By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Twitter: @farooqkperogi
Former Minister of Culture Femi Fani-Kayode started a
healthy national conversation about the constructedness of collective
identities in Nigeria when he repudiated his “Yoruba” identity because he said
the name owes etymological debts to the Fulani and that it has pejorative denotations
and connotations. This is, of course, both ahistorical and factually
inaccurate.
As I pointed out in
my preliminary intervention on his
claims on social media, the name “Yariba” was first attested in a treatise by a
16th-century Songhai Islamic scholar by the name of Ahmad Baba to refer to the
people of the ancient Oyo Empire, which included all of present-day Oyo State,
most of Osun State—and parts of Kwara and some western Nigerian states.
Ahmad Baba’s 1613 essay, titled
“Al-kashf wa-l-bayān li-aṣnāfmajlūb al-Sūdān” (translated into English as “
The Exposition and Explanation
Concerning the Varieties of Transported Black Africans”), mentioned “Yariba”
among ethnic groups Muslims were justified to enslave.
In his 1806 treatise titled
"Bayan Wujub Al-Hijra,Ala L-Ibad,” Sheikh Usmanu Dan Fodiyo referenced Ahmad Baba’s essay and
contested some of its claims. Ahmad Baba
had written that “the people of Kano,
some of Zakzak [Zaria?], the people of Katsina, the people of Gobir, and all of
the Songhay” were Muslims who could never be enslaved.
Since Dan Fodio didn’t think the Islam in Hausaland at the
time was authentic, he needed to justify his jihad, so he responded to Ahmad
Baba posthumously by asserting that what was true of Ahmadu Baba’s claims 200
years ago, “might not necessarily be true at all other times, since every
scholar relates what he sees in his own days.”
Dan Fodio’s son, Muhammad Bello, wrote Infaq al-mansur
in 1813 where he also responded to Ahmad Baba’s 1613 essay, and had cause to
mention “Yariba.” In other words, the name “Yariba” had been used to refer to
people of the ancient Oyo Empire at least 200 years before Dan Fodio and his
son, Muhammad Bello, used it. That invalidates the claim that it was the “Fulani”
who “gave” the name “Yariba” to people in today’s western Nigeria. In any case,
“Yariba” doesn’t mean anything in Fulfulde.
As etymologists remind us, before a word is attested in
writing, it must have existed several years in demotic speech. That means “Yariba”
had been in use much earlier than 1613 when it first appeared in writing—which is
hundreds of years before the Fulani encountered the Yoruba.
Now that we have established that it is chronologically
impossible for the Fulani to have “given” the name “Yariba” to Oyo people, where
did the name come from? It’s obvious that Songhai people (who are now found in
Niger Republic, parts of Benin Republic, and parts of Mali as Zarma and Dendi)
have called Oyo people some version of “Yariba” since at least the 1500s. But
the name may not be original to them, either.
Dr. Hussaini Abdu, in his forthcoming book titled Partitioned
Borgu: State, Society and Politics in a West African Border Region, makes
the persuasive case that the name “Yoruba” owes lexical provenance to the
Baatonu people of Borgu, Oyo’s immediate northern neighbors, whom contemporary
Yoruba people call Bariba, Baruba or Ibariba. The Baatonu word for Oyo people
is “Yoru” (singular), “Yorubu” (plural). The third person reference to the
people is “Yoruba.”
“The name was probably sourced from Songhay contact with
Borgu, later reinforced through interviews with Baatonu slaves in Sierra Leone
and popularised by European travellers like Clapperton and missionary
documentation, such as the works of Samuel Johnson in the nineteenth century,”
he wrote.
This isn’t a far-fetched proposition because Songhai, Borgu,
and Oyo had deep cultural and historical ties. For one, it was Songhai-speaking
Mande people from ancient Mali who brought Islam to Borgu and to Yoruba land,
which explains why Islam is called “imale” in the Yoruba language.
Two, the three polities share several common cultural
vocabularies. For instance, recently, Professor Oyeronke Oyewumi of New York’s
Stony Brook University and daughter of the current Soun of Ogbomoso, asked me
if the term wundia, which means a young unmarried woman in Yoruba, had
origins in the Baatonu language because, as she said, “it is clear to me that it’s
not an original Yoruba word.”
Well, the Yoruba
wundia occurs in the Baatonu language
as “
wondia,” but it turns out that the word is originally Songhai where
it occurs as “
wondia” in both Dendi and Zarma—with the same meaning.
This is just one of several vocabularies shared by Yoruba, Songhai, and Borgu people.
In fact, as I showed in my May 13, 2012 article titled
“The Arabic Origins of Common Yoruba Words,” several Arabic words in Yoruba such as “alafia,” “alufa,”
“borokini,”
“tobi,” “suuru,” “wahala,” “faari,”
“anfani,” etc., which also occur in the Baatonu language in the same lexical
forms, came to the language by way of the Songhai.
So it’s no surprise that there is a vast circulation of
cultural and ethnonymic registers between these polities. Interestingly, the
Baatonu people (more than 80 percent of whom are now in Benin Republic) don’t
call other Yoruba groups “Yoruba.” For instance, they call the Yoruboid groups
in Benin Republic Kawo (plural Kaabu or Kawobu). “Yorubu” is reserved only for Oyo
Yoruba.
It’s obvious that Ahmad Baba wrote “Yoruba” as “Yariba” in
his 1613 essay because Arabic, the language in which he wrote, does not have
the vowel “o.” The three dominant vowels in Arabic are “a,” “I,” and “u.”
Obviously, both the Fulani and the Hausa copied the name “Yariba”
from the Songhai who in turn copied it from the Baatonu people of Borgu. I
speak the Baatonu language natively; if the name “Yoru” had a meaning in the
language, that meaning is lost now. But there is not the faintest whiff of derogation
in the name when the Baatonu people use it to refer to Oyo people. Nor does it
mean anything even in Songhai, which my mother’s relatives speak natively.
What is significant, however, is that people of Western
Nigeria aren’t called “Yoruba” today because the Borgu people called them so,
or because they were identified by a version of that name by Songhai, Hausa, and
Fulani people. They self-identify as “Yoruba” precisely because returnee slaves
of Yoruba descent chose the name, popularized it, and encouraged people in the
region to embrace it.
John Raban’s 1832 book titled The Vocabulary of the Eyo,
or Aku, a Dialect of West Africa is perhaps the first to mention the name “Yoruba”
in writing. Then in 1843, Samuel Ajayi Crowther published A Vocabulary of
the Yoruba Language. Raban, like Crowther, was a reverend gentleman and
returnee Yoruba slave in Sierra Leone.
In 1859, Nigeria’s
first modern newspaper, called Iwe Irohin fun awon Egba ati Yoruba (Yoruba
for “newspaper for the Egba and Yoruba people”) hit the newsstands. The name of
the paper suggests that when the newspaper was founded, the “Yoruba” (read: Oyo
people) were regarded as different from the Egba and other Yoruba subgroups,
although the language was considered similar enough to have one newspaper for
all of them.
It was Samuel Ajayi Crowther who in the nineteenth century
actively worked to encourage the amalgam of related linguistic groups in
western Nigeria to adopt the name “Yoruba” as their endonym. So an exonym (name
given to a people by others) was adopted as an endonym (name by which a group
self-identifies) through the instrumentality of an outsider who made himself an
insider. Of course, Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s Action Group continued and
strengthened Crowther’s initiative.
Professor Stephen Akintoye has also done a wonderful job of
exploding Chief Fani-Kayode’s claims in his short article titled “About the
Name ‘Yoruba’.” Nevertheless, he misstated a few facts. He said it is Arabs who
call Yoruba people “Yarbawa” and that only Yoruba people call Arabs “Larubawa.”
"Larubawa" is actually a Hausa word. It's the
plural form for Arabs in the Hausa language. The singular form is Balarabe.
Yarbawa is also the plural form for Yoruba people in the Hausa language (the
singular is Bayarbe, which some Yoruba people mispronounce as “Berebe”). It's
not an Arabic word. Note that "awa" is the lexeme for the plural
forms of ethnonyms in the Hausa language. That's why the plural for even the
Hausa people themselves in their language is also Hausawa (singular: Bahause).
And “yamiri”? The Fulani didn’t “give” that name to the Igbo.
The Hausa did, and it’s derived from an imitation of yem mmiri, Igbo for
“give me water.”
Related Articles:
Fulani Did NOT Invent "Yoruba" and "Yamuri"
"Yariba," "Nyamiri," and "Sons and Daughters of Oduduwa"
The Arabic Origins of Common Yoruba Words
Top 10 Yoruba Names You Never Guessed Were Arabic Names
Of Yoruba, Arabic, and Origin of Nigerian Names
Language Families in Nigeria
Mesu Jamba, a Slur Against Ilorin People, is a Linguistic Fraud
Ooni of Ife's Strange Theory of the Yoruba Origins of English
"Mesu Jamba," the Question of Etymological Fallacy, and Other Reactions
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)
