionaire
lootocrat billionaire politician
of being one -
on the contrary the usually so contrary
seems to be bending over
backwards trying to find some
common ground
some common ground
of being, big grammar
being just one (a) quality
in the infinite flux of variability
and variety...
Bravo Kperogi
making history
Ibrahim Abdullah
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfric...@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDial...@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialo...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/287998db-d21a-455c-851d-6407c2f11c7en%40googlegroups.com.
Cornelius Hamelberg
Dear Everybody,
When certain so-called facts and insights go unchallenged there's the ever-present danger that they may pass as Gospel Truth. To obvert that, here's a slightly edited version of the original rejoinder from Baba Kadiri in which he presents plausible, alternate interpretations and other factual details for our consideration. I have only excised certain sensitive terms such as “inferiority complex” which in context, as presented by Baba Kadiri would qualify as an ad hominem even in the USA- Africa free speech poets' corner. The rest of what Baba Kadiri wrote, the unobjectionable wording is informative, educative and remains intact.
In that TF interview with Chief Dele Momodu, the chief said “ Yoruba is a flamboyant language”, bearing that in mind here's the milder, expurgated version of Baba Kadiri's response to Kperogi which should pass the Moderator's litmus test.
Baba Kadiri says,
”While I was expecting to read about the similarities between the Oduduwa and Arewa, as notified by Farooq Kperogi's headline, he began his article by pointing to the fact that the elites from the Muslim North and the South always manipulate the people by magnifying their differences instead of similarities. Back in tune with his headline, he wrote that Northern and Western Nigeria have had robust and cultural encounters before the advent of colonialism and the formation of Nigeria. Reading through the article it seems like Farooq's aim is to propagate the supposed conquest of part of Oyo empire by his ethnic group known to the Yoruba people as the Bàrùbá.
As a Bàrùbá man, Farooq Kperogi has his own personal perspective and special relations with the Yoruba people even if he may not be fully aware of his own bias or be ready to admit this openly. From my own point of view, the invented history that Kperogi has served us here is demeaning to the Yoruba. From my standpoint, such invented demeaning history was contained in his response to Olayinka Agbetuyi's interrogation on Thursday, 3 November 2016, when Farooq Kperogi wrote thus,
"For starters, *Yoruba* is an exonym first used by a Songhai scholar to refer to a people in what is now Oyo, Osun, and Lagos States .... and parts of Kwara State. Ajayi Crowther later adopted the name and used it to refer to cognate but nonetheless linguistically diverse people in Nigeria's Southwest. For administrative convenience, the colonialists standardized the Oyo *dialect* of the language and imposed it on people who never spoke it before. To this day, many people in rural Ekiti, Ondo, some parts of Ogun, etc. don't understand *Yoruba.* I think it was Professor Etannibi Alemika, an Okun person (whom some people would call a *Yoruba*) who once described himself as a minority that some majorities are aggressively trying to assimilate against his will. In other words, he resents being called *Yoruba.* I was once in a rural Ekiti community for a wedding, and *Yoruba* people from Lagos were shocked that most people there couldn't communicate with them in the common language of the region."
Almost five years ago, Farooq Kperogi thought a Songhai scholar who he did not name coined the name Yoruba which the legendary Ajaiyi Crowther adopted to refer to what Kperogi called “linguistically diverse people of Southwest Nigeria”. Yet, he claimed that the colonialists imposed a standardized dialect of the Oyo language on the rest of the people of Southwest who never spoke the language before. Which languages were spoken in Ekiti, Ondo, some parts of Ogun, etc., before the so-called standardized Oyo Yoruba was imposed by the colonialists? What kind of administrative convenience warranted the colonialists to impose a standardized Oyo Yoruba in the Southwest that did not warrant the imposition of Hausa and Igbo languages in the North and in the East respectively? Who gave the name Borgu/Baatonu to the people known by the Yoruba as Bárùbá? The Yoruba language consists of many dialects of which the Oyo dialect is the official. All the dialects understand one another in conversations. Thus, it makes sense to say that the Yoruba people of the Southwest are dialectically diverse whereas it is demeaning to claim that the region is linguistically diverse.
Farooq Kperogi's article below is a continuation of his 2016 belittlement and devaluation of the Southwest Yoruba people. He wrote among other things beneath,
"Take northern Oyo called Oke Ogun in Yorubaland, several towns and villages were founded by people from Borgu. Ogbomoso, a major Oyo town was founded by a Baatonu (Bariba) prince. The title of the town's monarch, Soun, is a corruption of *Suno*, the Baatonu word for King."
The word for King in Yoruba is Oba (pronounced Orba or Urba). The current King of Ogbomoso is titled Soun Ajagungbade III, Oba Jimoh Oladunni Oyewumi. Soun, as spelled here, does not comply with Yoruba alphabetical order whereby S and O in the spelling should have had a dot (.) respectively under the alphabets to accomplish an SH or CH sound (Shawun, Chawun). To watch, to keep eyes on an object or to guard objects in Yoruba is called, So (pronounced Shaw with one dot each under the S and the O, Showun). Soun in actual fact is the abbreviated word for the compound Yoruba word So-ohun which means to watch over, or to protect, or guard over or keep eyes on what is precious. Therefore, the right and correct translation of Soun into English should either be the watchman, or guardian or protector, or defender of Ogbomosho. It is, therefore, preposterous to claim that the title of Ogbomoso's monarch, Soun, is a corruption of Suno, the Baatonu word for King. Is Ogbomosho a Baatonu's name and what was the name of the Baatonu prince that founded Ogbomosho? The Bàrùbá word *Suno* may be a corruption of Yoruba words, Sonu or Sonu (pronounced sornu or shonu) which means to be lost, to lose, to throw away or sour, morose, ill-natured or ill-minded.
Some people may say that Farooq Kperogi is a Professor and when he insists that a mouse can give birth to an elephant just like his Bàrùbá Baatonu founding of Ogbomosho, who am I to question him?
In both Yoruba land and Borgu, the term from (sic) an unmarried girl is some version of the word "wondia." That's a Songhai word for an unmarried girl - Farooq Kperogi.
An unmarried girl, virgin/maid in Yoruba is called *wundia* while a married girl is called Adelébò* (pronounced Adelebor). Similarly, an unmarried man, a bachelor is called in Yoruba, Àpón (pronounced Àpurn). If Kperogi's Borgu and Songhai word for wondia is connected to the Yoruba word wundia, what then are the Songhai/Borgu connected names for the Yoruba words Adélébò, and Àpón? Although it is correct that Muslims in the Southwest use the word Tálákà, derived from the Arabic word Talaq, to refer to the poor, the commonest Yoruba words in reference to the poor, miserable, wretched, indigent person and a pauper are, Òtòsì (Olósì) and Akúse (pronounced Akúseh). Truly the word wahala is used throughout Nigeria to indicate trouble, affliction, tribulation, worry, molestation, and annoyance, but the common Yoruba expression for those conditions is ÌYOLÉNU/ÌYONU (pronounced Iyorlernu or Iyornu). The idea of borrowing words from other languages is not the problem here, but the impression being created that we were nothing before the Arabs and European incursions into Africa. Why should one be discussing the similarities between the Northerners (Arewa) and Southwest (Oduduwa) to the exclusion of Southeast (Ndi Igbo) and the South-south who have been part of Nigeria with us since inception?
Linguistically, many words in Igbo are either identical or similar to Yoruba words. For instance, the nose in Igbo is called Imi while the Yoruba says Imu; Aka which refers to arm in Igbo is called Apa in Yoruba; Ile in Yoruba that refers to land is called ala in Igbo; Enu which is the name for mouth in Yoruba, is called Onu in Igbo; the ear which is named Eti in Yoruba is called Nti in Igbo; to kick in Igbo and Yoruba is called Gba; while the jaw is named Agba in Igbo, the Yoruba calls it Agbon and the name for the masquerade in Igbo is Egwugwu while the Yoruba calls it Egungun etc. There are many medicinal herbs common to the Igbo, Yoruba and other ethnic groups in Southern Nigeria and the Middlebelt. In reality, Nigerians are one and the same people. Thus, as a patriot, I love Nigeria and whenever there is a conflict between the people and the government, I will always stand by/with the people.
S. Kadiri