BISHOP SAMUEL AJAYI CROWTHER WAS A NUPE MAN

By Ndagi Abdullahi Amana Nupe

All Yoruba claims to Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther being a Yoruba man are tied to just one ambiguous statement by Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther in his very brief autobiography speech in which he stated that he came from a village called Ocho-gun.

Yoruba revisionist historians are today telling us that the village of Ocho-gun mentioned by Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther in his brief autobiography referred to the village of Osogun which can still be seen in the Iseyin LGA of Oyo State to this day.

Unfortunately for the Yoruba revisionists there are a lot of problems associated with this claim that Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther’s home-village of Ocho-gun is the same as today’s Osogun in Oyo State.

First is the fact that Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther categorically stated that his village was located in the Oyo Province. Since he said he was captured and sold into slavery in 1821 then the Oyo Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther was referring to must be Oyo Ile or the Old Oyo in today’s Kwara State and not Oyo d’Ago or New Oyo which is in Oyo State today. This is because in 1821 there was only Oyo Ile as Oyo d’Ago was founded only after the sack of Oyo Ile in 1836.

The point here is that since Bishop Samuel Ajayi must have lived in Oyo Ile or Old Oyo then the town of Iseyin in today’s Oyo State could not have been the town of Isehi which Bishop Samuel Ajayi said was just twenty miles from his village of Ocho-gun.

Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther also stated that in the late 1810s and early 1820s the Fulani Jihadists were well known as continuously marauding and disturbing the villages and towns in the Oyo Province where his home-village was located. On the other hand there is no historical document to the effect that the area where the Oyo Kingdom is located today was exposed to continuous and rampant Fulani Jihadists harassments and slave raiding in the early decades of the 19th century. The tsetse belt would have prevented the Fulani Jihadists slave raiders from penetrating down to the place where the Oyo Kingdom is located today.

All these go to show that Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther’s home-village must have been some village in the general area of Old Oyo or Oyo Ile which was a Nupe Kingdom located here in KinNupe not far way from Jebba. This, of course, means that Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther was a Nupe man.

We should also mark the fact that throughout his life Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther never referred to the village of Osogun in today’s Oyo State as his home-village. And, more importantly, Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther never ever said he was a Yoruba man.

Also, the tribal marks on the face of Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther were those of Nupe people and not of the Yoruba.

It is also interesting to note that Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther began his work on a Nupe Dictionary long before he wrote a Yoruba Dictionary.

Again, the name Ajayi was originally not a Yoruba name; it only became so after it was popularized by Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther.

Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther’s incredible interest in anything Nupe and his repeated visits to KinNupe on several occasions to the extent that he became an ambassador for Etsu Masaba may not be unconnected with his awareness that he was a Nupe man.

Even back in Lagos Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther surrounded himself with Nupe freed slaves including people like James Babington Macaulay who is the father to Herbert Macaulay; Reverend Emmanuel Adedapo Kayode who is the great grandfather to Femi Fani Kayode; and others.

The Yorubas claim that Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther said he is an Egba man so Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther is a Yoruba man because the Egba are one of the Yoruba subtribes.

The truth, however, is that the Egba are not Yoruba. It was Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s shifty Pan-Yoruba politics of the 1940s and ’50s that led to the Egba being wrongly included among the Yoruba people today.

Before the Awolowo era nobody ever referred to the Egba as Yoruba. When Captain Richard Burton visited Yorubaland in the 1850s the Egba people at Abeokuta categorically told him that they are not Yoruba and they vigorously told him not to list them among the Yoruba people.

James Johnson who was the CMS Superintendent at Abeokuta in the 1870s wrote in 1877 that the Egba people are not a Yoruba people. He wrote this based on the Egba traditions of origin he garnered from the Egba people among whom he lived for years.

The Egba traditions clearly show that the Egba are not descended from Oduduwa and did not originate from Ile Ife.

The pioneer Egba historian A.K. Ajisafe and Professor Saburi Biobaku both wrote that the Egba people originated from Nupeland or KinNupe.

Even the name of the Egba capital city of Abeokuta bears an Old Nupe name and not a Yoruba one. ‘Abeokuta’ is a corruption of ‘Ebi Kuta’ which is an old Nupe phrase meaning ‘Child of the King’ or ‘prince’ indicating that Abeokuta must have been founded by a Nupe Prince from Oyo Ile. Professor Idris Shaba Jimada wrote that many of the Egba villages and towns were founded by Nupe settlers.

In the Modern Nupe language ‘Egi Etsu’ or ‘Egitsu’ means ‘Child of the King’. But in the Old Nupe language ‘Child of the King’ is ‘Ebi Kuta’.

We should understand that the Nupe language, like all other languages, have not been static and has been changing or evolving over the ages.

Old Nupe is the Nupe language as it was spoken hundreds of years ago. The Old Nupe language is so different from the Modern Nupe language that if we were to resurrect a Nupe man who died, say four hundred years ago, we will not understand most of the Nupe he will be speaking even though both of us are speaking the Nupe language.

The modern Yoruba claim that Abeokuta derived it’s name from the Olumo Rock hideout is ridiculously spurious and baseless.

And the Egba traditions narrated that the Egba were early on located to the northeast closer to KinNupe and that it was only in latter times that they moved further south to their present location.

We can now see that even if Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther was an Egba man then he was Egba Nupe and not Egba Yoruba.

The Egba are the same Nupe people known to Nupe historians variously as the Gwagba, Gbara, Ibara, Eba, Ebi, Bini or Gbidigi today.

In the 1820s when Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther was captured and sold into slavery the Egba people were still a Nupe people through and through. Professor Idris Shaba Jimada wrote that the Egba were ruled by Nupe governors called the Eso from Oyo Ile or Old Oyo; this will confirm Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther’s own testimony that his home-village was located in the Oyo Ile general area.

From all the above we can see that Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther was a Nupe man and not a Yoruba man in the modern sense of the name Yoruba.

The Yoruba have misappropriated many of our Nupe heroes and almost all of our mythical gods like Oduduwa, Shango, Obatala, Olokun and many others who are all Nupe.