REGARDING THIS IMAGE here, Humans of Edoland is absolutely correct: They started with Great Benin Obaship title and moved to Benin royal sword of Authority (Ada and Eben) and now going for the Great Benin red beaded crown. 

With this beaded crown that this current ooni is today wearing, tomorrow they’ll start carrying new lies about how it’s all theirs, how it’s simply ‘yoruba’; just like how they took the word ‘Oba’ ie the original Edo word and title for ‘emperor’ to mean a Yoruba word ‘king’. Today we hear of all sorts of ‘kings’ attaching ‘oba’ to their already existing particular title.

The first creation of the title of ooni as ‘king’ was the election of Aderemi, a  charismatic politician by the British who made him ‘ooni king of the yoruba’ in 1930 when Ademiluyi the priestly holder of the title passed on that same year. Before Aderemi, there was no ‘oni, king of Ife’. Rather ‘ooni’ a priesthood title of Ife. The previous guy, Ademiluyi, was merely a ‘priest’. When Leo Frobenius went to the village of Ife, there was no ‘king’ of Ife. There were all kinds of priestly (babalawo) titles. The this of Ife, the that of Ife. But the one connected to the hidden ‘olokun head’ was the ooni of Ife, Ademiluyi, and like the others, he too was a priest. Now, the title ooni was important because it was the caretaker of the grove, ‘Ebo-olokun’, which for centuries contained a ‘buried head’. Ademiluyi was the one Frobenius was dealing with to unearth ‘the head’ at the sacred grove Ebo-olokun, which for centuries, the Ifes had been exhuming and reburying.

Ebo-olokun is an Edo word.  Ebo and Olokun, the shrine and principal Edo god of the ocean, are together the name of the grove in Ife, Ebolokun. To date, the original  site of the god Olokun is in a village in Oredo. Because that god has been for thousands of years the Edo god of wealth, fecundity and possibilities. 

The people of Ife had kept this word Eboolokun for centuries because it came with the buried head which for centuries, they had been unearthing to offer offerings and re-burying; and all without a clue on how it was made. When Frobenius arrived and realized not one person in Ife knew how the Olokun Head was made and further no industry of same existed anywhere around Ife, he was all the more convinced of his racial theory that the Africans did not make anything, rather a ‘white civilization’ that existed in Africa before the Africans did and made the sculptures unearthed at Ife.

Frobenius was in 1910 entirely ignorant of the bronzes and ivories works and terracotta in Benin City and consequently the ancient guilds for the simple reason that, for the 400years of the European Slave Trade, after the kingdom’s initial trade relationship  with the Portuguese (called Potoki in Edo), Benin had been mostly shut off to the English and other European slavers, whether from Esigie’s early ban against the trade in human beings that lasted well over 200years, to the various recalcitrant bans that various Obas of the kingdom would enact against the Europeans. For a brief period in the 1700s, Oba Ewuakpe would try and revive a connection with the (now mostly Dutch and English) traders to gain some might in the eyes of the people. But it was no use. Oba Ewuakpe was at some point exiled or ‘de-powered’ by the people and his choice of igniting some kind of slave trading cost him even more in the eyes of the people. Ewuakpe was rewarded with the guild’s depictions of him as crown-less king who instead wore a European helmet surrounded by not knights and warriors but the enslaved. The only force capable of saving the king was according to Benin History, his Oloi (Queen), Oloi Iden. 

In any case, Ewuakpe or not, the ‘new’ Europeans from the 17thcentury onwards, never really got to know Benin City, though rumours persisted among the English of the possibility of gold statues in the capital city. 

The ‘Ife head’ is most likely a Benin Bronze left by the Igun guild sculptors that followed Ekarledehan into exile. In typical guild fashion, in all that time in exile, they refused to share with the locals the lost wax method. The Igun guild like all Benin guilds are an ancient familial occupation, passed on across lineage: and some of the best would have chosen to foray into the hinterlands with Ekarledehan. 

The sculpture “Olokun Head” whose ‘crown’ imitations this current ooni began to wear (before this recent one of coral beads) is called such because it was discovered at Ebolokun a grove in Ife. It is the norm amongst archaeologists to identify sculptures with the dedication of the site in which the works had been found. It is more than likely that ‘Olokun head’ is a stylised representation of a prince of Benin who saved the Ifes from Nupe raiders and became their leader, refusing to be ‘king’ but rather titled priest. Because to him, the kingdom of Igodomigodo where he is from, already existed, well over a good millennium.

Soon after Frobenius ‘discovery‘ of the buried head in 1910, the British began the politicization of ‘ooni’ a priestly title to ooni a ‘king’, and when Ademiluyi, the priest who had gladly been cooperating with them, died, they eagerly fetched Aderemi a congenial colonial guy and feted him as ‘king of the Yoruba’.  In that time between, and through the fantastic efforts of a class of Englis-men desk-explorers, ie the group of wealthy stay at home ‘gentlemen’ that sent the likes of Mungo Parks and many others on expeditions, the British began to publish ‘history books’ on ‘Medieval Ife’, with one of these desk historians, Johnson, coming up in 1921 with whole chapters on Ife as a mecca of flourishing highway activities. This among many other very British feting was how ‘Yoruba’ was born as a unified singular ‘entity’ flourishing out of Ife. 

Whereas all that time between the 12th c to the 15th to which the found ‘Ife heads’ are currently being dated, there was no mention of ‘Ife’ in any text nor on any map. 

Kingdoms are a question of military history. The kingdoms of Benin and that of Kanem Borno are the only true legitimate, real kingdoms in any sense of the word. One was south and the other in north east. There was never and has never been any ‘army’ to Ife. Because it wasn’t a ‘kingdom’ that the British, from 1900s onwards, cooked it out to be as a way to create ‘Yoruba’.

You need an army of men to have any kind of kingdom. Else, you just have settlements and clans. The only peoples with army on what is todays Nigeria were: Benin Kingdom and the kingdom of Bornu, aka Kanem-Bornu (ie Kanem-bornu from being conquered by the Kanem). Nupe raiders were serving Kanem-Bornu. From the time of Ewuare the Great onwards, Benin took interest in the men of Igala as a strategy to have strong fighting force and spread more systematically. Which is why during the early trade with Potoki, the early Europeans coming to visit the Oba would often meet the Oba quelling rebellion from the Igalas; and Oba Esigie right upon taking the throne was quick to mediate and create peace in Igala as he foresaw a much bigger problem coming in from the seas.

 In all of these, Ife was never in the picture, was never an article or presence. Because all it was was a settlement, replete with babalawos and connected to Edo before it was ever ‘yoruba’. It was for this aspect that the Iyoba Idia sent to Ife for babalawos to come and live in the royal quarters at Ogbe so she could have their constant assistance. 

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Let us know the history for once instead of ‘wazobia’ lies the British fed its coerced, colonial creation ‘Nigeria’ and invariably left its creation with evermore ‘post independence’ falsehoods and lies.

- Noz

Edited and supported by Architecture of Unforgetting