Ooni of Ife: In The Storm Of Strange Historical Eruptions |•By Akoko Olufe
Ugly and unwarranted circumstances surround the Ooni of Ife in recent times. Lots of very discomforting verbiages too! They come in eruptive manners making the metaphor of eruptive volcanoes most fitting to describe them. Volcanoes are violent, poisonous, destructive and chaotic. Wherever a volcanic incident occurs unquantifiable damages in human and material terms are recorded. So, volcanoes are an anathema because they unsettle, disrupt and disorganise natural locations and human arrangements. Unfortunately they are a part of nature, and, so humans must continually deal with them.
What makes the metaphor of volcanic eruptions fitting for the ugly scenarios in which the Ooni of Ife is being unabatedly cast is not just the eruptive nature of volcanoes. The metaphor has bearings with the many forms of the ugly circumstances, the uneasy silence and the cracks on the surface of the long settled earth crust that precede eruptions of volcanoes; to these we must add the stormy nature of volcanoes; it’s poisonous emissions and the forceful damage and alterations to nature. Volcanic Eruptions are of types.
Hawaiian Eruptions,
Strombolian Eruptions,
Vulcanian Eruptions,
Sub-Plinian Eruptions,
Plinian Eruptions, and
Ultra-Plinian Eruptions are the well known forms.
It seems the possibility of these destructive eruptive phenomena had been anticipated by our ancestors who invented a special invocation for the security of the oneness of the Yoruba that the position of the Ooni represents. Here is the invocation in its raw form: han gba yikiti kan to erin, han se gidigba kan to Efon; Kan ni bu kan ni iro gbogbogbo lowo n yo ju ori. The points of emphasis in this Yoruba axiomatic invocation are that no human can wish into their personal self-existence the robustness and largeness of an elephant; no human wishes into their self-existence the muscular hugeness of a buffalo; whichever way the measurement is done, the arm will remain forever longer than the head.
Several instances and moments in the life of the Yoruba people have proven the efficacy of this invocation and the truism in its axiomatic bent. Those of revisionists of Yoruba history are just one. But for whom is this invocation meant? Those who are properly brought up culturally and historically know that it is for the Ooni of Ife and not Ooni Adeyeye Enitan Ogunwusi Ojaja II. To reduce the foremost traditional political stool of the Yoruba people to its past or incumbent occupant is to suffer from the myopia of the immensity of Yoruba history and intricate patterning of Yoruba traditions. So many of such sufferers of this myopia! The worst and most appalling are from the Yoruba traditional rulers. I mean the very few ignoramuses among them. I speak of this category of our Obas with all sense of modesty but with that of responsibility that a social criticism of this nature demands.
What is the Ooni of Ife and who is its occupant? These two interwoven questions have posed a great challenge to many, leaving them confused, angered and agitated. Yet a few have provided answers that are largely satisfactory. Thanks to the authors of the satisfactory answers. However, some salient additions are necessary. This is because it has become evident that history and traditions still count for the reconstruction of the Yoruba social world and reformulation of the bases of their political practices in contemporary times.
So what is the Ooni stool? It is the essence of the Yoruba unity and the basis of Yoruba cultural formation and formulations. Without it, the Yoruba won’t evaporate from the surface of the earth but their sense of historical oneness and cultural integrity will. They will exist of course but without the golden pole to which their history and traditions that give them wholeness and wholesome identity up until today are anchored.
And so who is an Ooni? An Ooni is that person assigned the role of operating the apparatuses of the throne by which the Yoruba philosophy, history and traditions are ULTIMATELY made meaningful, useful and productive.
This deeper level of understanding of the person of an Ooni is what eludes many leading to their delusion. Too many of such deluded individuals focus on the genealogy of the occupant of the stool rather than its strategic placement within the complex of Yoruba social and political existence.
By the way, how correct are their assertions about the ‘what’ and ‘who’ of the stool?
In Ife origin history is held sacred and genealogy is treated with caution. This is the reason many do not know that the Ooni is Oduduwa in absential and at the same time more than that representation in absential. When mythical Oduduwa is said to be the father of all the Yoruba, those who enjoy tracing their genealogy to Oduduwa should learn that the Yoruba family tree with its firm roots in Ile-Ife branches out into more than Oduduwa. But our forefathers learned a long time to sum up to a convenient unit complex formations and formulations. That’s why within lineages, there are families that, if seriously examined genealogically, are eternally unrelated. This is a very advanced philosophy on which our ancestors sustained the life they lived for eons, which was bequeathed to us, but which the revisionists of Yoruba history threaten to dismantle with reckless abandon. Who says this is in our ‘omoluabi’ philosophy?
•Akoko Olufe