Throughout Human history, there has never been a paucity of narratives which one way or the other validate the existence of divinity, some superhuman intelligence or cosmic force often fine-tuned, summarised or conceptualized as GOD. Such narratives, together with the tropes and motifs of search, seekership, pilgrimage, losses, upgrade and discoveries embedded within them, have formed the template for the more modern concept of religion and the postmodern concept of spirituality. Today, humans can lay claim to a relationship with the divine either via or without the agency of religion which fact has engendered the possibility of a myriad of expressions including but not limited to mysticism, exhortionism, witchcraft and sorcery, spiritism, and the list is endless.

For the Yorubas, spirituality finds its ouvre from one main source – Olodumare – which the English have roughly glossed as God the almighty or God the creator. This superintelligent force or being has been known to be invisible, invincible and unapproachable, hence His creation of numerous deities forming a pantheon of gods and goddesses which has often expanded to accommodate demigods and deified mortals who have transcended mortality through various acts of self-sacrifice, uncommon heroism and unparalleled ascetism. The pantheon offers the ample opportunity for humans to select a route to the largesse and a leeway from the wrath of Olodumare. Dedication to one or more such deity thus forms the foundation of religion in the Yoruba Spiritual system while, ultimately, belief in and reverence for Olodumare can be equated to the epitome of spirituality. Religions are thus often founded and designed to revolve around certain people who bring, write and interpret the laws of the religion on behalf of the deities while playing major roles in the channeling of communication between the deities and the devotees. These individuals are the priets, shamans and leaders of religious sects in the Yoruba spiritual system- forming alliances, cults and societies where peer-reviews and checks and balances are the order of things.

Yet, just as it is in the trajectory of world spirituality as I earlier hinted, the Yoruba spiritual system is often not bereft of few non-conformist figures who bypass the agency of religion to seek access to the God-head (Olodumare) via unorthodox means often frowned (or marveled) at as the case may be in religious circles. Such mystical personalities are pejoratively referred to as “adahunse” (he who goes it alone) in the Yoruba society. How else would you refer to someone who has broken the mould by refusing to associate and conform to the rituals of religion?

As Oyebola (1980) puts it, a bias often repeated in non-scholarly circles and even among non-initiates, adahunse is a nominal occult practitioner. He seldom offers daily (or a regular seasonal) sacrifice and libation like the babalawo, celebrates the anniversaries of anyone of the igba irunmole like the orisa devotees or attend iledi meetings like the Ogboni. The adahunse only accesses the abode of the divine, often on behalf of clients, on occasion and at will: usually through unconventional means which deepens the legend of such adahunse as a special one, an enigma or even sometimes earning them an outcast status. In comparison with the Christian religion which stipulates five offices of Apostle, Pastor, Prophet, Evangelist and Teacher each domiciled in a ministry but hardly conflated in one official, a church owner who establishes a ‘church’, operates the five ministries (or beyond) without the assistance of any and without recourse to the reviews and edicts of any regulating body in Christendom may be said to be the Christian version of Adahunse. Such personalities dazzle (or annoy) both their congregants and the conventional Christian community with their unusual ways containing in miracles, unconventional teachings and doctrines and in a number of cases, the leaders’ claim to be God.

Adahunse figures pervade Yoruba mythology and even seep through recent history. Many would recall the legends of Ige Adubi, Basorun Gaa, Efunsetan Aniwura and a few today who cannot be mentioned in respect to their right to privacy and to avoid possible litigation on grounds of breach of privacy and slander. Such individuals have been targets of ‘persecution’, assassination attempts and various forms of cancelation as conventional society often deem them dangerous elements with capacity to subvert leadership and societal order. In their defence however, adahunses have conversely often turned out as freedom fighters and liberators who open the people’s eyes to the deceit, half truths, exploitation and subjugation more often perpetrated in religious circles and in the larger society.

The Difference between BABALAWO, ONISEGUN and ADAHUSE?

Johnson K. (2021) African Indigenous Healers and Counseling: A Case study of Babalawo. OSP Journal of Health Care and Medicine 2. HCM-2-129

Oyebola, D.D.O (1980) Traditional Medicine and its Practitioners Among the Yoruba of Nigeria: A Classification. Social Science & Medicine. Part A: Medical Psychology & Medical Sociology, 14(1) Pp 23-29,

Growing up as a Yoruba boy, it has always fascinated me how the same expression is deployed to label the art of worship of God and the art of breeding animals. Theism’s and animal husbandry’s equal claim to the term however leaves a little allowance for categorisation which can be located in polysemy. But this polysemy is only afforded by the latter field – animal husbandry. In Yoruba, the lexico-semantic equivalent of “breed” is “sin”. To say “I breed dogs” either as a pet, for meat or even for sale (which in turn metaphorically returns one to the idea of money or food as meat) is to say “mo n sin aja”. It therefore becomes obvious that the word “sin”, like its English counterpart is a lumped expression which, often in certain contexts or after a little more interrogation, can be unpacked to reveal different dimensions which all stem from the idea of ‘ownership’. In short, the breeder (olusin) owns the animal.

Yet, while theism seems to be free of such demarcation of either breeding for meat or as pet, at least denotatively, it does not take too much struggle to access it connotatively when one takes some time to examine the practices of theistic worshippers in any of the world religions. Besides, if anything, theism retains the idea of ownership and it grudgingly accepts that fact, even though it is designed to present God as the supreme owner of the universe. The way religion proselytising is carried on reveals something akin to an attempt to sell what you own or have bred meticulously. Likewise, the fact of different forms of ‘God’ as presented by Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, and some modern forms of Pantheism and others points at a semblance of different breeds of what is sold.

A deeper interrogation of the Yoruba’s choice of the word “sin” (worship) in connection to God often leads one to the advent of monotheism in Yorubaland. Yoruba historians have always referred to the early Yoruba as polytheistic or pantheistic (taking all the gods as necessarily working together and venerating all, albeit while devoted to one or a few). And the choice word for veneration or worship was “bo (Orisha)” which more faithfully reflects the processes involved in worship – pouring of libations, offering of sacrifices, total subjection even in the face of being ignored or unrecognised for such devotion. At this stage, “sin” was more aptly deployed for a relationship of indebtedness. For instance, to “sin’gba” (sin ogba) meant to serve term as a bond servant usually as a means of repaying some loan or debt; the full payment of which leads to the total freedom of the servant and cessation of the devotion. A slight semantic shift applies for the use of the word in animal husbandry where the human owner is said to own/breed “sin” the animal due to the fact that s/he performs the devotion. After all, the animal mostly only enjoys the services of the human until it is time for it to also serve some purpose – as meat, carrier of burden, a means of exchange and so on. In these two senses interrogated, one thing is clear: to “sin” is to serve with an expectation of some end (both temporally and economically).

Fast forward some decades to the age of hybrid Christianity/Islam among the Yorubas. The worship of God seems to be attached to the provision of the daily bread. In fact, the Yorubas have since found out that embracing the religion was a way of getting access to the world of the European coloniser whose intension in the first lace was to use the religion to gai access into the world and wealth of the African. While many devotees of the monotheistic God worship him for love and in simple wonder about His awesomeness and ethereal mystery, many simply, either covertly or overtly hang on to Him because of the promise of meat. Meat, again in its metaphorical sense, include food, wealth, health, safety, good life and other needs as suggested by the scholar Abraham Marslow. For them, it is more sincere to say they serve God in the sense of “sin Olorun” than worship God in the sense of “bo Olorun”. And being in the majority, their use of language has seeped into the popular consciousness where everyone now ‘serve’ rather than ‘worship’ God. 

*This essay relies heavily on the Sapir-Whorfian Hypothesis (linguistic determinism/relativism) which argues for the fact that the peculiarities of our languages have the ability to determine or largely influence the way we see the world and interact with it.

I had an experience today that widened my perspective on racism and the role of education in correcting the ugly thinking pattern underlying racism.

Some of my high school students started a bedlam while teachers were in a seminar. Shiuts of “Corona Virus” took over the whole place. We rushed out to see what was wrong only to find that a certain Asian salesman (probably Lebanese or Iranian) had come to sell his wares as usual. Unfortunately, the students were almost surrounding him, screaming at him and I suspected that any remonstration from the man would have set off real chaos (God forbid). We immediately reprimanded the kids and promptly apologised to the man and his Nigerian partner.

The crux of this gist is how it made me feel about the few experiences of racism during my brief visits to foreign countries. More so, when we read reports of racial abuse all around. Don’t the abusers feel justified because of the education they have received and the different narratives which consolidates their false sense of superiority, innocence and purity vis-a-vis the victim’s inferiority, sinfulness and guilt?

It struck me really hard that we Africans have concentrated too much on the evils of racism based on a narrative that presents the white as the offenders and the black as victim. We seem to have neglected to teach them that racism can go either way and it’s wrong in either circumstance.

Now that Covid-19 is aboard and some super powers are already selling the narrative that it is the fault of the Chinese – an unfortunate idea, shouldn’t we seize this opportunity to re-evaluate our philosophy about the other and their problems which often become the bases of discrimination and racism?

Plagues can start anywhere and THIS is not the fault of the Chinese.

Olushola OYADIJI.

Each time I read Richard Wright’s classic satire, Native Son, I feel compelled to write particularly about the ‘antiheroic’ hero – Bigger Thomas – for reasons that will surface almost right away in this write up. However, it is pertinent to state at this early point that the real driving force behind the composition of this essay is not so much in the acts and trials of the protagonist (or the controversies generated by his very portrayal) as is in the fact that a novel published as far back as 1940, and set in another clime, can so much capture the present Nigerian situation of 2019. The purpose of the essay is not to celebrate Wright’s timelessness and indisputably faultless artistry or the spacio-temporal transcendence of the novel. Rather, it is an essay about Nigeria, Nigerians and the travails of the Nigerian underprivileged. However, it is apt to abandon this detour and dive headlong into the whirlpool that is Bigger and his Nigerian Nativity.

So, who is Bigger Thomas? Or better put in the predictable choice of diction of the readers, “who the devil is Bigger Thomas”? If I should lay all my cards on the table, my response is going to be double-faced, much like a Siamese twin or a schizophrenic: much like Bigger himself in the confines of his troubled heart. My Bigger Thomas in this essay is both the protagonist of Wright’s novel as well as the Bigger of present-day Nigeria. Actually, I find it hard to dissociate or distinguish one from the other.

Bigger Thomas is the repressed, oppressed, depressed and angry yet expectant and hopelessly hopeful iconic hero of this story. Born African-American in a pre-civil rights southern state of Mississippi, USA and nurtured (maybe tortured actually) in the Northern state of Chicago with all its splendour and overflowing wealth which the black person is forbidden to access, Bigger lives in abject poverty while inherently and inarticulately conscious of the ‘inalienable’ right of all (human) beings to dignity and a good life. Bigger knows, even if he cannot explain, that all human beings, irrespective of race or social class deserves a fair and unhindered access to education, opportunities, rights and the common wealth which the (white American) society has hoarded and systematically priced and prised out of the reach of the downtrodden. The downtrodden (mekunu/talakawas in Nigerian parlance) are thus left with nothing but dreams, yearnings, aspirations and a Darwinian type of competition for the crumbs dropping from the high tables of the rich (whites): which are few and far between.

If Bigger is left with something other than the dreams and struggles, it is anger. This explains the trajectory of Bigger’s life – a journey through anger to self-hate, psychopathy and jail/death which takes flight from the ports of poverty, squalor, domestic violence, lack of education in any reasonable form, aimless living and fear. And if Bigger is to be identified, especially in terms of his Nigerianness, how do we find him? How do we identify him? How can we help him? After all, there is no racial segregation in Nigeria. Yet, Bigger is 75% of the Nigerian population: maybe more. He is faceless, illiterate, hungry and poor – he is only found in the debatable data of the United Nations’ many departments. He has credentials ranging from “living on less than a dollar per day”, “living mostly in villages and slumghettoes of the cities” and you know them.

He is made hungrier by the aroma of food from the exquisite restaurants and the high-windowed kitchens of the rich. He is made angrier by the vain display of obscene wealth of the rich, made inaccessible by the fat vicious-looking dogs and electrified barbed wires on high walls. He is made dumber by the ill-equipped and irregular public schools which he can only struggle to attend on part-time basis. He is made more faithless by the unfaithful religion that festers in the country. He tries to turn to God but is told to forget his materialistic and ‘worldly’ desires and focus on finding pleasures in heaven. His confusion turns to anger when he discovers that the pastor does nothing but pursue and enjoy a world of pleasure, materialism and worldly desires.

The only thing Bigger has is his anger. And to his pleasant dismay, it is a veritable tool. It scares the rich. It is the reason for hiding behind their high walls so that they can enjoy the proceeds of their gluttonous harvest of the common wealth in ‘peace’. So, Bigger uses what he has. He terrorises the rich and the poor alike. He is unreasonable and wicked. He rapes and robs. He kills at the slightest provocation and strangulates when his will is tested. He sometimes even helps the rich, against whom he started the war. He is confused. He is easily bought. He forgets himself and is now driven by only one passion – to become like his oppressor or kill him (or die trying). Bigger’s situation is pitiful, And like the anger and incoherence that defines his early life, Bigger is hard to understand for those who are looking for sensibility. That’s what makes him Bigger Thomas.

The present century, especially the turn of the millennium, has brought with it the feminist ideology simply labelled in many fields as feminism. And feminism has raged on like wildfire. The wildfire metaphor is deliberately and aptly deployed here to capture not only the sense of how ravaging an ideology feminism has been, how much it has dazzled the onlookers and fire fighters alike or how seemingly unstoppable it has been. More interestingly, this metaphor is deployed to paint a picture also of the difficulty of pinning down its source to a certain force of ignition or a location – although the latter subjects itself to easier explanation than the former which keeps an elusive façade. But also, the wildfire metaphor captures a sense of what is burnt as well as what may yet get burnt as wildfires always carry an undesirable prospect of burning more than the human societies would have projected or imagined.  

This essay is however not a pedagogical piece on metaphors. Rather, it is a concentrated peep into the inconvenient fact that the Yoruba society, which prides itself on wisdom and the veneration of women as harbingers of life who are celestially imbued with almost god(dess)-like qualities, somehow secretly (and maybe inadvertently too) deploys language to disallow the woman from being a woman if she must aspire to the highest ideals of the Yoruba culture.

A quick comparison of the various women ‘emancipation’ movements like the Women’s Lib of late 18^th century America, Canada and Europe, the more recent Pussy Riot of 2011AD Russia and even the ancient and agelong Aje sorority of Yorubaland which roughly compares with witchcraft reveals a common goal – to advance the cause of women (universally) and assert the right of the woman to live in freedom and pursue happiness as well as realise her full potential as a female human being. However, there are deeply entrenched biases in Yoruba language that clearly reveal that women are expected, against the spirit of Simone De Beauvior’s (1949) The Second Sex, to either forgo these desires or mutate (maybe metamorphose) into a different kind of specie to attain the recognition which the society bestows on its full-fledged members.

As Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf put it in their classic and widely criticised ‘hypothesis’ which has come to be known in the Linguistic parlance by names like Linguistic Relativism, Linguistic Determinism or the Deficit Hypothesis, people are (forever) at the mercy of the language which has become the vehicle of expression of their culture as they cannot but think, speak and otherwise experience the world outside the boundaries of that code system. Indubitably, long-held and deeply-entrenched expectations and codes of behaviour are stacked for ‘safekeeping’ as well as reference purposes in Yoruba proverbs and axioms. While sets of sayings are reserved for different situations and purposes, there is a level of fascination in this essay with sayings that pretend to praise women but which actually end up reminding them of their inability to reach the level of full personhood that everyone desires and which most – if not all – of their male counterparts achieve by default.

Prominent among such denigrating accolades is the expression “obinrin bii okunrin” which roughly translates as a woman who is just like a man. On the surface, this praise term evokes a sense of pride for a woman who feels respected for being better than just a (an atehinto) woman. A Yoruba woman invariably had to be manlike to be great sine being womanly is tantamount to subjugation and relegation. Being referred to as atehinto is a reminder of the culturally loaded reference to the structure and location of the female genitalia which compels her to pass her urine ‘backwards’ rather than forward like her male counterpart. Another such saying that comes to mind immediately as it is often used to complement the foregoing is “to act like a man”. In other words, women from whom bravery is expected are enjoined to se bii okunrin or se okan akin. Akin is a Yoruba expression for the brave at heart, a warrior or ‘he’ who stands out for some adventurous deed. The use of the “he” preform in the antecedent sentence lays claim to freedom from any gender bias or chauvinism on the author’s part. Rather, a cursory anthropological journey into the Yoruba naming system would reveal that Akin may only be a “he”.

Akin can be semiotically linked to “Kumolu” – another Yoruba name which evokes another saying that a woman would not be named Kumolu except on the ground of some exceptional situation. The reader need not look too far for the exceptional situation as it is simply the lack of or the death of a ‘male’ heir in a family of some nobility. Olu being the heir, the real successor, the real child that bestows pride on the family, every home prays for an Oluomo. The Olu twist brings in another interesting angle to the narrative when one considers the morphological make-up of words like “Oluwa” (God/Lord), “Oluse” (doer) et cetera. In short, a woman is not linguistically catered for in the world of the active and great. No woman is addressed as “my Lord” in the Yoruba culture except she has stripped herself of or been forcefully stripped of the ‘limiting’ female garb in order to effectively become relevant in positions of Lordship like a regent (interim king) or an acting General of an army.

This essay should not conclude without once again establishing the fact that the woman in Yoruba culture has her place. However, her place is to be located in softness, beauty and grace – concepts and virtues which are not essentially the loftiest in the order of greatness among which bravery, royalty, sacrifice, wisdom and heroism rank the highest. A woman who aspires to such virtues as these must become (like) a man, sometimes literally having to dress up, talk and act (like) a man in order to be a true obinrin bii okunrin, a heroic, liberated woman – probably a mutated specie of woman.

For Further Reading, see:

De Beauvior, Simone. 1971. The Second Sex. Alfred Knopf

Mead, Margaret. 1949. Male and Female: A Study of the Sexes in a Changing World. Harpercollings

www.yorupedia.com (for Yoruba words)

Figures:                         

Pussy Riot (credit: http://www.wikipedia.com)                    A Yoruba Witch (Credit pinterest.com)

Women’s Lib demonstration, Washington DC, 1970. (www.wikipedia.com)

Female Yoruba Regents (www.nairaland.com)

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton