April Fool’s day joke is meant to last a day, but the cruel April Fool’s Day Joke played on Yoruba-Igbo has lingered for 84 years. On April 1st 1939, the Southern Protectorate was broken into West and East to disrupt the emerging Nigerian Youth Movement. It was an insulting joke claiming the Southern Protectorate was divided for administrative ease while the Northern Protectorate that was twice as big and diverse was left united. It was a ruthless joke of not only administrative violence against the NYM, pitting Awolowo and Azikwe against each other, as Yorubas demanded Igbos returned to their new created region to contest politically.
For over 80,000 years, Yorubas, Igbos and other Southerners and Middlebelt had coexisted peacefully and productively as an Ifa/Afa based civilization until the wicked April Fool’s Joke turned ignorant self centered Yoruba and Igbo generations against each other for the last 84yrs in politics, civil service, business and nearly every other aspect of life, except marriage. The April Fool’s Joke tore apart the two most populous, prosperous and oldest indigenous African groups, whose unity was the key to the rise of Nigeria, the world’s most populous nation, and the Black Race as a whole. The 1939 April’s Joke was based on the logic that if the Yoruba and Igbo tributaries of the Original African civilization forget their source and linkages, like a river that forgets source, we would run dry.
84 years earlier, in 1855, displaced Yorubas resettled in Lagos were attacked by displaced Yorubas from Oyo Ile resettled in Ibadan and Abeokuta, led by the likes Madam Tinubu of Abeokuta seeking to retain the same slave economic that made both groups displaced. While this cruel joke occured between Yorubas, a mother of all cruel jokes was planted to derail our civilizational identity as indigenous Africans across Africa. A process was embarked upon known as epistemicide in which our indigenous knowledge bank containing our civilizational identity and history was mischievously misinterpreted.
The trick was to choose one dialect in a subregion in which the Bible was written and became the official language of the new tribal geographic group. In Yoruba land, the Bible was written in Oyo dialect by Bishop Ajayi Crowther, an Oyo himself, just like Samuel Johnson that wrote Yoruba History. In Igboland, the dialect chosen for Igbos was Onitsha. They institutionalized tribalized dialects by enforcing that it should only be the language of communication in churches, schools and all colonial institutions. And that was how they balkanized the Original African civilization whose source was Ife Odaye, Ife Ooyelagbo and Ile Ife.
Yoruba and Igbo towns, as well as others of South and Middlebelt, were established and lived by Ifa/Afa, the sixteen sector knowledge bank accumulated through observation of natural phenomena and philosophy for tens of thousands of years. And nowhere in our knowledge bank were the words Yoruba, Igbo or other tribes mentioned. Basically, we had no tribes but a continuum of dialects known as the Niger Congo ethnolinguistic groups that spread from our coast all the way to South Africa, sharing the same genetic and cultural origins. We had minor lingusitic divergences as we diverged from the same Source into Oyos, Ijesa, Ekitis, Igbominas into Igala, Igbos as each generation took the next land to farm as we spread all the way to South Africa. One people, one philosophy, one destiny.
Before the 1400s advent of the European, there wasn’t much difference in our civilization based on Ifa-Afa-Iha-Fa-Efa, yams, beads and kolanuts. There are essentially two civilizations across Nigeria and Africa – our Original Indigenous African civilization composed cultural and genetic related people and the Afroasiatic/Arabic civilization made up of various groups that later underwent Arabic imperialism at different times. The disfigurement and derailing of the Original African civilization into divisive tribes leaves us at a competitive disadvantage to the Afro-Arabic and European civilizations.
Genetic anthropological evidence from the multinational Human Genome Project (Tishkoff 2009) and Harvard Medical School Simons Genome Diversity Project (S.Mallick 2016), those called now called the Yorubas were the oldest full sized humans dated around 89,000 years ago. The dynamics of the genetics shows how we spread to South Africa. Yoruba and Igbo had the longest and oldest DNA strands with only Igala between them.Yoruba, Igala, Edo, Igbo and a few others, all belong to the same subgroup known as the Volta-Niger ethnolinguistic family, the oldest ethnolinguistic family, which evolved before the Benue-Congo ethnolinguistic evolved on River Benue before spreading into Cameroun and all the way to East and Southern Africa.
So the divisive joke planted in the mid 1800s blosoomed into the April Fool’s Day Joke that derailed our independence movement. It split Yorubas and Igbos Original African civilization that covers South and Middlebelt, and 70 percent of the population, enabling the minority Afroasiatic civilization to establish a political hegemony, robbing us of the chance to build a stable and balanced two powerbase polity. For us to evolve to a higher political existence, we need an Epistemic Democracy, wisdom of the multitude, whereby our people understand their civilizational identity and collective economic and political aspirations. Therefore we must strive to unite Yoruba and Igbo with true civilizational knowledge. Our civilizational leader, the Ooni of Ife Oba Adeyeye Ogunwusi attempted to educate us a few years ago that Yoruba and Igbo were closely related, but the hate was too much fuelled by those that used the division to make or protected their political control. While leaders like ex President Goodluck Jonathan have stated that their political ambitions are not worth the loss of a single life, we have those ready to waste millions of lives, violently deprive entire ethnicities of the their voting rights.
The schism between displaced Yorubas of the North and South Yorubaland went from 1855 to 1839, it’s about time the schism between children of Ifa/Afa, Yoruba and Igbo must now end. Yoruba science identifes that 84yrs cycle of Universal Justice/Shango, two of which should bring a new and higher level of consciousness/Olokun. There are 6000 ethnicities in the world out of which Yorubas and Igbos have no closer relationship. These two sides of the coin must become currency to buy our economic and political advancement. The disgraceful Tribalistic voter repression of March 18th must never be repeated, otherwise for the lack of knowledge a people will perish.
