April in Yoruba is?

My tongue is not of my mother

I have had this song going on in my head for days an aide memoir for the months of the year in Yoruba. Yoruba is my mother’s tongue but it is not my mothertongue, I did not start to speak Yoruba with any level of quality till I was almost 10.

I had mostly spoken English and my accent was somewhere between a Brummie accent (thankfully, I have lost that trait) from the West Midlands in the UK and the corruption that comes with growing up in a mixed society in Nigeria.

My Nigerian friends thought my accent was foreign whilst my English friends though it was foreign, the other nationalities of Chinese, Japanese and Romanian because I do remember Maya who prevented me from coming first so many time just knew I was born abroad.

Horrible Yoruba lessons

In fact, there were people who from the time we returned to Nigeria addressed me as the Omo Ilu Oyinbo - The child of the white man’s land.

I eventually learnt Yoruba but never enough to make a decent passing grade in secondary school, the Yoruba teacher was a cross between Marquis de Sade and a witch, she was wicked, shrill, and nasty; she punished us in ways that would make the torture revelations we hear of today sound like tiddlywinks.

I have been away from Nigeria a long time but many would say the standard and quality of my Yoruba speaking is good, I use proverbs and sayings and can crack jokes.

Who are the Yoruba?

More recently, I have been concerned about where Yoruba is going as a language, culture and heritage, I was taken aback when it took a couple of Cubans to make me aware of the richness of the Yoruba culture that remains vibrant in Cuban through Lukumi and in Brazil through Candoble.

Just as the history and traditions of the Greeks are exemplified in their mythologies that they have not given up for new religions, that of the Yoruba is in their traditions and animist mythologies that have been labeled inherently evil by strange religions that have left us bereft of our roots and bequeathed a heritage that is neither Middle-Eastern nor American - I suggest brand of convoluted Islamo-Churchianity with a Nigerian slant.

The months quiz

One of the things you learn with a new language is the calendar months of the year, Yoruba has those too and the song going on in my head has been that of the Yoruba months of the year, my classmate Goke taught me, I have the memory of an elephant.

I have created a quiz mainly directed at the Yorubas to list the months of the year.

Yoruba months of the year - Quiz

Do not rush off to Wikipedia seeking help until you have completed the quiz, even a good bit of that information is totally wrong, like there are 4 days in a week, 7 weeks in a month and 93 weeks in a year, never use Wikipedia as an authoritative source.

Are you as Yoruba as you think you are or is your rudimentary Yoruba deceiving you into thinking you can really conduct a decent conversation entirely in Yoruba?

Please leave comments in the blog, if you are inclined to. Thanks!

Who are the Yoruba?

Dinner with new friends

I have questions, many questions and wonder where this would lead to. On the day of our arrival, there was a couple on the table beside ours who appeared very friendly that we had a few pleasant exchanges.

Then, the second night at dinner we were invited to a themed evening featuring Brazilian cuisine and we all obliged at which point I asked if we could share a table and they found that quite agreeable.

We met up just at the appointed time after I had a slight bathroom mishap which had just under 1 centimetre squared of skin scraped off my scalp in the process of balding my head.

Blood but no guts, a bit of alcohol and I was close to cresting a banshee octave, well, not really, but it was quite a burning sensation and then it clotted and I was fine.

Dancing with anthropology

So, both professors, one in anthropology and the other with a speciality in dance and interpretation covering classical, contemporary and Spanish dance. However, the most important part of this was the Cuban heritage which had obvious affiliation to the great dance diva Alicia Alonso.

The incredible linkage between dance and anthropology comes down to a more intriguing history of the Cubans and the dominance of Yoruba types and traditions which apparently are more advanced in Cuba than in Salvador de Bahia in Brazil. However, a good deal of Yoruba culture is expressed in dance and music, but there is a whole area of academic study of crucial importance we native Yorubas need to explore.

These two men were quite versed in Yoruba history and mythology and more so exposed certain aspects of my ignorance of the culture of my forebears because of the way re-education and Western religious diktat have subsumed what essentially is our identity.

The dominance of the Yoruba

It would appear whilst lots of slaves were taken from the Slave Coast which was once the name of Southern Nigeria, that was not the only place where slaves were acquired, but when they arrived in the lands of bondage, the Yoruba culture and norms became the dominant expression for most slaves where in Cuba it was the least adulterated as opposed to the amalgam in Salvador de Bahia because of the suppression of cultures and traditions of the slaves in Brazil and the American South.

The Yoruba dialect spoken in Cuba is known as Lukumi which derives of Oluku mi, which finds equivalent meaning from the Ijebu dialect of Yoruba meaning “My friend” – See Church of the Lukumi.

The Yoruba identity

Now, there is no way we can talk of the Greek civilisation without strong allusions to their mythology, similarly, it would appear the whole essence of the Yoruba beyond just the language is expressed in our mythologies which feature more strongly in the Yoruba Diaspora which descends from the slaves than in the indigenous tribes back home, this is commonly known as Santeria (Cuba), Oyotunji (USA) or Candomblé (Brazil).

The Yoruba are essentially a very religious if not very spiritual people but the unrelenting encroachment of a brand of Christianity and modernism that subsumes our core identity into a non-descript amalgam of Judeo-Western interpretations which leaves us with just the language but no representative tradition and compellingly vibrant history is worrisome.

All probably is not lost because simplistically we do use Olorun (Ruler of heaven) or Olodumare in synonymy with the Supreme God, but we need to relate more of our understanding of our culture to our adopted religions, we cannot become a listless people or all that defines us would be lost.

Giving up ours for others?

Now, I am not saying Christianity is to blame for this, but if our culture by certain Christian or other religious teachings is supposedly inherently evil because the underpinning mythologies relate to gods called orishas what have we left of our customs after we leave the church, the mosque or some religious place of worship?

I am no expert in these matters, but I worry about these generalisations - the American brand of Christianity that promotes materialism, the African brand that expands on this materialism with an enemy round every corner and the European brand which is too liberal for the comfort of many.

It is time to go back to the things that make us a people who have a history that predates when slave traders came to take our ancestors away to lands so far away but after hundreds of years, that self-same ideal of what is Yoruba has survived the onslaught of slavery, racism, modernisation and religion.

I think the core of what is Yoruba is worth fighting for regardless of any other foreign religious beliefs we might have acquired.