Borgu, Northern Nigeria, and Yoruba History

By Farooq A. Kperogi My December 21, 2024, column titled “ Kemi Badenoch’s Yoruba Identity Meets Inconvenient Truths ,” where I set out to ...

By Farooq A. Kperogi

My December 21, 2024, column titled “Kemi Badenoch’s Yoruba Identity Meets Inconvenient Truths,” where I set out to show that, contrary to Kemi Badenoch’s claim, the Yoruba and the “North” have had and still have a lot in common, hurt the ethnic susceptibilities of many Yoruba nationalists who misunderstood me as creating a hierarchy of historical and cultural dominance in which the Yoruba are inferior.

That was not what my column was about. If it comes across that way, it’s because people are gazing at the past with the lenses of the present. Historians call that presentism. Presentism animates the sort of defensive, ahistorical, knee-jerk, decontextualized, and emotive reactions that some people gave to my column.

Notions of collective identity with definite ethnographic boundaries are relatively new all over the world. I made this clear to Dr. Lasisi Olagunju who wrote a 3,526-word response to my column last Monday in which he cherry-picked evidence from the self-comforting presentist fantasies of certain Yoruba historians to countermine my arguments. Here’s my response to his response.

Dr. Olagunju took issue with my restating of a well-known, uncontested socio-historical fact: that “Yoruba,” the collective name for the people of western Nigeria, is an exonym that traces etymological provenance from what is now called northern Nigeria and that it originally referred only to people from Oyo, not other subgroups such as Ijebu, Ondo, Ijesa, Egba, etc.

It explains why Oba Sikiru Adetona, the Awujale of Ijebuland, still says the Ijebu are not Yoruba and are not even descendants of Oduduwa. It also explains why, as I pointed out in my October 26, 2019 column titled “Fulani and Origin of the Names ‘Yoruba’ and ‘Yamuri’,” Nigeria’s first modern newspaper, called Iwe Irohin fun awon Egba ati Yoruba (Yoruba for “newspaper for the Egba and Yoruba people”) indicated from its name that the Egba and the Yoruba were different ethnic groups who nonetheless belonged to the same linguistic group.

In other words, as of 1859 when the newspaper was set up, the Egba didn’t call themselves “Yoruba.”

That the name Yoruba is an exonym from the North of Nigeria for the people of Oyo is so settled in the literature that I am befuddled that anyone would contest it with mere implausible conjectures and self-created oral histories.

For example, in his 1984 article titled “Yoruba Ethnic Groups or a Yoruba Ethnic Group? A Review of the Problem of Ethnic Identification” published in África: Revista do Centro de Estudos Africanos, Professor Biodun Adediran argued that the term Yoruba wasn’t native to Yoruba and was, in fact, a word first used for Oyo people by northerners.

He said, “the term first appeared in Arabic sources and in European accounts based on information from the Hausa country,” arguing “It was probably the Hausa who first gave the name ‘Yarribah’ to their Yoruba-speaking neighbours. Since the Oyo were the sub-group the Hausa came most frequently in contact with, the name easily became synonymous with ‘Oyo’” (p. 62).

Adeniran also argued that the term "Yoruba" initially remained confined to "the dictionary of those who invented it" (p. 63) and gained broader use only in the early 19th century due to increased interactions between the Yoruba and their northern neighbors. During this period, local wars fostered sub-group pride, leading many non-Oyo groups to reject "Yoruba" as a foreign name.

It was only toward the end of the century, when Europeans insisted on its use and referred to the Alaafin as the King of the Yoruba, that even the Oyo (to whom the name originally referred) began to embrace the term (p. 63).

In his 2019 book, Partitioned Borgu: State, Society and Politics in a West African Border Region, Dr. Hussaini Abdu investigated it further and found that the Hausa themselves borrowed the term Yariba (or versions of it) from the Baatonu people of Borgu, known to the Yoruba as Bariba, Baruba, or Ibariba, who are Oyo’s northwestern neighbors. The Baatonu, as I argued before, refer to the Oyo people as "Yoru" (singular) and "Yorubu" (plural), with "Yoruba" used in third-person references.

Abdu traces the name's spread to Songhai-Borgu interactions, later reinforced by interviews with Baatonu slaves in Sierra Leone and popularized through European travelers and missionary records, such as Samuel Johnson's 19th-century writings. This theory aligns with the historical and cultural links between Songhai, Borgu, and Oyo, including the spread of Islam to both Borgu and Yoruba land by Songhai-speaking Mande from ancient Mali, reflected in the Yoruba term for Islam, "imale."

This is consistent with collective naming practices all over the world. Immediate neighbors typically name each other, which others then adopt. Olagunju cited the examples of “Hausa” (which came from the Songhai) and “Fulani,” which came from the Hausa.

The older Hausa name for Yoruba people was Ayagi (see my August 19, 2022, article titled “‘Ayagi’”: Earliest Nupe-Influenced Hausa Name for Yoruba People” based on my review of Professor Rasheed Olaniyi’s work), not Yariba, which strengthens Abdu’s research about the Borgu origins of the name Yoruba.

Of course, Katanga, the name of the old capital of the Oyo Empire was, according to Professor Stefan Reichmuth, the “Hausa name for Old Qyo,” adding, “This term which might even be originally a stranger's name of northern origin was in the late nineteenth century coming to be accepted as an overall 'national' name not only by the Oyo themselves but by other related groups as well.” (p.157).

However, in his 1934 book titled A Hausa-English Dictionary and English-Hausa Vocabulary, G.P. Bargery defined Katanga as the Hausa word for a “wall of a house or compound” (p. 583).

Well, in their 2015 article titled “'Lucumi, 'Terranova', and The Origins of the Yoruba Nation,” published in The Journal of African History, Henry B. Lovejoy and Olatunji Ojo point out that all the collective names by which the Yoruba people were known are exonyms. They also agree that “Yoruba” came from the North.

Most importantly, they found that the term "Yoruba" does not appear in European slave records, slave-owner documents, or early self-references by the Yoruba people themselves before the 19th century. So, Olagunju’s argument that Baatonu people might have imitated the name from Oyo people whose Alaafin sought refuge in their land seems highly unlikely.

Yoruba isn’t the only exonym by which the “Yoruba” people were known. A common name in slave records that historians have found is “Lucumi” (or Lukumi). Lovejoy and Ojo found that while the term could mean "my friend" in Yoruba, or "female lover" or "concubine" in the Owo dialect, it was the name Bini people called people in eastern Yorubaland.

They said it originated as a pejorative Edo term for foreigners, likely slaves, who spoke unintelligible languages, including Yoruba. In Edo, they pointed out, oluku means "young animal," while mi or mie translates as "that" or "to have." The term’s dual meanings in Yoruba and Edo, they said, suggest an ironic basis for its later identity formation.

"Nagô," a self-appellation of the Anago subgroup of Yoruba, became the dominant term in Brazil for enslaved Yoruba speakers. Fon-speaking Dahomeans adapted this term as "Anagonu" to refer broadly to Yoruba-speaking groups (p. 355)

"Aku," derived from the Yoruba greeting "eku," was also used to identify Yoruba-speaking recaptives in Sierra Leone following British anti-slavery efforts in the early 19th century.

Nonetheless, as I pointed out in my 2019 column, which Lovejoy and Ojo supported with more scholarly evidence, the people of Western Nigeria aren’t called “Yoruba” today because the Borgu people called them so, or because they were identified by a version of that name by Songhai, Hausa, and Fulani people. They self-identify as “Yoruba” precisely because returnee slaves of Yoruba descent chose the name, popularized it, and encouraged people in the region to embrace it. More significantly, though, it was because colonialists insisted on it even when other subgroups protested its imposition.

To put it cheekily for Kemi Badenoch, the same Europeans who stitched the North and South together to form Nigeria were the ones who insisted on calling her Ondo and Ijebu kin “Yoruba,” a northern label originally meant for the Oyo, a group her people weren’t even part of. Oh, the irony!

Dr. Olagunju reproduced passages from his favorite Yoruba nationalist historians to dispute specific claims about Borgu’s immersion in Oyo’s history but dismissed the claims of the well-regarded Akinwumi Ogundiran's well-received book, The Yoruba: A New History, which supported some of my claims, as suspect because he “did not cite any authority to back this claim.”

Never mind Dr. Olagunju’s unsupported claim that I. A. Akinjogbin said Borgu was under Oyo “until 1783.” Well, he made no such statement. What he actually wrote was that Oyo’s “tributaries included at least parts of the Nupe and the Bariba countries” (p. 450). How “parts of” a territory paying tribute translates to the entire country being under Oyo’s rule is beyond me.

Nonetheless, later Yoruba historians have challenged the exaggerated narratives of Oyo’s rule and reach and undermined claims such as Akinjogbi’s and the predecessors that inspired him. For example, Professor Olayemi Duro Akinwumi, in a 1992 article titled “The Oyo-Borgu Military Alliance of 1835: A Case Study in the Pre-Colonial Military History published in Transafrican Journal of History wrote:

“The extent of the Old Oyo Kingdom had been a subject of debate among the professional and non-professional historians. Crowder, for example, had given the impression that Oyo at its peak of glory extended far and wide to cover north, south, west and east of the kingdom…. Among the states incorporated into the Kingdom was Benin on the east, and Dahomey on the west. Samuel Johnson (1960:179) went further by including a portion of Nupe, Borgu and Dahomey. It is now certain that the Kingdom did not embrace all the Yoruba and the non-Yoruba states as claimed by many authors” (p. 160).

Dr. Olagunju doubted that the bashoruns of the Oyo empire were of Borgu origins even when Professor Ogundiran pointed it out in his book. Well, they were more than bashoruns. According to Professor Babatunded Agiri, whom Dr. Olagunju quoted in his response to me, “This process, by which the earliest Yoruba dynasties lost their political power to an invading Borgawa group, is also found in the Save area (now in Dahomey).

"Here the invasion probably took place sometime in the seventeenth century or slightly earlier. That the ruling dynasty in Old Oyo was non-Yoruba is also supported by the existence of a relic of an extinct (and probably Yoruba) dynasty in the lineage of the Basorun” (see “Early Oyo History Reconsidered” by Babatunde Agiri, History in Africa, 1975, p.7).

Agiri also pointed out that, “The Oranyan dynasty was from Borgu and the traditions of its origin in Old Oyo emphasize this link. The conquest of Old Oyo by the Borgawa dynasty must have occurred well before the fifteenth century” and that Borgu “established satellite dynasties in the Yoruba towns in the area, including Oyo, replacing the former Nupe influence there” (p. 10).

He said Alaafin Abipa owed his success in reestablishing his dynasty at Old Oyo to the large following of warriors from Borgu who accompanied him and that some of these warriors were rewarded for their services by being permitted to replace the rulers of some former Yoruba settlements such as Kishi, Igboho, and Igbeti.

“Others became rulers of new settlements like Ogbomoso, located in strategic areas to guard the state against further Nupe incursions. Thus, the post-Igboho period witnessed another influx of Borgu men and blood among the Oyo but, as with the earlier conquerors, their descendants have been absorbed completely into Yoruba culture-a culture which probably expressed a broad continuity with the earliest inhabitants,” he wrote (p. 10).

However, in his 1985 article, “How Many Times Can History Repeat Itself,” Professor Robin Law argued that the Alaafins of Oyo were of Borgu origin. He dismissed the idea that these rulers were returning Oyo refugees, labeling it a stereotypical narrative used to legitimize foreign rule.

Instead, Law suggested a Borgu conquest, noting that several northern Yoruba towns, including Saki, Kisi, Igbeti, Igboho, and Ogbomoso, had royal dynasties of Borgu descent. He linked the foundation of Igboho to a significant influx of Borgu settlers, who likely introduced cavalry, enabling them to dominate northern Yorubaland despite their small numbers.

Law also questioned the traditional timeline, proposing that the Borgu dynasty’s arrival at Igboho could predate the 16th century (p. 47), which annihilates the notion that Borgu could ever be a tributary state of Oyo, especially because there is not a single ruling dynasty in all of Borgu that traces ancestry to Yoruba.

All that this shows is that the Yoruba and the North have always been intertwined since precolonial times. That’s not a reason to force a union of the people or to deny anyone the prerogative to take pride in their ethnic or regional identity. It’s merely to set the records straight.

Related Articles:

Kemi Badenoch’s Yoruba Identity Meets Inconvenient Truths

Fulani and Origin of the Names “Yoruba” and “Yamuri”

“Ayagi”: Earliest Nupe-Influenced Hausa Name for Yoruba People