The Yoruba Nationalist Movements, Ethnic Politics and Violence: A ...

tribes. Even at the 21 st century, the political events that followed the imagined creation of
Yoruba as a nation are still short of creating a common political aspiration for the Yoruba
people as a whole.
It should be noted that even till the present period, the term ‘Yoruba’ does not exist in
the Yoruba dictionary. Of course, the term was traced to the Hausa word Yar ba (Awde,
1996). According to Awde (1996) in his dictionary of Hausa, the term Yar ba was used for the
Oyo people whom the Hausa had the earliest contact with in the present-day South-western
Nigeria. In Hausa, the term is used to refer to a group of people that are smart and clever. In
the pre-colonial times, however, the people now known as the Yoruba were known by their
distinct tribal names such as Oyo, Ijesa, Ife, Egba, Awori, Igbomina, Ekiti, Remo, Ijebu, Owo,
Ondo, Ilaje, Akoko, Ikale, O’kun, Egun, Yewah and Ilorin. The collective name, Yoruba, was
never used in reference to these peoples.
Nonetheless, as ethno-nationalist movements became stronger, consciousness of ethnic
commonality was established among the Yoruba. This cultural awareness has been traced to
slavery, Christianity and colonial politics. According to Matory (2005), the Yoruba that were
exported to Brazil, North America and the West Indies initially noticed among themselves
that they came from the same port of embankment and that they shared some degree of
cultural similarity. Hence, they joined together to stage protests against the slave dealers.
When slavery was aborted, a larger percentage of them were returned to Sierra Leone where
they formed a group known as the Creoles. Eventually, they were taken to Lagos in an
attempt to re-settle them within their cultural origins. Among these new freed slaves were
some lucky ones who had benefited from Portuguese gestures of Christianity and western
education, factors that contributed to their becoming the elite of Lagos and Egba. It was these
individuals who formed the first African clergy in Nigeria. Examples include Samuel
Johnson, Samuel Ajayi Crowther and Lipede who translated their sense of ethnic
commonness into a cultural project.
This new clergy wanted to translate the English Bible into a local language in order to
facilitate evangelization in South-western Nigeria. As they were constrained by orthography
to use, they borrowed from German and Latin alphabets and sounds, with which they
introduced the writing in the Yoruba language with vocalization from the Oyo dialect. These
early clergymen had their origins from the old Oyo kingdom, and so through them the Oyo
socio-cultural pattern was made dominant as the expression of common Yoruba values. The
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