The Oluwo of Iwo, Oba Abdulrosheed Akanbi, has publicly rejected the long-standing claim that Ile-Ife is the origin of the Yoruba people, setting off a fresh round of royal rivalry and scholarly alarm.
In a video posted to his Facebook page while bestowing a chieftaincy, the monarch insisted Ife “has no Yoruba culture” and argued its speech and religious terms differ from what he called the genuine Yoruba tradition.
The comments were reported in the national press and instantly revived an already tense dispute among leading Yoruba kings.
Oba Akanbi’s argument is blunt and binary. He told subjects that Ife residents use the term “Eledumare” rather than “Olodumare”, call their ruler “Olofin” rather than “Alaafin” and therefore cannot claim the ancestral mantle of the Yoruba.
He claimed Iwo — not Ife — preserves the “real history” and warned listeners to keep his words, invoking mortality to underscore the urgency of his revisionist narrative.
History and archaeology tell a different story. For decades Ife has been recognised by historians and museums as one of the earliest and most sophisticated urban centres in Yorubaland.
Excavated terracottas and highly naturalistic copper-alloy heads dated from roughly the 11th to the 15th centuries provide material evidence of an advanced polity centred on Ife long before modern claims of contested origin.
Leading reference works and museum essays place Ife as a formative seat of Yoruba political and artistic life. Those artefacts and the scholarship around them pose a direct challenge to any simplistic disinheritance of Ife’s place in Yoruba history.
Linguistic variation, however, does complicate blanket assertions of a single uniform “Yoruba language” or culture. Yoruba is a cluster of dialects spread across a vast territory; names and ritual usages vary. Terms for the supreme being — Olodumare, Olorun, Eledumare — are often used interchangeably in oral and written sources, reflecting regional usage rather than proof of a separate civilisational origin.
Scholarly and popular sources note that these different names coexist within the wider Yoruba religious vocabulary. That nuance undermines any claim that lexical difference equals ethnic non-membership.
The Oluwo’s intervention should also be read through a political lens. The episode comes hard on the heels of a fraught chieftaincy clash between the Ooni of Ife and the Alaafin of Oyo over a pan-Yoruba title said to have been conferred on a businessman at an unveiling in Ibadan. The Alaafin publicly ordered the title revoked, issuing a 48-hour ultimatum that turned ceremonial rank into interstate drama.
The recent exchange shows how chieftaincy prerogatives and symbolic claims to Yoruba unity are easily weaponised in contemporary palace politics. Oba Akanbi’s pronouncement therefore lands not only as history but as manoeuvre.
That fusion of politics and provenance is dangerous. When royal rhetoric overrides peer-reviewed archaeology and accepted historiography, it risks fragmenting communal memory and stoking localisation of identity for short-term prestige.
Iwo itself has local traditions asserting deep roots and honourable origins; regional pride is legitimate. But historical claims that contradict established evidence should be subjected to scholarship, not broadcast as immutable fact.
What is required now is not another royal duel but sober inquiry. Universities, the national museums and leading historians should respond with accessible, peer-reviewed summaries of archaeological finds and linguistic studies so citizens can separate patriotism from provenance.
Traditional rulers have an honourable role in preserving culture; they also bear a responsibility not to let contest for status rewrite shared history.
If Oba Akanbi’s video forces that scrutiny, the country may yet gain from the debate. But if the argument hardens into factional identity politics it will do more harm than any single chieftaincy tussle.
The safest course is scholarship and measured dialogue, not triumphal revisionism passed off as anthropology.
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