Who stole the Yoruba python skin?

One of the thematic preoccupations of the book, What the forest told me: Yoruba hunter, culture and narrative performance, (2014) is that, inside the forest, there is a consistent superiority war, often fierce, between man and animals. Written by Ayo Adeduntan, Research Fellow at the University of Ibadan, the book averred that, while animals sometimes win this war, succeeding in crushing hunters for supper, many atimes, hunters vanquish these forest dwellers. They fell these notorious animals renowned for bathing in the blood of their human victims. In pursuit of this theme of a superiority duel in the wild, Adeduntan was in a forest called Ìgbẹ́ Alágogo. Hunting expeditions to the Ìgbẹ́ are seasonal excursions that take hunters to Òj̣é-̣Owódé in the Òkè Ògùn area of Oyo State. There, Adeduntan interviewed a hunter called Òjó Ògúnkúnlé of Agúnrege village. Ògúnkúnlé’s narration of how his hunter-master, named Ògúnòṣ̣un, a very powerful hunter, married a buffalo and was eventually demystified by the animal, painted the picture that a mutual damage often occurs in the duel between animal and man.

The narration goes thus: One day, Ògúnkúnlé went hunting and felled a huge buffalo with his gun. Unable to process what to do with his mountainous game, the young hunter walked back kilometers to announce his kill to his master named Ògúnòṣ̣un. While they were both walking back to where the buffalo was felled, about a mile to the scene, a pretty lady walked past them and saluted on her two knees. In a magical reality that may be hard to believe, Ògúnkúnlé inferred that the buffalo was the one who morphed into the pretty lady. He told the researcher, “all of a sudden, we met the animal, the pretty woman” – “àfi pẹ̀kí n la bá pàdé ẹran l’ọ́nà, èyuùn ìyàwó. Arẹwa obinrin ni”. If Ògúnòṣ̣un had listened to Odolaye Aremu, the Ilorin musician who warned that there is always a suddenness to calamity, (pèkí làá ko èèmò) he probably would have been wary of a beautiful woman suddenly encountered in a dense forest. From wooing the buffalo-woman and taking her home, Ògúnòṣ̣un ended up marrying her. Before the marriage solemnization, according to Adeduntan’s account, the buffalo-woman gave a caveat, which I paraphrase: “Now that I’ve agreed to marry you, the day you recklessly call me an animal, you are done for.”

The buffalo-woman gave birth to children for Ògúnòṣ̣un. However, one day, the wife enraged her husband, so much that he thundered, “You good-for-nothing unlucky daughter of an animal!” (‘Àb’órí ì rẹ burú ni, ìwọ ọmọ ẹranko yìí!). A very mysterious anger immediately seized the woman who instantly morphed into her original buffalo form. As she charged at Ògúnòṣ̣un with her menacing horns, the hunter quickly reached for his hunter talisman (Ìgbàdì). The Ìgbàdì is the phial belt which hunters have recourse to, while on hunting expedition. If a ferocious animal suddenly attempted to harm them, they untied the belt. They then chanted some metaphysical verses which enabled them escape the animal’s deadly ferocity. As Ògúnòṣ̣un chanted the incantations, he landed in a prehistoric mountain on the outskirts of the village. He was however not fast enough for the buffalo which used its horn to gore him and tear his ligaments. The buffalo thereafter ran into the mountains and never returned. Ògúnòṣ̣un, said the narrator, as reported by Adeduntan, carried with him for life the cicatrices of a fractured leg. This motif of a superiority duel between animals of the forest and man is also present in D. O. Fagunwa’s Igbo Olódùmarè where the hero of the book, Olówó-Aiyé, fought the spirit, Anjonnu-Iberu, who transformed into a boa and, helped by a ravishingly beauty witch named àjẹ́diran, who gave him a magic fruit, Olówó-Aiyé transformed into an elephant and crushed the boa constrictor.

What provoked this excursion into the world of animals is a discussion said to be gaining currency among some intellectuals in Southwest Nigeria today. It is themed around the rhetorical question: Have current runners of Nigeria, led by a Yoruba, with their prodigal handling of Nigerian economy and society, not succeeded in demystifying the Yoruba myth of administrative and leadership competence? Same discussion, I learnt, is bandied in banters in Northern Nigeria today, amid sniggering laughter. So, in the ancient “war” between Yoruba and Northern Nigeria about administrative and leadership competence, has the North succeeded, like Ògúnòṣ̣un’s buffalo-woman wife, in demystifying the Yoruba buffalo?

Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s Premiership of Western Region, with its sterling and highly commended leadership, opened the trough of that narrative. That leadership was followed by another one provided by UPN governors of the Second Republic. Watched over by their leader, Awolowo, those governors also significantly showed the world the colour of developmental leadership. That was the last time the Yoruba had the opportunity to showcase their ability, until Olusegun Obasanjo came in 1999. Though he demonstrated comparative competence to lead Nigeria above all his successors, Obasanjo’s pan-Nigerian claim and overt attack on Awolowo’s leadership of Nigeria made his Yoruba people disown him as theirs. In overt flaunt and gloat, Yoruba had often said to the hearing of whoever wanted to listen that, with their centuries-old sophistication, urbane character, western education and grasp of the modern system of administration, if ever they had the opportunity to lead Nigeria, Yoruba would show the world the stuff they were made of.

2023 was that opportunity. Today, under 15 months, Nigeria has fallen into tatters under a man who answers to all the physical attributes of a Yoruba. The question being asked now is, what happened? Why did people who have always held themselves as crocodiles, suddenly turn out to be lizards? Why are people with reputation of lion, King of the Jungle, now being exposed as mere rodents-eating cats? Muhammadu Buhari, whose leadership is compared to an affliction, is almost celebrated as a mascot now by Nigerians in comparison. Aso Rock claims its reforms are like a surgical operation to correct a medical anomaly. It also says that the pains Nigerians undergo are comparable to one inflicted by the Olóólà, facemark maker, whose knife, which cuts painfully deep down into the bosom of the skin, is a precursor to beauty. To the Villa, our pain is a desirable agony. None of the reform evangelists has however been able to explain the optics we see of reformers living in stupendous comfort while targets of reforms are enmeshed in indescribable hunger.

When they are boxed to a corner, in fitful explanations, Yoruba flaunt an explanation which demarcates the Yorubaness of present Nigerian rulers from theirs. They say occupiers of Aso Rock today are mainly coastal Yoruba. These are people, they say, who are a corrupted version of their own ancestry. Theirs, they go further to say, approximates all those qualities of the Awolowo Yoruba and it is because they are from the hinterland.

By trying to remove themselves from the stain of this leadership calamity, the Yoruba seem to be answering a question posed by William Butler Yeats in one of his poems entitled ‘Among School Children’. In it, Yeats had asked, ‘How can we know the dancer from the dance?’ I am of the opinion that, rather than engage in demarcation of hinterland and coastal Yorubaness, (thereby seeking to remove the dancer from the dance) Yoruba should be more frontal in demanding that those in government today should not stain their leadership reputation’s white apparel bequeathed by Awolowo. This will necessitate that they disclaim some Yoruba who have consistently licked the spittle of Aso Rock, all in the name of clapping-on an obvious failure of a child whose waist we adorn with beads not deserved. The Yoruba case in Nigerian leadership is synonymous with the narrative of a head hunter (Oluode) who was caught mourning his hunting dog killed by a tiger. Asked why he mourned, Oluode told them that a valiant tree does not ooze out cowardly secretions (ako igi kìì s’oje) and that what he mourned was his reputation that was at stake. How would the world reconcile itself to the story of a brave hunter’s dog killed by a mere tiger? It was the hunter who was literally killed!

The other explanation Yoruba could give is that what Nigeria has today isn’t the original, certainly nothing of the variant of Awolowo, Bola Ige or any of their leaders’ original copy of leadership. The owners of that original have gone with their slough. It reminds me, again, of one of the hunter-animal liaisons and contests for primacy narratives in Adeduntan’s book. Another hunter, Kìlání Alápó of Alápó village, Ibadan, tells it perfectly. For eight years, Alápó had killed a python under an àràbà tree in a forest called Ẹléṛè.̣ However, in the ninth year of harvesting the python, the snake was nowhere to be found under the àràbà. In its stead, he found the skin of a deer (awo ̣̣ ìgalà). Alápó however went home with his strange find, the àwọ̀. Apprehensive about the slough he kept and its probable consequences, he inquired of a Babalawo who warned him not to destroy it as its owner would someday ask for it (aláwò ̣ ó ̣ wàá bééré áwó). Seven days after, a pretty lady walked into Alápó village, demanding Kìlání Alápó’s home. Seeing this woman, dogs began to bark mysteriously. Adeduntan explained this as the capacity of dogs to “see the numinous.” On meeting Alápó, the woman promptly demanded, “could you please return my slough?” (Ẹ dákun, àwò ̣ mi t’éẹ̣ kó, mọ fé ̣ k’éẹ̣ kó o fún mi). The hunter walked in and handed her the skin. According to the narration, for fifteen years, Alápó consistently killed a deer under the àràbà tree.

Yoruba are in a dilemma. They have an impostor child who, unfortunately, hails from their home of noble leadership pedigree and honour. Like relished epaulettes, the honour of excellence in leadership and administration is what the Yoruba still cling on today. In the same way the python-woman walked back to Kìlání Alápó to demand what rightly belonged to her, the race must demand its àwọ̀ from the impostor.

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