Tolu Daniel on the dialogic violence of Yoruba nationalists

Tolu Daniel. Illustration by Iyasele Caleb.

Tolu Daniel is one of the most prolific Yoruba essayists writing today in the English language.

His essays have appeared in top quality journals, including Catapult.co, Olongo Africa, and Lolwe.

In June 2025, he won the Isele Nonfiction Prize for “Notes of a Nonresident Alien”.

He is currently a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Washington University in St Louis, U.S.

I spoke to Tolu recently via phone. The transcript of our conversation published below was edited for clarity.

READ ALSO: Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún on what it means to be Yoruba

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Solomon Elusoji: So the question for the interview pretty much is what does being Yoruba mean to you? I mean, how do you think about being Yoruba? Do you identify as a Yoruba person?

Tolu Daniel: Okay. That brings a whole twist to the question. You know, by asking if I identify as Yoruba changes my initial perception of the question of identity. Of course, I identify as Yoruba in the very basic way one does, you know, from my name, which is very, very much a Yoruba name.

SE: I was actually going to start from that also, because you have a Yoruba name. And your other name is Daniel, which is not Yoruba, but sounds like maybe Jewish, I guess.

TD: Yes, that’s also part of the inheritance, the colonial, and religion. But, yes, I do identify as Yoruba. If someone were to see me randomly here in the US, for instance, and ask me if I’m Nigerian, I would say yes. I’m Nigerian but I’m also Yoruba.

I always try to think about this from two angles. When I was in Nigeria, I was primarily Yoruba. It was harder to be Nigerian except when I was watching a sports event on TV and I saw another Nigerian out there doing something, or like when a Nigerian was shortlisted for a prize and I wanted the Nigerian person to win, by virtue of my proximity to them.

But my identity becomes much more glorified – “glorified” seems a stretch, I guess . . . the concept of my Yorubaness, if I were to use that word, becomes a little more complicated when I think about leaving; what leaving Nigeria meant to me, and how, when I got here, I had to start negotiating a new identity that was very alien to me when I was growing up.

So suddenly being Yoruba, being Nigerian, became much more important. It took a different kind of importance than they did when I lived in Nigeria. So I guess my long-winded answer is to say, yes, I do identify as Yoruba. I do see myself as Yoruba. I speak Yoruba as my first language. I move around within spaces as a Yoruba person.

But within the framework of Yoruba as it is defined within the sociopolitical moment in Nigeria particularly, I don’t necessarily think that I identify with that brand itself.

SE: Okay, so you wouldn’t say you identify as Yoruba in the sense of it as a political movement?

TD: I wouldn’t. So this is my clarification. You are Yoruba, so you know what I’m talking about. There’s an ‘emi lokan’ thing happening right within the Yoruba community and it’s not new, right? It started years ago. If we were to stretch it, it started during the civil war.

SE: So you would trace the idea of Yoruba as a political movement back to the civil war?

TD: I would, because I think the reasons for the complications of our varying identities in Nigeria are because of the fact that we are a country of several nations. Yoruba nation is just one of the many nations that make up Nigeria, right? And so there’s a lot of truths and untruths that have been floating around post-civil war within the individual nations that make up Nigeria. And neither of these categories, and I say this carefully, neither the Hausas or Fulanis or the Yorubas or the Igbos or the Niger Deltans and everybody else that make up Nigeria have really sat down to think about ourselves post that civil war.

And so because of all of that, in 2020 or 2021 – let me begin with 2015, because that’s when tribalism became a political moment in Nigeria, right? With Buhari’s ascension into power, the questions of ‘What tribe do you belong to? Are you Yoruba? Are you Igbo? Are you Hausa? Are you Fulani?’ became political identities.

And as such, you find yourself, your colleagues, the people you grew up with, people who you are supposed to identify with by virtue of our class system, suddenly beginning to disintegrate into these tribal identities that, prior to that moment, were not the primary ways in which we saw each other.

And so suddenly the Igbos are insisting on having a country, talking about the Biafra war and the Yorubas are acting like assholes as usual, pretending like that war didn’t happen and people didn’t die. And the Hausas are like, ‘Oh yeah, we all know the power in this country, you all, the rest of you, are just pretenders’.

And then, you know, with Tinubu’s ascension to power, the conversation about what it means to be Yoruba began in full flow once again, where if you were Yoruba and you supported a candidate that was Igbo, which is Peter Obi, whose candidacy sort of represented this sociopolitical moment for those of us within that particular class system of the working class, right? The working class with middle-class aspirations, if you found yourself supporting that candidate, most people who were Yorubas that you grew up with would reach out to you and be like, ‘What are you doing?’ You know, that sort of thing.

And suddenly it became much more evident that there is a sociopolitical identity within the bigger framework of what it means to be Yoruba. Who is Yoruba? Who isn’t Yoruba?

SE: I think you were getting somewhere with that. Actually, I think that, I mean, the sense that tribalism is essentially a negative thing or something to be avoided, I guess, sits at the core of what I’m trying to get at in terms of when people say, ‘Oh, you’re being tribal’. I mean, I guess the roots of the word also is very kind of like – you know, I think it came from anthropology where these guys would come to Africa – that’s white people would come to Africa – and, you know, describe the conflicts or problems as tribal problems. Sort of like, all these tribes are fighting with each other. And you know, it became sort of a loaded word.

So, tribalism is sort of something to be avoided. But the tribe itself is not necessarily a bad thing in terms of how we identify as Yoruba. But then I guess it goes back to the original question. What does it mean to be Yoruba? Does being Yoruba mean that you have to speak the language, or you just have to bear the name, or your parents just have to be Yoruba? How do you define that? That’s what I’m confused about.

TD: I have an anecdote to answer. I have a very close friend and I wouldn’t necessarily mention his name in this interview, but he is a relatively famous Nigerian poet. We both know him. He is Yoruba by virtue of the fact that his father is Yoruba, right? His mom is Benin. But he never grew up in Yorubaland; he grew up in Benin City.

And for most of his life, even till now, there’s never been a moment where Yorubas have ever accepted him. And so this goes back to what we were saying again about the political moment, it’s part of this really hideous political thing that has been created, which unfortunately is also a part of our culture as well, right?

And the way I can describe all of this is to also think of what you mentioned, the etymology of the concept of tribe within African society. The fact that people like myself, I call myself a colonial boogeyman. I am the wet dream of the colonial masters when they looked at locals and said, yes, we are going there to colonise them. We’re going to make them speak our languages. We’re going to civilize them.

[Before the White man], we were a people, we were a nation, our own empire, right? In Europe, the peoples of the Yoruba kingdom or the Yoruba empire would be a country by themselves. It’s not even a wild claim, because it is what it is, right? But when the colonial masters came, they decided that we were tribes because a tribe is just slightly lower than a country.

And they could not or they refused to envision us as anything but what they claimed us to be. So we became this group of people, the savages, right? And because they colonised us, they then arranged us into systems that were supposed to make their countries better, right? Such that this space that we all exist in, this place of Nigeria would be a place where they could come and take raw materials. This is not new to you, you know.

But how does it relate to the current question? I think the Yoruba identity, as we see it today, as we cling to it today, as it’s been weaponized by the political class in Nigeria, versus the former political class, is not the Yoruba identity that I grew up in or grew up aspiring towards.

I remember moments while I’m here in the US. When a white person or an African American asks me about my culture, about my relationships in Nigeria, about the things that I’ve done and the things that I know. Maybe they saw some custom that they were fascinated by. I always remember how proud I would feel within those moments. These are the cultures they are asking about. So I tell them all the stories. I tell them about Ife, I tell them about the Oyo Empire, yes, I tell them about Abeokuta, about the roles of women in Abeokuta, the Egba culture, particularly because that’s where I’m from.

I tell them about all of these things with all the pride, with all the joy that that brings. And then, almost immediately, I get on Twitter, being the dialogic space, and then I see people who are Yoruba perpetuating that Yoruba in ways that are injurious to the collective.

So this is the thing, this is part of why your question is fascinating. On one hand, this is supposed to be a very simple question that demands a simple answer: Are you Yoruba, yes or no? There should be no argument around that. But then, when we think about how Yoruba is being performed now versus how Yoruba was performed when we were growing up, with all the limitations of that world that we grew up in . . .

We now exist in this dialogic social media space where everybody has a voice, and everybody’s constantly creating and defining the culture, right? What’s happening now, why it’s hard for someone like myself to claim Yoruba as a primary identity is because of the moment. The moment demands a kind of disavowal of this toxic nationalism, which typically I would agree with, because we are not Europeans, we are not Americans. We don’t have power. So nationalism here is a concept that we should always be happy to embrace.

But the nationalism that I have seen my friends practice or people that I have called my friends in the past practice is basically the same thing as the white supremacists that I’ve seen in Europe and the ones that I’ve met in America. It’s the same brand, and it’s disgusting. It’s filthy. It’s filthy more so because we are claiming some sort of supremacy over people that have the exact same stakes as us in the very fact of the country that we all belong to. Yes, so I don’t know if that helps this conversation.

SE: You say the identity is being weaponized by people on social media, the political class. I definitely agree with that. But I guess my question would be, are we also sort of whitewashing Yoruba history by saying that Yoruba nationalism has not always been violent? Because, well, if we do go back, I mean, a lot of Yoruba history is also riddled with conflict. We talk about the slave trade. I mean, the Oyo Empire participated in the slave trade also. There is a lot of violence in that history. There’s a lot of classism in that history. How do we then sort of explain Yoruba nationalism as something that is pure? I mean, are we actually whitewashing Yoruba nationalism in that sense if we don’t acknowledge that?

TD: I think the notion of whitewashing it is where the problem is. I think we can disavow a particular brand of nationalism without it seeming that we are whitewashing it. From the part of Yorubaland that I’m from, we say, ‘Omo Egba meji won kin je ara won ni yan’, basically translated as, ‘We don’t argue with each other’, right? But despite the fact that Yorubas say they don’t argue with each other doesn’t mean that they don’t debate. And that doesn’t mean that they don’t disagree in ways that are productive.

I think the thing about culture, or the way I see culture as someone who sees himself as a cultural critic, is that culture is supposed to be a forward-moving ideology. It’s supposed to constantly evolve.

Yes, Yoruba history was riddled with violence. What history isn’t riddled with violence? What we know of Yoruba history, the only part of Yoruba history that we know is violence, right? Which is also a kind of whitewashing in itself, because we are not told about the ways in which the old Oyo Empire or the old Ife Empire created the empires that they did. The fact of the poetry of the Ifa corpus, right? We don’t know all those things. We just know that those things exist.

But what we know for a fact is that the old empires were violent but that’s the nature of empires, right? Empires are constantly violent. And when we say that’s the nature of empires, then we have to fast-forward into our moment, into this time, into this season, this 2025. What has happened to us as a group of people, such that our thought for our nationalism or for whatever progress we claim to be having right now, we have performed it at the expense of others?

What does it say of us that the violence of the past is our excuse for perpetuating violence now? So how are we different then from those who are perpetuating jihad in the name of holy prophets? How are we different, when the framework that we are using to perpetuate our violence now, at least based on what we both know, what’s happening in the news, is mostly dialogic?

It’s mostly through words. It’s mostly through sentences. We say things like, ‘Oh, you know, when a Yoruba person supports the cause of a fellow Nigerian, an Igbo person’, we say things like, ‘Yoruba ronu’, which is to gaslight the person into submission to the nationalistic ideology which these other guys are pushing. I mean, there’s more to say about all of this. There’s a lot to disentangle.

We are all entangled in this project. The Nigerian project is the first entanglement. And the truth is, it’s an entanglement that has come to stay. Until Nigeria breaks into pieces and all the individual nations – realise that I’m not calling them tribes intentionally – until all the individual nations decidedly depart from each other, then the onus is on us to at least, for the sake of this fictional national unity, pretend that we can be together and move away from the dialogic notion that insists on ‘Because I’m Yoruba, I am better than Igbo’, and ‘Igbos are not to be trusted’, and ‘An Igbo man cannot become president’. This is basically the national dialogue right now.

To be Yoruba right now is to be a part of that dialogue. Whether or not you want to be.

SE: How do we rescue Yoruba identity from that sort of animalistic dialogue?

TD: I feel like this has been the core of my work for the past few years. As someone who grew up in small-town Nigeria, you know, I grew up in Abeokuta, I’m not a Lagos boy. I only ever go to Lagos once in a while. And I’ve spent most of my life in Nigeria just watching the politics of identity play out. I was very much a part of that. I grew up being a super Yoruba nationalist, right?

I would never tell you I had it figured out at the time that I lived there. But at some point, I had to start. You know, the more you read, the more you engage with other people, the more you listen, the more you just . . . I think listening was the first part. And then the change started coming.

And so, to answer your question, how do you rescue this identity? I don’t think the key is to rescue. I think the key should be, first of all, to acknowledge. Because I think the problem that the whole country is having right now or has been having for God knows how long is, one, we don’t know our histories. Two, those of us who do are drowned out by the people who don’t.

And so, if there’s anything I would suggest in a sort of reparative way, it would be that we first of all start acknowledging the fact that we Yorubas are actually perpetuating violence. That dialogic violence. Because that’s the other thing about what it means to be Yoruba. It’s that you perpetuate your violence and say, ‘shebi mo kan so ro ni ?’ – you know, ‘I was just talking’. We always assume that words do not have the same gravitas or gravity as someone using a gun or a cutlass or a sword.

First of all, we need to acknowledge that we are also perpetrating violence. And I think from acknowledgment then comes anything that can be repaired.

I mean, I say all of this carefully. My first answer should have been that I don’t know. But I am very ambitious in the ways that I think about the nation-state contraptions that we are in. I constantly think that, for instance, I am one of the people that believed that Tinubu’s ascension into power was rigged. But I’m also someone who recognizes that, at least in Yorubaland, he was voted in because most of our parents, most of our colleagues, most of our friends could not envision a Nigeria beyond their tribal configurations.

SE: Absolutely, absolutely. To deviate, I do think that his (Tinubu) speech in Ogun state, the ‘Emilokan’ speech, I personally think it was one of the greatest Yoruba speeches. That’s my opinion anyway.

TD: I agree with you. I have been following Tinubu’s speeches since he was a young politician. And I may be alone in thinking this, but I think he’s one of the most erudite speakers in Nigeria. I remember, and this is a segue, that probably has nothing to do with anything. But I remember Tinubu’s speech in the run-offs to the 2015 elections when he was trying to rally the troops for Buhari. And I remember that that was one of the things that swayed me.

SE: Interesting. I guess where I want us to also maybe just segue down to, in closing the interview, would be . . . I would like to get your sense of – I know you say you’re no longer a Yoruba nationalist – but I would like to get your sense of how you would define being Yoruba. You know, can someone be Yoruba, for example, if they were not born Yoruba? How do you become Yoruba? I mean, if you’re, for example, not born Yoruba, you don’t have a Yoruba name, how would you become Yoruba? I guess my question is, what makes Yoruba different from other national identities? Is there anything peculiar about being Yoruba that makes it different? Or how would you define that peculiarity?

TD: That’s a very difficult question. And I don’t have an answer, but I have a response. The thing is, for you to be able to talk about differences, you must have a very good knowledge of other cultures. At least the cultures that we are sort of making the comparative analysis with, the cultures that are sort of living with it on a one-on-one basis, right?

It’s been difficult for me, at least for the past six years of being here, to think about that Yoruba identity outside of the arts, the music, the poetry, the short stories that we read, and even the way Nollywood was once upon a time configured – the Yoruba Nollywood and the Lagos/Aba-Onitsha Nollywood, right? It’s been difficult for me to sort of think about the culture outside of those configurations. And that’s probably also because I’ve been out of the country for so long.

And that’s one of the things that I wrote about in my last essay: this constant search for Nigerianness. And that constant search is – that is the thing when you start living away from home – you start negotiating new sets of parameters. There’s just a lot of things that you are negotiating that are so different from what you’ve always known.

Like I said, again, I don’t have an answer. Part of it is because I have been in this project of being an anti–Yoruba nationalist movement for a really long time now, that I’m just like, okay, the moment you ask that question, I am then forced to think about what makes the Yoruba identity a different configuration in itself. Is it because we are supposedly very respectful people? Is it because we are always greeting people, which is where we got our name from? Is it because we are kind? Do we like to help each other? Is it because of any of those little, little things?

But that’s the thing about the moment we are in, none of those things can be said of the Yoruba race by themselves. Every singular cultural group has those traits as well.

So personally – and probably because of the kind of research that I do – I am much more interested in the human species as a group and to find what binds us, what makes us the same people. It’s hard for me to think about the specificities of those differences. I know, of course, just being a Yoruba boy, being a Nigerian, I know what we say of Igbos, right? I know what we say about [Hausas]. Those things are banal. Everybody knows them. But are they truths? That’s one of the things that I don’t think I agree with anymore.

I don’t think that my being Yoruba makes me any kinder than someone else who is Igbo or Fulani. Or I don’t think that because I’m Yoruba, I am supposed to embrace the Awolowo ideology of being level-headed and being the in-between among the three major ethnic groups in Nigeria.

So it’s a lot of things that we grew up knowing that were a portion of our identity that I don’t necessarily think are true.

And so that’s my response to that.

SE: I would offer to say that, I guess, to be Yoruba, you should speak the language or understand the language. And the second thing would be that you should be a tax-paying resident of a geographical space populated by people who speak the same language as you do. I mean, I don’t know if that makes sense to you.

TD: If you offer that, then I would say to you that that should not be. Because by that virtue, you’ve already alienated every single Yoruba person or Yoruba-identifying person, or would-be Yoruba person if not identified yet, who lives elsewhere or who, by virtue of their positionalities whether they were intentionally part of the decision-making process that made the positionality happen or not – you’re removing all of those people from the equation.

SE: How do you mean by removing them?

TD: So based on your definition, there’s a geographical prescription, right?

SE: Yes. But you don’t have to live somewhere to pay your taxes there, right?

TD: That’s what I’m saying. I don’t pay taxes in Nigeria. Yes, most of the Yoruba Americans or Nigerian Americans that I’ve met here who are also Yoruba don’t go home. They’ve not gone home in years. They see me as a Yoruba person or a Nigerian and recognize the Yorubaness in me and we talk. And we’re happy to acknowledge that we do have shared identities or shared values, in quotes, right?

SE: You just said shared values and identity.

TD: I put the shared values in quotes.

SE: Yes, the shared value is a bit abstract, because if we say shared values, shared values is like a human thing, right? It’s not, like you mentioned earlier, a thing that is unique to just Yoruba people.

TD: Yes, yes, you’re very right. But by virtue of my name, they have made those assumptions for me. That’s what I meant by that. I remember a kid that I met, you know, I’d finished teaching a class and I took my students out for coffee. And we were at this coffee store, and the barista started yelling my name. And I’m like, why the fuck is this person yelling my name? I have my coffee right in front of me.

And my students are all looking at me like, what’s going on? Apparently, there’s this other dude whose name is Tolu in the same space. He had never met another Tolu before in his life. He grew up in Ohio. All he’d known of Nigeria was through the memories and the stories of his mother and father. And see, that person is Yoruba as well.

That’s what I’m trying to say.

SE: That’s the language, it’s the language that binds both of you together.

TD: He doesn’t speak the language, though.

SE: No, but it’s the name. The name is the language. It’s the uniqueness of the fact that Tolu is a Yoruba name. And it’s that name that binds both of you together.

Which is why I think that one of the greatest projects that has been done recently in Yoruba history is the Yoruba Names that Kola Tubosun started in 2015, I think – was it 2015 or 2014? It is the name. The name is important. It’s the loaded thing in terms of what it means, the history behind the names. Yorubas value names a lot. I think the language is fundamental to Yoruba identity.

TD: I agree, but I also don’t want us to make the same mistakes. I don’t want us to get carried away by the notion of name and language as markers. So, for instance, there was a whole time in my intellectual career or whatever where I was always championing this spatial logic in my head: if you’re not in Nigeria, if you’re not in Africa, you should not be making certain claims.

But then, the moment I started moving, I started traveling, I started meeting people whose positionalities are at best negotiable, right? Like, for instance, I have this friend who grew up in an Indian-American family. She is Yoruba. We would call her Yoruba, right? Her name is, I don’t want to mention her name in an interview but her name is like a typical Yoruba name. Except when you meet her and she introduces herself to you, she would pronounce that name in a way that it isn’t Yoruba. And in that sense, the link between language and naming sort of breaks, right?

And that’s the kind of thing, that’s the kind of fallacy that I want us to avoid in that sense. Because then, because she pronounces her name the way she pronounces it, which then means everybody else pronounces that name the way she pronounces it because that’s how she knows how to pronounce it. Because she grew up in a family that does not recognize the necessity of the Nigerian-ness of that name or even the Yoruba-ness of that name because you don’t know.

Only because I spoke to her, I interrogated her, is how I found out that her father used to be a Nigerian musician who left her mom, had a baby with her mom, and just left her here, you know. And so that’s what I mean by that, right? It’s not that I am necessarily insisting that the debunking of my spatial logic is the way to go. No. What I’m saying is that if we think about the Yoruba identity within space alone, we will lose, we will be disavowing and disowning millions of people whose relationships with the culture or the tribe or the nation were severed through things like migration, diasporification, slavery, right and all these other things in between.

So again, it’s not like I’m offering a better answer. I’m only querying yours.

SE: It can’t be just spatial logic, I guess. And that’s why the language part is important. And I accept your critique that the way it’s spoken might also exclude other people. But language is not just about how it is spoken, it’s also like how it’s written, I guess. And the reason why you probably thought the person was Yoruba was because of the name is written. It looks like a Yoruba script. So I guess that’s also a function of language itself.

TD: I agree with that.

SE: Yes, I mean, spatial logic or just taking it in terms of space, it’s maybe not – yes, it could be exclusionary also. But I guess the point of having a Yoruba identity or being Yoruba is that, I mean, essentially it excludes something. It has to exclude something in a way, right? There’s got to be some exclusion. And the way that I think we could do that exclusion without it being value-laden is to think about Yoruba as language. And yes, I mean, the tax part is important because I feel like the spatial part is important to me, because in the same way that I think about, say, the Jews, for example – why do they need Israel as a nation? Why do they need their own homeland? You know, and that’s a very contested and very heated conversation right now. I’m not going to go into that. But I think that, I mean, if you’re a nation or a race, you still need a space. Where do you guys come from? There’s got to be a mythology, like a myth.

TD: We’ve spoken about colonization, right? So, spatial areas, spatial awareness, is definitely not a wrong thing; it’s not by itself something that cannot be touched.

So for instance, in the Yoruba history that I know – because, of course, it’s also contested history – is that the Yorubas were travelers, or the progenitors of the race who settled in Ife came from the east, right? They traveled from the east and then they came and landed in Ife. That proverbial east is a space that has never necessarily been mentioned, so we don’t know where that is. We just know that they traveled all the way down and settled in southwestern Nigeria.

But they met people there. They colonised the space, right? And then by virtue of violence, they named that place their own, they made the place their own. And over time, started propagating the space such that Yorubas exist in a very sizable portion of the West African subcontinent.

The thing is, because of all those, whether fiction or non-fiction, whether we agree with it or not, because of how all these things happened, we are already at a disadvantage, such that the spatial logic that we want to apportion to what it means to be Yoruba needs to acknowledge the violence that made this system possible.

Then there is also the fact of colonialism, as a concept, as the way in which Nigeria became carved. Colonialism brought in another layer of violence. And so, because of all of these violences that begat this space in which we claim is our ancestral home, or this space that we’ve claimed as our ancestral home, being spatially aware or using space as a logic to define our difference is kind of almost strange that we even think we should do. And it’s part of the things that I’m querying as well, even within this conversation.

SE: But we can’t deny the fact that there are spaces that are predominantly Yoruba in the world today. That’s a reality. For example, we talk about Lagos a lot but there are Yoruba states basically in Nigeria: Ogun State, Oyo State, Osun State. I mean, these are basically Yoruba states; it’s not really contested, you know, apart from Lagos, which is a metropolitan state; and we all know why that’s contested. But I guess my point is, these are Yoruba states. I mean, there are probably a lot of Yoruba people also in places as far-flung as Gabon or even South America.

TD: Sorry for interrupting, but those spaces are Yoruba states based on the colonial inheritance that we got, which defines places like Ogun State as a singular Yoruba state. So for instance, to think about what makes up Ogun State as a state, it’s Abeokuta, it’s Ijebu. And Ijebu is a whole empire by itself, by the way. I could say within the configurations that make states possible that Ijebu should be a state, that Remo should have their own state with their own capital, same thing with the Egbas and the Aworis, right?

And so when I think about Yoruba states, those are the groups that I think about. I don’t think about the configurations that we made pre-independence and post-independence. Because this is part of the problems that we have because we are unable to even see ourselves as a singular people, as a singular nation. Why? Because of the fiction of our creation, or the fiction of our unity.

So I can give you another example in Ogun State, for instance. For as long as I have been aware of politics in the state, there has been this song, if I would call it that, of ‘Yewa Lokan’, which is basically a version of what Tinubu said about ‘Emilokan’. I dare say that Tinubu intentionally said ‘Emilokan, egbe kini yi wa, emilokan’ in Abeokuta because he understood the space. He understood the people that he was dealing with. The Yewas, or the people called Yewas and the Aworis, who are also supposedly major stakeholders in Ogun State, are a marginalized people, almost in the same vein as the Igbos in Nigeria.

And they (the Yewas) occupy a major part of the state, right? And there has never been a Yewa person who has become Governor. The Yewas have generally not been lucky in the socio-political configurations of the state. And this is part of the things I’m saying, that based on the way we play our politics in that country, there is still so much acknowledging that we need to do to make us proceed from where we are right now into anything that is reparative. Because, if you ask any typical Egba man, who grew up in Abeokuta about this thing that I’m saying, they will tell you, even though they are well aware of how the politics is, that it is not a big deal, that the Yewas have not just been forthcoming or insistent about their chances. And this is the thing I’m saying about the way we use dialogue to make violence on people.

SE: I think violence is also a very loaded word. There is a difference between physical violence and linguistic violence or verbal violence. I think you used the word ‘dialogic violence’. I think we should make a distinction between those two things. And in speaking about Yoruba culture, people would say, for example, that Yorubas are cowards because they just shout and make a lot of noise and can’t do anything. I don’t think that’s a negative thing about Yoruba identity. I think linguistic – let’s just call it dialogic violence – I think that’s a better thing to do than physical violence. I believe dialogic violence is inevitable, regardless of how you want to think about it, whether in interpersonal relationships. I mean, we say some things that are true that other people don’t like. I think you cannot really avoid dialogic violence, but I think we can avoid physical violence, the kind of violence that makes Nigeria unsafe today.

TD: I agree with your impulse to differentiate. But where I depart from you is where we think one brand is better than the other. Because I personally think – I should reiterate this is a personal opinion – dialogic violence is one of the things that gives birth to physical violence. Permit me to use the anecdote of people in a violent relationship. A woman in a violent relationship with a man. And the way it always begins is that it starts with the words. Things don’t just degenerate into gunshots. Everything has a beginning. And that’s how this dialogic violence became a thing, at least to me. We genuinely just don’t have honest conversations around the violence of the words and the ways in which we intentionally gaslight each other in Nigeria. There is a lot of gaslighting that happens. And the reason the gaslighting becomes perpetual is that we say, on one hand, that we are only ‘just saying’ or ‘just talking’. However, the other group is saying we are not just talkers. ‘A ma n be eyan lori ni’. And in our minds, we are insisting that our notion of dialogue is the best way. But within the first five minutes of that dialogue, we are already gaslighting the person. We are gaslighting them in ways that would inspire them to violence. This is something I have noticed in the ‘Emi lokan’ conversation. And wars have been started for less. Most conflicts of the world, as you and I know, were created by this dialogic conflict.

I’m saying all of this because I’m also one of those verbal warriors. I cannot fight to save my life. But I feel like I grew up with all the arsenals – I can gaslight the shit out of anybody that I want to.

SE: I agree with you. But I feel like dialogue is still our best solution – talking to each other.

TD: I agree with you.

SE: The question then is, what do you think are the red lines?

TD: I don’t know what the red lines are. I just think we should try to be better. I think our instincts, whenever we want to comment on issues that have to do with both ourselves and our cultures, we should be open to the possibility of the violence in the things that we are saying. This is how we grew up. We are all complicit in this. It’s not something we can change tomorrow. There are many things that we say about the other tribes. We call some ‘the a je okuta ma mu omi’. For a multicultural, multilanguage country, how many Yoruba people do you know that can speak Igbo or Hausa? It begins from all those things. If we were to allow ourselves to get off our frigging high horse and talk to these people like we would like to be spoken to, I think that’s where it begins. It’s all about kindness in my opinion. And I know that’s very banal and simplistic but I think we will have a better country if we are only kind to each other. If an Igbo man comes out to contest for the Presidency tomorrow and we can listen to what he’s saying, instead of looking at his name and saying ‘omo Igbo ni’, I think it changes everything.

SE: You say it is simplistic. But do you also acknowledge that it is very difficult to do?

TD: There is nothing in any of our prescriptions in this conversation that is simple. In fact, this conversation we are having is a difficult conversation.

SE: I agree.

TD: I have friends who are in the Nigerian government, powerful people, who are Yoruba nationalists. When they talk about politics, I’m disgusted. And not in what they are saying but in the excuses they make or give for why Nigerians are suffering. They say ‘I know that these people are suffering, I know that this my candidate is bad, but he is still my candidate and I will support him because he’s Yoruba’. These are things that people say. You know people talk like this too. It’s not singular to my friends alone.

SE: Yes.

TD: So, this is what I mean. It’s easy for someone reading this and saying I’m confusing fanaticism with nationalism . . . this is not about them being fanatics or fanatics of those politicians. If another Igbo person were to come out tomorrow that isn’t Peter Obi, the same things would be done to that person. And the only way we can move forward as a group is not about . . . our politics is not supposed to be about Peter Obi himself, neither is it supposed to be about Bola Tinubu. We are supposed to be thinking about how we, as a group of people, can move forward.

Now that I’m saying this, I remember the moment that I started changing. That was when Obasanjo was prescribing Goodluck Jonathan for power, that moment when we were not sure if Yar’Adua was dead or not. And I remember that, as a Yoruba person at that point, I was okay with Obasanjo running for third term. I was also okay with a lot of shitty things. And then we had Goodluck Jonathan. And for many of us who supported Jonathan’s ascension, we were also the people who said Jonathan was trash. This was why, for many people, 2015 was a turning point in their lives. When Jonathan became trash, we acknowledged he was trash and we wanted a change. And many of us campaigned and voted for Buhari. But very quickly, we realized that Buhari was worse than anything we’d ever experienced. And immediately people like myself joined hands with everybody that was willing to critique the government. And we started thinking about a candidate that was better, that was different. And that was the emergence of Peter Obi as a political option. And at that time, he was the vice presidential candidate to Atiku Abubakar. And I still remember what some of those guys in government I mentioned earlier were saying: ‘Igbo become vice-president, how?’ And you would think that an Igbo man had never sat in power before in Nigeria. And you would think that all these other guys, the Yorubas, the Hausas, the Fulanis, who had been Presidents of Nigeria in the past have been better or great for the country. The way Yoruba nationalism has become a thing, you would think we’ve had a great president of any of the ethnic groups who have been sharing power.

So, to go back to the question you were asking, we need to acknowledge that we have not been honest with ourselves; and from that acknowledgment comes all of the little changes that can happen. And it’s not the change that can happen in a singular day. It would happen over a period. Because that’s what culture is; it is that we should acknowledge our differences and problems and we should move on with it. Or we should try to adapt and become better. And it doesn’t mean that this Yoruba nationalism will go away; and that doesn’t mean those of us who are anti this Yoruba nationalism will not one day come out and say we are Yoruba nationalists, but in a very different configuration. ✚