Textuality, self-translation and the Saro-Yorùbá intelligentsia

Ajiṣafẹ began working on the History around 1906 while working in the Ẹgba United Government (EUG) (Ajiṣafẹ Reference Ajiṣafẹ1948: 3). The initial version was completed by 1912 but was postponed while he established the Native Authors’ Publication Society to raise funds for publication of an eight-volume history of the Yorùbá states (Law Reference Law1976: 73). Early Yorùbá histories were published in two styles: pan-Yorùbá histories and city-state histories. Ajiṣafẹ's History was a city-state history with a pan-Yorùbá and pan-Nigeria rhetorical agenda. After Abẹokuta's 1914 annexation, Ajiṣafẹ chose to write an apologia for Abẹokuta in a unified Nigeria. The History renegotiated the Odùduwà dynasty's constitutional terms and sanctioned the transfer of sovereignty to Nigeria. History was an evidentiary tool, used to demonstrate flaws in the endogenous constitution in making the moral case for entrusting dynastic sovereignty in British protection and obeisance to the Nigerian order. Abẹokuta, a constituent of the Odùduwà dynasty and fountainhead of Nigeria's Christian intelligentsia, was significant with regard to problems of self-government, which could be demonstrated in published histories.

Most histories were published in the Abẹokuta–Lagos corridor, the epicentre of Nigerian print culture. This literary movement was spurred by returnees from Sierra Leone (Saro), Brazil, the Caribbean and the USA, and their assimilation into the dynamic landscape of the Yorùbá city states (Matory Reference Matory2005: 63). Writing became a key part of their renegotiation of local systems of authority. In the 1890s, Saro historians, writing on the assumption that the Yorùbá polities would be united through the instrumentality of British power, wrote the first pan-Yorùbá histories.Footnote ² The early histories asserted providence in history but assumed that the British Empire would consolidate Yorùbá nationality. They could not foresee the implications of Nigeria as their basis of corporeal protection (Peel Reference Peel2016: 50–1). After the consolidation of the Colony and Protectorate of Southern Nigeria in 1906, however, the second wave of local histories peaked in the 1910s, the bulk of which were classic city-state histories.Footnote ³ This generation of local historians retracted the premature projections of national Yorùbá unification and reformulated a teleological framework to fit their new political geography of south-western Nigeria.

Whereas the nineteenth-century histories were written in English, the second-generation histories were bilingual texts (Barber Reference Barber, Peterson and Macola2009: 34). This article uses Ajiṣafẹ's History to argue that bilingual texts, such as the ‘history of Abẹokuta’, constitute single textual corpora that are negotiated in distinct lingual bodies. Jan Hokenson and Marcella Munson argue that bilingual texts have been left outside mainstream literary theory due to the consolidation of the nation state around monolingual hegemonies (Hokenson and Munson Reference Hokenson and Munson2007). Our knowledge of the bilingual treatise in Africa's intellectual history is incomplete without comparative analysis of both versions. A bilingual text ‘refers to the self-translated text, existing in two languages and usually in two physical versions, with overlapping content’ (ibid.: 14). It is helpful to think of Ajiṣafẹ as a bilingual self-translator. Self-translators invoke materials that overlap and are profoundly distinct, because the indigene's conceptual uses of the vernacular constitute an emic renegotiation of a moral community's reality independent of an external subjectivity. Ajiṣafẹ's dialogic deliberations in the Itan involve an array of genres, of praise poetry and divination verses, that negotiate the vernacular subjectivity. This article discusses the areas of overlap and explains some implications of the areas where the texts diverge.

The Saro intelligentsia consolidated the Yorùbá ethnicity and language that they concurrently worked to renegotiate (Peel Reference Peel2000). They codified oral traditions that preceded print yet set in motion a series of signs that would transcend their private lives as written text. According to Barber, ‘Text represents the capacity to produce meaningful forms outside any individual's immediate volition … and it can thus provide a model for all reflection upon social institutions and social action’ (Barber Reference Barber2007: 101). The anthropological aim of vernacular authors was to bridge the gap between orality and textual literacy. The reconciliation of the regimes of orality and textuality hinged on their pursuit of political sovereignty. The ambiguity of texts necessitated ongoing self-translations as a model for engagement and self-governance.

No institution made self-translation as imperative as religion. Religion constituted the outstanding domain for the articulation of Yorùbá oral traditions. The Ifá oral literary corpus is the most significant traditional expression of religious devotion in the Yorùbá states (Bascom Reference Bascom1969). The Ifá system and the institution of oriṣa worship, as expressions of the divine, are the locus of authority in the Yorùbá kingdoms. The Ẹgba kingdom was thus a kingdom of the Odùduwà dynasty with its system of sacred kingship articulated in the Ifá oral corpus (Law Reference Law1973; Adepegba Reference Adepegba1986). It was also the first Yorùbá kingdom to welcome Protestant missionaries into its architecture of self-governance in the early 1840s (Biobaku Reference Biobaku1957: 27–37).

After the late nineteenth-century Anglo-African treaties, the British government worked to consolidate the Odùduwà ‘Ọba Alade’ sovereign crowns into a centralized House of Chiefs/Lords built around the kings at Abẹokuta, Benin, Ifẹ and Ọyọ, among other places (Atanda Reference Atanda1973: 85–127; Asiwaju Reference Asiwaju1976: 118–19).Footnote ⁴ However, the potential of the Ọba institution to form the basis of a centralized monarchy remained unrealized. The British adopted the sacred kingship traditions that the Ọọni of Ifẹ used to determine the legitimate Yorùbá crowns, yet this was fiercely contested and obstructed monarchical unification.Footnote ⁵ Each polity had a distinct status that did not neatly correspond to the imperial project of an Odùduwà constitutional monarchy. The ecclesiastical foundation of the Westphalian nation state had been central to the era's partition of West Africa, and missionary institutions were essential to the negotiation of African polities in the Family of Nations (Anson Reference Anson1892; Alexandrowicz Reference Alexandrowicz and Ingham1974; Peel Reference Peel2000). Western ecclesiastical authority, therefore, was crucial to the bureaucratic rationalization of charismatic networks of authority such as the Odùduwà dynasty (Weber Reference Weber2004).Footnote ⁶ Following Abẹokuta's annexation into Nigeria, Ajiṣafẹ's History discursively negotiated sacred Yorùbá kingship and the British Empire's established Church as part of this generational effort to consolidate the House of Odùduwà and proffer a model of a centralized Nigeria. The textual corpus of Ajiṣafẹ's History, therefore, narrates a history of Abẹokuta as the recipient of divine grace and providential sanction in the newly unified Nigeria.

Biography, world religion and Christian historiography

Emmanuel Olympus Moore was born in Lagos in about 1875 (or 1879) (Doortmont Reference Doortmont1994: 52) into a prominent family, members of the Ẹgba–Ijẹmọ lineage, of Anglican missionaries repatriated from Sierra Leone. His grandfather, the Reverend William Odusina Moore, was among the first generation of Ẹgba Christians. Moore was captured in his Ẹgba village in 1824 and sold into the Atlantic slave trade (Anderson Reference Anderson2020: 203). The British Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron intercepted the ship that Moore was on, and he spent twenty-five years at Freetown, Sierra Leone. After returning to Abẹokuta in 1851, the Revd Moore served as an Anglican evangelist, and from 1868 to 1880 he directed the Anglican mission to the Ẹgba kingdom. S. J. Ajiṣafẹ Moore, Ajiṣafẹ's father, established, along with Emmanuel Lijadu, the pioneering Christian Yorùbá literary society, the Abẹokuta Patriotic Society, in about 1883. Ajiṣafẹ was a third-generation Christian, born into a community deeply rooted in the history of Christianity and vernacular literature in Nigeria.

Emmanuel Moore embodied the Saro who sought to reconnect with an imagined indigenous Yorùbá identity and shed the European names that they were given in colonial society in Sierra Leone. Indeed, the Lagos in which he came of age in the 1890s was a cosmopolitan centre of the African ‘cultural nationalism’ movement (Farias and Barber Reference Farias and Barber1990). The adoption of an indigenous African name became a key aspect of their identity politics, which signified their new-found authenticity. In the 1910s, Moore adopted ‘Ajayi Kọlawọlẹ Ajiṣafẹ’ as his new public name. He first publicized Ajiṣafẹ as his cognomen, which his father embraced in the early 1880s, in the 1916 first edition of the History of Abẹokuta. He used ‘Emmanuel Olympus Moore’ on the title page and ‘Ajiṣafẹ’ in brackets underneath. The name originates from A ji (to wake up) and ṣafe (to adorn oneself, to live beautifully) (Doortmont Reference Doortmont1994: 52). He developed a passion for European church music while a student at St John's School, Lagos, which he attended from 1883 to 1888. He finished his primary education at St Peter's Anglican School in Abẹokuta's royal court of Ake.

Ajiṣafẹ achieved a licentiate at the Victoria College of Music in Lagos and was inducted as a fellow of the Incorporated Guild of Church Music (Doortmont Reference Doortmont1994: 53). He was a composer of a vast repertoire of Yorùbá music using the Western system of music theory and notation (Stone Reference Stone2017: 404). Regarded as a ‘genius of music’, Ajiṣafẹ pioneered live performance on broadcast radio, the unionization of musicians and the recording industry in Nigeria (Gbilekaa Reference Gbilekaa1997: 15). He joined the EUG as a customs officer in 1900; from 1905 to 1911, he was the director of the EUG penal system.Footnote ⁷ Ajiṣafẹ's investments in the EUG influenced the way in which he wrote the History, which he began writing as part of his critique of the EUG. He was concerned with linking the EUG's politics to Christianity as a world religion.

Doortmont argues that Yorùbá historiography developed according to three interlocking epistemological principles: classicism, traditionalism and pragmatism (Doortmont Reference Doortmont and Falola1993: 52–63). Classicism referred to the influence of the Greco-Roman classics, a hallmark of missionary education in British West Africa. British missionaries to West Africa educated Christian converts in Hebrew, Attic Greek, New Testament Greek and Latin, in order to prepare Christians to read the Bible in the original languages (Goff Reference Goff2013: 25). At the turn of the century, local intellectuals drew on their missionary education to craft ‘a Yorùbá written literature that could stand alongside the classics of antiquity and modernity’ (Barber Reference Barber, Peterson and Macola2009: 32). To validate their identity politics and epistemic authority, Yorùbá intellectuals referenced only two textual traditions: the sacred Ifá oral corpus and the Holy Bible. The global tradition of Christian historiography thus provides a useful way of understanding their historicism (Peel Reference Peel2000: 281).

For Law, Ajiṣafẹ's annalist presentation of the past differentiated his History from his contemporary Yorùbá historians, whose histories were embedded within either the mythological or ethnological typologies of the oral traditions (Law Reference Law1976: 80). The discipline of church history, which figures such as Eusebius and Socrates Scholasticus pioneered, was another source of Ajiṣafẹ's historicism. Ecclesiastical history developed a Christian approach to the past that adhered to the scholastic tradition of Greco-Roman philosophy, while maintaining fidelity to the Church. Ajiṣafẹ wrote a history of the Ẹgba state that vindicated its spiritual past, while also vindicating the introduction of Christianity into the kingdom. Ajiṣafẹ utilized annalist historiography to articulate a Christian philosophy of history as ‘the meeting point of time and eternity’, in which the creator deity does the work of creation but grants to the creation personal responsibility for their actions in time (Dawson Reference Dawson1951: 318). The Christian philosophy of history enabled Ajiṣafẹ to assimilate dynastic claims into his construction of the overall destiny of the Ẹgba/Yorùbá regime, yet not efface the oriṣa devotion nor negate his faith in Christianity. When he began writing the History, the EUG was in decline, and he searched for a spiritual explanation for the political failures of his generation. A precedent for this apologetic enterprise existed in the early history of Christianity.

The archetype for Ajiṣafẹ's apologetical Christian historicism is Orosius's The Seven Books of History Against the Pagans (Reference Orosius and Deferrari1964). Augustine of Hippo commissioned Orosius to write the historical counterpart to his City of God. Orosius's History charted world history from a Christian perspective. Ajiṣafẹ's apparent appropriation of the Orosian epistemology demonstrates a conceptual link of English and Yorùbá Christianities, through the royal patronage of Christian historiography (Hurley Reference Hurley2013). Although the Ẹgba kings did not commission Ajiṣafẹ to pursue this undertaking, he urged the state to subsidize similar scholarship. Ajiṣafẹ's rhetoric of history, like Orosius's, was concerned with the objective, to demonstrate ‘what difference Christianity makes in this world’ through the framework of sin and punishment (Van Nuffelen Reference Van Nuffelen2012: 186–206). In this Christian view, the human past was understood as deservedly unfavourable because of the human condition of sin, a result of the fall of Adam and Eve. In the present, Christianity and foreign imperial rule have, by Ọlọrun'sFootnote ⁸ grace, provided the tools for people to rectify the corrupt human condition.

Classical Christian historiography was concerned with clarifying the ways in which human conduct, devotion and desire can justify a theology of state power. Due to the innate sin condition, in the Christian view, all human beings are naturally incapable of righteous self-governance and deserve eternal damnation. Through Ọlọrun's mercy, however, Ajiṣafẹ asserts in the History (and other texts) that European imperialism brought to West Africa the possibilities of peace, the rule of law, and salvific emancipation from the dominion of sin. Ajiṣafẹ's Christian epistemic presupposition aimed to conserve traditional authority by imposing stringent procedural limitations on the exercise of regal power. The doctrine of providence provided Ajiṣafẹ with a conceptual way of vindicating the chiefly aristocracyFootnote ⁹ while mediating empire. For patristic thinkers, Constantine's legalization of Christianity signified that, with the Pax Romana, Western imperialism would serve as God's vehicle for the gospel and his rod of chastisement for kings (Kofsky Reference Kofsky2000: 286; Van Nuffelen Reference Van Nuffelen2012: 189). Consequently, Ajiṣafẹ's rhetoric frames Ọlọrun's imposition of the Pax Britannica as a redemptive force and civil obedience the penitential reward for the chieftains whose sovereignty might otherwise have been lost in the Yorùbá civil wars to the African slave trade.Footnote ¹⁰

Ajiṣafẹ diverges from patristic theology in his mediation of the oral Ifá corpus. In the nineteenth century, the West African kings refused to renegotiate the terms of their sovereignty with the Western Church. Ajiṣafẹ, therefore, wrote from a context in which he selectively appropriated but did not strictly adhere to Anglican Christian doctrinal orthodoxy. Where patristic national Christian conversion was premised on the rejection of the national deity, Ajiṣafẹ makes it clear that the arrival of Christians in Abẹokuta fulfilled the national oracular Ifá prophecy (Johnson Reference Johnson2006). Ajiṣafẹ corroborates Apter's theory that Saro intellectuals ‘rewrote’ the Christian dogma on ‘paganism’ into a concept of Yorùbá empowerment (Apter Reference Apter1992: 195). However, the unfinished objective, imperative for the unification of the Yorùbá monarchy, was to explain, in the vernacular, the spiritual meaning of the Pax Britannica.

Western European imperialism had to be understood as part of the chain of God's plan for all humanity. According to Ajiṣafẹ, therefore, the arc of his biography, including the spiritual fall into the transatlantic slave trade, his family's return to Ẹgbaland and West Africa's ultimate annexation into the Western empires, were direct revelations of Ọlọrun's unmerited grace that would make possible the conditions for West Africa's ethnonational repentance and salvation. The African states would not make the existential transformation necessary for national self-government without the subjective understanding of the divine economyFootnote ¹¹ of European rule of Africa.Footnote ¹² By invoking the established Church's patristic epistemes, Ajiṣafẹ explains in the vernacular moral economyFootnote ¹³ the implications of its historical intersection with the imperial ‘divine economy’; the rule of law and the monarchical order to come in British Nigeria would be contingent on the individual's voluntary subjectivation to an imperial British Crown whose royal dignity was founded on the deity. The civil subject's justified obedience to the British Crown in Nigeria, therefore, irrespective of personal faith, was an act of penitential devotion to the deity (Ọlọrun) that undergirded the endogenous moral economy (Ifá) and the Abrahamic faiths (Hooker Reference Hooker1874: 456).

A brief overview of Ajiṣafẹ's oeuvre illustrates his Abrahamic formulation of religious dialogue as the mode of Nigerian self-government. By 1904, he completed the Ofin ati Ilana (On Law and Order) and was known for selling original sheet music for organ in Lagos.Footnote ¹⁴ A series of undated works possibly date from his pre-1911 period in the Ẹgba government. The early texts include the Ekun Iyawo (The Rites of the New Bride); a translation of the Asaro Kukuru Fun awon Imale (A Treatise Devoted to the Muslims); the hagiographic Life of Fadipe, the earliest published Yorùbá biography by a Nigerian (Peel Reference Peel2000: 292); and the Agbad'owo Re (Honour Thy Elders). In 1911, Ajiṣafẹ won the ‘Competition for Native Plays’ in the Lagos press for his drama Aṣika bi Aparo (1910).Footnote ¹⁵ Despite his astonishing productivity, he remained financially insecure. He depended on the patronage of wealthy Lagosians, such as Herbert Macaulay, the Olori Charlotte Olajumoke-Ọbasa, and the Lagos councilman (his cousin) Eric O. Moore, to finance his publications.

Between 1916 and 1923, Ajiṣafẹ published eight books in England with Richard Clay & Sons and Routledge; he was the only living Nigerian author to publish abroad in this period (Doortmont Reference Doortmont1994: 47). In this, his most significant period, Ajiṣafẹ introduced the History of Abẹokuta (1916) and a bevy of treatises. An announcement for the History in the Lagos Standard described Ajiṣafẹ as a bona fide writer who ‘has lately blossomed into an author whose writings have proved satisfactory as sale of his brochure Aiye Akamara, and other patriotic works printed in our vernacular shows’.Footnote ¹⁶ The Revd Adelakun Howells, later the Bishop of Lagos, recommended the Aiye Akamara, Ajiṣafẹ's most popular achievement, for the school curriculum on moral instruction and self-discipline. Ajiṣafẹ's History manuscript won the ‘Ibadan History Competition’. The most notable books of this period included the Igbadun Aiye (On the Good LifeFootnote ¹⁷); the Enia Ṣoro (On Human NatureFootnote ¹⁸); the Tan't’ Ọlọrun? (Who is Equal to Ọlọrun?) (c.1919); the Kil’ Ẹ P'Oyinbo Ṣe? (What is Your Accusation against the Europeans?) (1921); the Gbadebọ Alake (King Gbadebọ) (1922); the Trinitarian Akanṣe Adura (A Special Prayer for the Black Nations and Especially the Yorùbá) (1922); the Ọrúnmìlà (1923);Footnote ¹⁹ the Laws and Customs of the Yoruba People (1924); and the Iwe Itan Abẹokuta (1924).

Throughout the 1920s, Ajiṣafẹ petitioned the government of Nigeria for research funds. From his appeals to Sir Hugh Clifford, Governor of Nigeria, Ajiṣafẹ secured state funding for his book projects (Cookey Reference Cookey1980: 532).Footnote ²⁰ The Clifford Constitution of 1922 was premised on the Lugardian doctrine of the preservation of the indigenous systems of authority with the provision that Nigeria's national development was contingent on the discursive interaction of indigenous groups (ibid.: 533). The challenge was to consolidate the entire Nigerian protectorate around the federal capital (at Lagos or Kaduna), yet maintain delegated sovereignty throughout the indigenous states in the Nigerian legislative council. The Clifford reforms spawned party politics with the Nigerian National Democratic Party in Lagos under Herbert Macaulay, the putative ‘father of Nigerian nationalism’ (Ezera Reference Ezera1960: 30). The problem of representative government in Nigeria, however, could not be resolved unless the production of legislation was subordinated to the hegemony of the kings. The indigenous sovereigns would have to enter into covenant for Nigeria to function. According to Governor Clifford, the educated African intellectuals (such as Ajiṣafẹ) were imperative to this centralization of the Nigerian body politic (Cookey Reference Cookey1980: 540). Only an African intelligentsia could theorize the constitutional reforms of the indigenous groups that would facilitate coequal legislative and judicial self-government (under the British Crown's royal prerogative) in a federal nation state (Ezera Reference Ezera1960: 23–7).

During the 1925–35 period, therefore, Ajiṣafẹ embarked on an ambitious state-supported research scheme in cities such as Benin, Ibadan, Ile-Ifẹ, Ilorin, Minna, Kaduna, Kano and Onitsha in a bid to renegotiate the ‘natural’ constitution of Nigeria. According to I. W. Oshilaja, Ajiṣafẹ visited the major city-state capitals of the Western Region and drafted ‘laws and customs’ for each polity.Footnote ²¹ He collected data, met with the chiefs and kings, conducted interviews, notated the local music, and prepared manuscripts. He completed the history manuscripts for Lagos and Ile-Ifẹ. He finished his most comprehensive manuscript, The Yorùbá People of Nigeria: their creed, arts & sciences, and superstitious observations, which he submitted to Routledge. His musical performances and book promotions helped pioneer the rich literary traditions of OnitshaFootnote ²² and Benin City, which would take off only after World War Two (Obiechina Reference Obiechina1973; Falola and Usuanlele Reference Falola and Usuanlele1994: 304). Ajiṣafẹ's notable publications of the 1930s included a series of treatises in defence of constitutional monarchy that constitute historically significant documents of West African political thought. Only one manuscript from Ajiṣafẹ's state-funded research scheme, however, was published posthumously, as the Laws and Customs of the Benin People (Ajiṣafẹ Reference Ajiṣafẹ1945).

The Western tradition of Anglican Christian scholasticism provided the framework for what Ajiṣafẹ achieved by combining ethnography and philosophy in his attempt to consolidate Nigerian nationality. As a scholastic, Ajiṣafẹ's effort to study each Nigerian regime type was Aristotelian with the caveat of his Christianity. In extending his renegotiation of Ẹgba ethnonationality onto the larger stage of the Nigerian body politic, Ajiṣafẹ staked the legitimacy of Nigeria on an Abrahamic doctrine of divine providence (Peters Reference Peters2004: 2). Ọlọrun's (God's) providential intervention in the arc of history was what united the polities of Nigeria. Nigeria became the divine fulfilment of their past and the precondition for their national destiny. In the History, Ajiṣafẹ's articulation of Abẹokuta's incorporation as preconditional to Nigeria's national destiny is part of the tradition of anglophone political thought, in which representative government and civil liberties depend on national unity under divine providence (Clark Reference Clark1994).

In nineteenth-century Britain, people thought of Abẹokuta as the providential seat of Christian civilization in sub-Saharan Africa (Tucker Reference Tucker1854). British missionaries assumed that Abẹokuta would become, as Canterbury is to England, the archiepiscopal seat of a united Nigerian Church. That movement was derailed as the early Yorùbá clergy failed to effectively negotiate the local cosmology. How could Abẹokuta be the ecclesiastical seat of a united kingdom when Ile-Ifẹ is the sacred centre of dynastical power? In the Odùduwà dynasty's oriṣa ‘civil religion’, does the Ẹgba kingdom possess any royal prerogatives (Olupona Reference Olupona1991)? As it stood, the provisional social contract of the colonial state was tenuous, but so was the royal hegemony of the indigenous kings. Ajiṣafẹ ingeniously weaved traditions of dynastic origins and ecclesiastical historiography to renegotiate divine kingship in order to make royal power consonant with the modern state.

The Revd Lijadu's ‘Fragments of Ẹgba national history’, published in the Ẹgba Government Gazette (1904–05), formed the basis of Ajiṣafẹ's reconstruction of the mythological origins of the Ẹgba polity (Law Reference Law and Olusanya1983: 112). Ajiṣafẹ's work, therefore, reflected discourses already circulating among the Ẹgba intelligentsia. What he accomplished was the collation and reinterpretation of the data, in light of subsequent history, in order to narrate a complete account of the role of providence in the Ẹgba state formation. The vindication of the new order could best be done in separate English and Yorùbá texts. Ajiṣafẹ rooted his rhetoric of Ọlọrun's providence in the Ile-Ifẹ charter of dynastic power (Munoz Reference Munoz1977: 18–19). In both texts, the Ifá corpus is the locus of revelation. According to the corpus, the Ẹgba kingdom is a sacred state with ritual prerogative in the confirmation of regal power. The section below examines Ajiṣafẹ's discourse on religious ethnography and the constitutionality of royal power in the early Ẹgba polity.

Ajiṣafẹ's construction of religion in the early Ẹgba polity

The early Ẹgba history consists of narratives of cosmology and oral traditions of the eighteenth-century Ẹgba origins in the Ọyọ Empire. Ajiṣafẹ develops three major doctrines to substantiate his assertion of the constitutionality of the Ẹgba–Yorùbá dynasty's royal authority: (1) the Odùduwà doctrine of dynastic origins; (2) a systematic model of Yorùbá civic religion; and (3) the Ifá oracle's prophecy of the unique destiny of the Ẹgba dynasty in history. If we think of self-translated texts as distinct, the distinction is in how Ajiṣafẹ defends the work of Ọlọrun's providence in time. The work of providence in Ajiṣafẹ's argument is clear: Abẹokuta is the constitutional heir to the Ile-Ifẹ cosmogony. The Ifá oracle confirms that Abẹokuta will spearhead modernization and redeem the sovereignty of the Odùduwà clan. Whereas Ile-Ifẹ has royal hegemony in the sacred origins of royal power, Abẹokuta has royal supremacy in the confirmation of kings and in ecclesiastical matters. Above all, the social contract of regal power is contingent on consensual obedience. The Pax Britannica, which bookends Ajiṣafẹ's History, is fashioned as a divine grace period until constitutional self-governance in West Africa could be achieved.

The reader is introduced to Ajiṣafẹ's rhetoric on the dedication page. The reader learns that the History of Abẹokuta is dedicated to ‘The British Nation and the Missionaries’ for their ‘protection of’ and beneficence towards ‘the Ẹgba Nation’ (Moore Reference Moore1916: 2). The book was also dedicated to ‘all the Ẹgba children’ of the rising generation who would have a key role to play in the annals of their nation. The annals of past British beneficence towards the Ẹgba, the author asserts, would be instructive to future leaders of the nation. The dedication page establishes Ajiṣafẹ's view of the ‘British Nation’ and Church as a single covenantal entity, for which his text is an apologetical history. He was keenly aware that this work would be presented to a polity newly reconstituted within the British Empire. Ajiṣafẹ's dedication vindicates British historical relations with the Ẹgba and points towards a future Anglo-Ẹgba sovereignty. The nature of African sovereignty was the past, the contents of the book; the future is what the youth will do with his prescriptions.

Ajiṣafẹ begins with a narration of the Odùduwà dynasty's genealogy. He provides a cosmogonical account that fuses the oral traditions of Yorùbá kingship with an assumed cosmology from the Hebrew Bible. In the cosmogony, Ajiṣafẹ appropriates the historicist and theological typologies of the Bible: in historical time, the Yorùbá are the lineal descendants of Ham, and the dynasty's civic religion proceeds from an Afroasiatic or Semito-Hamitic religious culture. This approach enabled Ajiṣafẹ to defend Ọlọrun through his identification with the Hebrew deity, but also to defend the Odùduwà dynasty's religious culture as a natural postlapsarian innovation. According to this classic Semito-Hamitic typology of religious culture, divine providence was understood as national and not personal (Smith Reference Smith1889: 64, 246). Divine providence was experienced through the divine kings via the consultation of oracles, divination and ritual sacrifice for divine oblation. Many authors superimposed the Hamitic framework onto the Ifẹ sacred centre and its endogenous cosmogony (Lange Reference Lange1995).

With this rhetorical framework, Ajiṣafẹ positions NimrodFootnote ²³ as the Odùduwà dynasty's progenitor and allows the Ifá oracle to advance the ritual narrative to the British encounter. Ajiṣafẹ's cosmogony allows both the endogenous Ile-Ifẹ and Hamitic epistemologies to cohabit, whereby the latter explicates but never effaces the former. The Orosian epistemology, which regards divine kingship as a corruptible ‘City of Man’ and the spiritual church an eternal ‘City of God’, becomes central after civil order is established in history under the Odùduwà regime. Britain's providential introduction of the catholic Anglican Church and universal empire as modes of protection makes possible the fulfilment of Ajiṣafẹ's Hamitic model of dynastic self-government. The History, ultimately, fulfils the oracular prophecy of the consummation of national providence through the internal collapse of the EUG. Ajiṣafẹ's embodied testifying to Ọlọrun's grace under British Nigeria's protection renders fulfilled the foregoing sacred kingship modality. In Ajiṣafẹ's texts, the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels become the reformed model of Odùduwà dynastic power – a royal standard of self-governance that, through civil obedience, the British Empire will help cultivate in the protectorate of Nigeria.Footnote ²⁴

The Odùduwà traditions of origins fall into two categories: first, the endogenous creation stories locate Ile-Ifẹ as the cradle of humanity; and second, the migratory traditions assert that the dynasty occupied Ile-Ifẹ and later migrated to conquer other African communities. In each tradition, there are elements of conquest, but the distinction is in the configuration of Ifẹ. Christian historians, using the ‘Hamitic hypothesis’, typically rejected the Ile-Ifẹ cosmology.Footnote ²⁵ The Hamitic hypothesis held that historians were motivated by the Hamitic theory, which considered all states in sub-Saharan Africa to be established by Eurasian invaders from the north (Zachernuk Reference Zachernuk1994; Law Reference Law2009). More than a racialist framework, this Hamitic hypothesis presented an Abrahamic cosmology. Ajiṣafẹ employs the Hamitic doctrine, but, in the Yorùbá text only, he distinguishes the royal Hamitic bloodlines with sovereign powers from the rest of the sub-Saharan African population, who, he claims, constitute a diverse population of Afroasiatic peoples (Ajiṣafẹ Reference Ajiṣafẹ1972: 7–8). In so doing, his articulation of the Hamitic typology of dynastic lineage does not compromise the aristocracy's Ile-Ifẹ cosmology. The Ile-Ifẹ cosmogony is assimilated into a biblical typology, without claiming Ifẹ as ‘Eden’.

Ajiṣafẹ states that a group of ‘oriental hunters’, under Lamurudu, migrated from the east. The ‘Lamurudu’ name was traditionally understood as a linguistic corruption of the Canaanite ruler Nimrod. The hunters settled in the Lake Chad and River Niger regions of West Africa before proceeding to western Nigeria. He described the progenitors as having lived for some time at Tapa and Bornu (Moore Reference Moore1916: 2). Both texts assert an exogenous narrative, although the Itan paints a more detailed picture. The Yorùbá text remains a self-translation, as the rhetorical objective of a Hamitic Anglo-Yorùbá kingship is the same, but the vernacular enables an emic negotiation. In Yorùbá, Ajiṣafẹ states that ‘the Yorùbá are of Asiatic lineal descent, and they sprang from an ethnic Kanuri stock’ (Ajiṣafẹ Reference Ajiṣafẹ1972: 8). His specification of Kanuri heritage suggests the typical form of political propaganda used to keep Yorùbá statecraft in dialogue with Islam. Ajiṣafẹ insists, nonetheless, that the peculiarities of the Yorùbá cosmology originate in proto-Afroasiatic animism.

Ajiṣafẹ explains that, en route to their new home, the emigrants assumed a tribal formation and had a leader who ‘assumed the title Odudua (i.e., Odu ti o da wà, “A self-existing personage)”’ (Moore Reference Moore1916: 2). So, the progenitor ‘Odùduwà’ is two things: a ‘title’, under which a leader assumes a corporate identity; and a ‘self-existing personage’. According to Ẹgba oral traditions, Odùduwà was raised up from the ‘Almighty’ Olodumare. Odùduwà was sent down from the sky by his father and planted the first soils on the earth, which was covered with water (Biobaku Reference Biobaku1957: 1). Eventually, Odùduwà reigned as the first king in world history. Ajiṣafẹ described Odùduwà as ‘the father and progenitor of the Yorùbá dynasties’ (Moore Reference Moore1916: 2). Ajiṣafẹ accepts the sacred claims of Odùduwà acting in a patriarchal corporate capacity as the Odùduwà. He does so in accordance with the tradition of post-mortem kingly deification (Lloyd Reference Lloyd1960). For Ajiṣafẹ, Odùduwà is the incarnate corporate identity of the monarchical line, but he is a man who reigns in the name of the Odùduwà in time. Ajiṣafẹ subjects himself to the sovereign power of the Odùduwà, in a way that clarifies the majesty of dynastic power as a delegated authority from the pre-existent Ọlọrun. Humanity thus experienced the creation of representative government in time.

Royal power was, consequently, an expression of the divine on earth. From 1903, the British government elevated the Ọọni of Ile-Ifẹ as the ritual head of the future united monarchy (Olupona Reference Olupona2011: 77–85). For the Ọọni to sustain his ritual authority over the bureaucratic structure of western Nigeria, however, the nature of his divinity vis-à-vis the other Odùduwà kings needed to be clarified. In the History, Ajiṣafẹ reinterprets the Odùduwà title as a consolidated Ile-Ifẹ dynastic office that was only assumed ‘by the deified personage Ọbàtálá several hundred years afterwards’ (Moore Reference Moore1916: 2). There was a dilemma with the Ile-Ifẹ dynasty, Ajiṣafẹ insists, because Ọbàtálá, another dynastic progenitor, means ‘[t]he personage who created existence’ (ibid.: 2). For Ajiṣafẹ, Ọbàtálá assumes the personified manifestation of the creative force of divine reason that creates humanity in time. This means that the Odùduwà must be anterior to the Ọbàtálá as a constitutional teleological precedent, although each sired separate dynasties in Ifẹ and the Ọbàtálá clan claims autochthony (Obayemi Reference Obayemi1979). The Ọọni is thus the guardian of the sacred space of ritual sanction that is reciprocal to the wider dynastic repertoire rather than necessarily adjudicative for the wider Odùduwà clan. To cohere constitutionally, the Odùduwà and the Ọbàtálá lines would have to be consolidated, or else the Ọbàtálá dynasty would have to forfeit political sovereignty (Lawuyi Reference Lawuyi1992: 371). It is Ọlọrun, therefore, who confers sanctity onto Ifẹ, through whom the Odùduwà kings act in obedience as vessels of the royal dignity.

Although Ajiṣafẹ has yet to mention Ifẹ, Ifẹ as a physical place is irrelevant for this antediluvian Afroasiatic typology of the royal bloodlines. ‘Ifẹ’ (like Eden) is wherever the dynasty was at the moment of embodied existence. Ajiṣafẹ resolves the constitutional contradiction by sanctioning the Ile-Ifẹ cosmology as the historical self-articulation of a people, and making Ifẹ ritually reciprocal to Abẹokuta. He brokers an annalistic depiction of the deities that situate them in time in accordance with ritual custom, which leaves intact their (now consolidated) ritual claim to political authority once representative government is constituted on earth. He introduces another divine personage, Ọmọnide, wife of Odùduwà. At Ile-Ifẹ, now a place, Odùduwà and Ọmọnide sired seven children, constituting the first monarchy. Odùduwà's sons would migrate and establish kingdoms in neighbouring regions, establishing a commonwealth (Smith Reference Smith1969). Odùduwà (or the man who reigned as the Odùduwà) retreated to and died at Ifẹ, in Ajiṣafẹ's narrative, initiating legitimate kingship on earth.

Ajiṣafẹ proceeds to link the Ẹgba monarchy to its divine progenitors. Ẹgba traditions held that the polity consisted of three separate kings.Footnote ²⁶ Throughout the History, Ajiṣafẹ depicts the Alake of the Ake clan as the providential head of the Ẹgba kingdom. According to Ajiṣafẹ, Odùduwà and Ọmọnide sired seven children. As time progressed, these children migrated to establish dynasties: at Benin, the Olibini was entitled; at Ketu, the Alaketu; at Ake, the Alake; at Ila, the Ọrangun; and at Ṣabẹ, the Oniṣabe was enthroned (Moore Reference Moore1916: 2). The youngest son of the royal family became King Ọlọyọ at Oyọro, and, later in the narrative, he usurps this sacred constitution to become the emperor of Ọyọ (ibid.: 5–6). The daughter and eldest child of Odùduwà and Ọmọnide became the mother of the Olowu of Owu, the last king to join the Ẹgba at Abẹokuta. Ajiṣafẹ speculates: ‘Historians say that the Alaketu was the father of the Alake, and that the Alake was only a grandson of Ọmọnide and Odudua, as the Olowu’ (ibid.: 2). Whether the Alake was entitled by way of agnatic primogeniture is irrelevant, ultimately, because ‘the Ọmọnide removed and settled in the Ẹgba Forest, and she died there’ (ibid.). We learn that the ‘Odudua died at Ifẹ … Thus, the grave of the father and progenitor of [the] Yorùbá dynasties lies at Ifẹ, and that of the mother [of the Yorùbá dynasties is at] Orile Ake’ (ibid.: 3). The Alake of Ake (Abẹokuta) joins the Ọọni of Ile-Ifẹ, in Ajiṣafẹ's historicism, as the two ritual sites of constitutional sanction in the Odùduwà dynasty.

The Abẹokuta Patriotic Society (c.1880s) first published this Odùduwà–Ọmọnide constitution. Following Ajiṣafẹ, Biobaku maintained that the dominant lineage of Ẹgba Ake claimed descent from the House of Odùduwà (Biobaku Reference Biobaku1957: 3). Ajiṣafẹ's use of this doctrine explained to his Yorùbá audience, allegorically, why the erstwhile Ọyọ Empire was unable to broker a united Yorùbá kingdom. The prevailing Ọyọ–Ibadan hegemony was, Ajiṣafẹ argues, absolutist and unconstitutional according to divine law (the Ifẹ constitution) (Moore Reference Moore1916: 6–9; Atanda Reference Atanda1973: 85–127).Footnote ²⁷ A legitimate regime must constitutionally cohere with divine right. The idea of absolutism was a rhetorical strategy that intellectuals deployed to reinvest in traditions of divine law (Anderson Reference Anderson1974: 49–50). In Ajiṣafẹ's ‘divine right of kings’ view, kingship must be constitutional through divine law. The Ọyọ polity owed ritual obeisance to Ake, but it ruled Ẹgba through a distortion of the constitution. Ajiṣafẹ proffered this Yorùbá constitution, through adherence to divine right and British imperial protection, as imperative to the restoration of constitutionality to the Odùduwà dynasty.

The Ẹgba kingdom entered the British Empire without royal hegemony and with an unconstitutional configuration of royal power. Ajiṣafẹ was consequently forced to vindicate various modes of civil devotion. He attempts to balance the demands of Western Christendom with his subjectivity and takes the typical approach of defending monotheism as the basis of both mission and tradition. Beyond identity politics, however, there is a theological claim at the core of Ajiṣafẹ's religious ethnography. In English, Ajiṣafẹ asserts: ‘The early religion of the Ẹgba people could not be correctly called Fetishism or Paganism, for they were aware of and did acknowledge the existence of the Almighty God, whom they worshipped as Olorun’ (Moore Reference Moore1916: 17–18).Footnote ²⁸ Ẹgba religion, according to his logic, was not technically ‘paganism’ as the Christians had claimed, because the Ẹgba had foreknowledge of the supreme deity. The linkage of Ọlọrun's monotheist monarchy to the aristocratic hierarchy was contingent on the earlier Anglican identification of Ọlọrun with the יהוה (YHWH). If the Ọlọrun deity was shown to be sovereign, the early Anglicans reasoned, it would facilitate a Trinitarian (i.e. Christian) Yorùbá political theology to negotiate a unified Yorùbá monarchy.Footnote ²⁹

Ajiṣafẹ nuances his defence of the Ọlọrun deity's providential government with an essential caveat: he distinguishes different spheres of religious theory. The Ifá oracle is vested with a sanctioning power, and the civic sects with a devotional power. The Ifá corpus is the oracular catalyst of divine truth in the narrative (Moore Reference Moore1916: 34). Religion, nonetheless, has anthropological dimensions that are distinct from Ifá's civic sovereignty as doctrinal truth (Peel Reference Peel2016: 78). Ajiṣafẹ distinguishes religion as an instrument of government, in its institutional form, from religion as divine truth in its doctrinal form. Although loath to refer to ancestral religion as ‘paganism’, Ajiṣafẹ vindicates the fundamental Augustinian/Orosian epistemic distinction between divine sovereignty and civic religion. Ọlọrun is sovereign and blameless; all religion, however, is temporal and subject to a fallen human nature.

Therefore, the institutional aspect of Ẹgba devotion, according to Ajiṣafẹ, is as an instrument of the government. It is a constitutional entity exemplified in the Ilẹ (earth deity) of the Ọgbọni senatorial class; an ancestor reverence component in the Egungun masquerade society; and the Oro secret society that maintains law and order (Moore Reference Moore1916: 13–17; Ajiṣafẹ Reference Ajiṣafẹ1972: 23–30). In the Yorùbá text, Ajiṣafẹ situates the civic religion's development in the cosmic narratives of the consolidated Odùduwà–Ọbàtálá entity. He utilizes the lyrics of chants, poems, dreams, biblical scriptures and oriki (praise poetry) as sources for the Yorùbá narrative. He discusses the range of deities revered and includes the Odù Ifá verse given by the Babalawo chief priests to the Ẹgba in anticipation of their conquest of Abẹokuta. The Yorùbá materials reveal the rich negotiation of the vernacular moral economy. As a self-translation, the texts cohere in their overlapping defence of Ọlọrun's providence over the arc of history. The civic religion is an ethnological project, while the oracular prophecies are revealed in time. Ajiṣafẹ's rhetoric, therefore, depends on his selective differentiation and identification of the Ọlọrun deity with the civic religion.

Ajiṣafẹ's discourse aimed to induce an appreciation of a Christian ethic of state power. After reiterating Ọlọrun's sovereignty, he associates civic religion with the authority of political elites. He discusses the economy of ritual sacrifice, where ritual killing serves the purpose of divine oblation yet poses moral dilemmas.Footnote ³⁰ For example, he depicts the Oro system as often harsh, as ‘the ceremonies were performed absolutely without any girl or woman’ (Moore Reference Moore1916: 18). The consequences for transgressing customary law could be punitive: ‘If any of this sex of any rank or nation were to enter the grove at all, or should say or show that she had some knowledge about the making of Oro, the penalty was death’ (ibid.). Ajiṣafẹ gives an example of the intersection of capital punishment and human dignity. In his anecdote, a man brought his three-month-old daughter to witness the play and she was summarily executed (ibid.: 19). He notes that the ‘Oro play was used in the public management of the affairs of the Government in order to exclude the women from tampering with the functions’ (ibid.). Ajiṣafẹ's contractarian rhetoric uses the girl's execution (and its implied gender inequality) to illustrate an example of an illegitimate capital punishment that would not be justifiable in the Nigerian public sphere or in the international community vis-à-vis the British Empire.Footnote ³¹

The Yorùbá text on civic religion presents a more textured story. It explains the philosophical rationale behind civic institutions, the jurisprudential purposes of civic religion, and its role in the constitution of authority. Why does the History oversimplify the dynastic religion and focus on its challenges? In English, Ajiṣafẹ needed only to demonstrate the existential problems of civic religion. In Yorùbá, he had to negotiate the ontological distinction between the ‘City of Ọlọrun’ and the ‘City of Ènìyàn (Humanity)’.Footnote ³² The Yorùbá text asserts that the problems of civic religion, which intersected with issues of political economy and the warfare ravaging Yorùbáland, would soon be resolved by a divine intercession in time.

As a self-translation the texts overlap, but the English text lacks the complete oracular repertoire that constitutes the History's divine metanarrative. Peel argued that Yorùbá Christians utilized modes of ‘Christian inscription’ to ‘find ways to represent Christianity as the realization of Yorùbá historical destiny’ (Peel Reference Peel2000: 295). In Ajiṣafẹ's History, the prophecy doctrine works to profoundly disrupt the foregoing moral economy – ironically, through the consummation of both the Ifá and Judaeo-Christian modes of divine providence. The Ifá oracle sanctions the Alake dynasty and the establishment of Abẹokuta to consecrate the Ile-Ifẹ charter ideal of covenantal monarchy (Ajiṣafẹ Reference Ajiṣafẹ1972: 53–4). In the prophecy, change will come from the Ẹgba diaspora, providentially, working with the Western powers in Abẹokuta to proclaim national repentance. The Ẹgba monarchy was saved by God's providence (under British Nigeria) in order that it may consummate the Mosaic legislation through civil obedience and ecclesial absolution to achieve the ethnonational sanctification necessary to constitute covenantal relationships within and between African states (Smith Reference Smith1999: 338; Moore Reference Moore1916: 79, 127–8).Footnote ³³ In Ajiṣafẹ's History, West Africa was vindicated through Ọlọrun's providence. Providence was the underlying thread that connected Africa's history in a single web of national destiny.