The king’s bards of ancient times, the royal historians, are no more. The men who profess to know anything of our [Ìjẹ?>̀bú-Yorùbá] history are hampered by the political happenings of our day.Footnote 1
– T. O. Ogunkoya (1956)
This [online] broadcast is created to promote Yorùbá history and traditions… so that foreigners may not be the ones to write our history and that neither the Fulani nor the Ìgbò would take our land or erase our history.Footnote 2
– Ààrẹ Òpìtàn Ìbàdàn (Chief historian of Ìbàdàn), Laji Abbas (2022)
Introduction
In a Facebook video recorded on 27 July 2021, the Ààrẹ Ọ̀nà Kakanfò Yorùbá, Otunba Ganiyu Adams, addressed members of the Oodua People’s Congress, a Yorùbá nationalist organization, on the steps that he had taken to facilitate the release of political activist, Sunday Adeyemo. The latter was detained in the Benin Republic on 19 July 2021 at the request of the Nigerian government for leading protests across southwest Nigeria demanding a sovereign Yorùbá nation and an end to Fulani aggression in Yorùbá territories. At a point in the address, Adams cited oral traditions about a few past Ààrẹ Ọ̀nà Kakanfò while fiercely condemning the Ààrẹ Òpìtàn Ilẹ?>̀ Ìbàdàn (chief historian of Ìbàdàn) Laji Abbas over a claim that the latter made in a live-streamed Facebook video on 13 July 2021.Footnote 3 In the 13 July video, Abbas explained how the title of “Ààrẹ Ọ̀nà Kakanfò” was, according to history, occupied by the “head of guards” of Aláàfin Ọ̀yọ?>́ (Ruler of Ọ̀yọ?>́) and for that reason, no Ààrẹ Ọ̀nà Kakanfò in the post-independence period, including Adams, could be more relevant than any ọba (a monarch; typically the ruler of a town) in Yorùbáland.Footnote 4 Abbas had also grounded his arguments in the 13 July broadcast in the same oral traditions that Adams would use in the 27 July rebuttal, albeit rendered with different historical claims. In Adams’s view, his title is equivalent to “commander at arms of all Yorùbá peoples” and not simply “head of guards” to Aláàfin Ọ̀yọ?>́.Footnote 5 Almost immediately after Adam’s 27 July response, Abbas live-streamed an equally fiery response on Facebook re-emphasizing his initial interpretations of the title, admonishing Adams and Yorùbá netizens not to confuse “traditions based on myth” with “genuine traditions” that are “verifiable with documentary evidence.”Footnote 6 By December 2022, videos of the three exchanges between Abbas and Adams had attracted hundreds of thousands of views and commentaries on social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Clubhouse, and WhatsApp. Yorùbá netizens in Nigeria and abroad also responded to the exchanges with numerous videos.
This contestation over historical accuracies in Yorùbá oral traditions and the right to perform epistemic power, pitching a homespun historian (Abbas) against a major Yorùbá chieftain (Adams) on social media with Yorùbá netizens – elders, royal bards, monarchs, clerics, poets, high school students, college students, market women, and politicians – acting as consumers and interlocutors, represent a new frontier for history negotiation.Footnote 7 Such conversations are transforming social media platforms into the new loci where the urge to perform cyber patriotism toward a national or ethnic cause compels netizens and cyber homespun historians (CHHs) – homespun historians who use social media as the primary channel for engaging in discussions on history – to infuse ethnonationalism sentiments into conversations about Yorùbá oral traditions.Footnote 8 Almost in the same manner that European netizens are recently identified to be utilizing social media for memory activism through the “sharing and disseminating of alternative knowledge about a contested past,” netizens protesting Yorùbá marginalization and demanding an independent Yorùbá nation are also converging around Yorùbá CHHs for political activism.Footnote 9
This article stems from a study of 42 social-media-focused Yorùbá CHHs, both professional and self-professed. The study was particularly interested in how they research and present oral traditions on social media. I examine their research and presentation approaches in context of the political priorities expressed by Yorùbá netizens on Yorùbá-focused social media discussion forums. I consequently weigh the possible continuities and discontinuities that these approaches (by CHHs) and political priorities (by netizens) could have on how Yorùbá oral traditions progresses in the age of Facebook and Clubhouse community formation. One of the central conclusions of this study is that while oral traditions are usually influenced by politics, which trigger changes in their rendition over time, two factors make this change different in the social media metaverse in contrast to the off-internet world. The first relates to an unprecedented level of speed with which a specific tradition gets modified over numerous times on social media as a result of the rapid and consistent influx of new contaminants. The speed at which these contaminants (ethnicist, religious, nationalists, etc.) move across social media and reaches an unprecedented number of people at the same time makes new information that could alter “facts” in an oral tradition available at a rate that human communications have never experienced. The second concerns the presence of cyber archival footprints produced by netizens and CHHs in the form of posts, comments, videos, and so on, which allows for greater efficiency in tracking the factors that shape an oral tradition over time. These two qualities influencing oral traditions on social media platforms are absent – in their current form – before the invention of the internet. The presence of such new factors, among several others discussed in this article, are reasons why mainstream academic historians – those employed in institutions of higher education – should consider showing greater interest in the role that social media is playing in how people perform, interpret, and deploy oral traditions for political causes.
How oral traditions are discussed on the internet sharply contrasts with the obsolete assumption that “once oral traditions are recorded and published, all variant traditions are extinguished in favor of the published version.”Footnote 10 Instead, the recasting of Yorùbá oral traditions across social media conforms with the currently dominant view in scholarship that suggests “old narratives” and “new contaminants” are constantly in conflict, causing a tradition to change through time and space. David Henige established this fact in 1982 when he concluded that oral data, in general, “continuously adopt and adapt whatever new, relevant and interesting materials come their way.”Footnote 11 This article argues that the resistance against Yorùbá marginalization in Nigeria and the push for a sovereign Yorùbá nation are the two most peculiar new materials/contaminants colliding with old narratives, which is engendering the production of new variants of specific traditions.
The nature of Yorùbá oral traditions recast on social media are so malleable that the typologies of oral traditions identified by Jan Vansina (formulae, poetry, lists, tales, commentaries), Philip Curtin (formal, informal, and personal recollections), and others after them are collapsed into two dominant archetypes.Footnote 12 The first are traditions rendered to propagate Yorùbá exceptionalism – the excellence of Yorùbá culture. The second are traditions that push for Yorùbá unity and sovereignty. During the course of listening to and participating in dozens of Clubhouse rooms, WhatsApp groups, Twitter spaces, Facebook groups, and YouTube livestreams between February 2021 and December 2022, I asked 37 netizens about their motivations for engaging in conversations on these platforms. Of this group, 17 mentioned how useful they find social media to be a safe space for properly understanding the Nigerian government’s privileging of the Fulani over the Yorùbá; 13 consider their participation to be a way of rekindling cultural and ethnic pride as Yorùbá; 5 came into the forums seeking guidance in their journeys to spiritual renewal in the Yorùbá religion. The story of two female netizens, Bola Salis (alias Àwòko) and Olayemi Adewunmi (alias Òwúrubutu), reflects that of several other female netizens I interviewed. At the time of the interview, 40-year-old Àwòko was co-administrator of the Àwùjọ Ọmọ Yorùbá channel on Clubhouse and resided in London. She invites Yorùbá CHHs to the channel and occasionally leads conversations relating to Yorùbá nation agitation. 45-year-old Òwúrubutu is a presenter with Sweet 107.1 FM Abeokuta and the Yorùbá Broadcasting Network, an online television station. Unlike Àwòko, Òwúrubutu lives in Lagos. The latter equally works with Yorùbá CHHs to teach oral traditions on her programs.Footnote 13 Apart from their drive for an independent Yorùbá nation, Àwòko desires a renewal of faith in the Yorùbá religion. For Òwúrubutu, it is about promoting Yorùbá excellence to her listeners. Individuals like these two married women defy gender like these two married women defy gender and other sociocultural boundaries by risking their lives, leading pro-Yorùbá nation agitations on social media. Netizens like Àwòko and Òwúrubutu are synchronously coexisting with Yorùbá CHHs as interlocutors in ethnonationalism-influenced dialectics about Yorùbá oral traditions. In turn, the dialectics are creating syntheses in the nature of new historical interpretations of oral traditions and influencing how netizens imagine real-life political issues.
While mainstream history scholarship continues to be largely inaccessible to a significant demographic of the Yorùbá public owing to the usage of esoteric academic language in history writing and the high prices of monographs and journal articles, Yorùbá CHHs are bringing history and oral traditions to the same public using the plainest vernaculars without price tags in the open world of social media. The Nigerian literary scholar Pius Adesanmi rightly predicts that in these “Twitter and Facebook years,” the ability of players such as Yorùbá CHHs to assert epistemic power on sources of knowledge such as oral traditions stand to put “the writer and the scholar… light-years behind the… street.”Footnote 14 Presently, the imaginary street Adesanmi points to is in the form of Facebook groups, Twitter spaces, Clubhouse rooms, etc. Among the Yorùbá public, the history buildings in that imaginary street are controlled by epistemic power-wielding Yorùbá CHHs. To ignore the latter’s impact is to dismiss the knowledge shaping the street’s understanding of history, and, in effect, to lose track of how oral traditions are changing in the social media age. Not all Yorùbá CHHs should be considered as amateur historians who lack the sophistication to scientifically appreciate history. They should be seen as more than informants and considered as “fellow travelers” on the path to reconstructing Africa’s past. Studying CHHs can aid mainstream academic historians in understanding how the African public are engaging the past in the present.Footnote 15 Thomas Spear recognized this potential in 1981 when he observed that if mainstream academic historians can treat oral traditions as history, then they could benefit from seeing traditional oral historians – including CHHs – as “colleagues in the practice of a common craft.”Footnote 16
Politicized Traditions
To suggest that ethnonationalism contaminants are guiding conversations about Yorùbá oral traditions on social media should not be strange. The Asian American historian Mae Ngai recognizes in her appraisal of Benedict Anderson that “literature on nations and nationalism has shown us not only that nations are… historically produced ‘imagined communities’” but that there is a “powerful influence that nationalism has had on the writing [and speaking] of history.”Footnote 17 This contemplation has bewildered historians of Africa as well. In 1953, historian John Fage and social anthropologist David Tait, both of the newly established University College of the Gold Coast, set out to understand “the nature of the problems involved in the recording and interpretation of oral traditions” in the colony’s Northern Territories.Footnote 18 In the process, they observed that the oral traditions given to them by members of the Mamprusi had elements that reinforced the idea that the Mamprusi were the ancestral parents of communities such as Dagomba and several smaller Mole-Dagbane communities. Such historical premonition of sovereign dominance by one community over others was a consequence of the politics of the time, considering this was the height of independence agitations in French Togo and British Gold Coast. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, anthropologists and historians sensed a similar problem in African oral traditions. For example, in a 1973 study of how Fante oral traditions related to colonial rule, David Henige noted that the Fante’s desire for power led them to conjure traditions that had no basis in their history. The Fante, he observes, used European sources, many of which contained factual errors, to create “traditions to fit every contingency.”Footnote 19 Also, while investigating the role of political propaganda in the production of oral traditions among the Yorùbá in 1973, Robin Law suggests, in similarity with Henige, that between the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, Yorùbá rulers and early homespun historians modified oral traditions “to serve changing political functions.”Footnote 20 Elsewhere in 1977, historian Magbaily Fyle noticed the same problem as Fage and Tait, Henige, and Law while collecting oral traditions among the Yalunka (Dialonké), Kuranko, Limba, and Temne communities of Sierra Leone.Footnote 21 In 1985, anthropologists in South Africa set out to compile pre-colonial Swazi oral traditions collected by different state agencies between the 1960s and the early 1980s due to the rapid evaporation of Swazi elders. The anthropologists had hoped to launch a project that would preserve “pre-colonial” Swazi oral traditions by storing all the collected recordings at the Lobamba National Archives. They realized that the politically toned history programs broadcasted on radio stations across Swaziland in the years leading up to the 1980s must have strongly shaped “the historical conceptions of the Swazi people.”Footnote 22 Similar observations continue to emerge from the 1980s onward.Footnote 23 Likewise, legal historians of colonial Africa have, to varying degrees, encountered the same politically motivated changes in oral traditions as a source for customs codification.Footnote 24 Karin Barber’s Reference Barber1991 work on praise poetry noted similar influence of written sources on oral sources in her 1991 anthropological study of Òkukù town in southwest Nigeria.Footnote 25 Meanwhile, the interest in looking at the internet’s role in the evolution of oral traditions has yet to gain significant attention from historians. This deficiency leaves a major gap in how historians could potentially inspect the role of politics in the life of oral traditions. Donald Ritchie brought this fact to attention in the preface to the 2014 reprint of his seminal work, Doing Oral History, suggesting “the internet has left us no excuses of parochialism” and that oral history – and, by extension, oral tradition – could improve the already “greater voice” given “to those who had been marginalized in historical [and political] narratives.”Footnote 26 The utilization of social media by Yorùbá CHHs and netizens to reject the political marginalization of their ethnicity exemplifies Ritchie’s point.
There is a growing number of scholars across the humanities and social sciences who are using newer techniques to extract oral sources in digital spaces.Footnote 27 Others have suggested how to archive such sources.Footnote 28 One of the most interesting conversations in this regard is happening in the digital humanities where scholars are looking at the intersection of oral sources, memory, and politics on social media. A worthy mention is James Yékú, whose work suggests that Nigerian netizens – and by default, Yorùbá netizens – perform “subversive” and “anti-establishment” attitudes against the Nigerian state by using “trickstoid” characters extracted from oral and mythic traditions as cyber conduits.Footnote 29 Orli Fridman calls these performances “mnemonic tactic,” which also moderatly correlates with Hongmei Li’s idea of “evil joking” among Chinese netizens who are resisting the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarianism (Figure 1, 2).Footnote 30 For Yékú, social media, one of the modern “technologies of power,” is giving Nigerians the agency to self-represent by using satiric, comic, and direct speeches, whether written or contained in graphics, to convey anxieties and criticisms of the “corrupt and oppressive” state.Footnote 31 Indeed, for Yorùbá CHHs and political activists elsewhere, social media is not only a space for mediating politically charged public discourses, but it is also a tool for influencing the public’s view of the past for the purpose of pushing a political agenda, oftentimes to the benefit of marginalized and minoritized communities.
Screenshots of Clubhouse rooms of three Yorùbá-focused channels showing conversations on Yorùbá oral traditions and sovereignty. Photo credit: Author via Clubhouse.
Ààrẹ Laji Abbas (left) interviewing members of the Toki Onibudo royal family at the latter’s ancestral house in Ìbàdàn in April 2022. Photo credit: Ìtàn Yorùbá via YouTube.
Making the Yorùbá Cyber Homespun Historian
In the 22 months spent observing conversations about oral traditions across 32 Yorùbá-history-focused social media forums, I noticed that several of the Clubhouse, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and YouTube forums are created and moderated by Yorùbá CHHs. This section of the article considers the sophistication of Yorùbá CHHs’ process of historical inquiry and how it links with their ability to influence the recasting of oral traditions in these forums. The sophistication that I observed slightly departs from Derek Peterson and Giacomo Macola’s 2009 observation that African homespun historians “did not work in universities, and they were not working to prefabricated academic patterns.”Footnote 32 These two features correctly describe some Yorùbá homespun historians of the pre-twenty-first-century, including Samuel Crowther, Moses Adeyemi, Olympus Moore, Isaac Akinyele, Moses Okubote, and Samuel Johnson, just as it correctly applies to their counterparts elsewhere in Africa such as Petros Lamula (Zulu), Vilho Kaulinge (Kwanyama), and Harry Nkumbula (Ila). Contemporary Yorùbá CHHs also do not work in universities; only 14 of the 42 consulted even have undergraduate degrees, with just one earning it in history. Meanwhile, some of the methodologies of historical inquiry or the so-called “prefabricated patterns” that might be considered exclusive to mainstream academic historians, are noticeable among Yorùbá CHHs as well. These patterns manifest in three phases.
First, the average Yorùbá CHH demonstrates a strong understanding of primary sources’ relevance to constructing and making claims about historical accuracy, particularly as it concerns oral traditions. They are familiar with visual, oral, and textual forms of evidence. About one-third of the 42 Yorùbá CHHs are deeply familiar with the existence of written documentary sources on the Yorùbá from pre-early-modern-era traveler accounts to post-fifteenth-century Arabic and Ajami manuscripts, and British colonial records. Open-access digitized archives, mainly in the form of government gazettes, missionary journals, explorer accounts, and newspapers, are popular among Yorùbá CHHs. They find such primary sources on Google Books, Internet Archive, Scribd, and other relatively open online repositories. Of the 42 Yorùbá CHHs, 32 confirm to have used at least one of these platforms more than ten times to find sources between February 2021 and August 2022; and 6 had, at some point, derived primary sources from subscription-based platforms such as Journal Storage, HathiTrust, and ProQuest, occasionally through associates affiliated with academic institutions. While all 42 Yorùbá CHHs mentioned that they visited such repositories in the past, only 6 had visited at least one brick-and-mortar archive – the Nigerian National Archives in Ibadan – to find primary sources within the same 18-month period. I asked all to list 10 secondary sources on the Yorùbá offhand without prompt. Of the 42 Yorùbá CHHs, 11 could mention between 8 and 10 secondary sources, while others were generally able to mention 2 or more. Although these distributions suggest that Yorùbá CHHs do not extensively engage physical archives and secondary sources, which starkly contrasts with mainstream academic historians, many among the Yorùbá CHHs are nonetheless astute in providing “presumed” justifications and evidence for the claims they make when narrating oral traditions. The “accuracy” of those claims is an entirely different debate.
Some differences in methodology separate Yorùbá CHHs from mainstream academic historians. When consulting written sources, most Yorùbá CHHs confirmed that they consider the publication year of such source as the most crucial determiner of its ability to convey “historical accuracy,” i.e., the older a book, the greater its dependability. Bukola Adeleke, a historian and a playwright based in Ìbàdàn, who is also the founder of Ìṣẹ?>̀dálẹ?>̀ Media Concept (Origin Media Concept, established in 2020), represents this sentiment while observing that “historians of the older days take time to do research compared to present-day historians, and for this reason, I consider older works over more recent works.”Footnote 33 Problematic as it may sound, this prioritization of publication year has canonized the works of Yorùbá homespun historians of the nineteenth to early twentieth century in the historical imaginations of Yorùbá CHHs. The canonization makes the work of Moore, Akinyele, Johnson, and others effectively exist as a collective “article of faith” within which presumably “accurate” and “dependable” Yorùbá histories reside.Footnote 34
13 Yorùbá CHHs dismissed works from European and American historians in the belief that such works may not offer “proper” historical appreciation of the Yorùbá. When pestered further for clarity, they peg their disapproval on some supposed neocolonial and racist biases that inhibit the gaze of Western historians on Africa, with particular disapproval of the so-called “white” British academics. The latter category invigorates a special distaste among Yorùbá CHHs because of Britain’s forceful thrusting of the Yorùbá into the Nigerian colonial project. Only 6 Yorùbá CHHs mentioned anyone among the likes of Richard Dennet, Robert Smith, John Peel, and Karin Barber as dependable British scholars who specialize on the Yorùbá, primarily emphasizing their elongated residence and teaching commitments among the Yorùbá. Certainly, there is a legion of British scholars whose works are crucial in the field of Yorùbá studies and history, which renders the Yorùbá CHHs’ dismissal of, or lack of familiarity with, the former’s work a serious weakness. But considering the motivating factor for most Yorùbá CHHs is to galvanize netizens in antagonism to the Nigeria state’s marginalization, the rejection of British secondary sources has to be seen as more of a decolonial protest and less of an unforgivable weakness. Balogun Bokini, a media volunteer with the nationalist group Ìlànà Ọmọ Oòdua (Children of Oòdua’s Pathway), who occasionally leads history conversations on the group’s Clubhouse channel, justifies this protest by arguing that the anti-Yorùbá-nation critics – who make his group’s mission harder to accomplish – are misguided because those critics “read Yorùbá history publications produced by ‘white’ people and have refused to ground their thoughts in the oral traditions that we received from our forefathers and local historians.”Footnote 35
The second dominant pattern of historical inquiry I observed concerns fieldwork. Of the 42 Yorùbá CHHs, 34 declared preferences for researching the history of towns, villages, nobilities, and sites of historical significance. When at research locations, they collect data, including locally published pamphlets, record books, and diaries of religious and cultural groups, artworks, and family photographs. They also record audiovisual interviews. Many narrate the arduous task of traveling to research locations. It is usual for them to spend days, weeks, and sometimes months traveling to and staying at these locations collecting data. Such work comes at high personal costs as many often use personal savings to facilitate travel expenses. Several Yorùbá CHHs admit to receiving sponsorships from netizens who wish to have the former produce historical studies of the latter’s hometown or lineage. Other Yorùbá CHHs occasionally get funding from monarchs, usually of lesser-known communities, for the same purpose. These public interventions in the production of local historical studies are, in purpose, similar to how mainstream academic historians get funded through foundations, private individuals, and state agencies.
More interestingly, several Yorùbá CHHs exhibit an understanding of what Vansina describes as the tendency of eyewitness accounts to be “conflated with rumors” or hearsay.Footnote 36 To avoid this hole, Yorùbá CHHs get data on one historical question from multiple informants. Olatunde Ogunniran, a historian and poet, holds that engaging more than one informant is necessary since “people add sentiments to what they say, and we do not accept what one informant says as the ultimate truth, but we compare various versions and settle for the middle which is most likely the accurate information.”Footnote 37 Of the 42 Yorùbá CHHs, 12 added that they usually consult monarchs, chiefs, heads of house, and – significantly – leading Ifá priests during fieldwork. Olayinka Adesina, historian and founder of Buk-Dam Fad Ventures and Records International, notes that he derives the outline of a community’s history, more so if such community’s existence predates the colonial era, from Ifá priests who evoke relevant Odù Ifá verses because “Ifá is the key to unlocking true Yorùbá histories, and it is where our history has from time remain chronicled.”Footnote 38 Of this same group, 18 consider oral sources the chief ingredient in their research. They recognize that myth and legend derived from the Odù Ifá, and other sources are useful historical evidence. Meanwhile, few like Laji Abbas – who, apart from being the chief historian of Ìbàdàn, is also the founder of the online media company named Ìtàn Yorùbá (Yorùbá History) – argue otherwise. They claim, as represented in Abbas’s words, depending on myth and legend as representations of history may not “offer any help in advancing Yorùbá nationalism and history, but they will rather make outsiders not consider our past seriously.”Footnote 39 For most of those who are skeptical of myth and legend, they back their criticism with presumed empirical evidence. For instance, one of the frequently debated traditions is the Yorùbá myth of origin that identifies Ilé-Ifè as the cradle of civilization, with the Yorùbá people as the earliest humans. When this tradition comes up in social media forums, Yorùbá CHHs often point to archaeological publications openly accessible online that put humans’ origin in other parts of Africa. Such an action demonstrates the willingness among Yorùbá CHHs to adopt “scientific” evidence in the process of recasting oral traditions.
Many netizens and Yorùbá CHHs believe indigenous chiefs are not reliable sources of oral traditions. Bokini claims that “these are fine boy kings”Footnote 40 and “many Yorùbá chiefs and kings today bought their titles with money and not based on traditional qualifications, which prevents them from having deep knowledge of their people’s history.” For this, he notes further, “we [Yorùbá netizens] cannot depend on them for accurate oral traditions,” hence the shift toward Yorùbá CHHs.Footnote 41 Those in disagreement with this view – such as Olawale Bangbopa, a historian and manager of Ìtàn Àti Ewì Àdídùn Lóriṣiríṣi Lédè Yorùbá (Exciting Histories and Poems in the Yorùbá Language) on Facebook – generally holds that monarchs are the strongest authority on Yorùbá oral traditions, especially given that mainstream academic historians “would not know a community’s history more than the custodians of that community like chiefs and elders, and more so because these scholars sometime rely on monarchs and elders as informants during fieldwork.”Footnote 42
The third pattern concerns how Yorùbá CHHs use the data gathered from secondary sources and fieldwork to produce new variation(s) of a particular tradition. Abbas captures this third stage observing that “it is like identifying and separating gold dust from bodies of earth collected from different places, with the collected gold dust, in the end, weighted for accuracy and tenacity to withstand criticism.”Footnote 43 Throughout these three phases, particularly in the third, ethnonationalism contaminants get into oral tradition narratives. For example, if a given narrative is about a heroic figure, supposed “facts” about that figure’s life are infused with anecdotes that reinforce Yorùbá exceptionalism. Such reconstruction often exaggerates the subjects’ heroism. When the reconstruction concerns the history of a community, Yorùbá CHHs usually use their rendition to criticize the depletion of Yorùbá people into autonomous states under the Nigerian federal republic system, which has hitherto created a sense of political separation among the Yorùbá public. They equally lend dissatisfaction from the eighteenth-century Fulani jihadist invasions of northernmost Yorùbá territories such as Jẹbà, Ìlọrin, Ọ̀ffà, and Òṣogbo and the Fulani political hegemony over the Yorùbá in the twenty-first century. As Adesina laments when asked why they infuse such ethnonationalism sentiments, he complains:
Nigeria is founded on fraud, and it has caused the Yorùbá great trouble and misfortunes because they [the supposed Fulani-dominated government] do not want our language to be a source of pride… and they enslave us in this homeland and also try to regulate our thoughts. But we need sovereignty to organize things the way we want so that we can be the custodian of our present and future.Footnote 44
Possessing the ability to influence Yorùbá netizens’ memorialization of the past through oral traditions and how the latter adopt such traditions to understand present political predicaments in Nigeria automatically produces significant epistemic power for Yorùbá CHHs.
Although Yorùbá CHHs are united in their desire to preserve oral traditions and galvanize toward a Yorùbá nation, I observe jealousies that lie deeply among their ranks. A few of them recount occasions when other Yorùbá CHHs discredited or verbally attacked a colleague’s personality on social media for reasons relating to disagreement about historical accuracies. Commanding a larger pool of followership and receiving recognition from social clubs or political figures also strikes envy. Despite these unpalatable internal wranglings, it is crucial to reiterate that Yorùbá CHHs – as Peterson and Macola note about pre-twentieth-century African homespuns – vigorously “sought to draw their divided people together around” a common political agenda despite usually sharing conflicting “account of the past.”Footnote 45 More interestingly, though, certain Yorùbá CHHs do not stop at criticizing their colleagues but also go as far as questioning mainstream academic historians as proper authorities on Yorùbá traditions since, for example, and according to Ogunniran, “professorship is but a compilation of someone else’s knowledge and thoughts.”Footnote 46 Again, while such assumptions are inaccurate, it is better to consider them as reactions to past approaches by Western scholars who refused to interpret African history using Africa sources, realities, and feelings.
Conversations about oral traditions in the Yorùbá history-focused forums could go smoothly or become outrightly abusive, or violent. In a Clubhouse conversation on the Think Yorùbá First channel on 23 July 2022 about whether Lagos is a Yorùbá territory, a debate on the “Yorùbáness” of the Benin people in present-day Nigeria turned the conversation chaotic. At the start of deliberation, Yorùbá CHHs and netizens were divided on the emergence of the Lagos-based politician, Bola Tinubu, as the Yorùbá’s leading candidate in Nigeria’s 2023 presidential elections. As deliberation progressed, Benin netizens in the room claimed that, historically, Lagos was founded by the Benin, which makes the Eléèkó (Ruler of Lagos) a subject of the Ọba Benin (Ruler of Benin) (Figure 3, 4). Benin netizens cited several oral traditions to reinforce their claim. Yorùbá CHHs vigorously challenged this claim using some vicious words, which threw the room into full-blown verbal chaos. Unlike the Benin netizens, the Yorùbá CHHs were able to provide written sources for their counterclaims, earning them the approval of many netizens in the room. From this example, three archetypal problems associated with oral tradition conversations mediated by Yorùbá CHHs on social media emanates. First, the Yorùbá CHHs existed as the main performer of epistemic power by being a quasi-determiner of what rendition of an oral tradition is taken as valid or invalid. Second, historical accuracy in an oral tradition became the bone of contention even as the room was supposed to address another (political) topic. And third, a discussion about Yorùbá oral traditions in the context of Nigerian politics triggered ethnonationalism sentiments. Ibrahim Ariwoola, a curator with Afrika Uniqueness, validates the third problem – politicization of oral traditions – noting that “discussing Yorùbá culture and oral traditions alone do not attract much interest, but infusing politics [like Yorùbá sovereignty agitations]” are what attracts Yorùbá netizens.Footnote 47
Bukola Adeleke (middle) interviewing the Ọlọ́fin Àjáyè Òrúgbò Ìdó in Ẹ̀pẹ́, Lagos State, Ọba Adewale Mushafau Abdul at his residence in June 2021. Photo credit: Bukola Adeleke.
Ibrahim Ariwoola (left in the right frame) and the Afrika Uniqueness team during an interview with the Asẹ́yìn Ìsẹ́yìn in Ọ̀yó State, Ọba Adekunle Salaudeen. Photo credit: Ibrahim Ariwoola
Of the 42 Yorùbá CHHs interviewed, 13 have prior training in media broadcasting and production. Several have experience working with either radio or television stations. For many of these Yorùbá CHHs, creating history-focused online channels to promote Yorùbá history and traditions is a greater career fulfillment than working at orthodox media companies. The professional trajectory of Abbas and Adesina reflects the experience of several Yorùbá CHHs.Footnote 48 Before establishing Ìtàn Yorùbá in 2010, Abbas presented Yorùbá history programs on Inspiration FM (Ìbàdàn), Sobi FM (Ìlọrin), and Agidigbo FM (Ìbàdàn). At the time of interviewing him in March 2022, he hosts similar programs on Noble FM, (Ìbàdàn). Adesina worked with Murhi International Television (MITV) in Lagos on the production team of several Yorùbá history and cultural programs before creating Buk-Dam Fad Ventures and Records International in 1997. Adesina and several other Yoruba several other Yorùbá CHHs, lamented the restrictions that guided the kind of history content they produced while working at these stations, especially those considered too “tribalist” or ethnonationalist. Programs along these lines have attracted more sanctions from the National Broadcasting Commission since 2015 when President Muhammadu Buhari assumed power. These sanctions targeted stations that supposedly show apologies toward secessionist movements such as the Yorùbá Nation and the Indigenous People of Biafra. Meanwhile, experiences garnered at the brick-and-mortar orthodox media houses are the building blocks for the transition into online media companies for many Yorùbá CHHs. In Adesina’s case, before the abundant availability of the internet in the 2000s, Buk-Dam Fad produced dramatized presentations of oral traditions about Yorùbá monarchs on compact discs (CDs), which were distributed through local home video marketers across the Nigerian southwest. The CDs targeted the same demographics that watched the programs he helped produce for MITV. Famous among Buk-Dam Fad’s CDs are Ọ̀kẹ?>̀rẹ Ṣaki (Ruler of Saki, produced c. 2000), Fabùnmi Òkèmẹ?>̀sí (Fabùnmi of Òkèmẹ?>̀sí, c. 2000), a four-part series entitled Orísun Yorùbá (Origin of the Yorùbá, first episode produced in 2001), and another four-part series called Ìlànà Yorùbá (The Yorùbá Pathway, produced in 2001), all of which were major street hits in Lagos and Ìbàdàn. Leveraging on contacts made while at MITV, Adesina developed the scripts and appeared as the narrator in many of the CDs. He claims that students in tertiary institutions found the CDs useful, with several using them for undergraduate theses and doctoral dissertations. These CDs were among the first set of publications uploaded to Buk-Dam Fad’s YouTube and Facebook channels, reaching even more consumers. Although these CDs, except for Ìlànà Yorùbá, are barely infused with secessionist and ethnonationalism sentiments, from 2015 onward, their equivalents published on Buk-Dam Fad’s online channels carry heavy pro-Yorùbá nation and ethnonationalism messages in response to the increased violent incursions of Fulani herders into Yorùbá territories. Recent examples of such ethnonationalism-loaded productions by other Yorùbá CHHs include Tani Fulani (Who is Fulani?), released in 2021 by Alawiye Adebayo through Bàba Gbàgédé Ìmò TV (BGI TV), and Yorùbá Ronú (2022), an audio publication by Abbas under the auspices of Ìtàn Yorùbá. Adebayo’s video presents Fulani history through the lens of the latter’s jihadist and nomadic advancements into Yorùbá territories, while Yorùbá Ronú rallies the Yorùbá public to reject Fulani dominance in Nigeria by electing Bola Tinubu as the country’s president in 2023.Footnote 49
For Yorùbá CHHs who had no prior experience in the traditional media, many among them spent several years teaching Yorùbá language classes in primary and secondary schools. 7 of the 42 Yorùbá CHHs had training in Yorùbá studies at undergraduate and graduate levels. Some among this category were inspired and mentored by eminent Yorùbá literary icons, including Oladejo Okediji, Adebayo Faleti, Lawuyi Ogunniran, and Daniel Fagunwa. Bukola Adeleke’s experience is relevant in this regard. Her first publication, entitled Ìgbà Tirẹ Rèé (This Is Your Time), a fiction, which she created out of her undergraduate thesis – and eventually published in 2017 by Nelson Publishers, a Lagos-based company that worked with Fagunwa – brought her to Faleti’s attention in 2012. Conversations with Faleti relating to the publication’s promotion spurred Adeleke to focus on publishing books with historical significance.Footnote 50 She also had a similar encounter with Okediji in 2018 concerning another publication, Aláàfin Àjàka (Àjàka the Ruler).Footnote 51 Like Adeleke, Olatunde Ogunnira recognized the robust guidance and influence he drew from his father, Lawuyi Ogunniran, on history writing before the latter died in 2020. But there are Yorùbá CHHs such as BGI TV’s Adebayo who had no prior media experience or direct mentorship from eminent literary figures but only “heeded a divine call” to establish an internet-based broadcast company that focuses on promoting Yorùbá traditions and culture.Footnote 52 For Yorùbá CHHs such as Adeleke and Ogunniran, whose original flair was in fiction writing, the consequence of their interaction with icons such as Faleti, Okediji, Lawuyi Ogunniran, etc. suggests that post-independence Yorùbá literary luminaries who wrote in the indigenous language were concerned with the preservation of Yorùbá oral traditions. It was out of this concern that they considered internet-age writers worthy vessels who could bring history to the Yorùbá public, even as the latter category do not have formal training as historians.
Conclusion
Pius Adesanmi closes his 2020 posthumous anthology on the struggle for agency in post-colonial Africa with an imperative question for scholars of African studies and history. He asks, “the dilemma we face with a generation in possession of multiple narratives of a single nation in the age of social media is this: will their stories become a thousand flowers armed with the inalienable right to bloom under the sun or will their stories be Babel?”Footnote 53 For Yorùbá CHHs helping the Yorùbá public understand the latter’s place in Nigeria as a marginalized people, their narratives of a nation – Yorùbá exceptionalism and Yorùbá sovereignty – are already blooming. For this reason, it is critical for mainstream academic historians to diachronically interrogate the consequence such narratives are having on the integrity of oral tradition as a method of historical inquiry.
As this article demonstrates, nationalities and demographics relegated to the political peripheries of modern state-making projects, as is the case with the Yorùbá in Nigeria, are weaponizing oral traditions to negotiate belonging. In the internet age, those negotiations are happening in Facebook groups, Clubhouse rooms, Twitter spaces, and other forums within the social media loci. To Yorùbá netizens who are able to afford history monographs and journal articles authored by mainstream academic historians, it often appears as though the latter are more concerned with being diplomatic and value-free in their presentation of historical narratives. Meanwhile, the same Yorùbá netizens would often expect that such publications massage the reader’s ethnonationalism biases, i.e., to demonstrate Yorùbá exceptionalism. This imagined lack of solidarity from mainstream academic historians pushes Yorùbá netizens toward Yorùbá CHHs. Such gravitation toward the latter is made easier because, in contrast to mainstream academic historians, most of whom write in English and primarily communicate through monographs and journal articles, Yorùbá CHHs are closer to netizens by virtue of using a shared indigenous language to communicate history while maintaining consistent engagement on social media. This proximity with netizens gives Yorùbá CHHs more epistemic power as propagators of Yorùbá oral traditions and, by extension, Yorùbá history, over mainstream academic historians in the social media metaverse.
Along a related line, though, there is no questioning the strength of scholarship about the role of politics in how people memorialize the past on social media and how this memorialization could be archived.Footnote 54 But if the historian finds it useful to understand the evolution of a tradition and its effects on social relations over time before hoping to make a comprehensive sense of that tradition, it might be useful for the same historian to consider how contaminants permeating social media are altering continuities and discontinuities in that specific tradition. This openness is essential because the oral sources – traditions, life histories, etc. – that mainstream academic historians will seek during future fieldwork in Africa stands to echo the sentiments of CHHs.
The future of African writing and orally generated cultural texts is locked with the future of social media. Doing African history in the internet age without cognizance of social media’s influence on oral sources leaves significant questions to be answered regarding the integrity of those sources. The fact that there are hardly any set guidelines for historians to use in studying oral sources on social media opens up an opportunity for suggestions in methodology-focused journals. Lastly, it is clear from the preceding that it would be wrong to suggest that orally generated cultural texts no longer serve as the primary driver of history conversations among Africans. Certainly, Africa is not in a post-oral age. As this article shows, the convergence of homespun historians and the non-academic public on social media platforms indicates a continued relevance of oral texts to history discourses in Africa. It also suggests that the unprecedented access to influencers and followers who share specific political biases on social media is respectively influencing African netizens and homespun historians to re-embrace their oral origin of history teaching.
Open access
