₦airaland Forum

zstranger:
^^^^

You are very stupiddd

The Ooni is superior to the Alaafiin

Pukkah:
@zstranger, did you mean what you just wrote to me? What's that supposed to mean?

You should have the maturity and decorum not to throw insults or abuses at people that are not your mates in any way. I have never abused anyone on this forum and I am not about to start.

Pray, did you bring forth any evidence to controvert my assertion instead of hurriedly hurling abuses at my person. You need to slow down and take it easy. I love decent and well-bred people regardless of their tribe or religion. Take it easy boy!

hercules07:
Stranger u know we have gone through this before, your Ooni is not fit to lace the boots of the Alaafin, I know you are a proud ife man but please do not distort history oooooooooooooooooooooooooo, just to buttress my point, who did the British Monarch sign treaties with in Yoruba land during the Yoruba Civil wars?

At  no  time  in  recent  years  have  the  conflicting  claims  of  supremacy
among  some  Yoruba  traditional  rulers, [size=18pt] particularly  the  Ooni  of  Ife
and  the  Alaafin  of  Oyo  been  more  evident  than  between  October  1983
and  the  present.  In  June  1984  the  in-fighting  between  the  rulers
became  so  embarrassing  to  the  military  government  of  Oyo  State[/size]
(which  includes  the  traditional  domains  of  the  two  rulers)  that  the
governor  had  to  warn  the  traditional  rulers  not  to  destroy  the  in-
stitution  of  Obaship  handed  down  to  them  by  their  ancestors.  Yet  as
of  July  1984,  the  supporters  of  the  parties  concerned  were  still
engaged  in  a  war  of  words  in  Nigerian  dailies.
On  1  October  1983,  the  tussle  became  open  when,  during  his
swearing-in,  the  newly  elected  governor  of  the  state,  Omololu
Olunloyo,  promised  as  traditional  chief  to  both  parties  to  find  ways
of  resolving  their  differences.  Then,  in  the  first  meeting  of  the
Council  of  Obas  held  on  13  October  (in  which  both  the  Ooni  and  the
Alaafin  were  absent  for  unannounced  reasons),  he  also  told  the  Obas
to  decide  on  who  would  be  their  chairman.  They  were  given  the  option
to  decide  on  rotation.
Unlike  the  first  meeting  of  the  Council,  the  Ooni  and  the  Ala-
afin  were  present  at  the  second  meeting  and  the  tussle  turned  into
an  open  conflict  which  The  Punch,  a  Nigerian  daily,  described  as
"the  last  straw  that  broke  the  crisis  open"  the  following  day.  In
that  meeting  of  Thursday,  20  October, [size=18pt] the  Ooni,  who  was  made  the
chairman  by  Olunloyo's  predecessor,  referred  to  himself  as  the
father  of  all; [/size] some  Obas  were  reported  to  have  reacted  unfavorably.
The  Alaafin  said  that  it  was  he  who  was  the  father  of  all,  and  that
the  Ooni  had  apparently  not  read  his  history  well.  [size=18pt]He  was  evidently
referring  to  Johnson's  History  of  the  Yorubas  in  which  the  Oyo  ver-
sion  of  the  origin  of  the  Yoruba  claims  that  the  Ooni,  as  the  care-
taker  of  the  Yoruba  shrines  in  Ife,  was  the  descendant  of  a  slave,
Adimu,  while  the  Alaafin  was  a  son  of  Oduduwa,  the  founding  father
of  Yoruba  monarchy. [/size]
On  21  October  The  Punch  reported  that  the  new  governor  had  prom-
ised  to  make  the  Alaafin  chairman  of  the  Council  if  he  were  elected.
It  was  probably  in  keeping  with  the  promise  that  he  suggested  a
rotational  system  and  finally  decided  that  the  Ooni  should  continue
to  be  chairman  until  1984  when  he  would  have  completed  his  two  terms
of  two  years.  He  did  not  indicate  the  basis  for  suggesting  a  rota-
tional  system,  but  he  seems  to  have  based the ideas on the aspirations of certain members of the council

This essay is not intended to judge the propriety of any polit-
ical move on the issue. What the essay aims to do is to show how the
descent from Oduduwa, an aspect of Yoruba traditional history, has
been made a recurrent political issue of our time. This in itself is
not irrelevant, as it shows how the past can be cited for the'polit-
ical claims and counter-claims of the present.
[size=18pt]Robin Law has thoroughly examined the heritage of Oduduwa from
the perspective of Oyo history. Making use of the various local
traditions of the Yoruba, he dismisses it as being used just as a
means of legitimacy by the Oyo rulers.[/size]1 The present article is
preoccupied with the analysis of the descent from Oduduwa from
available, concrete, and living cultural materials of the people
with a view to broadening our perceptions of Yoruba cultural his-
tory. The essay compares archaeological materials from ancient Ife
with some present cultural practices of the Yoruba to determine (1)
who Oduduwa is likely to have been, and (2) who his descendants were.
The issue is by far older than the early 1950s, which Olunloyo
was trying to suggest as its origin. In his address to the tradi-
tional rulers on 13 October 1983 and in his broadcast of 2 December
1983, he claimed that the struggle for supremacy between the two
rulers began with the formation of the Action Group (A.G.) in 1951.
The Action Group was the first political party to rule the former
Western Nigeria, including the Ijebu, Egba, Ekiti, Akure, Ondo, Owo,
Oyo, Ife, Ijesa, Ila and Benin kingdoms.
The Unity Party of Nigeria (the rival and opposition party to
Olunloyo's own party, the National Party of Nigeria) was headed by
Chief Obafemi Awolowo, who was also the founder of the Action Group.
Many members of the old Action Group were also members of the Unity
Party of Nigeria. It was during the first indigenous government of
the Action Group in the Western Region that the Ooni was first made
the president of the House of Chiefs and later the first Yoruba
governor. It was also during the government of the Action Group
under Chief Awolowo's leadership that Alaafin Adeyemi II, supported
by the National Council for Nigeria and the Cameroon (N.C.N.C., then
the opposition party in Western Region), was deposed and sent into
exile, where he later died. In essence, what Olunloyo was implying
was that the issue of supremacy among the two rulers would not have
arisen if Chief Awolowo had not formed the Action Group around Odu-
duwa and Ife. The Ooni would have had to remain subordinate to the
Alaafin, as under the British, particularly during the time of Cap-
tain Ross. Ross was the Resident of Oyo province, which comprised
Ife, Ilesha, Ila, and Oyo. [size=18pt] In Olunloyo's view, what the Action Group
government did was to reverse what the British had done.[/size] Besides
that, since his own National Party of Nigeria was shown by the re-
sults of the 1979 election to have had a wider geographical spread
in Nigeria, while its opponent, the Unity Party of Nigeria, had only
the former Western region as its stronghold, Olunloyo's 1983 state-
ment effectively labelled the Unity Party of Nigeria an ethnic or
tribal party - an accusation that the N.C.N.C. had levelled against
the Action Group during the first republic.

.     .     .  The  origin  of  the  conflict  may  more  appropriately  be  credited  to
the  British,  who  cannot  be  absolved  of  double-dealing  in  their  meth-
ods  of  colonial  rule.  Despite  the  fact  that  the  sovereignty  of  each
of  the  Yoruba  kingdoms  was  recognized  by  the  series  of  treaties
signed  between  each  of  them  and  the  British  before  any  agreement  was
ever  signed  with  Oyo,  another  treaty,  signed  in  1893,  acknowledged
the  Alaafin  as  the  overall  ruler  of  Yorubaland.2
T[size=18pt]he  origin  of  the  latter  treaty  lay  in  the  British  desire  to
gain  direct  access  to  the  trade  of  Ibadan,  which  was  being  denied  by
the  Ijebu  and  the  Egba,  with  the  support  of  Ife  (Ijebu  had  been  an
ally  of  Ife  since  the  Owu  war).3  Ibadan  recognized  the  overlord-
ship  of  the  Alaafin  despite  its  military  strength,  but  simultane-
ously  supported  the  British  when  Ijebu-Ode  was  attacked.  The  British
needed  Ibadan  trade  as  much  as  Ibadan  needed  British  arms.  So  the
British  rewarded  their  allies;  hence  the  treaty  recognizing  the
overall  headship  of  Oyo  in  Yorubaland  was  signed.  It  is  possible
that  since  the  British  first  dealt  with  the  Egba,  who  had  just
fought  and  won  their  independence  from  Oyo,  they  logically  thought
that  the  Great  Oyo  empire  covered  all  of  Yorubaland. [/size]
No  sooner  was  the  treaty  signed  than  the  error  of  having  ac-
cepted  the  Alaafin  as  the  supreme  ruler  of  Yorubaland  was  discov-
ered.  This  might  have  arisen  from  the  desire  to  build  indirect  rule
on  historic  foundations.  [size=18pt]In  a  confidential  dispatch  on  the  order  of
precedence  of  the  Yoruba  rulers  to  the  governor  of  Lagos,  a  British
Resident  of  Oyo  Province,  H.  L.  Ward  Price,  noted  that  various  Yo-
ruba  rulers  used  to  make  false  claims  before  British  officials  on
the  matter  and  that  he  had  ample  evidence  that  the  Ooni  was  the
leading  chief[/size].

hercules07:
Stranger u know we have gone through this before, your Ooni is not fit to lace the boots of the Alaafin, I know you are a proud ife man but please do not distort history oooooooooooooooooooooooooo, just to buttress my point, who did the British Monarch sign treaties with in Yoruba land during the Yoruba Civil wars?

T[size=15pt][b]he British were then faced with a dilemma. To go back on what
they had done was distasteful. But the reality of the situation
forced them to turn to the Ooni on certain issues involving tradi-
tional rulers even outside Oyo Province. For example, in 1902 when
there was a protest from the Akarigbo of Sagamu over the wearing of
a beaded crown by the ruler of Epe, the clerk on native affairs in
the Government House, Lagos, Henry Libert, had to write for clarifi-
cation from the Ooni, whom he described as "the recognized head in
Yorubaland who has the right of issuing crowns at an early date."5
In the following year, in a letter to the British travelling commis-
sioner at Ilesa on the right of the Ooni to allow the Olosi of Osi
in Ekiti to wear a crown, C. H. Elgee, the travelling commissioner's
boss at Ibadan, wrote: "it does appear to me that the Oni [Ooni] had
not in any way overstepped his rights. His power to confer crowns is
universal and unique in Yorubaland[/b][/size]."6

This traditional position of the Ooni notwithstanding, the na-
tive administration was still to be headed by the Alaafin. [b] When
Captain Ross was the Resident of the province, he deliberately pur-
sued the policy of making the Alaafin supreme among the other major
obas of the province. Atanda refers to how Captain Ross set up a
court of appeal for the province and made the Alaafin its chairman,
with the Ooni and the Owa of Ilesa as subordinates.[/b]7 The action
was, however, resisted by these two rulers, who boycotted the court.
Captain Ross might have been nursing an ambition to have a Sokoto-
style administration, headed by himself and the Alaafin.
The British treatment of the Alaafin up to the end of Captain
Ross's residency made the latter realize the benefits of manipula-
ting his political masters. He succeeded under the British, and
sought to manipulate the indigenous governors in the same way. [size=18pt]But
if the Action Group was to have freedom from colonialism as one of
its aims (as evident from its motto "Freedom for all, life more
abundant", and if it was to unite all the Yoruba against British
rule, Chief Awolowo could hardly succeed with the Alaafin who had
all along been the protege of the British. Hence, Chief Awolowo's
line of action on the formation of the Action Group was natural.[/size]

hercules07:
Stranger, your revision of history will not and can not succeed, have you asked yourself why the Ibadans will submit to the Alaafin even when they knew he was fuelling some of the wars and yet will send the Modakekes to deal with the Ifes? We know our history, can you tell me about Basorun Ga, do you know the Oyo mesi? Reverend Johnson was not an Oyo man, he was from present day Kwara state.

We can now turn to the question of Oduduwa as contained in Oyo
tradition. Oduduwa is taken as the father of the Alaafin of Oyo and
six other rulers while the Ooni is supposed to be the slave priest
put in charge of Oduduwa's shrine. [size=18pt] But from the available archaeo-
logical materials viewed against the practice in Old Oyo described
in oral sources, the descent of Oyo rulers from Oduduwa is somehow
questionable.[/size] Though it is only among the Oyo Yoruba that the Yoruba
face mark patterns which developed from the striations on Ife arts
are adopted, the people of the Old Oyo capital were not associated
with such marks. Those in the old capital are generally known as
Atabaja_ those who wear abaja face mark patterns. They too refer to
themselves as such. AZabaja ka re' Le, Oyo dun j'oko lo ("Wearers of
abaja masks, let us go home; Oyo, the capital, is more pleasant than
the farm or provinces" is part of their praise songs. Abaja marks
are face mark patterns whose components are without the temple or
the side of the nose marks (PeZe consists of three vertical marks on
the cheek and is not considered abaja.) Abaja marks consist mainly
of parallel horizontal gashes which occasionally can be surmounted
by three short vertical gashes on the cheek bones. They are referred
to according to the families wearing them or, more commonly, by the
number of cuts which make them. There are abaja of three, four,
five, six, seven, eight, and eleven strokes. Three to five are usu-
ally horizontal parallel single strokes. Six can be two sets of
three horizontal ones or three horizontal surmounted by three ver-tical ones on the cheek bone. Eight could be two sets of four paral-
lel marks or four groups of two horizontal parallel marks made on
top of one another at regular intervals. It is only in the Ejigbo
and Ilobu area that I have come across this second type. The abaja
of eleven is only the first type of eight surmounted with three
vertical ones on the cheek bone.
The earliest abaja pattern was likely to have been three, and
the three most likely resulted from the traditional "cat's whiskers"
which are made basically of three gashes converging at the corners
of the mouth.33 The "cat's whiskers" are also represented in the
arts of ancient Ife, on terracotta pieces. The Yoruba face mark
patterns (related to the striations on Ife art as depicted on the
second dynasty, which may have been Oduduwa group) are gombo, which
have vertical elements across the temple added to some abaja pat-
terns. Keke, another word for the pattern, can be misleading in that
it could refer to patterns with temple elements which are of free
short cuts. In Ife, it is even used as a name for the basic abaja of
three which Johnson reports as the common mark of Ile-Ife,34 but
which might have been of only the Modakeke part of the town, which
is Oyo in origin.
[size=18pt]If the abaja are the metropolitan Oyo marks and the gombo which
apparently evolved from the royal striations of Ife were not common
to the capital, it means that the rulers of Oyo cannot have de-
scended from the straited royal figures of Ife, which might have
been Oduduwa dynasty. [/size]
My effort to find out more about the royal marks of Oyo reveals
that the present abaja of six now adopted by the Oyo royalty belong-
ed to the mother of Atiba, the first king in the present Oyo; the
royal marks in Oyo-Ile were not six, but three. This was confirmed
by the family of Ona Oniseawo, who have changed their original ab-
aja, however, from three on the two sides of the face to abaja of
three on one side of the face and pele on the other, on the instruc-
tion of the oracle when the family was suffering from infant mortal-
ity. The three horizontal ones are said to have come down to them
from Sango, an early Oyo king, and they generally do not marry from
Oyo royalty. They too have the royal eyo marks on the arm, and their
story is confirmed by Omokiti and some families in Ona-Isokun Oke
compound who also wear abaja of three on the two sides of their
faces and have the royal marks on the arm. They too are related to
the Oyo royalty according to tradition.
T[size=18pt]he significance of this is that the Oyo ruling house did not
develop directly from the lines of the rulers represented in the
arts of Ife. As abaja patterns very likely developed from the "cat's
whiskers" in Ife art and the "cat's whiskers" have been ascertained
to be Yoruba marks,35 there is no doubt that the Oyo rulers were
Ife in origin. But in Ife there is no evidence that they belonged to
the ruling line.[/size] Since Yoruba face marks are adopted according to the father's family, they must have been a group of people in Ife who succeeded in establishing themselves in Oyo but who used the
descent of a much-revered ruler of Ife to validate their positions.
The claim of the Ooni to be the descendant of a slave of Oduduwa
is untenable.

I[size=18pt]f any of the Yoruba traditional rulers is to be asso-
ciated with a slave origin, the Alaafin of Oyo would be the most
likely candidate, in the light of the origin of their facial mark-
ings. The abaja markings for which they are known, as mentioned
above, developed from the "cat's whiskers." In the praise songs of
the rulers of both Ife and Oyo, the cat's whiskers are considered a
slave mark.[/size]36 It is also the mark borne by the figure of the
cross-bearer, which in Benin art has been identified as the mes-
senger from Ife.37 It is the prevalence of the mark in the Niger
Benue confluence that made Ryder suggest that the kingdom of the
overlord of Benin when the Portuguese arrived was northeast of Benin
according to the direction the Benin people pointed to as its loca-
tion.38

The etymological explanations for Adimula and Ooni, which are
the titles of Ife rulers with which the claim is illustrated, are
wrong. Adimula, which is said to have been contracted to mean
"[size=15pt]Adimu, the slave, has become rich" as a word means "that which or
he who is held on to and saves one." In essence, the title simply
means savior. Ooni simply means "the owner of," particularly in the
eastern Yoruba dialects. Thus Oonife, as the title is fully said,
means "the owner of Ife.[/size]"1
Equally untenable is the claim that the founder of Oyo was the
prince who inherited land from Oduduwa. [size=18pt] It is true that some time
before colonialism, the Oyo kingdom was the largest and the most
powerful of Yoruba kingdoms. But there was nothing to show that
before the Yoruba civil war of the nineteenth century, Oyo had any
control over the domains of any of Ife, Ila, Ilesa, Owu, or Benin,
all of which are southern and southeastern kingdoms which sprang
from Ife.[/size]

In conclusion, the archaeological and ethnographic evidence made
use of in this paper clearly indicates that if any rulers of the
kingdoms which sprang from Ife descended directly from Oduduwa, it
is only the ruler of Benin. The ruler of Ife belonged to the pre-
Oduduwa rulers of the town. [size=18pt] The Alaafin of Oyo cannot even be traced
to either Oduduwa or the rulers of Ife before and after Oduduwa. The
claims of superiority by the Alaafin based on descent from Oduduwa should therefore
not be seen as anything more than fabrications for self-aggrandize-
ment which certainly do not represent a true national history of the
Yoruba people[/size].

zstranger:
If any of the Yoruba traditional rulers is to be asso-
ciated with a slave origin, the Alaafin of Oyo would be the most
likely candidate, in the light of the origin of their facial mark-
ings. The abaja markings for which they are known, as mentioned
above, developed from the "cat's whiskers." In the praise songs of
the rulers of both Ife and Oyo, the cat's whiskers are considered a
slave mark.36 It is also the mark borne by the figure of the
cross-bearer, which in Benin art has been identified as the mes-
senger from Ife.37 It is the prevalence of the mark in the Niger
Benue confluence that made Ryder suggest that the kingdom of the
overlord of Benin when the Portuguese arrived was northeast of Benin
according to the direction the Benin people pointed to as its loca-
tion.38

PhysicsMHD:
@ zstranger, you don't see a glaring contradiction here?


I could go into detail about why this is bogus, but for the record, the cat's whiskers mark is obviously not a slave mark.

It's unlikely that any king anywhere in Nigeria is descended from a slave.

PhysicsMHD:
@ zstranger, you don't see a glaring contradiction here?


I could go into detail about why this is bogus, but for the record, the cat's whiskers mark is obviously not a slave mark.

It's unlikely that any king anywhere in Nigeria is descended from a slave.

Beaf:
According to history (Yoruba and Edo) the Alaafin is way superior to the Ooni.

Katsumoto:
Alaafin was only superior in so far as Oyo was superior militarily to Ife. That superiority disappeared as soon as Oyo stopped being a power house. That Japan conquered parts of China at different times does not mean that Japan is superior to China. Ife was the spiritual home of the Yoruba and continues to be so. Secondly, Oyo came after Ife.

The title of the Ooni is higher than that of the Alaafin. The superiority of the Alaafin through the British in the 20th century was based on a false notion since there were more powerful states than Oyo when the British arrived.

Katsumoto:
Does Russia have to conquer Nigeria before you accept that Russia is stronger in military terms? Oyo was a powerhouse; Ife was never a power house.