These days, some in my network love to argue that Christianity is the cause of all our problems in Nigeria. They want us to return back to our manner of connecting with God before Christianity. It is a fact that Christianity came with colonization to South West of Nigeria.
I am not a fan of colonialism because it is a system of domination that took our resources and treated us as inferiors in our own land. We have to be honest that our custom and way of life were not perfect before colonization. You can catch glimpse of what things used to by examining cultural artefacts. In my opinion, books written by those who had (or had access to those who had) first hand experience of what things were before colonisation are also a form of cultural artefacts.
I chose to translate “Aye Daye Oyinbo” as “Our World Has Changed Because of Colonialism”. There could be other variations but they won’t be radically different. The book lifted the curtain (at least from the perspective of the narrator) on how the way of life, manners and customs of the Yorubas changed due to the influence of colonialism. The focus of this article is the family life in a polygamous household and the plight of women.
Colonialism changed everything: governance, relationships between husband and wife, authority of kings over subjects, the status quo, how labour was organized, check and balances in society, worship and religion, and of course, the notion of freedom. Some of the changes were good others not so good.
The author of the book was Isaac Delano. There is a wiki providing a brief autobiography of his life: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Delano. A quote from his wiki caught my eye:
“As a political/social activist, he attempted to explain African societies and the position of women, destroying stereotypes of female submissiveness in Yoruba culture and instead advocated that women were respected equals in Yoruba society and government. He also brought attention to female Yoruba heroes like Moremi Ajasoro.”
As I will show later, regardless of Delano’s political/social activism, Aye Daye Oyinbo painted a completely different picture of the experiences of a Yoruba woman before colonialism arrived to what that paragraph implies.
The author was born in 1904. Delano classified the book as fiction, but we should never forget that many fictions are rooted in reality. I think he was writing about the experiences of somebody in the generation of his own grand parents , probably his grandmother, somebody who saw the change unfold in real time.
Chapter 1 is captioned “Ile Olobinrin Pupo” ( “In A Polygamous House”). Before colonialism, the Yorubas were generally polygamous. What does polygamy offer a woman and the offspring of a polygamous marriage? Isaac Delano’s account in Aye Daye Oyinbo was from a woman’s perspective, we can gain some insight.
The first sentence in the book looked back to the good old days when life was good and peaceful, food was available in abundance and “olukulu ngbe nipa titobi re” (translated “each person lived according to how large, big or great their power, authority, strength, ability or force was”).
Just in case you are not sure what that sentence meant, the narrator used the next sentence to illustrate. She said the powerful can cheat their less powerful neighbour without being challenged by anybody. In the third sentence, the narrator made sure we had no doubt about what she meant by telling us that a lucky person born into a honorable, wealthy, dignified or respectable family can enjoy life. Obviously, at the expense of the unlucky born into penury.
The narrator was born into wealth and respect: her father was the war chief for their town, he would return from war with slaves, some of whom he sold, others he killed and others he married. The impunity with which the powerful lived was laid bare and stark.
The picture of what Yorubaland was in her days was very Darwinian: the fittest, wealthiest and most powerful rule the roost.
The narrator then moved on to describe her mother, who appeared to be a woman of substance. She had her own business, a seller of valuable beads. She contrasted her mother with others in society, specifically “eru” (slaves) and “iwofa”. Iwofa was a person pawned in place of a debt. Just as today people who are short of cash can take their valuables and pawn them for a loan, in those days, a man could pawn his son until he was able to replay his debt. An Iwofa will continue to serve his master until the obligation is settled. People’s poverty exploited to perpetuate their lives in debt.
The narrator moved on to describe one of the banes of polygamous families: favoritism. The narrator’s father preferred her mother to the rest of the wives and therefore, he treated her and her children better than the rest and that led to discord (in the author’s words, rebellion, riot and fights).
When the author’s sister died, her father and mother were inconsolable and believed the other wives were responsible. Obviously, this increased enmity and distrust within that family.
How the narrator’s mother greeted her father was an eye opener. She knelt down. That is still how children greet their parents in Yoruba culture. Clearly, the status of the wife was not the same as that of the husband.
When the narrator described a typical evening among the Yorubas then, she again gave us a graphic illustration of the plights of women in her days. In those days, pounded yam was the typical meal in the evening (most likely pounded by the women). Just before you decide to start eating pounded yam every evening, note that the children go out to play after their meal; they don’t sit down like couch potatoes watching TV; they played in the moonlight and their play was varied and involved a lot of physical movement. The children had fun but what about the women? The narrator wrote:
“À fi àwon ìyá wa, lí àìjé eléhàá, lí àìjé erú ni kò jáde sí gbangba lálé. Isé ni wón se…Ìpín obìinrin lí ojó wonni kò dára tó rárá”.
Translation
“Despite the fact that our mothers were not slaves and were not in purdah, they didn’t come out at night because they were busy working. The lots (portion) of women was not good enough in those days”.
The narrator then went on to describe how her mother prepared her for marriage. This included how to look after her husband, her mother in law, the rest of the in-law: clearly it was the husband’s world!
Finally, she returned to the intense rivalry among all the wives, despite eating together and drinking together. She concluded that if she were a man, she would not marry more than one wife.
In conclusion, the first few pages of Aye Daye Oyinbo laid bare the plight of women before colonialism from the viewpoint of a woman who grew up in a polygamous family. It is hard to argue that women were treated as equals of men. First a man was allowed to marry several wives. They knelt down to greet their husbands and apparently, they worked all evening and a child of such a marriage concluded that the lines did not fall to women in a good place.
I personally believe that without colonization, the dynamics of the relationship between men and women would have nevertheless changed with time. Having said that, colonization accelerated the process of change because Christianity was part of the package.
I don’t want to go back to colonialism. Neither do I want to go back to how my great grandfather lived before then. Instead, We should learn what we can from our past and use that to inform how we organize our society for the future.
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