Vernacular historiography and self-translation in early colonial Nigeria: Ajiṣafẹ's History of Abẹokuta

Abstract

AbstractEmmanuel Olympus Moore (aka Ajiṣafẹ) (c.1875/79–1940) was a pioneer of Nigerian Yorùbá literature and popular music. Ajiṣafẹ was one of the most significant Nigerian popular cultural figures of his generation. Written during the amalgamation of Nigeria, his History of Abẹokuta (1916) (Iwe Itan Abẹokuta, 1924) is a seminal text for our understanding of Abẹokuta and the Ẹgba kingdom. This article examines the bilingual passages of the History in which Ajiṣafẹ invokes oral history to construct a religious ethnography of the early Ẹgba polity. Self-translation enabled vernacular authors to mediate constituencies. The English and Yorùbá texts of the History differ in their engagement with Yorùbá cosmology. Ajiṣafẹ's texts converge in his defence of the Odùduwà dynasty; Abẹokuta, in a constitutional Yorùbá united kingdom, would be the seat of ecclesiastical power. Civil authority in Nigeria could be stabilized through an Abrahamic renegotiation of divine kingship. To establish his treatise within a genealogy of world Christianity, Ajiṣafẹ utilized self-translation as a rhetorical device to reconcile the working of providence in precolonial and colonial African history. Ajiṣafẹ's History, ultimately, is an Abrahamic exposition of the role of God's providence in bringing about the complete unification of Nigeria in September 1914.