No one would have dared, when Ilorin was founded by the Yoruba in 1450, to rail against the practitioners of traditional African religion/culture (isese), the group currently under assault by the city’s Muslim dictators. But time throws up surprises. The provincial military headquarters of the Oyo Empire became the suzerainty of fraudsters from foreign lands who came to the city on a survival pursuit, later serving as wardogs of its treacherous ruler, Afonja, the man they eventually buried in a festival of arrows. But even though the foreigners displaced the rulers, they never could wipe out the people, and today both groups co-exist in (mis)trust, the former band of roving thieves now nestled in flowing robes. The conquerors adopted the language of the defeated, seeking by this means to rule forever in a reverse form of assimilation, but the very tactic is now the Achilles heel of Empire, proclaiming Yoruba provenance in resonant terms. The palace does speak Yoruba, but the town knows the trajectory of the throne. The people speak of Ilorin Afonja with pride, though the crown does prefers Garin Alimi (Alimi’s town). The name, Ilorin, itself shows where the truth lies, and the civilisations that border the city, from Bode Saadu to Jebba up North, are overwhelmingly Yoruba. Fun fact: Ilorin Afonja is far more popular than Garin Alimi, the language of opportunism.
Unlike some people, I have chosen not to pon jebe lakisa (elevate trifles) but to tackle the real issue. Ilorin was founded by Yoruba people and conquered by aliens, but has retained its essential Yoruba qualities. The real contest in the city is therefore between the indigenous Yoruba owners and the settler Fulani overlords. The isese palaver is just a reaction to Yoruba suppression and historical injustice, and the Ilorin overlords know this truth, although they are yet to realize that threatening violence is a weak tactic. Wise cities live and let live; they do not threaten dissenters with fire and brimstone. If you steal people’s grandparents, don’t cry blue murder when their grandchildren come visiting.
The hegemony masquerading as Islamic dictatorship in Ilorin has bred dissent for ages. It was so prevalent that a distinguished professor of Yoruba studies was once harassed by the Ilorin principalities when he brought egungun to Unilorin as part of a course requirement. The professor was said to have wondered why Unilorin had a course in Yoruba when the powers that be knew that they did not want such cultural expressions. The said professor is a household name in Yoruba linguistics circles. The Ilorin principalities had enough power to determine what could be taught in a supposed federal university, against the Yoruba view that no aparo (patridge) is taller than another. I detest any group using religion as a cloak for dictatorship, like Roman frauds have done for millennia.
When a Yoruba person analysing the Ilorin saga goes into legal exegesis pointing out the utter illegality of the actions of the Ilorin Ulama or whatever this noxious group calls itself, (s)he is being factual, but anyone would be a fool to think that his/her interest is principally or only in the law. The truth is that the analyst has the trajectory of the Ilorin Emirate and its hollowness before him/her and wonders at the absurdity of strangers harassing the original landowners in their provenance. They found a buffalo by the river bank, then immediately set upon it with knives. Did they think it died from drinking too much water? The isese they frown on is at the core of their tira practices: the Ilorin alfas are famous because of their depth in Yoruba medicine.
The overfed, rotten aristocratic class has stolen too much for the owner not to notice. Empires rise and fall. Ilorin –and I have lived there–is a Yoruba city. There is a discontent that the Yoruba nurture about Ilorin: they may hide it under isese but their real grouse is the suppression of the Yoruba in Ilorin. The natural inclination of people is to flow by their ethnic configuration. The Ilorin triumphalists must therefore be careful in their verbal/physical assaults. If the impression gains ground that their real interest is to wipe out Yoruba people from Ilorin, the situation will change dramatically. The Ilorin noisemakers are the same kind of people who thought that Russia was going to overrun Ukraine in a jiffy.
Trying to erase Yoruba influence from Ilorin is an exercise in futility. More amala is eaten in Ilorin than tuwo, and even those threatening to bomb dissidents retire into their sitting room to eat amala after their warmongering rhetoric. Learn from Niger Republic: the big reason the North has cried against war is the ethnic configuration of the country and the existing relationship with Nigeria: Niger is predominantly Hausa. In the same vein, Ilorin is predominantly Yoruba, so think carefully before putting on your armour. If Nigeria invades Benin Republic, the Yoruba of Nigeria will have sympathy for their kith and kin in Porto Novo, etc. The Ilorin warmongers had better put on their thinking caps. Whenever I have visited Ilorin, I have never felt that I was outside Yorubaland. It amounts to utter lunacy to say that a religion founded a city: religion has no blood and bones, ethnicity does. If the onslaught on the isese people begins to sound like a war against the Yoruba, the bottom of the Ilorin establishment will become hot.
The Igbo are overwhelmingly Christian by belief but when the civil war came what did they deploy? The power of ethnicity. Why did the Yoruba vote for Tinubu? Is it because he is a Muslim? I will leave the Ilorin noisemakers to answer that question. The fact that you have triumphed for centuries is no guarantee that you will smile tomorrow. History works differently. Surely, even a fool knows that nothing obliterates people’s sense of origin: everybody in this world knows where they are from. When the Soviet Union broke up, it was into ethnic cleavages.
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