By Lasisi Olagunju

Okuku town in present Osun State has a well-recorded history of cultural promotion and preservation. Ulli Beier’s ‘Yoruba Beaded Crowns’ (1982) and Karin Barber’s ‘I Could Speak until Tomorrow: Oriki, Women and the Past in a Yoruba Town’ (1991) are two of the contributions of Okuku to Yoruba cultural history. The late Yoruba playwright and culture icon, Adebayo Faleti, told me in 2004 that he wrote one of his major plays in Okuku in the 1950s.

Oba Moses Oyewole Oyinlola was Olokuku of Okuku from 1938 to 1960. A very deeply religious and cultural man, he died on 20 February, 1960 and was buried two days later. Within those two days, there was a flurry of rites in the town and in the palace. The late oba’s grown-up male children feared that the king’s corpse would be tampered with by some unknown people called traditionalists. And so, they met and plotted to stop it.

One of the boys was embedded in the palace room where the remains were laid in state. Armed with a machete, he kept vigil over their dad’s remains while others lurked around as a back-up. Then, deep in the night, with curfew in place, some elderly persons, in a column, filed into the room. They turned out to be known faces; they were the chiefs that reigned with the now dead king.

The chiefs did not see the hiding young man with a machete. They started the rites while the boy watched every aspect of what the chiefs came to do. To his relief, there was no attempt to tamper with the corpse. “They did not even touch it. All they came with were words and wishes. They communicated with their oba asking him to intercede for them before the ancestors so that their own lives and that of the entire town could be as sweet as that of the departed oba.” They finished their prayers and left. Did the sentry leave too? An eye was kept on the remains until they were buried on February 22, 1960 in the premises of St Michael’s Cathedral, Okuku. The tomb is up to today the most prominent there.

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The hiding prince told me all this in 2004 as I was gathering materials for the biography of the late oba, which was published in December 2005. Some people of tradition would ask where the prince is now. He grew to become a man, became successful, earned a PhD, lived well and died a few years ago at almost 90.

The death last Sunday and burial on Monday of the Awujale of Ijebuland, Oba Sikiru Olukayode Adetona, is the top trending topic. His transition and the controversy of his burial have renewed public interest in who should bury an oba and what really happens to the body of a king in Yorubaland when he dies. Do the bodies get mutilated and the hearts removed for the installation of their successors? Do succeeding obas eat the hearts of their predecessors?

I have cited the Okuku case above. I have also read wide and consulted people who should know. All my sources maintained that cannibalism is not one of Yoruba people’s ‘disorder’ and so, eating the heart of a dead king couldn’t have been one of the ingredients of their royal installation rites. The late Awujale, in an old interview that has also gone viral lately, gave his own experience on the heart-eating myth: “I cannot recall any rite that was done behind the scene. Let them come and tell me. It is all lies. Nothing like that. They even tell you that they give the heart of a deceased oba to the new one to eat!…Nothing like that. Okay, which heart did Orimolusi eat when Adeboye died in Tripoli? Besides, when Gbelegbuwa died, I wasn’t in the country. I was abroad and didn’t return until about a year after his death. So, which heart was given to me? I didn’t eat anything oooo. So, no such thing happened.” I think other obas should come out and tell their story. Doing so may stop friends and foes of the Yoruba from looking at them as man-eaters.

Some tradition-loving Yoruba persons are angry because the Awujale was buried by Muslims. Now, I ask: What is traditional burial? What is Muslim burial? Among other obligatory steps, the Muslim corpse is washed and shrouded in a simple white cloth; prayers are offered. Inside the grave, the body is laid on its right side, facing the East. At what point does a received practice become part of one’s tradition? I asked because just like the Muslims, the Lo Dagaa of northern Ghana, who are not Muslims, also bury their dead people “lying on their right side facing the East so that the rising sun will tell them to prepare for hunt or for the farm…” So, what is ‘Muslim’ to Yoruba traditionalists is ‘traditional’ to that Ghanaian ethnic group. We can read this and more in J. Goody’s ‘Death, Property and the Ancestors: A Study of Mortuary Customs of the Lo Dagaa of West Africa’ published in 1962.

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It happened that some bad kings received bad burials in the past. One of such punishments for royal misdeeds could be dismemberment of the cadaver. There were other rewards for good and bad behaviour on the throne. When a wicked oba died, the chiefs stormed the palace and seized all items in there as communal property. When a good oba died, the chiefs delayed the announcement until the family of the departed had moved all they wanted out of the palace to his private residence. The chiefs could achieve that because in theory, the Yoruba king owned nothing as personal property. He reigned in the name of the town, got gifts and favours in their name and on their behalf he kept or used them. It was therefore the law that the palace, the king, and all he owned were property of the kingdom. All these, including the body, could go back to the people and the oba’s family stripped naked if the departed was not a good man.

If it is the Yoruba tradition that the king’s body belongs to the community, then we have to define who approximates that community today. The majority Muslim/Christian groups or the minority who claim ‘tradition’ as their religion? If tradition is a people’s way of life, have Christianity and Islam not become part of the Yoruba ‘way of life’? Indeed, there is a whole Odu in Ifa celebrating Islam and Muslims. It is called Odu Imale. Tradition is a river; it draws its strength from the source but gets stronger and larger as it takes from this stream and that tributary. It would be a dirty, diseased pond if it resists the cleansing ritual of free-flowing.

Tradition is not the earthing of a people in a past that is long gone. What is traditional is not exactly what is archaic.

The West brought Christianity and civilisation to the ‘savage’ tribes of Africa. In 1946, they stopped the suicide of an Olokun Esin in Oyo who was billed to accompany the Alaafin on his journey to the ancestors. Since then, no Oyo king has enjoyed having an entourage to heaven. Dying with the king was hugely celebrated in Oyo as the ultimate expression of love for the empire and high-end duty to the king:

Olókùn-esin İbàdàn

K’ó má ba Olókùn-ęsin Ộyộ je

Ẹni ó bá rójú b`óba kú

L’`a á mò l’Ólókùn-esin.

Eyí ti ò rójú b’óba kú

A á maa pè ‘ón l’Ólókùn-eran ni…

(Adeboye Babalola, 2001:125).

It was also part of the ritual of passage for the Alaafin that his crown prince (Aremo) must die with him. But Alaafin Atiba stopped that practice. He got his Aremo Adelu endorsed as his successor before he died in 1858 at the age of 58. There was a resistance to that change snowballing into a very bad civil war – the Ijaye War of 1860-1862. But the reform was eventually upheld because forced suicide (or murder) was repugnant to decency and a violent assault on the prince’s right to life.

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Tradition speaks to aspects of a people’s way of life. It is the “inherited beliefs, practices, and values passed down through generations.” But it is not immutable. Traditions are practices in perpetual transition. A tradition isn’t what it is called if it fails to adapt to societal shifts, to advancements in tech, to new cultural influences. Customs and traditions live when they accept modifications, reinterpretations, and even the abandonment of certain practices as societies evolve. Take a glance at the death and burial of King Francis I of France in 1547. I will rely on this quote from Ralph Giesey’s ‘The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France’ published in 1960: “With the death of a king, the body was immediately eviscerated, embalmed, and the removed remains subsequently buried apart from the corpse.” Evisceration means to disembowel a person or animal. Would anyone expect the evisceration of a king’s body today in the West? Even French that did it five centuries ago has since abolished the monarchy itself. It did so on 24 February, 1848. Have we paused to ponder the future of Yoruba kingship as democracy digs in?

While we seek to preserve what we call our tradition, have we asked how the various parts came to be? How do traditions get invented? What the French did to the corpse of their king in 1547, the act of disemboweling that took place some 500 years ago, was it for ritual or for medical reasons? W. Arens’ in ‘The Demise of Kings and the Meaning of Kingship’ (1984) from where I got the Giesey quote will serve you if you need more on the sacred and religious contents of that royal burial and the parallel it drew with the burial of kings in a part of Africa.

So, as we bid the iconic Awujale good night, it is time the Yoruba elite and commoners calmed down and got to work on the real issues of development that need urgent tackling. As I told someone at the weekend, the Yoruba have no friend in Nigeria. Onílé owó òtún kò wo niire, ìmòràn ìkà ni t’òsì ngbà, ká lé ni jáde ni tòókán ilé nwí. I will not translate this; rather, I will add that majoring in minor issues degrades the Yoruba advantage of over 200 years of education and of global engagement.