Professor Falola’s Advice to the New Alaafin: A Roadmap to the Yoruba Renaissance

Wale Alonge

Bar none, Professor Toyin Falola is the preeminent scholar and Professor of History and African studies not only on the continent but arguably on the global scene. When he speaks the entire world listens. His advice to the new Alaafin which every Yoriba must read is a divine revelation to the Alaafin and other Yoruba monarchs.

His Royal Majesty Alaafin Owoade would be well advised not only to digest and imbibe but to print this compendium of knowledge in bold fonts to be displayed prominently in his bedroom as a daily reminder. Frankly all Yoruba Obas would do well to read this piece so they would be reminded of their divine responsibility to return our unequalled culture, tradition and language to their preeminent position in the comity of cultures and nations of the world.

The entire world loves, values and venerates our culture, our music, our colorful taste in aesthetics and fashion, our Ifa divination and its incredible fountain of knowledge, our glorious and divinely delicious dishes. Yoruba is trending on the global stage. Our music is busting the global charts. Nigerian restaurants and fashion rank among the most copied in the world. Our tradition religion is king in the Americas while we busy ourselves desecrating it with our obsession with the foreign religion. Even as the globe is embracing Yorubana, we the custodians seem not to value and appreciate what our ancestors spent millennia to build, perfect and hand over to us.

There must be a Yoruba cultural renaissance. The Alaafin and the Ooni of Ile-Ife as young dynamic leading Yoruba monarchs and as the custodians of our spiritual, political and cultural heritage must jettison and leave behind the self-defeating war of supremacy that has weakened us as a people and made us vulnerable to external attack and domination. Professor Toyin Falola has provided a pathway.

If and when the Ooni and the Alaafin form a formidable co-leaders of all other Yoruba monarchs and assemble the best and brightest of Yoruba in all fields of human endeavors from the humanities, the social sciences, economics, politics, science, technology, engineering and entrepreneurship of which we are beyond richly endowed them we will take our rightful and divinely ordained leadership position not only in Nigeria but on the continent. The Fulanis and the Igbo would be petrified to challenge and take advantage of us like they have done for decades routinely.

Then the century will be remembered as truly the Yoruba cultural, political and economic Renaissance. May Olodumare give the new Alaafin and other Yoruba in the position of power the wisdom to do right for the Yoruba race.