Arc. Olumorin Moses Dayo (ARCON)

The interesting thing about the current debate over the Yoruba language in Lagos is that it is not new. In fact, people made versions of the same argument nearly a century and a half ago. One development that brought the issue to the fore was the 1882 Education Ordinance, which made English compulsory while making no similar provision for Yoruba. The controversy that followed divided the Lagos elite, particularly the Saro community. On one side were the more radical Saros. This included men such as James Johnson, Mojola Agbebi and C. Sapara who increasingly described themselves as “Yoruba Africans.” They argued that the Yoruba language was one of the distinctive characteristics of Lagos and that not teaching the Yoruba language to students in schools was, in effect, to “teach them to entertain the lowest idea of themselves and make them servile imitators of others.” On the other side were figures such as E. O. Macaulay and J. Began Benjamin. They derided their opponents as “Yoruba maniacs” and dismissed their demands as a “farrago of nonsense.” Their argument was essentially that refinement and progress required English to become the dominant, if not exclusive, language of respectable Lagos society. If you strip away the nineteenth-century vocabulary, that argument, you would agree, sounds remarkably familiar. The language may have changed to “cosmopolitanism,” “competence,” and “modernity,” but the underlying proposition is much the same: that Lagos somehow becomes more sophisticated by weakening the place of its indigenous language and culture. In the end, the so-called “Yoruba maniacs” largely won the argument. But what is particularly striking about the 1882 debate is not simply what each side said. It is how each side understood its relationship with Yoruba society. The men who called themselves Yoruba Africans, despite their Saro backgrounds, were deeply conscious of their Yoruba heritage. James Johnson was proud of his Ijebu identity; Mojola Agbebi embraced his Ijesa heritage; and Sapara his Ekiti roots. Their Yoruba identity was not incidental to them. It was something to be defended, even when doing so came at a professional or social cost. Johnson took this cultural commitment to an extraordinary degree. As J. D. Y. Peel recounts, he could be so uncompromising about his Yoruba heritage that he was prepared to flog members of his congregation for giving their children non-Yoruba baptismal names. Whatever one thinks of these men, there was no ambiguity about their conviction: language, names and culture were not decorative accessories. They were central to a people's sense of themselves. Their opponents approached the matter differently. Some men of Yoruba ancestry, such as Macaulay, identified more strongly with the Sierra Leonean Creole world and with the British “civilizing” project than with Yoruba cultural nationalism. When figures such as James Johnson were harassing Governor Gilbert Carter over the Imagbon war in Ijebuland, elements of this opposing Lagos elite defended colonial atrocities through their newspapers. Others within the same broad camp had no Yoruba ancestry at all. One example was Dr. Easmon, who campaigned virulently against the Yoruba African movement. To men of this ilk, the Yoruba character of Lagos was not something requiring preservation. If anything, it was something that could be subordinated to a supposedly more cosmopolitan identity. And this is where the nineteenth-century debate begins to feel eerily contemporary. Watch the arguments being made today. The vocabulary has been updated, but many of the assumptions are familiar: Lagos is “cosmopolitan”; language requirements undermine “competence”; or emphasizing Yoruba diminishes the city's openness to others. But cosmopolitanism does not require cultural amnesia. Montreal does not become less French because people from across the world live there. Berlin does not cease to be German because it is multicultural. A city can welcome everyone without pretending that it emerged without a people, a language or a historical culture of its own. Language matters because it is more than a means of communication. It encodes memory, history, concepts, names, literature, humor, and ways of understanding the world. Once a language is banished from public life, other cultural markers atrophy gradually. And as those markers disappear, the bonds connecting one generation to the next become harder to sustain. That was what the “Yoruba Africans” of nineteenth-century Lagos understood. They were not arguing that Lagos should be closed to outsiders. Many of them were themselves products of migration, return and cultural encounter. Their argument was that openness did not require self-erasure. And that distinction remains relevant today. So when people insist that requiring a political office aspirant in Lagos to be a Yoruba speaker is somehow incompatible with the city's cosmopolitan character, they are not advancing an especially new argument. We have heard versions of it before. The names have changed. The vocabulary has changed. The debate has not.