ASHE Foundation is dismayed by the new round of Yoruba versus Igbo tribal rivalry and baiting, between the two most populous groups of the Indigenous African civilization, provoked by a book allegedly accepted into school curriculum, which claimed Igbos founded Ile Ife with Obatala and were chased out by Oduduwa, the Yoruba leader. The offending book has not been read to verify the claims, but the claims are much ado about nothing, and only exhibits the decivilization and mental slavery of both groups.

ASHE Foundation created for African sociocultural harmony and Enlightenment recognizes the urgent need to tackle such ‘Kolomentality,’ which is a terrible self debilitating mental disease caused by epistemicide, the killing of a peoples knowledge bank. The River of consciousness runs dry when it forgets its civilizational source, and for the lack of knowledge a people are destroyed. 

Igbos are not the first non-Yoruba group to trace their history to  Ile Ife, the source of the Original African civilization, which was butchered into tribes by European colonists. In a previous book by S.K Owonaru, Ijo/Ijaw was the first son of Oduduwa, whose extra-ordinary strength and stubbornness led to his tacit explusion from Ife about 600 BC, directed to take charge of the estuary of the river Niger. He would only return to Ile-Ife upon the death of his father to inherit the throne. Unfortunately, Ijo could not be traced after Oduduwa’s death because he was already in the difficult and nearly inaccessible creeks of the Niger Delta. (Woyengidinikpete G.Y. 2006)”.

 The normal reaction of a civilizationally conscious Yoruba should be to warmly embrace any other group ethnic group that claims an Ife origin. Neither would an African civilized Igbo go back to his village or origins to tell his cousins that their ancestors were chased out of the land by Oduduwa, which means ‘spiritual leader (Odu) of (d) the world (Uwa) in Igbo land. The sad part is both sides are not really interested in the origin and content of their tribal identities, and only using it for Prebendalist or superficial tribal exceptionalism and online braggado. Especially since 2023 Presidential elections, these tribal spats have been instigated and fuelled by decivilized prebendalist politicians. These Yoruba and Igbo online gladiators are psycho-culturally damaged and decivilized by coloniality, which bred racial inferiority complex that makes them hate their reflections.

The irony is that both ethnic irredentists are ignorant of the true cosmic meanings of the cyclic spiritual concepts of Oduduwa, Obatala and other Orisas/Alusis, thinking they were just linear one-off beings. They don’t understand that the first story of Oduduwa was the creation/modification of planet Earth for human habitation, while the second cycle of Oduduwa and Obatala stories was the transformation from Obatala theocracy to Oduduwa monarchy. At a point in our evolution of advanced social organization, we were initially all theocracies led by Obatala priest kings that spread from Ife, known as Ogiso in Edo and Eze in Igboland, before we evolved to monarchies known as Oba that spread to Benin and then to Igboland as Obi in Onitsha, Awka etc. If not for European destabilization, the Obi stool would have spread to replace Eze across Igboland..

The tribal bigots on both sides are ignorant of modern scientific genetics and cultural anthropology that proves common genetic and cultural origins of indigenous Africans that speak a continuum of dialects known as Niger Congo ethnolinguistic family that spread from Ife to South Africa. In Tishkoff (2009), the global chart of all major tribes genetic values showed Yorubas to be the oldest with 0.932 (93.2%) followed by Igala with 0.931 and then Igbo with 0.920, while the Harvard Medical School Reich Laboratory, Simons Genome Diversity Project (Mallick 2016) proved that those now called Yorubas were the oldest full sized humans that diverged from San pygmies 87,000 years ago. As the Eze of Aguleri said it’s not about who is oldest among the now enslaved indigenous Africans, but the fact that they are all related and strategic allies for freedom.

While in Ife the ancestors of those now identified as Yorubas, Ijaws, Igbos etc would have been an indistinguishable group that all spoke the same language. All indigenous African languages come from one mother language and there is no other source that any Black person must have come from into Ife. Glottochronology shows that dialects evolve when the same group diverges geographically over thousands of years. Their episteme was the same sixteen sector knowledge bank which after divergence was called Ifa in Yoruba, Afa in Igbo, Iha in Edo, Efa in Delta and Fa in Middlebelt. For tens of thousands of years, this people lived side by side being their greatest economic and spiritual partners, until a few hundreds years ago when the Abrahamic European and Arabic civilization came to divide them in order to rule them. 

The European slaving empires split the Original African civilization led by Ooni of Ife by arming its outposts of Edo, Igala and Oyo with weapons to push its Golden Triangle of slaves, arms and sugar/cotton. Armed with European weapons, Oyo and Edo Citystates, initially empowered by Ife to be the guide posts, matched towards Ife taking lands and slaves. When Oyo-Ibadans captured and defiled their Ile Ife, their civilizational sources, they imploded under the weight of their slave empires and became colonized by those that armed them. Following 350yrs of Slavery and 100 years of colonization, 90% of Yorubas and Igbos are Abrahamists that spit on their Ifa/Afa values that actually define them. If Yorubas really believe their Ifa epistem that Ife was the origin of humanity, instead of the Abrahamic Eden, they won’t have a problem with other groups claiming they are from Ife, even if they come with an attitude of tribal exceptionalism.

The British strategically broke the Ifa-Afa-Iha-Fa-Efa civilization into tribes, by writing the Yoruba Bible in the Oyo dialect to make it the standard language of an amalgamation of dialects labelled Yoruba, while the Onitsha dialect became the standard langauge of a continuum dialects labelled as Igbo. Both names, Yoruba and Igbo, are not in Ifa/Afa, the knowledge bank that dictates their identity and values. It is obvious that the two languages must have been mutually intelligible for a single man to write both the Yoruba Bible and Igbo Dictionary, however they used different linguistic rules to make the languages appear very different. The chosen dialects were to be used in schools, churches,and other colonial institutions so within three generations the dialects in-between had disappeared and new forms of language evolved.

The British colonists cut the upper part of the Original African civilization, now known as the Middlebelt and added it to the Northern Afro-Arabic Protectorate. This resulted in a North and South that were neither geographically equidistant nor reflect the different civilizations. Since the European Christians were Abrahamic cousins of the Northern Fulani Islamists, they skewed regional territories in favor of the North, by allocating nearly 75% of the territory though they were only 30%, while the Indigenous African civilization was confined to 25% of the land while they accounted for 75% of the population. To make matters worse, the British split the Original African Southern Protectorate that should be under Ooni of Ife into two regions, East and West, to instigate unhealthy rivalry between Yorubas and Igbos till date. As long as Yoruba and Igbos fight amongst each other, they can’t unite to reclaim the Middlebelt, which will give them the demographic strength to control the manifest destiny of Nigeria. Neither would they be able to impart their civilizational values on the governance template to reduce corruption and apathy.

The 1951 regionalism constitution was an antithesis of our civilizationism, which in spiritual reference to the 16 sector indigenous African epistem, has resulted in 16 year cycles of boom and bust, parambulation. 1951 constitution to 1967 Civil War cycle of failed regionalism; 1967 to 1983 coup cycle of fight for national consciousness; 1983 Buhari coup to 1999 rule of the military Presidents: 1999 to 2015 years of democratic boom, and now 2015 to 2031 crash. ASHE Foundation is certain the destiny of the Black Race is in the hands of the Yoruba and Igbos, the two most populous, prosperous and older indigenous African groups, but they have to recivilize and free themselves from mental slavery. They must unite their Original African civilization to fight for an egalitarian society not only in Nigeria but across Africa.

Prince Justice J Faloye, President ASHE Foundation think tank