AjaanaOka:


Interesting. I've suspected for sometime now that Oye (Yoruba), Ogie (Benin), Ovie (Urhobo) and Eze (Igbo) are cognates, despite Eze looking nothing like the rest.

This suspicion was strengthened when I read Dr Blench's reconstruction of proto-Igboid, where he postulated that in the proto-Igboid stage of Igbo linguistic evolution, Eze was Eje. The interchangeability of Z and J is well-known. Examples: Izon/Ijọ, Oja/Oza (market in Yoruba and Olukumi), Nzele/Njele (titled men in different parts of Anioma, Ezomo/Ojomo (war title in Benin and Eastern Yoruba); and, taking an example from Indo-European, Zeus-Pater/Jupiter (the head of the Indo-European pantheon in Greek and Latin).

With this knowlege, the relationship is easier to see:

Oche (Idoma) - Oye (Yoruba) - Ovie (Urhobo/Isoko) - Ogie (Benin) - Oje (Esan) - Eje (Blench's Proto-Igboid) - Eze (modern Igbo)

It is highly unlikely that the proto-YEAI ancestor of these words meant 'king'. The neolithic small-scale society of the proto-YEAI period of our history probably didn't have kings, and thus no words for it.

It is more likely that the word was used for distinguished men that commanded respect. Much, much, later after proto-YEAI had diverged into its daughter language groups(Yoruboid, Edoid, Akokoid, Igboid) and some of those groups had gone on to develop mini-states and kingdoms, new words were either coined for 'king' (e.g., oba, obi, etc), or the old word underwent semantic change to accommodate the novel institution.

Fascinating and thanks for pointing this out. It seems so obvious when you put in perspective but I’d completely missed ‘eze’ as a cognate when looking at various Nigerian languages. “Ozo” had occurred to me as a possible cognate but I hadn’t done much research beyond noting the similar sound. I appreciate your caveats but I have very little doubt that you’re right about this one.

It’s even more interesting on a comparative basis that some of these cognate terms are closer in sound than their modern variants might suggest, i.e. the little-used Yoruba term “Iye/Eye”, meaning something befitting or conferring of status, as in the Ekiti state slogan ‘Ilu Iyi, Ilu Eye’. Forgive the accent of tonal marks, which would help to make the case even clearer.

It would be fantastic to know if “Ze” or Proto-Igbo “-Je” had a similar connotation (“suitable; conferring status” etc) and also if there are semantic references to particular birds, feathers or feathered headdresses with any of these terms. I realize that’s much more of a stretch but it’s a recurring theme historically that I think is possibly central to understanding how these terms came to be and what they reference.

letu:
Ajaala is the same as sand or ordinary ground but that's what it is to ordinary person, for someone who understands the mysticism within the Ajaala such person will be seeing the Ajaala as more than ordinary sand/ground.
Ajaala is an integral part of our Igbo culture, it plays a very important role in spiritual things when it comes to tradition, it is where spiritual things are done and that's where the drink offering are pour during prayer(when you're praying to your chi eg Agbara and also Chineke kere eluigwe la uwa la ojujuya) that's if you know how to do the Igbo traditional prayer, it can be used for ritual's eg Igba Afa, and don't be surprised for you will see some Bible verse that speak's about it eg the Bible Gen 35: 14,Num 28:7--8,Ex 29:41, lev23:13 and Ex 20: 24 etc .

Just seeing this—thank you for the description.

AjaanaOka:


LOL. Everyone has a lot of free time on their hands now. Trying to fill the boredom with stuff I enjoy, i.e., history.

Here is one piece on the research on Lake Bosomtwi (I murdered the name earlier because I was writing from memory) in Ghana:
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/07/20/486670144/an-archaeological-mystery-in-ghana-why-didn-t-past-droughts-spell-famine

We are all grateful for the time, and thanks for the link.

My dating is certainly closer to Chambers' than to Onwuejeogwu's. But I doubt he (Chambers) took 'dateable' ecological occurrences into consideration.

His estimation that Nri's formative period lies between 1225 and 1425 is certainly close to my suggestion of an upper limit for the beginning of the Nri system around 1100, with the 1300s being probably closer to the mark. On some other points on the chronology we disagree by a substantial amount.

That was my recollection too but I didn’t know if he, or anyone else, had published some updated material.

Ajaala (or in my own dialect, Ajaana) literally means 'Soil of the Earth', Aja being soil, and ana/ala being Earth. For my people, it is a more emphatic way of referring to Ana in a spiritual context, especially when one needs to make the distinction between the earth/soil of his own community/clan, and the earth/soil of other clans. Hence it is often followed with the name of the community, eg., Ajaana Oka (my moniker) = the Soil of the Earth of Awka. Not a very elegant translation, but you get it.

Semantically there is no relationship with Agbala

Ah, understood. A recent dictionary I have offers “agbala” as both a variant of “agbara” (as in spirit) and a specific ‘Agbala’ deity in the Nri-Oka area. Both seem to be pronounced with the same tones [high-low-low?] so just wondering how they fit into the broader understanding of “ala.”

As an aside, I thought this exhibition might interest you. The catalog is supposed to be published this year but I haven’t seen any updates on it. The curators have written some impressive work about Oka decades ago but one of them seemed to have taken a lengthy break from academia until recently.

AjaanaOka:
Was Ogboni traditionally an arm of goverment in Benin as it seems to have been in many southern Yoruba kingdoms?

I am not asking about the modern Reformed Ogboni which drew membership from ethnic groups besides the Yoruba. I am asking if Ogboni existed in pre-colonial Benin.

Documentary evidence will also be nice.

It is not, and the poster you’re referring to is unfortunately one of our under-educated young people. The article he’s citing is specifically about an Ijesa titleholder (it’s by JDY Peel), who was traditionally responsible for maintaining trade relationships with the Benin royal court. The implication of this is actually the opposite of what he’s trying to argue but I doubt that is quite clear to him yet. JDY Peel’s longer book (“Ijeshas and Nigerians”) is an excellent case study with more information.

The word ‘Ogboni’ itself is quite multifaceted. Anecdotally, it is used to mean ‘cousin’ or ‘relative’ in the Idaasha parts of modern-day Benin Republic, who are also sometimes thought to be connected to Ilesha and the complex of ‘Sha’-related ethnonyms in the Yoruba and Borgu-speaking areas.

Ajaala/Radoillo, thanks for the fantastic post as always. I’m guessing that you’re finding yourself with more free time during this extended quarantine period as well.

Could you provide some citations for the ‘little ice age’ research you referenced for the lake in Ghana? Also, your dating of Nri matches fairly well with Chambers, from what I remember. It’s a little earlier than his 15th-century proposal but I don’t remember if he’d used these ecological factors in his methodology. These changes in water resources and environmental conditions had monumental significance in our region and there’s a lot to learn from closely examining myths and oral history.

letu:
Please, the Ajaana(Ajaanaoka) in your name is it the same as Ajaala eg Ajaalangwa,Ajaalaowerri, Ajaalaubakala, Ajaalambisee etc.

Could you explain a little more about what Ajaala means? How does it differ semantically from just ‘ala’ or ‘agbala’?

SilverSniper:
TerraCotta, I apologize but I will have to delay my detailed response to your (very interesting) posts a little longer than I had anticipated, since something came up (in my personal life) that I need to work on that is taking me longer than expected. I found the quote you provided from Ward-Price's book about Christianity in Ife especially interesting, since it corresponds closely with something I had come across years ago in a book on Ife's past by M.A. Fabunmi. I should be able to post a response by Sunday.

Your reminder about the other place inspired me. Looking forward to your thoughts on this stuff though.

RedboneSmith:
Hmm. Between 1476 and 1987, you say.

Hmm. If I go to my archives and dig up the books written by Talbot, Egharevba, etc, and you no wire me this 1K, I go swear for you oh. Hehn!

Redbone appears to be a man who pays close attention to details like dates. It’s a characteristic that serves historians well.

Please donate some of the money to charity on my behalf.

TAO11:


But I think the link Bondarenko sees between a society's socio-political complexity (on one hand), and what I would call the Oba-dom (on another hand) is particularly in reference to societies outside of Yorubaland.

I see what you mean. I wouldn’t credit this idea to Bondarenko (or me, obviously) though—it’s a central idea of Professor Obayemi’s mini-state and mega-state taxonomy mentioned a while ago. It’s explained in his essay “The Yoruba and Edo-Speaking Peoples and Their Neighbors before 1600 a.d.,” in History of West Africa, vol. 1 (second edition) from 1971. It’s not easy to find a copy unfortunately but his essay “Ancient Ife: Antother Cultural-Historical Interpretation” makes many of the same points and is available online.

Professor Obayemi died some time ago but there have been efforts to preserve his unpublished research: https://eap.bl.uk/project/EAP050

Hi TAO—yes, I’m assuming that’s what Bondarenko’s references to the pre-obaship period is meant to suggest (although I’m not sure how familiar he is with these languages).

Also wanted to point out that I don’t endorse the glorification of ‘kingdoms’ and the like, as some northeastern Yoruba (Okun/Kabba areas for example) basically had these smaller polities (“dukedoms”?) as well despite many of them using the “Oba” and “Olu-“ or “Ele-“ style title systems (Obaro and Obadofin in Kabba, for example).

You are talented with an unusual perspective and subject matter. Please post your website/Instagram etc if you have them.

TAO11:

The latest from the Edos:

"Oba" is only an abbreviation in Edo language ?? ?? ??

My people coman hear oo:

They're gradually confessing that the word "Oba" is not found in the Edo lexicon. cc: macof .. gomojam .. googi .. babtoundey.

So, with this recent confession, let me drill further:

Do other Edoid speaking people have cHiLdReN who sHiNe for them?? ?? ??


See, do not deceive yourself, ask ANY Edo person who is not preview to this Nairaland Edo gymnastics to translate the phrase Oba of Benin into English language.

They will be honest enough to tell you that it means King of Benin.

Everyone (including your people) know that "Oba" is an actual word, not an abbreviation. And that it simply means "King".

The problem for you all, then, remains that this word "OBA" is original to Yoruba, and alien to Edo.

"Ogie" is your original Edo word meaning "King", and since the beginning of the Yoruba connection till date, it is almost never used for any Benin king.

That's precisely why it is not found in your lexicon. Hence your latest gymnastic of "iT iS aN aBbReViAtIoN".

I stay away from these types of discussions but wanted to point out that “ogie” probably does not strictly mean “king” in Edo. It more closely matches up with a title of nobility like “duke” or “baron” in English, which tallies up with cognate terms like “oye/oloye” in Yoruba and related languages. The “gh” (as in “oghene”) is called a voiced velar fricative in linguistics and is regularly pronounced as “-y” or “-w” or elided altogether in modern standard (Oyo) Yoruba, although it’s retained and still prominent in both northeast and southeast variants of Yoruba and in Igala. This suggests it’s an older inherited sound that changes in the Oyo-speaking region.

Might be interesting insights for anyone interested in this.

I’ll try to keep this short so it’s not an intimidating read but hopefully this will help dispel some of the falsehoods and misunderstandings I’m seeing on this thread.

There seems to be some confusion about what constitutes “history” and why archaeology and anthropology are key to our understanding of the African and global past, even with cultures that have thousands of years of “written” history.

The word “archaeology” quite literally means “ancient history” in Greek (from arkhaios = “old, ancient”; logos = “words, study”) but is defined as “the study of human history and prehistory through the excavation of sites and the analysis of artifacts and other physical remains.”

It’s quite acceptable as evidence of past events and is often the sole means of determining the events of evolution of “prehistory”. In some cases, archaeology may supersede or provide more trustworthy evidence than written chronicles, which can clearly be incomplete. This is obvious from examples in European or Asian history, where archaeologists recovered the sites of ancient Troy and Crete or the Chinese “Terracotta Army” of China’s first emperor on the basis of oral traditions, despite not being fully identified by written records alone. Obviously we have no written records for the period of human evolution or when dinosaurs roamed the earth, so archaeology (or paleontology) is the key discipline in investigating those eras.

I don’t know of any serious historian in the world that would discount archaeology or anthropology and their value in helping us fill in the (very large) gaps in the written record anywhere in the world, in any period and for any group. Two short examples should demonstrate this clearly:

A) A few weeks ago, an archaeological report added significant new information to what we know about London’s past, suggesting it’s 3000 years older than previously believed : https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/london-history-prehistoric-ceremony-site-archaeology-a9455621.html

B) Last year, other archaeologists look at material evidence from the Woodstock concert in 1969, and found contradictions with the eyewitness recollections of an event that happened just 50 years ago, with living attendees: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/archaeologists-find-woodstock-really-did-take-life-its-own-180972504/

These disciplines are even more important in places like the vast majority of Africa, where there are very few indigenous written languages and records (although more are still being identified) and only slightly more written observations from foreign visitors.

Archaeology is actually just one branch of the larger science of anthropology. This field includes the disciplines of biological or physical anthropology—the basis of current human DNA analyses and migration, fossil records of dinosaurs and so on; cultural or social anthropology, which analyzes past and current societies and the economic, religious etc. changes they have undergone; linguistic anthropology, clearly focused on the evolution of languages; and archaeology, which has been defined above.

I genuinely hope this helps some people understand why we need all these disciplines (along with specialists in art history, chemical analysis and other fields) to get a full picture of the human past.

Hi—just wanted to point out that I’m still very much here (and will keep trying to participate as long as this global quarantine permits! )

For those trying to bait me into an aimless war of words over claims of superiority, dem go tayah. I’d recommend spending the time to fully read the materials referenced in this thread and others.

For others who are interested in prior discussions that summarize some of the well-known literature on this topic, please refer to the threads below from 8 or 9 years ago. I’d recommend reading the whole discussions if you have time but I’m linking to some posts that contain information on Ife/Ufe/Yufi/Ryder/Thornton/Ibn Battuta/D’Aveiros etc.

The poster PhysicsQED/MHD etc is the same person as SilverSniper, and you’ll see why I respect him so much due to his detailed and well-informed responses:

https://www.nairaland.com/797242/bbcs-documentary-bronze-cast-head/5#9534334

https://www.nairaland.com/1253380/maps-kingdoms-peoples-states-cities/2#15674765

There was another poster by the name of Negro_Ntns (I’m not sure if he is the same person as Dudu_Negro and MetaPhysical or whether he still participates here) whom I vehemently disagreed with on some religious or spiritual (metaphysical!) interpretations that he proposed all those years ago. I’m humbled to say that he may have been more correct and insightful than I knew at the time. A belated apology wherever you are, Negro_Ntns (although there are still many positions of yours that I disagree with).

TerraCotta:


A perfect example of why I save my responses for worthwhile people and topics. I sincerely don’t even know what you mean by this, but if these references to Suzanne Preston Blier’s work have interested you, please delve into her bibliography here: https://scholar.harvard.edu/blier/biocv

You will see her upcoming book (titled “1325: How Medieval Africa Made the World Modern”) mentioned, which I expect will cover her research on Ife arts and this export economy I referenced in greater detail.

Her 2015 book that I have mentioned here (and in years past) is available from Cambridge University Press here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/art-and-risk-in-ancient-yoruba/1D8136F1682FC0244F690903B437653D#fndtn-information (not sure how easily available it is in Nigeria itself, unfortunately)

Suzanne Blier lecture in French (coincidentally on her research on Vodun in Benin Republic, in case that somehow clarifies your question above):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uv9VYFlJbRo

Suzanne Blier lecture on African trade routes and putative links between the roots of the Prester John concept, historical Coptic Christian centers in medieval West Africa and the global trading networks I alluded to in my other posts:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HTZsaksh84

Edit: Silver Sniper—please refer to 10:00 - 15:00 of the last video for the information on wadis and important references that tally with my earlier post.

Hi SilverSniper (and TAO and others of course)—I realize there’s a lot of material in my earlier posts, but I’ll take the risk of overwhelming readers with material and provide a few more supportive primary sources on this idea of Ife’s trans-Saharan trading connection with Coptic Christian centers in Egypt and the Sudan.

As you might recall from prior years, I’ve been skeptical of attempts to tie Ife (and West African cultures more broadly) to “ancient Egypt”, “Nubia” etc in the past, despite some tantalizing references and points of cultural conversion that suggested ties.

The upcoming Blier book I mentioned in an earlier post will cover the material she discusses in the video above—namely, that Ife’s connection to global trade may have come through trading networks of Coptic Christians that flourished in this 14th-century period—, but the material inspired me to re-read some books with a closer eye towards details that might confirm or refute her uniquely original insights. Consider this passage from Resident H.L Ward-Price’s “Dark Subjects”, the insightful memoir that contains the endlessly-quoted reference to the Oba of Benin’s prayer for the Oni of Ife:

“The late Oni of Ife, who died in 1930, was one of the old types of African chiefs, whose mind was rooted in the traditions of the past. He will, no doubt, prove to be the last of that kind, now that money-making and education have become the main objects in the life of the people. Many a time have I watched him, sitting on a leather pouffs, clothed in three or four thick robes, even on a hot day, his waist bulging with charms to keep off every conceivable kind of evil, and in his hands a long white ram’s tail, fixed to a leather handle. With this he would acknowledge the salutations from the continuous stream of his subjects prostrating themselves before him. His principal topic of conversation, repeated again and again, was the relationship of the city of Ife and the crown he wore to the rest of the world. While he vigorously expounded the story, his attendants cooled him with strong gusts of air from the long-handled circular fans of leather, decorated with ostrich feathers; others sopped the sweat from his face or sponged his hot skin under the many-coloured velvets he wore.

Ife, he used to say, is the most ancient place of human habitation in the world. It was the birthplace of all mankind. White men, who were nothing more than ‘peeled’ black men, were, he declared, his own ‘sons,’ he being the direct descendant of Oduwa, the founder of the human race. Tears would flow as he complained that the ancient authority and dignity of his crown were rapidly passing away under the British regime, which showed no interest in the great traditions of Ife...”

NOTE: for other readers not named SilverSniper , please don’t draw me into a discussion on the merits of a mythological claim on the role of Ife as the birthplace of humanity—that is an old and well-worn subject, and you will find similar claims in many other ancient cultures. Despite the title of the thread, I’m also not particularly interested in discussing the seniority/status etc of the Ooni re: other Nigerian monarchs beyond what has been said here as that discussion has been held endlessly and people can come to any conclusion they wish. I’ve written on here in earlier years that I am less interested in the careers of monarchs and so on and more interested in the dynamics of cultural development, social evolution and economic interaction. I’m focused here on the new and illuminating connections between Ife and related polities like Benin to the global economy of the medieval world. The bolded portions include the material I find most impressive and interesting, including the reference to the ostrich feathers and leather in the regalia of the Ooni.

A few pages earlier, Ward-Price writes the following relevant passages after providing a variant of the foundational myth of Ife with Oduduwa (which he spells Oduwa):

“One point is universally acknowledged to be true, that all the hundreds of towns and villages now scattered over the face of Yorubaland trace their descent from the Mother City of Ife. Wherever they might have migrated from originally, and some say they came from Egypt, it was at Ife that the pioneers first settled and where they created a complicated, but efficient, system of government. There are signs of a high state of civilization having been attained there perhaps over three thousand years ago. Ancient stone images of men and women stand in sacred groves on the outskirts of the city. Some were unearthed by Frobenius, a German traveler, in 1911. Heads with African features, made in bronze and terracotta, have been described by experts as equal to the best in the world of sculpture. A few have been exhibited in London.

There is another survival at Ife which may be worthy of comment. In numerous places can still be seen patches of burnt-clay, standing on their edges. This is part of the paving of old streets, paths, and gutters. The earth studded in this manner was not easily washed away by the rain; nor did it become muddy. This work was done at the order of one of the few ‘Queens’ who have occupied the throne of Ife. She was a great personality, possessing boundless energy. In the course of her reign she acquired a large number of slaves whom she made use of to improve the amenities of the city. One of their tasks was to pave the streets, walks, and gutters with these bits of baked clay. Though this was done hundreds of years ago, the paving still remains in places where it has not been deliberately disturbed. Scores of times my two-ton lorry, fully loaded, has passed over a patch of it near the Ife rest-house without leaving an impression ... Of the two-hundred-and-one shrines dotted about the town, one is called Yesu, and seems to be a relic of the Christianity introduced by European priests five hundred years ago. There is a small hill near the king’s house at Ife, now covered with buildings, which is called the ‘Hill of the Promise.’ On an occasion long past, the townsfolk gathered there and vowed among themselves that they would for evermore renounce the Christian religion, as it interfered too much with their habits and customs,; but when the missionaries again opened up in Ife prior to the Great War [NOTE: World War I], they were, nevertheless, able to collect some adherents.

The official hats still worn to-day by the more important chiefs of Ife are made in a shape closely resembling a bishop’s mitre; they were adopted in olden times when Christianity flourished, and the leaders of religion were also the rulers of the town. But the old gods were not neglected. Almost daily at Ife there is still a feast to some god or other, or a ceremony is performed to celebrate some outstanding event in the people’s history.”

Quoted passages were culled from Ward-Price, H.L. Dark Subjects. Jarrolds Publishers (London), 1939, p. 133-137

Suzanne Blier’s book obviously hasn’t been published yet, but I anticipate that this and similar passages in other works I’ve since re-read might form part of the foundation of her book on the medieval trading networks. As an aside, it reinforces my view that a simplistic reading of these polities as “kingdoms” (or empires or what-have-you) might give us the wrong impression as to how government and society worked in medieval West Africa.

I think trade and the inextricable role of religion—with sodalities like the Ogboni mediating as a combined priesthood, senate and a form of trade union—might be the more fruitful avenue. I have mentioned a few years ago that Obayemi’s work was influential in my thinking, as he proposed the “mini-state” and “mega-state” taxonomy some scholars have used. I’ve developed the ideas in a little more detail but they’re basically from that route and I think would be useful to others trying to understand the political and religious roles of groups like the Igala Mela, Uzama in Benin, Oyo Mesi etc.

ghostwon:


Ogane is a mythical place. Not a real place. The first map showing ife was done in the 19th century. Enough said, stop telling people to get acquainted with rubbish. Who are you trying to fool here ?
Also it is funny you actually have noticed that Suzan Blier is fluent in French and did some work about Benin Republic but you didn't notice that her mention of Benin might not have meant Benin Kingdom but rather the region which is now being referred to as Benin Republic ?

A perfect example of why I save my responses for worthwhile people and topics. I sincerely don’t even know what you mean by this, but if these references to Suzanne Preston Blier’s work have interested you, please delve into her bibliography here: https://scholar.harvard.edu/blier/biocv

You will see her upcoming book (titled “1325: How Medieval Africa Made the World Modern”) mentioned, which I expect will cover her research on Ife arts and this export economy I referenced in greater detail.

Her 2015 book that I have mentioned here (and in years past) is available from Cambridge University Press here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/art-and-risk-in-ancient-yoruba/1D8136F1682FC0244F690903B437653D#fndtn-information (not sure how easily available it is in Nigeria itself, unfortunately)

Suzanne Blier lecture in French (coincidentally on her research on Vodun in Benin Republic, in case that somehow clarifies your question above):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uv9VYFlJbRo

Suzanne Blier lecture on African trade routes and putative links between the roots of the Prester John concept, historical Coptic Christian centers in medieval West Africa and the global trading networks I alluded to in my other posts:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HTZsaksh84

Edit: Silver Sniper—please refer to 10:00 - 15:00 of the last video for the information on wadis and important references that tally with my earlier post.

samuk:


I have carefully gone through your submission and highlighted 5 areas.

1. You suggested that the 20 moon is a mystical journey, this will only lead credence to the arguments by some that Ogane is a mythical kingdom that wasn't real.

Hello—please re-read my submission, as it should be clear that I am not the one suggesting this is a mystical (or if you prefer “religious”, “symbolic”, “magical” etc) journey—that is Alan Ryder’s position in his classic essay that gets quoted frequently here but does not seem to be closely read. I happen to agree with this interpretation but not because it’s specific to Ife, the Niger-Benue confluence or any other mentioned location. It is because any journey of this type involving a coronation, enthronement, death rites etc would almost necessarily be a mystical (“religious”, “symbolic”, “magical” etc) one. It is the opportunity to provide a fitting send-off for one royal/consecrated soul and an appropriate welcome for another one. It cannot be viewed as a marathon, as I said, because speed would not be an essential feature of the ceremony. Think of any burial march, but certainly in the context of Benin, think of the Oba’s ceremony of enthronement and the traditional journey from Uselu, or the various other processional journeys taken as part of that ceremony. I thought this would be clear from my post but hope that this elaboration on the concept is helpful to readers.

2. You have played down Ryder's 250 league distance because you would have realised by now from Silversniper conversion that 250 league is about 900 miles which is more than 5 times the distance from Benin city to Ife which is about 171 miles.

I have not “played down Ryder’s 250-league distance” and believe me, I had read this Ryder essay, the John Thornton one and dozens of others before I ever heard of Nairaland a decade-and-a-half ago. As repeatedly said by many others here, 250 leagues is the estimate of the Portuguese explorer in trying to convey some information received from his Benin informant. It is not the estimate of the Benin informer (who would not have measured distance in leagues), nor of Alan Ryder or anyone else citing the information. It is a guess based on the “20 moons journey”, which is why that piece of information is the crucial one, according to Ryder.

3. You speculated that the 20 moons must have certainly be calculated using Ife lunar calendar, there is no evidence that Benin was using Ife lunar calendar at this time, besides, the informant that told the European this story was a Benin informant, not Ife informant.

This is an example of the sort of hyper-sensitivity or willful misreading I referred to earlier. I am not suggesting that this “20 moons must have certainly be calculated using Ife lunar calendar” at all. Those are your words and your interpretation. In fact, my point is that lunar calendars are common to our part of the world and in many non-European cultures around the globe more broadly. Lunar calendars are the oldest type of calendars and the current common Roman or Gregorian solar calendar is derived from that. Most Asian cultures use the lunar calendar, the Islamic calendar is a lunar one etc. This point is actually not specific to Ife at all—my point was that I’m fairly confident a lunar calendar was in use in Ife, and it would not surprise me if Benin used the same (as with the majority of other West African cultures I’m familiar with). This is similar to the well-documented and widely-shared four-day ritual calendar in West Africa, which Silver Sniper and I have discussed productively on here in past years as well—you may find it interesting to read in the Nairaland archives if you have the time and inclination.

4. You indicated that Ryder himself dismissed Ife as being the location of the Ogane and rather pointed to the direction of the Niger Benue confluence.

Yes, Ryder famously (with Thornton’s agreement) says that he doesn’t believe present-day Ile-Ife is the location of this Ogane/Oghene figure, despite the many compelling arguments for that belief. He does point to a region slightly north of Ife for several reasons (a region that contains several towns actually named Ife/Ufe, by the way—please read Professor Ade Obayemi’s work on this issue again) and my point is that this region has since been repeatedly and undeniably connected to both modern-day Ife and the historical development of Ife-related cultural and economic production.

5. You seems to be tying to link the Niger Benue confluence to Ife. To be honest I don't see how this will be relevant to the fact that non of the actual evidences support Ife to be Ogane.

Again, I can forgive people who aren’t familiar with the literature for not realizing that dozens of historians and anthropologists have made this point (many of whom aren’t even Nigerian, in case that gives people comfort) have made the connection between the Niger-Benue confluence region to Ife in the five decades (half-a-century!) since Alan Ryder published his classic work. There is an abundance of evidence that “support Ife to be Ogane” (I assume you mean that suggest Ogane/Oghene is cognate with the current title “Ooni”), but I am perfectly fine with you believing differently. The only requirement is that you are fully conversant with the very lengthy reams of research on this issue. If you wish to cite the excellent alternative proposals by Alan Ryder and Professor Thornton on the identity of the Ogane/Oghene, then the right moral and logical thing to do is to equally familiarize yourself with the various works of Professors Ade Obayemi, Suzanne Preston Blier, Frank Willet, Robin Law, Robert Smith, Henry John Drewal, Robert Farris Thompson, Adebanji Akintoye etc. on the identity of this Ogane/Oghene and Ife/Ufe/Uhe/Yufi etc. Simple.

TAO12:


[quote author=TAO12 post=88519217]

The Portuguese account says that the Ogane's is "some 20 moons" walking distance away from Benin kingdom because of "slow pace" travel.

Is Ife actually some 20 moons' walking distance away from Benin kingdom at some olden days "slow pace" ??

Here, there is a natural temptation to attempt determining the walking duration between Benin and Ife using Google maps.

The consequent error from this temptation would result from the fact that walking durations on Google maps are based on assumptions that become less realistic the longer distances get.

For example, Google maps will not factor-in the "slow-pace" which the Portuguese account clearly acknowledges.

It will not consider how many stops were made, and how many days were spent camping or resting for each stop.

It simply assumes a quite rapid constant pace of continous, no pause, non-stop movement, come rain-come shine, come day-come night, without sleep, without rest, through out the entire lenght of the trip.

This is obviously very impracticable. In fact, Google maps always warn, even for very short distances saying: "Use caution --- walking directions may not always reflect real-world conditions."

The blatant error inherent in an attempt to use Google maps to answer the earlier raised question thus becomes very obvious.

To then answer the earlier raised question quite correctly, it is important that one first determines what may have been the pace of long walking trip traditionally in this part of the world.

A piece of data which I find very useful to find this traditional pace is seen in C. Okojie cited in Ryder (1965), p.27.

He noted that it traditionally took from 4months to 6months to complete a walking trip from Uromi (Ishan) to Benin-City --- a distance of some 50miles.

Based on the foregoing highly invaluable piece of data given by Okojie, alongside the well-known distance betwen Benin and Ife (i.e.about 171miles); we can therefore estimate the duration it must have traditionally taken (in months) to journey from Benin to Ife.

Calculation:
--------------------
(a) IF Ishan and Benin which are
about 50miles apart took about 5months long traditionally.

(b) THEN Benin and Ife which are about 171miles apart would have taken about (171÷50)×5months long traditionally.

When evaluated, this walking duration from Benin to Ife, based on the available traditional data came to more than 17 months.

In fact, Mathematically 17 months is the equivalence of 19 moons. I am happy to demonstrate this Math as well.


This (i.e. more than 19 moons) therefore comes to be reasonably equal to the "some 20 moons" of the Portuguese document, in contrast to an irrational and unrealistic result of 2 days from Google maps.

Cheers!

TAO12:
Hi davidnazee:

See attachments as promised. For some reasons, I couldn't type them in here without getting blocked.

Cheers!

Hi TAO—I’ve really enjoyed reading many of your earlier posts on this issue (won’t pass judgement on some of the interactions but suffice to say it’s not my style—to each her own).

This issue of the distance and direction of Ife from Benin has been so thoroughly discussed in some of the articles referenced in this discussion that I often wonder if people have actually read what they’re citing. Suffice to say that your point on the “twenty moons journey” as a consequence of “the slow pace in which they travel,” and the comparative example of the journey between Uromi and Benin City provided by Ryder, shows that the journey was not intended to break any land speed records.

Even more pertinently, Ryder made the point that “the twenty moons’ journey” was a mystical, rather than merely physical, trip:
“Moreover, the visit of a new Oba’s emissary to the Ogane was a ritual one...”

That last sentence is key, since it seems to me that we are forgetting that the logic of our African forebears living seven hundred years ago would be diametrically opposite to the measurement of traveling distances through Google. In fact, the twenty moons is the key phrase in understanding this journey, not the postulated 250 leagues, which is clearly D’Aveiros’s estimate. The initial informant told him that the journey took “twenty moons” likely because there was a ritual logic to that time (likely to reflect a lunar calendar certainly in use in Ife at that time), not any gauge of how quickly the journey could be accomplished by foot, horse, canoe or whatever means.

Significantly, Ryder points out the same need to examine the question of direction through the emic (“internal indigenous”) lens rather than what the compass would tell us “east” and “west” mean in late-20th or early 21st-century times:

“However, it must be borne in mind that the category of direction, like those of distance, have to be referred to the Benin context from which these items of information were gathered. East and West are nowadays indicated at Benin with reference to the morning and evening sun, and in the Benin view of the world the sun goes down into the sea.”

The sun going down into the sea suggests to us that what the European compass might describe as the south (the coastal area of Nigeria bordering the Atlantic) is traditionally “West” (where the sun sets) in Benin and related cultures. By the same logic, the place where the sun rises (“ibi ti oju ti mo wa”, as is traditionally said in Ife, as a matter of coincidence or fact) would be described on a compass point as “north” but traditionally in these related West African cultures as “East”. This is not my conjecture—it is in the same Alan Ryder article so lovingly cited here, but apparently so infrequently read. This is actually the point I was referencing in my previous post to Silver Sniper on Robin Law’s wonderful essay on “Eastern Wangara”, which makes this same exact point from the perspective of diplomats and traders in Asanteland in the 19th century. Their orientation of east, west, north and south is completely different than a European’s view, much like China has for thousands of years considered itself “the Middle Kingdom” because from their perspective, China is the center of the world. Ryder is also honest and smart enough to provide the reference to HL Ward-Price’s record of the Oba of Benin’s dawn prayer that demonstrates the importance of the rising sun.

The central takeaway is this—during the coronation of most traditional figureheads etc. in our part of the world, the initiate and their entourage are often required to tour their towns, sleep in sacred groves and temples etc for prescribed periods of time. These events are not meant to be marathons and would likely involve different ritual reasoning for the time required than just measuring how quickly the trip can be accomplished.

Of course, Ryder believes that the Ogane / Oghene is certainly a preserved tradition of a very real place or personage but not necessarily found in the modern-day location of Ile-Ife. As said repeatedly on here in years past, it’s quite possible that he is right in locating the original (or perhaps twin) site of an Ife / Ogane polity in the area of the Niger-Benue confluence (see above for the long and elaborate evidence).

What Ryder may not have known (and that we do now more clearly, with the additional benefit of decades of archaeological, anthropological and historical research) is that this exact area is also inextricably tied by economic, cultural, ritual, artistic etc evidence to the Ife cultural field, as I have referenced in my earlier posts and which other scholars much more experienced and dedicated than I (amongst them Ade Obayemi, Suzanne Blier, Robin Horton, Robin Law, S.F. Nadel etc etc ad nauseam) have demonstrated to most sane and unbiased readers.

Edited to bold some points and to clarify a few other references.

One last point, as this just caught my eye in reading your most recent post (I’d written the reply above before I’d had a chance to read it)—Suzanne Blier is a fluent French speaker and actually developed her initial interest in African art history while serving in the Peace Corps in the Republic of Benin (then-Dahomey) in the late 1960s. She has talked about how her interest in Ife developed because it was often referenced as the source of Fa and a place of ancestral importance to Dahomean diviners and sources that she interviewed during that time. She’s also given several prominent lectures and interviews in French that are available online.

None of this guarantees that she’s aware of the prevailing French literature on Ouargla of course, but I would be surprised if she was not familiar with the material you cited. Most importantly, her latest work is quite literally centered on the importance of wadls in the trans-Saharan movement of goods from West African (producers) to North Africa (ports) and ultimately Europe (consumers). The contemporary analogue would be something like the crude oil market.

All this points to a reason to expect a direct link between the polity represented by our putative Ogane/Oghene in the vicinity of the Niger River, and Ouargla in modern-day Algeria. One was the source of important products—exotic feathers and ivory in this case, but some proposals also suggest gold—while the other was the port of both entry and dispersal to European consumers. It would be far too speculative to propose a link between the two names, but it is very easy to see why a medieval cartographer might conflate both source and port into one entity.

The example I alluded to earlier (I’m sure there are others but this is what comes to mind now) is Ibn-Battuta’s Yufi, which is also a confusion of at least two places in Africa. Ibn-Battuta writes that “The Nile (i.e. Niger, an age-long confusion of the two rivers that wasn’t cleared up until the 19th century) descends from Timbuktu to Gao] then to the town of Muli in the land of the Limis, which is the frontier province of Mali (*MY NOTE: i.e. Mansa Musa’s Mali—and keep in mind this description is also from the mid-1300s and thus basically contemporary with the Catalan Atlas*); thence to Yufi, one of the largest towns of the negroes, whose ruler is one of the most considerable of negro rulers. It cannot be visited by any white man because they would kill him before he got there. From Yufi the Nile descends into the land of the Nuba...” etc. (translation from “Ibn Battuta’s Africa: Bronze and Gold in Mid-Iron Age Africa,” Transafrican Journal of History, Vol. 10, 1981 by J.E. Sutton, but obviously translated and available in many other forms).

I bring this up because while it is clear that Ibn Battuta is referencing an important (but unvisited) polity in the region of Mali in West Africa, famous as a production center for a valuable material but supposedly hostile to foreign, non-African visitors. Yet earlier in the same book, he had described this “Yufi” as being located somewhere in southeastern Africa (Sutton supposes somewhere in the vicinity of Zimbabwe). This is likely because in that region of East Africa, there was also a prominent urban center peopled by “pagan” Africans exporting gold and other valuable luxury products. The name “Yufi” is likely historically accurate for at least one of them—and obviously the contention I support is that it’s likely to refer to Ife/Ufe—but the conflation during an era of global exploration and the first recorded contacts during economic expansion—is understandable. “Yufi” was a bit of a convenient shorthand for a “type” of society for Ibn-Battuta—an African polity that was wealthy enough to be noteworthy but foreign enough in religion and mores to be a mystery. My reading is that Cresques perhaps makes the same type of conflation in discussing a “Rey de Organa” that is placed next to Mansa Musa and Mali on the Catalan Atlas but is represented by a North African Muslim ruler (who very well may have been the more familiar leader of Ouargla.

A hint of this is seen when you look at the figure of a nearly-nude black man leading a camel right next to the “Saracen” Rey de Organa on the Catalan map—it is a clear allusion to trade with non-Muslim Africans (we can infer this from the lack of Islamic clothing) and their connection with camels, which are the beast of burden of trans-Saharan trade. As a mapmaker, Cresques does not write out the details in text but represents them graphically in the tradition of cartography. Perhaps even more subtly as a member of a trading family belonging to a persecuted minority with a near-monopoly on this trade in exotic luxury goods, he wanted to allude to the source of North African luxury trade materials in this region without explicitly divulging trade secrets.

Either way, the link between this Muslim “Saracen” Arab or North African “Rey De Organa” and his tie to the non-Muslim African, the trade in exotic goods that brought wealth and prominence to both Ife/Ufe/Yufi and ports like Ouargla, and the logical reasons to conflate the two can be seen. This link is clearly supposition on my part, and many other scholars make the point that the “Organa” should rightly refer to the Ogane/Oghene on geographic and economic reasons alone (just as others believe that Ouargla would be the more correct interpretation). I’m just offering an alternative analysis that proposes a link between both entities and explains a possible reason to conflate them in this emergent era of global trade.

I am familiar with the background of the Portuguese search for "Prester John" (incidentally "Prester John" is actually indicated in the Catalan Atlas, on panel IV), however I think that this depiction of the "Rey de Organa" on the Catalan Atlas is not likely to have been a motivating factor in their search for Prester John in west Africa. Considering that Cresques depicts him as war waging "Saracen" and taking into account the attitudes that probably existed in 15th century Christian Iberia with respect to "Moors", "Saracens", etc. that seems unlikely. Thornton suggests, more plausibly, on p. 356 of his 1988 article, that the maps they used which led them to /later/ identify "Organa" with Prester John were certain later maps, rather than the Catalan Atlas.

I'll try to respond to rest of your post as I get time.

Edit: Upon re-reading your last paragraph above, I realized you were actually alluding to the fact that the Portuguese were later to explore the west coast of Africa in search of the source of the gold that was flowing in the trans-Saharan trade (in addition to seeking Prester John in Africa as a Christian ally against the Muslims; they were carrying out the two objectives simultaneously). So I think I did misinterpret that last paragraph of yours in my initial response and actually I agree that the Catalan Atlas, with its depiction and description of Mansa Musa and his abundant gold and wealth, would have been an impetus for their desire to explore west Africa in the 15th century. Since that is what you seem to be alluding to (their search for the source of the gold in west Africa that was going north in the trans-Saharan trade) then there's no disagreement that the map would have been a major inspiration for them.

Professor Blier has done some exciting preliminary work on this “Prester John” question and has made excellent and compelling arguments for the possible influence of the Coptic Church in medieval West Africa. Much of her work actually ties into your point on Ouargla, as she’s focused on the importance of oasis towns in the Sahara as trading ports and rest-stops on the millennia-old trans-Saharan trade routes. These routes are literally the same ones our fellow Nigerians follow to this day when attempting to cross over to Europe through undocumented migration, which is a sad but poignant reminder of how long Africans have exploited and exported our wealth—both human and material—to enrich the cities and citizens of others. There is a long YouTube lecture where she touches on some of this material that I can post if you’re interested.

But you are right—my main focus was on the search for the source of the gold at the heart of Europe’s economy in this period. The allied trade in exotic/luxury goods like plumes, leather (a leading export of Kano and the Hausa city-states that was for hundreds of years ascribed to Morocco, for another example of conflation between producer and port), ivory and jewelry in glass and polished stone is a less well-known but not necessarily less important economic aspect to this question of Ogane, Oghene, Organa, Ooni (and, I would posit, Ogboni). There is even a fruitful avenue of exploration in the related Nigerian cultures that place great prominence and emphasis on exotic plumage—I think of the traditional headdresses worn during the Ofala festival in Onitsha, and the use of eagle and parrot feathers in certain religious ceremonies, but I am certain that there many more examples in Benin and other places that I’m not as familiar with.

In addition, there is a related thread of discussion on geography and directions—why some descriptions may cite east instead of west, north instead of south etc—that is worth having as well (have you ever read Robin Law’s “Central and Eastern Wangara:" An Indigenous West African Perception of the Political and Economic Geography of the Slave Coast as Recorded by Joseph Dupuis in Kumasi, 1820”? This gave me some extremely valuable insights into traditional concepts of geography and cartography when I first read it, even though it doesn’t directly touch on this discussion).

Forgive the delayed response as well—even though I’m at home with more free time than usual, there’s still work and home responsibilities to attend to. I’ve typed out this response separately so I wouldn’t lose it spambots etc so please excuses typos and omissions. It’s always a sincere pleasure to have a well-informed and civil conversation with someone like you, and it gives me a rare opportunity to put my thoughts and analysis in order and commit this stuff to writing. Looking forward to reading your view and any input from other informed readers.

Ouargla is in the Sahara, and given the cultural background that Ouargla would have had at the time the map was made it would be quite understandable why the king of Organa would be depicted and described as a Saracen, if Cresques was indeed referring to Ouargla. Considering that the sounds "l" and "n" often end up being interchanged in words in various languages (this is a very common linguistic phenomenon; I don't recall the word for it), the name Ouargla is actually close to Organa even in sound and appearance.

There's also something else notable about Ouargla besides the fact that the cultural background of a medieval sultan of Ouargla would be a better fit for the depiction and description of the king of Organa given in the Catalan Atlas. It was apparently one of the oldest towns in the Sahara (or at least it is described as such in multiple sources) and it was also a major player in the trans-Saharan trade:

"By 911, the Shi'ite Fatimids ovethrew the kingdom of Tahert as well as established their control over Sijilmasa [southern Morocco] and Ouargla or Wargla. It was the Fatimids who founded the city of Mahdiya as their capital around 915. It was however in 947 under the ruler Fatimid al-Mansur that they established Mansuria, slightly southwest of Kairouan, as a new capital to replace Mahdiya. Associated with these changes, *Ouargla emerged as the dominant northern terminus of the major gold-bearing trans-Saharan route that led from Gao*. " - Stefan Goodwin, Africa's Legacies Of Urbanization: Unfolding Saga of a Continent, p. 88

This major role in international trade would probably make this city a noteworthy place for a map-maper and that is probably one reason why the the ruler (sultan) of Ouargla might be depicted on a later medieval map.

R and L are liquid phonemes and you’re describing the well-known phenomenon of rhotic and lateral switching (in Nigeria, we make stereotypical jokes about certain groups who show this tendency but it’s actually fairly common; in Cuba, for instance, the Efik/Ibibio/Annang etc cultural complex was often known as the Carabali, despite putatively hailing from the port of Calabar. So, your point absolutely makes sense and could explain this issue satisfactorily.

The point I was making earlier is that Ouargla’s emergence in the 10th century actually suggests that the Algerian port might be a younger polity than the “Ife / Ufe” under discussion, if we are to follow Professor Blier’s timeline and the dating of both the “kinglist” or dynastic poetry of the Ikedu text and the Ife archaeological record. I grant that I’m not familiar enough with Ouargla’s founding or archaeological records in the area to say this definitively and common sense would suggest that it’s probably much older than its “emergent” trading period suggested in your Goodwin quote. Going back to the Ikedu/Blier/Ife archaeological record though, occupation of the current site of Ife is attested to by 400 BCE and dynastic organization appears to have emerged (the “pre-Oduduwa” period) around 700 CE as I mentioned yesterday.

On to the central importance of trading (it all comes down to the money) and the infinitely valuable reference you made to the sources of Ouargla’s wealth!

You also mentioned Cresques' background as part of a Jewish trading family. Interestingly, Ouargla did actually have a significant population of Jews in the Middle Ages:

"M'zab Jewry are apparently the descendants of Jews from Tahert, an ancient metropolis destroyed in 902 C.E., but also from Sedrata and Ouargla in the important region of Ifriqiyya – which in ancient and medieval times contained the territories of present-day Libya and Tunisia. *Ouargla was a center of Karaite Jews*. Until 1300 the Jewish community of the M'zab was reinforced demographically by Jews from the island of *Djerba (southern Tunisia) and Jebel Nafusa (the region of Tripolitania in modern Libya). Overwhelmingly residing in Ghardaia, *the Jews were mainly employed as goldsmiths as well as being suppliers of ostrich feathers whose exports to Europe were monopolized by their coreligionists in parts of the Mediterranean*."

[https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/m-x0027-zab](https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/m-x0027-zab)

Your very last sentence is the crux of my argument about the accuracy of the map and the importance of portraying Mansa Musa’s Mali, which in the 1300s was considered the premier source of gold for Western Europe. The Internet these days is flooded with references to Mansa Musa as the wealthiest person in world history so his historical wealth has become almost a bit of a joke, but it is indisputable that the inflation caused by his pilgrimage and his fame in the medieval era raised European (and global) awareness of West Africa’s wealth. Gold is well-recognized as a luxury good produced in our region but the other article mentioned (“ostrich feathers”) would not stand out to contemporary readers as a high-priced fashion item.

In medieval Europe however, this was one of the most lucrative trading items and expensive luxury gifts for hundreds, if not thousands of years. There is an extensive literature on the market for these items—and the related trade in ivory, which I’ll also come to—that I won’t delve into now but suffice to say that ostrich plumes are referenced in your example because of the immense value European nobility (and later upper middle-class consumers) placed on them as items of fashion. Exotically-colored (if readers can visualize very large peacock feathers) and worn as part of an expensive gentleman’s hat (think of the Three Musketeers) or noble lady’s hats, the access and ability to wear the plumes of tropical birds in that era would have held the same value as Tahitian pearls or crocodile-skin Birkin bags may hold in ours. These were the luxury items to own of the day. As with the expensive fur coats of yesteryear, they have largely lost their luster and prestige in contemporary fashion. If you or other readers are interested, I’d recommend Paul Lovejoy’s works on trans-Saharan trade from what is now northern Nigeria to North Africa, but there’s a slew of material on this topic to be found.

A more recent treatment of the importance of these items in colonial and Victorian and Edwardian times is “‘Falling into Feathers’: Jews and the Trans‐Atlantic Ostrich Feather Trade” by Sarah Abrevaya Stein from The Journal of Modern History/, vol. 79, no. 4, 2007, pp. 772–812. It’s available on JSTOR if you have an account but focuses on the South African trade of the 19th century and less on the millennia-old North-West African trade route referenced in your example. Her book on the topic is titled “Plume: Ostrich Feathers, Jews and a Lost World of Global Commerce”—I can’t recommend it as I haven’t had a chance to read it (it’s on the list!) but the title gives you some idea of the importance of this trade.

This is pertinent to our topic because the plume/feather and ivory trade were among the leading items of commerce, following gold, that West Africa exported globally during this medieval period. A third item of crucial importance is glass, which was only manufactured in a very few locales around the world in this period (Ile-Ife being a prominent example) but I don’t want to distract from this exotic plume trade. It was prominent and lucrative enough to be referenced as a core trade item alongside gold in Ouargla by your source, which gives us a sense of its importance.

While the trading ports into Europe were, like Ouargla, located in North Africa and near to the Mediterranean, the source of these feathers were in the interior, beyond the Sahara (where agriculture and animal husbandry were obviously fairly limited) and into the savanna and tropical forests of West, Central and East Africa where ostriches, parrots, elephants, giraffes and these other exotic luxury products roamed and could be procured by trained hunters from those regions.

The current site of Ile-Ife is located in a bowl-shaped region of present-day Osun state that once teemed with elephants, exotic birds, and several scholars have proposed that collective hunting of these animals resulted in the growth of urbanization in that area. Hunters often feature as founding figures in the foundational myths of Yoruba towns and as explorers, scouts and soldiers, are one of the central professions (alongside traditional doctors, blacksmiths/metallurgists, long-distance traders etc). In fact both Clapperton and Sultan Bello explicitly identify parrots, exotic and “wonderful” or rare trade goods (presumably including plumage) as a key trade item from Yorubaland in the early 19th century (happy to provide references later if interested) but I’m less interested in the specific locales than I am in the concept that these items of trade—ivory, plumes, exotic skins and leathers, and perhaps glass beadwork and indigo-dyed textiles—were known to be sourced from the region around the Niger-Benue confluence and points north and south of there.

These were so valuable that they are commemorated in the copper-alloy work from this region. P. 28 of Blier’s “Art and Risk in Ancient Yoruba” contains examples and she elaborates on page 53, saying:

“Found at the Niger River site of Tada with the two cire-perdue Ogboni-linked sculptures were two large copper alloy figures of ostriches (plate 8.h) and an exquisitely rendered baby elephant (plate 8.i) in the same cire-perdue material. These animals were commissioned as shrine furnishings most likely because both feathers and ivory tusks comprised valued commodities in international trade that fed through the Tada site. The elephant represents the most valuable item of the forested areas of southern Nigeria today, the ostrich references a valued trade good from the more northerly savanna areas of this same country. Most likely the seated and standing Ogboni-style onile figures from Tada assumed a similar role in helping to resolve regional commercial disputes and other issues. Bathed each week in the Niger River, then polished, these works also helped promote increase and fertility in relationship to animals, crops, goods, and humans in and on the Niger River.”

Updated to correct some of the HTML bolding/italicizing errors and to correct my reference to Usman Dan Fodio on the exotic exports trade—I meant Sultan Muhammad Bello’s short treatise from the 1820s.

Hi SilverSniper—it seems we are all running into spambot issues with long posts. I’ve just read your latest posts that refers to wadls (I’d forgotten the term but Blier uses it quite frequently) but it in fact converges very closely with what I’d typed out. I’ll put my posts below, hopefully in order if the spambot allows for it.

First of all, great post! My situation is precisely the opposite - I'm not near many of the books I have at all, nor do I have access to some of the things I would like to cite (as I alluded to above with regard to Meek's book) but I'll try to make good with the few I have with me if we have another very lengthy discussion as we've had previously. Also, I'll be responding in parts just because I have some other things to get done even in this quarantine/shelter-in-place situation and I can't spare as much time to make super lengthy posts just right now.

It’s a mixed blessing to be home at this time. Even though so many people are dealing with harsh conditions during this quarantine, I’m lucky enough to have time to sort through my library and revisit some of these works and discussions that I enjoy.

Yes I am aware of this idea of the Niger-Benue confluence as some kind of origin or dispersal point for the larger linguistic group that several of the southern and Middle Belt groups in Nigeria belong to and I have read that article by Obayemi in the past. Ryder's focus in the article is more related to the issue of this thread so I didn't want to get into that broader issue of what the origin point of the so called "Kwa" group is right here (as that seems to be another topic in and of itself).

Got it—I honestly assume that you’re already familiar with the vast majority of sources and materials I reference. I like to spell them out in the likely event that many other readers (current and future) might not be aware that some of these points have been known/discussed/analysed for decades.

I did read professor Blier's book on ancient art in Ife years ago so yes, I am aware of this mention of the map from her book. The issue of the depiction of the "king of Organa" and similarly named places/rulers on 14th, 15th and 16th century European maps was actually brought up by Thornton, in his 1988 article on the Ife-Benin relationship, so I was aware of it even earlier (and Blier is well aware of Thornton's article, which she cites at one point in that book). He actually uses that map and others to make his own argument about who he thinks the ruler really is and of course his identification is quite different. (I still disagree with his ultimate conclusion, so my position about the validity of his identification has not changed - I still think that identification is mistaken, just as I did in that other thread where we had a lengthy discussion although some of my reasons have changed slightly.)

Yes, I remember discussing Thornton’s skepticism in this article with you a few years ago. I think his points, like Ryder’s, are well-presented, logical and interesting but agree that they’re ultimately off-base.

Again, forgive the elementary background information but I’m assuming that many people on here citing his 1988 essay on this issue don’t understand that Thornton specializes in West-Central African history (i.e. the Kongo-Angola polities) and their diasporas, and Nigerian history is a bit of a side-step from his main areas of focus. The fact that he’s not a Nigeria-area specialist doesn’t invalidate his scholarship or his conclusions /a priori/ but I thought it might be useful for people to understand where his comparative strengths and interests lie. He is the pre-eminent contemporary historian on Central African military history and in my view can be forgiven if his West African cultural history contains minor errors.

So the possible connection between the Ogane/Hooguanee of the Portuguese reports, and the Organa king/kingdom on the late medieval European maps has been more widely known at least since Thornton's article was published, although other scholars (Richmond Palmer may have been one of them, if I recall correctly) had suggested this connection even earlier, prior to Thornton's article.

I believe Professor Obayemi is usually credited with this first identification of the Ogane/Organa connection in a 1980 paper. I’d have to take another look at Richmond Palmer (are you talking about the old magazine pieces from the 1940s or his book?) but Obayemi’s articles from the 1970s-1980s are where I first came across the concept and Blier also cites him as her source.

I am also familiar with the Catalan Atlas and what it depicts (I even discussed that map on a thread on /that other forum/ - that one where you made an account but didn't post [image:3E262DAA-CB9A-44DA-AC86-D678ABAF8353-7560-00000B937D1AB532/smiley.png]. By the way, were you too annoyed by some of the ignorance, bias, etc. that exists on there and considered it a waste of time to even bother engaging with it, or was it just too boring and nothing on there caught your interest? I'm still somewhat surprised that you didn't make a single post.)

Long story there, but I honestly just got very busy with both work and life responsibilities around that period and subs withdrew from all online posting/engagements for a few years. I really liked the concept of the place and the breadth of discussions happening there (even though my main interest is West Africa and the African diaspora, there were soooo many rich discussions going on that I really expected to be more involved).

I’ve learned over the years (mostly from this place, honestly) that ignorance / bias is just par for the course when it comes to discussing cultural history in a non-specialist / “popular” context. We (especially but not exclusively Black people) have so much invested in feeling like our past and cultural origins are appropriately respected that we become both ultra-sensitive and ultra-aggressive when engaging in what should be calm, measured, positive and even “fun” discussions. I’m not a preacher so I hesitate to counsel people on how to talk and behave, but once I see childish language, insults and aggrandizing language, I tend to ignore the poster and assume I’m dealing with a half-literate person. I can tell by the way you respond to most of the uncouth language that you feel the same way. Time is the only constraint but I’m always up for an engaging discussion on history, ethnography etc.

I would however point out that Cresques' knowledge here must be described as shaky or inadequate if he really did mean to refer to what we might presume that he meant to refer to with that king of Organa figure and kingdom on the map. The Catalan Atlas actually describes the king of Organa in this manner: "a Saracen who waged constant war against the Saracens of the coast and with the other Arabs". The coast he is referring to here seems to be the North African coast. In fact, the way the map is (and where the "Organa" king is positioned) there couldn't be any other coast that he is referring to.

I was probably too effusive in my praise of his accuracy, but as with all things, this is a relative issue. I meant to say that the Catalan Atlas gives us the most accurate map of the known world in the late 14th century, which was an extraordinary period of artistic, economic and cultural “fluorescence” (to steal a phrase from Blier) around the globe. I‘m fairly sure that Cresques himself never visited the majority of places he describes (including everywhere from China to Mali) but in terms of relative accuracy and information, he’s unparalleled. It’s similar to how I think about someone like Richard Burton, who was an unrepentant racist and probably someone I’d never want to sit down with in person, but is truly a shining treasure trove of historical, ethnographic and linguistic information of his time (I remember reading that he spoke something like 29 languages, and having read his works on West Africa and a few of his South American and Asian works, I can believe it).

On the issue of Organa being a Muslim Arab ruler—as you rightly point out, this is obviously a problematic barrier in identifying this polity with a “pagan” ethnically West African ruler, but as with all these historical mysteries we love to investigate, the truth is infinitely more complex than they appear at first glance.

Blier does state in her book that the "Rey de Organa" is "repositioned toward the central Sahara" on the Catalan Atlas (instead of being further south where we would presume he should be if the figure is meant to depict a ruler closer to the part of west Africa we are discussing). It seems that in fact the positioning was not a "repositioning" and the real reason for the position was that Cresques did not really see the "Organa" kingdom as being what we are referring to in this discussion (so I am not sure that he had a real understanding of the polities of the region we are talking about if the Rey de Organa is meant to depict a west African ruler from somewhere in or near Nigeria), hence Cresques' map presenting the idea that the king of Organa was an Arab that fought other Arabs, and hence the ruler's depiction on the map as an Arab/Saracen.

Thornton did of course argue (on p. 356 of his 1988 article) that the positioning of Organa on the "best" maps from the Catalan school of cartographers should be interpreted as implying that the Rey de Organa was really south of the desert and closer to the Niger river (the "Nile" on that part of the map). But he also made an interesting comment, or admission, in note 20 (on pp. 360-361) at the end of the article. He mentioned in that note that the historian Tadeusz Lewicki, in his article "Le Royaume d'Organa des cartes européennes du XIV e au XVIe siècle" (1976) actually "summarizes the existing arguments and provides a strong argument for identifying Organa with the oasis state of Ouargla".

I’m so glad you pointed this out, as this point is another example of an approach I resolved to take many years ago when I started following these issues. You have to respect the integrity of scholars like Thornton (and Ryder too, in the earlier essay) who diligently put forward and analyze the flaws and alternative explanations for their hypotheses, even if they ultimately disagree with those conclusions.

Ouargla is certainly a plausible alternative explanation for this “Rey de Organa” and ultimately, it may be the right one. I’ll show in the next segment though that Ouargla itself by dint of its location as an oasis and as a trans-Saharan trading center was likely linked to the cultural and economic production center in the Niger-Benue confluence region and in fact may partially owe its medieval prominence to that area. In showing this, I think Cresques’s conflation of a West African polity-potentate and North African/Arab trading entrepôt is entirely understandable and is reflective of other similar conflations of trading ports and hinterland production centers that we know of in history. (By the way, I want to be clear that I’m not just using fancy words as synonyms for “king” and “kingdom” for the hell of it—I have long believed and argued that these European-specific terms are too loaded and in some ways insufficient to accurately portray West African government of this “medieval” era, just as words like “chief” obscure traditional title-holding roles in the modern era).

gregyboy:



They were all out off point


You falsely tried to connect yoruba and nupe which you failed

Tried to connect ogane to ife which you failed too

You failed in all round...

Try to use this your energy to connect it to the benins instead of a much more wider yorubas that you know little on.......

Thanks for your insightful contribution. I see that you joined this site in 2016 so you probably have not read the other lengthy discussions Physics/Silver Sniper and I have had on these topics in past years. Please go and read those and the works mentioned in them if you’re interested in the topic; otherwise, I’ll be ignoring your future posts as it’s clear you and I have very little in common when it comes to this material.

SilverSniper:


The historian Elizabeth Isichei is one scholar that did suggest (in A history of Nigeria), when discussing the Beni Nupe confederacy, that Ryder drifted away from his 1965 suggestion in his 1969 book:

"If there was a real dynastic link with Nupe this seems doubtful. It seems more probable that statements about a common heritage rest on the accidental verbal similarity between Benin and Beni. It is noteworthy that Ryder, who questioned the Ife connection and argued the case for linkages with a northern kingdom, abandoned the line of argument in his later book, Benin and the Europeans" - Elizabeth Isichei, A history of Nigeria, Volume 2, p. 137

However after re-reading his 1969 book I found that he does not actually do so at all. On page 7 of the 1969 book, Ryder cites his 1965 article, where his position was that the reference to east should perhaps be interpreted as the correct, and literal direction (although allowing for other possibilities about its meaning) that the Benin informants intended to indicate to the Portuguese about where the "Oghene" lived, (Oghene is a word meaning "great lord" in Edo (Bini), but which is used to refer to God in some other Edoid languages in modern times; of course God in Edo (Bini) is Osa, Osanobua, Osanobua Noghodua (God almighty), etc.) without changing his position.

In his 1969 book when discussing the origins of the dynasty of the Obas of Benin, Ryder cites his 1965 article on p. 7 and he does not indicate that his position had changed:

"1. cf. A.F.C. Ryder, 'A reconsideration of the Ife-Benin relationship'. Journal of African History, vol. VI, i (1965). This article examines the evidence for and against the tradition which identifies the Oghene with the Yoruba Oni of Ife, and suggests that many conflicts could be resolved by ascribing a more northerly origin to the dynasty. It is further argued that the origin of the name Benin might be sought in this direction."

I believe Isichei simply misread or did not accurately recall what Ryder's position was in his 1969 book. John Thornton's 1988 article about the Ife-Benin issue, where he cites Ryder's work repeatedly, does not make any note of Ryder changing his position at any point. I think Isichei was simply mistaken about this point.

I found out later on that the idea that the "Oghene" was indeed literally to the east of Benin, as stated twice in two different primary sources - first by Duarte Pacheco Pereira (in Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis) and later by João de Barros (in Décadas da Ásia, First Decade, Book III), was not exclusive to Ryder or Thornton. Decades before either Ryder or Thornton put forward their theories, Charles K. Meek had suggested (in his 1931 book A Sudanese Kingdom: An Ethnographical Study of the Jukun-speaking Peoples of Nigeria) that the "Ogane"/"Hooguanee" mentioned by Pereira and then by de Barros was possibly the ruler of the ancient Kwararafa state, based on the fact that the distance given in the original account (two hundred and fifty leagues east of Benin in de Barros' account) and the direction (east) line up with the location of the ancient Kwararafa state relative to Benin.

My views on this issue haven’t changed dramatically over the years and I’ve expressed them in the many fruitful discussions we’ve had about the issue in past years. I’m at home and close enough to my library to be able to reference both older and more recent scholarship that can help illuminate this issue of the identity of the Ogane/Oghene, and the idea of a common origin of the current Ife-Benin monarchic traditions and their connection to the area of central Nigeria where the Niger and Benue rivers meet.

While Ryder should get some credit for his hypothesis on this issue, the idea that the Niger-Benue confluence area is key to southern Nigerian cultural history has been widely-accepted since at least the 1970s, more due to the work of historical linguistics isolating that area as the source of Kwa-languages, i.e. “The implications of modern linguistic research both fit in with and supplement those of archaeological research. They suggest that Yoruba, Edo, Igala, Idoma, Igbo, Nupe, Emirates and Gabri form a cluster of languages within the larger Kwa group, centered roughly on the area of the Niger-Benue Confluence,” (Ade Obayemi in “The Yoruba and Edo-speaking peoples and their neighbors before 1600”, History of West Africa, Vol. 1, Longman Publishers, 1971).

What is important to note for this discussion is that neither Pacheco Pierrera or Joao de Avieros (de Barros in some transcriptions) introduced the concept of the Ogane/Houganee as a pre-eminent governmental or religious power in our area. That idea dates back to the 1375 map of global kingdoms called the Atlas, made by Europe’s leading cartographer of that period, Abraham Cresques: https://www.earthlymission.com/catalan-atlas-medieval-world-map/.

That 1375 map identifies a mysterious figure called the Rey de Organa (i.e. “King of Organa”), which appears to reference the Ogane/Oghene title under discussion. The Rey de Organa is portrayed as leading the most important trade point/monarchic area east of Mansa Musa’s Mali, and this is notable because Mansa Musa’s unimaginable wealth from gold mining had recently been unveiled to the world in spectacular fashion following his pilgrimage to Mecca, where his entourage caused a global devolution in gold prices with the amount of gold they spent during the trip.

It’s also good to note that the Catalan Atlas was so accurate because its maker (Cresques) was a member of a Jewish trading family in Spain with extensive contacts throughout northern (and presumably western) Africa, and as these families traded in the exotic luxury goods produced in these areas (likely including glass jewelry but almost certainly ivory and rare birds and feathers, which is an important point as we shall see later), they had strong motivations to understand the politics and polities in this region.

At any rate, the Catalan Atlas became a central inspiration for the Portuguese court’s sponsorship of exploration into West Africa and establishes this Organa (Ogane/Oghene) as a leading political/religious figure about 100 years before Joao de Aveiros refers to the leader with a similar title who is responsible for consecrating the leader of Benin’s royal symbols etc. This is detailed further on page 6 of Suzanne Preston Blier’s “Art and Risk in Ancient Yoruba: Ife History, Power and Identity c. 1300,” Cambridge University Press, 2015.

The similarity between the titles of Organa/Ogane/Oghene and Ooni are plain enough to readers, but there are other historical, linguistic and glottochronological reasons that satisfactorily suggest a connection. First is the unpublished Ikedu oral history tradition in Ife collected by Professor IA Akinjogbin and cited by Professor Blier in her book. This citation (similar to the oriki poetic traditions that most Yoruba families will be familiar with) provides a list of rulers and details of reigns before the arrival of “Oduduwa” and establishment of his dynasty. The title of the ancient Ife line of kings is rendered as “Ogane” in this oral history, according to Akinjogbin and Blier. Unfortunately, Akinjogbin’s records on the poems (which Blier has read and cites in her book) has not been published and remain in his field notes.

Blier does provide the name of the first Ogane of Ife as “Awire”, and dates his reign to around 700 CE (or AD if you prefer) based on an average reign length of 13 years (the accepted method used by African oral historians). She notes that this makes Ife one of the three earliest-founded surviving dynasties in the world (Japan and Rajasthan in northern India date from roughly that period of 660-750 CE as well).

The other linguistic evidence is a little bit of supposition by me but makes perfect sense for those familiar with linguistic shifts etc. Yoruba is a language that is particularly rich in ellision and contraction. You will see “Oduduwa” frequently rendered as “Odua” or “Oodua”, just as certain proper names are the result of ellision (“Adekunle” being “Ade kun ninu ile” etc. I think it’s a good bet that the modern form “Ooni” is a contraction of an older term similar to “Ogane/Oghene/Organa”, and this is indicated by the “double-O” in the written form, which almost always signifies that the term is the contracted form of a word featuring two vowels (as in “Oduduwa” becoming “Oodua”).

Even more interesting is the central linchpin that I think even Professor Blier may have missed, although I’d have to look through the book again to be sure. The terms “Ogane/Organa/Oghene” are themselves close European renderings of a very familiar Yoruba term denoting the central political organization in the Yoruba-speaking area (including Igala) one that still exists to this day and means quite clearly an aged and respected political and religious leader. What is the term?

“Ogboni.”

In precolonial times, this was often described as the regional version of a senator, someone who sat as part of a judicial and governmental association (with strong ties to trade and economic development, as Blier notes). An “Ogboni”, denoting a member but also the association as a whole,” was “the real power in the country”, according to the many references we read in Richard Burton’s works, in Leo Frobenius’ “Voice of Africa” and many, many more. A variant of the word is “Ogbeni” in modern Yoruba, which denotes a gentleman or someone of upright social standing. The older variant of the term and its explicit ties to government and religious observance fits the record quite neatly for me, however. In earlier posts on this topic, I had proposed that I found the simple references to precolonial Nigerian polities as “kingdoms” and “empires” too simplistic to capture the variation of political and economic organization, and I think this confusion of titles, terms and kingdom names typified by the “Ogane/Oghene/Organa” etc debate is a particularly poignant example. In the future, scholars will have to expand their analysis beyond European models of political organization, art, architecture, economic systems etc. to get a clearer picture of the African past. Historical linguistics/glottochronology and archaeology will probably be the most useful tools, but it takes a certain amount of imagination to interprete what the facts and clues allude to.

Note: I am not interested in the modern Nigerian connection with cults and the bloodsucking fairy tales often peddled by pastors etc so I will be ignoring the inevitable references to that in future replies.

There is also the fascinating issue of Ile-Ife’s direct connection to the Niger-Benue confluence region, which as I’ve mentioned in past posts is the key to the commonwealth of cultural history shared by Nigerian groups connected to the area. I believe I’ve posted this before, but in the very first references we have to Ife’s role as the place of creation, it’s foundation is clearly linked to a “great river” and the idea of crossing that river and establishing new settlements along its banks and tributaries.

Reverend Ajayi Crowther says in his “Vocabulary of the Yoruba Language” (1852 edition, which expands on his earlier 1843 work) that “It is said by the Yorubans that fifteen persons were sent from a certain region, and that a sixteenth, whose name was Okambi (an only child), and who was afterwards made King of Yoruba, volunteered to accompany them ... on opening the gate of this unknown region, they observed a large expanse of water...” The passage is long but available to read in full here (in the “Introductory Remarks”: https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_Grammar_of_the_Yoruba_Language/9yBKAAAAcAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Samuel%20Crowther&pg=PR2&printsec=frontcover&bsq=Samuel%20Crowther

The long and the short of it is that this earliest written description of the founding of Ife describes it as an island of sorts on the shore of a great river. TJ Bowen records a similar tradition in the 1850s and concludes that Ife was likely founded further north and that the current town may not be the original location. What is relatively certain is that the confluence region of Jebba Island, where Ife-style naturalistic bronze and brass works like the Tada figure have been found, was as recently as the 19th-century a Yoruba-speaking border region with Nupe people. In fact, the Gbede/Gbedegi sub-group of the Nupe found in that region today are known to be originally Yoruba-speakers who “became” Nupe through contact with the legendary Tsoede (who is dated to post-15th century wars of expansion and therefore later than the 13th-14th century dates we are discussing for the Ogane/Oghene/Organa (and I would add) Ogboni.

One last point of interest here that we are again indebted to Professor Blier for—she discusses the importance of the pure-copper and Ife-style “Tada figure” found in this area, the nearly life-size sculpture of a seated man that is considered one of the most technically-accomplished artworks of its kind in the world: https://www.chron.com/entertainment/article/MFAH-exhibit-shows-a-side-of-African-art-few-know-1706619.php

This figure is importantly linked to Ife by art historians because of the similarities in proportion, naturalism and material usage (pure copper being also used for the naturalistic Obalufon mask in Ife) but Blier points out that the missing limbs, which have broken off over the years, suggest another important clue—they appear to have been arranged with the left thumb encircled by the right fist, which was and is a disctinctive ritual greeting gesture of none other than ... the Ogboni association.

Much more than I meant to type but hope it was interesting reading! I had more thoughts to add about Ibn-Battuta’s reference to the kingdom of Yufi and why contemporary scholars like Obayemi and Blier believe it to be another early reference to Ife (or as the locals would insist on it being called in eastern Yoruba dialects, “Ufe”) but I know that TAO has capably discussed that in one of her earlier posts so I’ll leave it there.

Good to be back to add what I can while I have some free time. There is also some interesting material on Kwararafa and the Apa polity (unclear if it was organized as a “kingdom”, “empire” etc) and its connection to geomancy (Ifa/Afa/ominigbon etc) but I’ll save that for some future post as well.

I’ve edited to add a few useful links to some material that’s’ available online, although most of the citations are from books that are only available In print unfortunately. I can add more information for those interested.

SilverSniper:


Hello TerraCotta! Long time no see. Yeah, that's me. I forgot the login details for my old account(s) since it's been years since I signed on and posted here, and I couldn't remember where I had those details saved, so I just made a new account. I would be interested in anything you have to share regarding references to the use of such polishing in traditional/ancient Nigerian architecture.

I know what you mean. It’s been about five years for me as well but Covid-19 is giving everyone more spare leisure time than we know what to do with! That old post where you referenced the Benin wall-polishing technique stood out to me for two major reasons:

A) I like to keep track of descriptions of architecture, engineering and construction methods etc and while I’d taken note of lots of murals, paintings , carved columns and the like, I hadn’t noticed those references in the first-hand literature, and
B) I had seen many more references to the ritual importance of reflective or glittering surfaces (now generally assumed to be mica or quartz-rich soil), which were used in the design of Ife terra cotta sculpture and pottery, potsherd pavements etc.

At any event, in re-reading some material over the years (mostly 19th-century missionary descriptions of western and northern Nigeria but also noted in contemporary descriptions of Asante buildings and I believe Dahomean palace architecture), I kept an eye out for similar material and found the following (by no means exhaustive, as I’m still trying to remember the various other places I’ve noted these):

“Meroke's house, like others in Oshielle, has a high wall next to the street, on each side ; it is built in a square. A gate, carved with the head of an idol, opens into the street; there is a court-yard in the centre, and the rooms are built all round the inte rior of the square ; the sloping roof pro jecting beyond them forms a verandah. This verandah is the reception-place for friends: "the Tortoise," says the Yoruba proverb of an inhospitable man, "builds his house, and makes the verandah behind it;"* it is also, especially in hot weather, the bed-room. Meroke takes up the mat on which she has been lying, and begins to sweep out her house. She has a short brush with which she sets to work. The polished walls and floor, shine, as it is said in Yoruba, "like the rain clouds, beautifully black," and the floor the same...”

From page 11 of “Oshielle, Or, Village Life in the Yoruba Country: From the Journals and Letters of a Catechist There, Describing the Rise of a Christian Church in an African Village” by Mary Ann Barber, 1857

Reverend Samuel Johnson described a similar process in “History of the Yorubas” (page 99): “the houses are without any decorations; the walls are plastered and polished with black and sometimes red earth by the women whose work it generally is. The houses of Kings and Princes are embellished with a sort of wash which is a decoction made from the skin of the locust fruit.”

I can remember reading similar descriptions in Reverend RH Stone’s “In Afric’s Forest and Jungle”, “Travels and Explorations in Yorubaland 1854-1858” by William Clarke (which also contain excellent recording of indigenous landscaping and agriculture alongside architecture and sports etc) along with others like TJ Bowen but I’ll have to look closer at those works to find them. There are alternative descriptions of whitewashed walls, which were accomplished by used lime and shell mixtures and I believe this is still practiced in some traditional shrines etc.

Your example of the similar traditional Japanese practice in that old thread helped me visualize this effect and made it stick out in my mind when I re-read some of these works, as I like to do every few years.

SilverSniper:


As I said above, Dapper did not mention street lights. If there is some suggestion that he did, it is incorrect. He does not claim they had street lights in his account. Tall metal lamps placed at fixed positions in compounds and at a specific place in a square in the city are mentioned in mid and late 19th century British accounts, but nothing about "street lights" is in Dapper's account.

The newspaper you quoted was not criticizing there being an absence of street lights in the Benin City of the late 19th century, but just disputing the general picture conveyed by Dapper. That person writing in 1897 would have had no expectation that there would have been such things (street lights) on the basis of anything Dapper wrote, because Dapper did not mention street lights.

The "shiny walls" refer to earthen walls polished to a high degree so that they had a lustrous appearance. This appearance of the walls of the buildings in the capital are mentioned in the 1651 eye witness description of a Spanish priest, translated by Ryder and included as an appendix to his 1969 book on Benin. In that account, in Ryder's translation (p. 313 of Benin and the Europeans) the priest states that the walls of the houses are made of red clay and are "so smooth that they seem to be painted or polished". Later accounts by British visitors give a similar impression. James Fawckner, a British ship captain who visited Benin described a polished earthen bench he saw in a compound in Benin as looking "like marble":

"In the centre is a bench formed of brown clay, which, by frequent rubbing with a piece of cocoa-nut shell and wet cloths, has received a polish, and when dry looks like marble." - Narrative of Captain James Fawckner's Travels on the Coast of Benin, West Africa (1837), p. 33

Another mention of this specific kind of polishing of earthen architecture is this statement by Alan Maxwell Boisragon, one of the survivors of the "Benin massacre", who described a building in Ughoton in a similar manner:

"The chief of Gwatto's house, where we slept that night, was very much superior, the walls, which were very thick, being polished till they were nearly as smooth and shiny as glass." - Alan Boisragon, The Benin Massacre (1897), p. 81

Alan Boisragon was not writing a "positive' or "grandiose" account of the Benin kingdom, obviously, but was actually critical of it and could not be accused of trying to engage in exaggerated praise of Benin, for obvious reasons. He did not like Benin or its people - he was nearly killed by them afterall. There is nothing about mentioning shiny walls that makes a description grandiose. There was a traditional technique to polish earthen walls in certain parts of southern Nigeria to a very great degree in order give them a lustrous, aesthetically appealing appearance and the perception by some Europeans of Benin's particular application of such a technique to buildings in the kingdom was that it made the walls "shine".

I am guessing you’re that former NL poster who had an intense interest in physics and Nigerian history? I remember reading some references you’d made then to mud-polishing which were new to me in traditional architecture, but in the years since, I’ve noticed several references to similar effects on house walls and this “glossy finish”. I’ll see if I can re-locate them because it’s such an interesting (perhaps now lost) reference to an impressive traditional design technique.

Probz, Egusi is described as the seeds of the Bara plant in Samuel Ajayi Crowther’s “Vocabulary of the Yoruba Language” (published in 1843). Contrary to some of the conjecture I’ve read here, the bara melon that egusi is derived from is a native West African plant like our yam tuber and is likely to be one of those ancestral foods eaten by our ancestors in our region for thousands of years.

By that logic, it is likely to be a shared inheritance and arguing over who “owns” it makes as much sense as arguing over who owns water (“omi“ in Yoruba; “mmiri” in Igbo). I trust Nigerians though—there will still be arguments.

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Vocabulary_of_the_Yoruba_Language/NMINAAAAQAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=A%20Grammar%20and%20Vocabulary%20of%20the%20Yoruba%20Language%20Samuel%20Ajayi%20Crowther&pg=RA1-PA76&printsec=frontcover

The previous poster who described Jollof rice as Senegalese food (Wolof rice) is correct.

Bigchee72:


Lol...

I'm from Franklin Avenue, Crown Heights. Mostly Carribean and African American crown heights. The clap at you part of crown heights. I reaaaaally get annoyed hearing Nigerians talking hood knowing what I grew up around in crack cocaine 1980s through the 90s where bodies were being dropped left and right. Especially being around for real "Niqqas" on that talk that Nigerians and Nigerian Brits are forcing it into their vocabulary. For real "Niqqas" you see around the way knowing they have bodies on their resumes. For real "Niqqas" who when you're waiting for your Chinese food, they walk into the restaurant and you're PRAYING Chin Lee finished with your order because you want to get the hell outta there as fast as possible before he has a reason to notice you. For real "niqqas" you're relieved to hear that someone else bodied them. Dudes who aren't rappers.

So understand why I'm annoyed. I made it out of that trash alive. It wasn't an outfit to wear. It's still a part of who I am. That's why I get annoyed at Nigerians appropriating that language. They wasn't raised through this type of gun culture hell.

Small world. Should have figured this was you when I was reading this thread earlier. I missed the private reception with the Ooni but i ran into you outside MoCADA. It's O.D... from that other place. Thank you for putting together this program. I was impressed with the turnout, the respect for the Ooni and the culture on display from the entourage. It made an impression on Fort Greene and BK in general tonight.

Shymexx--for what it's worth, I know Bigchee (by any another name though). He's a good dude. The gunman talk doesn't really do anything for you or for advancing Yoruba culture. Conceiving and executing this event deserves a salute.

Katsumoto:


Welcome to the debate

First, Lagos is one of 6 states in the SW. I wouldn't want to restrict the discussion to just Lagos.

I focused on Lagos when discussing Tinubu because that's the state he governed and had the most direct influence on. He may have been a strong factor in the emergence of other Yoruba governors but it's not the same thing as being the executive. I think it's fair to discuss his achievements with Lagos as the backdrop.

Afterall, most of the SW states have debts. In any case, tax receipts may be high but is it being translated in an improvement in the standard of living of average Lagosians? Or revenue is going up and a few are getting paid?

From what I know, increased tax receipts in Lagos funded the construction of the Lekki-Ikoyi bridge, the first stage of the Lagos light rail system, the Lagos HOMS affordable housing developments (Ilubirin estate being a massive example), the indepdent power projects running courts, hospitals and other public buildings in Ikeja, the Ikorodu Road redevelopment and the solar street light project. Those are the infrastructural improvements I can think of offhand and which I've had first-hand experience with as recently as January. It's probably not an exhaustive list and it certainly isn't enough for an economy that's larger than Ghana and Kenya, but it's a start and Tinubu's role in instituting the public finance formula to fund these improvements is hard to dispute.

Second, I don't think anyone has demonized debt. Surely debt is required for development but the issue I have with debt in Naija are as follows:
1. Lack of Accountability
2. Mis-managment
3. Corruption

Well you certainly haven't demonized debt but I know several others have earlier in the discussion and generally on Nairaland, if we're being honest. Again, I don't fault people who don't understand how capital markets and infrastructure finance work, but we're not doing our states and region any services by insisting that being debt-free is some sort of aspirational goal. Public finance worldwide is debt-reliant and even on the corporate side, the most cash-rich companies in the world like Apple and Merck still fund operations with bonds.

I agree without reservation with your other points about lack of accountability, mismanagement and corruption. I'm not willing to condemn all debt if the results are visible.

And I doubt that SW politicians are implementing any Keynesian economics to boost their state economies. Were they practising Keynesian economics when Nigeria was making additional revenue from the sale of Crude oil?

I have no idea if Keynes is big in Nigerian political circles, but why do you doubt this so strongly? Aregbesola's rstionale for his OYES public employment scheme is exactly the same as the New Deal was in depression-era America: give people public-sector jobs to do anything (including transcribing folk songs and sweeping roads) to counter the lack of private-sector employment. They may not dress it up with terms like counter-cyclical investment but the philosophy is the same. Of course, I'm not suggesting that it has been totally effective.

The simple fact is that Jonathan and everyone in power in the last 6 years mis-managed funds which accrued from high oil receipts. Now that Oil prices have crashed and with most states bankrupt, what is the way out of the quagmire? What will Osun sell to pay its debt?

This touches on areas of professional interest for me but even then, I don't want to be arrogant enough to assume I can solve a problem that's been brewing since the early 1970s (when we went into oil production overdrive). For me, the oil price decline is a good thing for Nigeria It will force the central government to manage with less resources and to generate more taxes, or to starve and deal with crippling social unrest. States like Osun will have to develop agricultural assets like cocoa and palm oil for domestic/regional production and consumption not for low-value raw exporting. They can also devote themselves to tourism to the captive Yoruba diaspora. I think you've already mentioned that solid minerals are affected by the worldwide commodity price drops so the gold isn't likely to generate much income in the near-term, but it's about time to reduce raw exporting and move up the value chain in any way possible. Pair these steps with an injection of debt-funded infrastructure development that employs rural Nigerians and I believe we'll start to see results.

Third, the alternatives to Tinubu & his boys are obvious.

Who are they? Not being funny--I sincerely can't think of any credible candidates.

To whom much is given, much is expected.

My point is that I don't think Tinubu (and the other APC governors were 'given' anything. I think it took serious campaigning, strategizing, trading and some unsavory deals to get into higher elected offices. I don't think 90% of people have the charisma, connections, stamina or competence to run for office and we shouldn't pretend that elections are always won by the virtuous or the brilliant. There are other important factors that contribute to leadership, which is why some people are career civil servants and policy wonks and others go out for the electioneering. It's not easy, bro. If it were, all of us talking on Nairaland could be in Abuja today.

If Tinubu's party is making progress, there would be no need to make references to Bode George, Alao Akala, Kashamu, etc. When your party does well, the opposition isn't relevant until you mess up.

I'm surprised at your idealism here. When Awolowo was in office, he regularly played second-fiddle to Adelabu in the Ibadan area and was not unanimously popular in places like Ilesha either. Did that mean that he or the Action Group had messed up? Social progress in a deeply-damaged place like Nigeria is going to be long and slow and anyone benefitting from the status quo is sure to resist it. That's the reason why convicted drug couriers and vapid jobbers are fighting hard and paying whatever is necessary to remain relevsnt. I don't think that means Tinubu is no good.

Fourth, China's debt to GDP ratio is high but China really isn't the best example of efficient spending since most of its infrastructure is unused. And lets not forget that China holds a large percentage of US Debt. China's holding of US Debt ($1.5T) is approximately 25% of it's own national debt. So China has some fall back. In addition, China leads in industrialization and manufacturing. Nigerian states are borrowing large sums of money, but what are they spending these loans on?

China isn't the best example of efficient spending--quite true. I was using them as an example of highly-developed, debt-funded infrastructure development though. Development that provided employment and enabled the spectacular growth of the private sector. It's far from perfect but I'm quite sure the average Nigerian would take living in Shanghai or Chengdu over Somolu or Yola.

Lets call a spade a spade - states collected free money from the center and borrowed both internally and externally yet are struggling to pay salaries; no improvement in health, infrastructure, education, defence. Where is the money?

I can't speak in those types of generalities. I've seen new roads in Osun, along with the youth employment scheme, free lunches and a free computer tablet for secondary education; significant new real estate and infrastructure development in Ogun; some impressive tourism development in Oyo and Ekiti and all the afore-mentioned advancements in Lagos. Let me stress that this is not good enough. At the same time, I won't pretend as if all the money evaporated into thin air or dissolved into political pockets. Let's find ways to insist on transparent budgeting, borrowing and spending but I can't sign on to wholesale doom and gloom when I can see (slight) progress with my own eyes.

Signing off for a while now--it's late over here but I wanted to make sure I replied.

IlekeHD:


Wow.....slow down please.

I hope that wasn't intended as an insult to my son, shymmex.

Maybe I wasn't clear. I like "batty" as much as any other red-blooded heterosexual man but it's just not my thing on Nairaland. I think Shymexx gives this place a great mix of serious insight, humour (and batty, of course).

Aareonakakanfo:

Haha Awa ma n se yeye dada ni bi bayi

Ko si wahala. Emi na m'an gbadun awada dada lori NL

I'm just saying that most of my posts are long and serious because most of what moves me to post are the longer/more serious questions.

Kats--I have to head out but I will respond to you later.

Aareonakakanfo:
Looool Shymm3x and Iya Agba una no serious

But seriously how do these guys type long comments though la layi n se typist

I can't type this much no matter how much I have to say

Anyhow sha, different strokes for different folks

It's true, sha. GIFs and jokes aren't my lane on NL. I keep the jokes fresh for my friends and I know which clubs to go to if I'm looking for the "Shymexx experience". I try to keep it informative here because I'm honestly shocked at how undereducated many Nigerians are about basic history, economics etc.

IlekeHD:
Do these old members just view NL everyday or is someone signaling you guys to this thread?

The retirement home can get a little boring so I try to scan through Nairaland for interesting topics on a weekly basis. It's a good place to take the social and political temperature of Nigeria.

2Prexious--your knowledge of older Yoruba words is really profound, even though I don't always agree with your interpretations. I've learned and re-verified many things from you so I just wanted to say thanks for sharing!