Prince Justice Faloye
In a recent discussion between some elders admonishing some youth for marijuana smoking destructive potentials, the youth were able to defend Naira Marley for creating productive value, but were tongued tied when Oluwo of Iwo’s name was thrown in. Older Nigerians, Yoruba in particular, often tie strange thoughts and illogical actions to marijuana smoking and I realized from the discussion that this generalization could lead to a dangerous oversight for collective survival. Despite a catalogue of provocative statements and actions by Oluwo Abdulrasheed Akanbi, people wave them off as symptoms of marijuana, instead of taking note to what is a threat to the collective survival of Yoruba Original African civilization.
The negative Cannabis stereotype was formed from the actions of protest muscians, thugs and park touts, who in most cases take a concoction of different types of alcohol and other drugs whose mix makes them aggressive and social misfits. Though Marijuana smoking as a depressant for recreational purposes started a bit later, it has been used for thousands of years, not only for various ailments as documented by Chinese in 2880BC, but the versatile plant could also be used for hair creams, threads, clothing etc. In precolonial Yoruba traditions Cannabis incense was used to ward away witches and evil spirits while it is used to treat some Orisa Obaluaye ailments like sickle cell, multiple sclerosis, Covid and other body structural sicknesses.
Interestingly, marijuana and the Obaluaye Soponna cult were both banned in the early 1900s, for socioeconomic suppression reasons. Initially accepted as legal tender in USA states, used even to pay taxes, the global campaign against Cannabis in the 1930s originated from the USA, solely for economic control reasons since the versatile shrub cultivated mainly by Black people could provide economic independence away from the racist financial caste system. The initial propaganda led by Anslinger was that it made Black men bold to make sexual advances on White women evolved to various negative stereotypes across the world.
Marijuana use is not confined to musicians and thugs. Various notable writers from Shakespeare, to USA presidents from George Washington, Monroe, JF Kennedy, Clinton and Obama. The world’s richest men like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, whose high intelligence was used to break technological frontiers like Windows, Facebook and Tesla electric car. Queen Elizabeth 1 and Queen Victoria that made Britain Great, and even some past Yoruba monarchs have also been rumored to be weed smokers, but the contemporary collective perception has been negative.
Fela Kutis message of truth was discounted by many that tied it to marijuana. Some might complain that Fela led to a mass culture of weed smoking, however it appears to be a contemporary global youth phenomenon. His message on coloniality, corruption, traditional African values were ignored, but decades after his death his truths reverberates through our collective consciousness. If Nigerians had taken note of his songs like Best Of No Nation, ‘Animal in human skin’, we could have been saved from the eight ruinous years of Buhari, the worst government till date. Nevertheless, many youth took his message of decoloniality to heart and are pushing the woke movement. We also have a whole genre of Afrobeats that has uplifted many youth to unprecedented heights on the world stage and created many dollar millionaires. Fela was written off as a weed smoker by many, but thankfully his positive messages have been passed down generations, the question is what would have happened if his messages were negative and socially destructive like those pushed by Oluwo of Iwo.
Right from Abdulrashid Akanbi’s ascension to the Oluwo throne, from engaging in public power tussle for Iwo Islamic leadership, claiming he was an Emir not an Oba, beating up other monarchs, crowning his Diaspora wife, caught on video building a joint, clearing the palace of Yoruba spiritual essences and trying to ban Isese in Iwo, Rashid Akanbi has been an errant king potentially worse than Afonja of Ilorin. Going back in history, one shouldn’t be surprised that it is an Iwo monarch denigrating Yoruba monarchy when one realizes that the first Yoruba mosque ever was built in Iwo around 1660, nearly two hundred years before Afonja handed Ilorin to Fulani Islamists.
During the early 2000s Sharia law debate, many advocates specifically pinpointed Iwo as an example why Sharia law should also cover Yoruba land, which was long before Akanbi became Oluwo. With a closer look it becomes evident that there is a pattern to his illogicality, which is Islamic fundamentalism, raising questions of whether he is being sponsored by the Sultan of Sokoto and Etsu of Nupe. Unlike Afonja that mistakenly used Fulani mercenaries to fight his Oyo Ile homebase and lost Northern Yorubaland, Akanbi set out from the start to deliver Yorubaland to the Fulani led Afro-Arabic civilization.
Recently when the Ooni of Ife tasked the academia to dig deeper into Ile Ife as the origin of humanity, Oluwo Rashid countered him that Yorubas didn’t evolve from Ife but from Mecca through Lamurudu. It is becoming clearer by the day that Rashid wearing an Oduduwa crown is not a true Yoruba Oba. Like most Abrahamic fundamentalists, Akanbi is ignorant of indisputable facts about the origins of the Yoruba and fundamentals of the Indigenous African civilization – Ifa-Afa-Iha-Fa-Efa. He suffers from Arabic coloniality that makes him wrongly believe that for Yoruba to be globally significant, we need to be tied to Mecca or Jerusalem. Actually, Mecca and Jerusalem pale into insignificance when compared to the Yoruba concept of Ife, meaning where the land spreads ‘ibi ti ile ti fe’, which goes back 66 million years ago when the Earth was hit by a meteorite that cause the breakup of the single supercontinent, Pangea into the present five continents, creating conditions in the same area where humanity evolved and spread.
Abdulrasheed Akanbi is ignorant of DNA evidence from the likes of Harvard Medical School Simons Genome Diversity Project (S Mallick 2016) that shows Yoruba to be the oldest full sized humans dated 87,000yrs ago, which is a good 80,000 years before lightskinned people evolved from Central Asia mountain complex and later took over Arabia. Mecca is not older than 2000yrs old, so how could Yoruba that evolved 85,000yrs earlier have originated from there. The same Abrahamic coloniality that makes some Igbos claim to be Jews.
The miseducation of Adewale Abdulrasheed Akanbi prevents him from understanding the philosophical foundations of Ifa-Afa-Iha-Fa-Efa, the world’s oldest knowledge bank, a compilation over thousands of years of our scientific observation of natural laws and phenomena. He doesn’t understand the cyclic spiritual and philosophical essences of Orisas which he wrongly sees as dead deities like Mohammed. Unknown to him that Orisas are natural phenomena tied to the universe which explains it’s workings in what is called African Spiritual Science. Ifa is not a religion, but includes religion, science, philosophy, astronomy, medicine, pharmacy, electromagnetism, quantum physics etc.
It is this wealth of knowledge accumulated over tens of thousands of years that Akanbi the errant king of Iwo wants to sweep away and replace with Islam created just over a thousand years ago. He attempted to ban Yoruba Isese culture in Iwo like in Ilorin, if not the Osun State governor that overrode him. Just like many Christian Africans don’t know the philosophical foundations of their adopted Abrahamic religion, Akanbi doesn’t know that Prophet Idris/Enoch, their oldest prophet brought Ifa to Islam at its foundation known as science of the sand/Ilm al-raml or lines in the sand Khatt al-raml. Akanbi has a superficial knowledge of Ifa limited to its arts but not its body of science that ties Orisas to planets and the cosmic system or social and physical sciences.
Future generations might draw wrong conclusions that Akanbi was like Colombus that extended Europe civilization to the Americas; Queen Elizabeth I that broke Britain from Roman Empire; George Washington broke USA from Britain, but even though all were weed smokers they were all fiercely loyal to their civilization like Fela. Abdulrasheed is smoking a dirty blunt of Obaluaye’s weed of territorial expansionism heavily laced with the suicidal foreign religious opium (gbana) of the poor. All Oluwo of Iwo wants is to be the first Emir of Yorubaland, and like a crackhead is willing to complete the Arabization of Yorubaland and annihilation of our cultural identity.
Yorubas need to take his threat very seriously and don’t just excuse it as weed smoking of our king has gone mad again. Pending the time he is curbed by Yoruba traditional institutions or state government that gave him the staff of office, every self-respecting Yoruba traditionalist has a right to stop according him the respect and privileges of an Oba since he has denigrated and denied Yoruba Obaship and claimed that he is an Emir or Emperor.
