The Yoruba Unity Day Of September 23 – Banji Akintoye

For and on behalf of the Yoruba Self-determination and Sovereignty Struggle. The 23rd day of September every year is the day that we Yoruba now celebrate as our “YORUBA UNITY DAY”. This day deserves that great name. It is on this day, September 23, 1886, that many Yoruba Obas and many of the greatest Yoruba warriors appended their signatures or thumb prints to the peace treaty that put an end to the Kiriji War, the war that had been going on in our land for many years.

The importance of that document, the Treaty of Peace 1886, is that it is the only document anywhere in the world that bears the signatures of Yoruba rulers and leaders of the era when we Yoruba were still ruler of our nation. It is therefore a document of tremendous importance, and the day that it was signed is a day of tremendous importance also.

So, I congratulate the whole Yoruba nation for this great Day of Unity. I congratulate our Yoruba Nation because we are celebrating something that is infinitely important in our history. And I congratulate our men and women who have put energy together to lead us into the celebration of the great day today. I pray that God may reward you and bless you for honoring the Yoruba Nation the way you are doing now, and that God may make you persons of importance in our land, both you and your children forever.

My most important thought today is that we Yoruba should not just celebrate this day of unity, but should think seriously about the need for unity in our nation. God made our Yoruba Nation a Beat nation and a great people, a people with enormous capabilities. By all measures of national greatness, the Yoruba nation is a great and powerful nation. Unfortunately, however, in our remembered history, we have done a lot of things that have negated and destroyed unity among us. Consequently, we have a long record of national failures resulting from division and loss of unity among us.

I will give some examples. The greatest achievement of the Yoruba nation was the creation of the Oyo Empire, the greatest empire ever in the history of West Africa, the greatest achievement of the Yoruba nation in history before the coming of the European colonialism.

It was an empire that spread from the banks of the River Niger all the way to the coast in the areas that are now call Benin Republic and Togo Republic, and it included large parts of the Yoruba territories that are now part of Nigeria more were Yoruba areas where the Oyo Empire did not cover. It did not cover the territories of the Ekiti, ljesha, Owo, Akoko, Ife, ljebu, Ondo. But even in those areas it was highly respected. It was a truly great achievement of the Yoruba people.

But it was destroyed by serious divisions and loss of unity among its most eminent leaders. The unity that had created the empire was lost in the late 18th century and Yoruba leaders of the Oyo Empire began to quarrel and fight among them.

Finally, there emerged a man in florin, a prominent leader known as Afonja, the local filler of Ilorin who was made the Are ona Kankanfo of the Oyo Empire. From florin Afonja then took a number of disastrous steps in his insatiable ambition to promote his personal greatness.

He became so hungry for personal relevance and greatness that he embarked upon an attempt to destroy the Oyo Empire and to create an empire of his own with its capital town in Norio. Step by step Afonja created the situation that led to the destruction of the Oyo Empire.

We Yoruba tell stories today that it was the Fulani Fulani that destroyed the Oyo Empire, but that is not true. The Fulani were no more than a handful of people in Ilorin. It was Afonja that set up an itinerant Fulani peddler of charms named Alimi as a charm maker for his army in Ilorin and thus started him on the rise to importance in Ilorin.

It was prominent Yoruba leaders of Afonja’s army, after Afonja’s death that made Alimi’s son, Abdulsalam, the first Emir of Ilorin.