Crowther’s Critics’ Cardinal Error (Series Part 3, Finale)

We have told the story of Bishop Ajayi’s early life. The teenage Ajayi was captured by his compatriots and sold into slavery. But for the interception of a British squadron, Ajayi would have been sold in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and might never have been known—just like the innumerable millions who perished in that grand evil scheme. It is hard to imagine that Ajayi, especially as he would later have learned about what could have been, would not have felt like he owed his life to Britain. Not only was he saved by British sailors, but he was also educated and introduced to Christianity by British missionaries. Considering the history of Britain at the time, we may assume that racist and hegemonic inclinations tainted the Christian education he received. So, it should not be shocking if we find vestiges of eurocentrism in Crowther’s works. What should be more critical is what Crowther willfully believed and defended.

Critics have pointed out how Crowther selectively translated “devil” as “Èṣù.” This observation is the most potent critique against Crowther’s translation work. Not only did Crowther retain “Satan” (adapted to “Satani”) in the Old Testament when, as already argued, the notion of God’s arch-enemy was not fully developed, but he also retained “Satan” in the New Testament. Without a justification for this choice, it strongly suggests that Crowther equated “devil” with “Esu.” However, it does not follow that Crowther also equated or confused the devil for Èṣù. A cursory look at the manner of use of “Èṣù” in Crowther’s work would have immediately made it clear that his “Èṣù” was different. Consider the following passages:

Therefore rejoice, O heavens, and you who dwell in them! Woe to the inhabitants of the earth and the sea! For the devil has come down to you, having great wrath, because he knows that he has a short time.”—Revelation 12:12

Crowther translated “the devil” of this passage as “Esu.” Contextually, this passage implies that Èṣù used to reside in Ọ̀run and was displaced to live on Aiyé. But the Yoruba metanarrative says nothing about the pantheon rejoicing because of Èṣù’s displacement to the earth. On the contrary, Èṣù remains the god of crossroads who is not necessarily against humans. Hence, Crowther’s “Esu” does not refer to the Yoruba deity. Below is another passage:

And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird. —Revelation 18:2

Once again, Crowther translated “devils” here as “àwọn ẹ̀mí Èṣù” (literally, “spirits of Esu”). This is a classic case of a foreign idea expressed in the Yoruba language with attending awkwardness. Yoruba metaphysics knows nothing about the “spirits of Èṣù.” On the contrary, Yorùbá only recognizes Èṣù as one of many deities. Perhaps, the most instructive case is how Crowther renders James 4:7,

Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.

Interestingly, Crowther renders “resist the devil” as “Ẹ kọ ojú ìjà sí Èṣù” (meaning, “fight/war against Èṣù”). But Yoruba traditional Èṣù is not a deity to fight. Indeed, he is practically the only hope of humanity! No Yoruba contemporary of Crowther would have failed to notice the difference between Crowther’s Èṣù and the traditional god. 

Besides the charge of Crowther’s consistent translation of “devil” as “Esu,” critics often cite lines from Crowther’s letters and journals to argue for his disdain for Yoruba metaphysics. In an oft-cited passage from Crowther’s journals, we read:

 . . . about the third year of my liberation from slavery of man, I was convinced of another worse state of slavery, namely that of sin and Satan. It pleased the Lord to open my heart. . . I was admitted into the visible church of Christ here on earth as a soldier to fight manfully under his banner against our spiritual enemies. (Quoted in Adefarakan, 44).

Here, we see how Crowther coped with the mind-torturing slavery he experienced. He considered it less than the slavery of “sin and Satan.” This language likely merely reflects the teaching Crowther received about Christian salvation. Some critics, however, see in the passage a demonization of Yoruba land and metaphysics. Temitope Adefarakan, for instance, writes (44):

What the above passage reveals is Crowther’s ontological and epistemological shift from a young man who was comfortably immersed in a Yoruba worldsense, to one who equated that very worldsense with slavery, sin and Satan and, in fact, indexing it as worse than human slavery, a type of spiritual slavery, if you will.”

(“Worldsense” is Adefarakan’s preferred African equivalent of “worldview” as she does not believe that African metaphysics privileges the visual sense over others.) Adefarakan sees Crowther here equating the Yoruba understanding of the world with spiritual slavery, sin, and Satan. She supports her conclusion with another quotation from a letter Crowther wrote in 1837 to the then CMS Secretary, Reverend William Jowett (44-45):

I suppose sometimes about the commencement of the year 1821, I was in my Native country, enjoying the comforts of father and mother, and the affectionate love of brothers and sisters. From this period I must date the unhappy, but which I am now taught, in other respects, to call blessed day, which I shall never forget in my life. I call it unhappy day, because it was the day in which I was violently turned out of my father s house, and separated from relations; and in which I [was] made to experience what is called to be in slavery—with regard to it being called blessed, it being the day which Providence had marked out for me to set out on my journey from the land of heathenism, superstition, and vice, to a place where His Gospel is preached.

Adefarakan stresses how Crowther here describes Yorubaland as “the land of heathenism, superstition, and vice”. But, as even Adefarakan observes, this merely reflected “what Crowther was taught to believe while in the care of the Christian Missionary Society in Sierra Leone” (45). But then she adds, “Crowther has uncritically embraced and internalized the Euro-Christian worldview at the expense of his Indigenous Yoruba worldsense” (45). This latter statement, however, is a mere assertion.

Adefarakan has not shown that Crowther “uncritically embraced and internalized the Euro-Christian worldview.” There is a more straightforward way to explain Crowther’s statement. Then a Christian, Crowther could think back about his ancestral land as one of “heathenism” because, well, the people did not believe as he did in Yahweh, and nobody preached the Gospel in Yorubaland. While Crowther could have used “heathenism” with the derogatory undertone characteristic of British usage of the term, and as Adefarakan argues, there is evidence of Crowther using the word positively. In an 1869 address to African missionaries in Lokoja, Stephen Ney (44) writes of Crowther saying, “If any activity ‘is not immoral or indecent, tending to corrupt the minds but merely an innocent play for amusement, it should not be checked because of its being native and of a heathen origin’” (emphasis added). As to the description of the land as one of vice, Crowther can hardly be faulted. We can scarcely describe the land and people who sold him into slavery as virtuous. 

Besides, there is evidence that Crowther critically assessed the Euro-Christian worldview he received. In the early days of the missions to the Niger, Europeans had more favorable, even if racist, views of Africans. Henry Venn, the CMS Secretary in 1851, for example, wanted “to strengthen the indigenous ministry” by seeking to make “self-governing, self-supporting, self-propagating churches with a fully indigenous pastorate” (Walls, 19). Henry Venn believed that African churches could self-govern themselves, and they did. But things changed in the latter days of Bishop Crowther. Andrew Walls writes (19), 

European thought about Africa had changed since the time of Buxton; the Western powers were now in Africa to govern. Missionary thought about Africa had changed since the days of Henry Venn; there were plenty of keen, young Englishmen to extend the mission and order the church; a self-governing church now seemed to matter much less.

This development happened after the Whiteness-infected Scramble for Africa at the Berlin Conference of 1884. It became fashionable in Europe to assert that Africans could not govern themselves and needed Europeans to govern them. European missionaries did take over the mission, “brushing aside the old bishop (he was over eighty) and suspending or dismissing his staff” (Walls, 19). In 1891, Crowther died of a stroke. 

A European bishop replaced Crowther, despite the availability of several capable indigenous candidates. This racist development and many others would eventually lead to the formation of African independent churches (Walls, 20). A key attribute of African independent churches (AICs) is their insistence on merging the African way of life with Christianity. For example, the AICs rejected European enforcement of monogamy in favor of traditional African polygamy. Contrary to what critics like Adefarakan would have us believe, how is a church development in protest of the European treatment of Bishop Crowther so proudly African in its outlook if the bishop “uncritically embraced and internalized the Euro-Christian worldview”? Indeed, Ney’s quote is worth repeating in its broader context. He writes concerning Crowther, “Christianity, he says, does not reject African collective identities. If any activity “is not immoral or indecent, tending to corrupt the minds but merely an innocent play for amusement, it should not be checked because of its being native and of a heathen origin” (44). Crowther encouraged engaging Christianity with “Africanness.”

Another line of reasoning often marshaled against Bishop Crowther claims that he was an angry fellow who sought to avenge his maltreatment. In a quite enjoyable written speech, Funso Aiyejina writes (4-5), 

The irony of the choices made by the Crowthers of the African world is that in their psychological disdain for, and rejection of, African culture, which was, in part, a response to the African involvement in their enslavement, they became a new generation of middle-men and -women who functioned as arrowheads for the denigration of African cultures. So, while a number of pre-colonial African chiefs and merchants betrayed their fellow Africans by selling them into enslavement, the intellectual Crowthers, acting as priests, interpreters, translators, policemen, postmasters, and school teachers, were key players in the process of the religious, psychological and mental enslavement of African peoples.

In Aiyejina’s conception, Bishop Crowther is the stellar example of Africans who willfully became veritable colonial tools and played crucial roles in the religious enslavement of Africans. Aiyejina (5) elaborates on this “religious enslavement” when he writes in a paragraph worth quoting at length,

If Africans had been less trusting and more cynical and suspicious, they would have wondered why the same translators of the Bible who saw nothing wrong with equating Satan with Esu did not find a near-equivalent Yoruba deity for Jesus Christ, instead of Yorubanising his name into Jesu Kristi. If Satan translates into Esu because of some perceived incidental similarities between the two, how come Jesus does not translate into Orunmila, given the fact that Orunmila is as proverbial, wise, calm, peaceful, and forbearing as Jesus? How come he does not translate to Ela, the divinity of regeneration? Of course, such a logical approach would have undermined the policy of discrediting African world-views and would have suggested a cultural equity between the West and Africa that Europe was not minded to concede. It would not be until much later in the interaction between Africa and Europe in the Americas that a democratic principle of equity between Christianity and the Orisa tradition would be initiated by Spiritual Baptists, who would erect a structure that would equate the Orisa with Christian saints, with Esu being equated to St. Peter in recognition of their gate-keeping and intercessory roles.

Aiyejina uses “religious enslavement” to refer to the process that claims that African traditional religions are inferior. In his view, Crowther’s choice of rendering Satan as Èṣù is a move that demonizes Yoruba metaphysics. Expressing a similar thought, Adefarakan writes that Crowther specifically targeted Esu, of all the orisa in the pantheon, “because of Esu’s unique role and function within the Yoruba metaphysical system” (emphasis in the original, 39). 

These critiques are off-target. First, it is unclear what Aiyejina means by “psychological disdain for, and rejection of, African culture.” Does he mean to include any African who rejects a portion of the culture but embraces the rest? Indeed, what is “African culture,” and is it immutable? One must imagine that Aiyejina would answer these questions in the negative. To do otherwise would include himself, “a professor of literatures in English,” in the mix. But if he answers negatively, why should someone who privileges “Euro-Christianity” over its traditional counterpart be any less African? The idea that Africans who embrace foreign religions are somewhat less African is deceptive, especially when we consider that many, such as Wole Soyinka, who claim to embrace African traditional religions, deny the realism of the gods. 

Aiyejina’s assertion that Crowther was an angry man seeking revenge is also not persuasive. Of course, it would be completely understandable if Crowther remained infuriated for being sold into slavery. But translating “Satan” as “Esu”—or more correctly, “devil” as “Èṣù”—is not an effective way to exact revenge. Indeed, with his knowledge of the Bible, a more effective way to exact revenge—an eternal one, at that—would be to borrow a leaf from the prophet Jonah, who chose to die over preaching to a people he intensely despised. Crowther could have refused to do missions in Yorubaland so that every Yoruba person may eternally perish, as Crowther’s Christian conception teaches. 

Furthermore, Aiyejina’s rhetorical questions on why Crowther only used “Esu,” of all the pantheon members, in his translation work is also misguided. Specifically, the reasoning here is guilty of assuming that Crowther intended his “Èṣù” to pick out the same referent as the traditional Yoruba “Esu.” It is pretty alarming how scholarship on the matter missed this point. Aiyejina’s questions are meaningful only if Crowther meant to assert a one-to-one correspondence between the referents of the terms—and critics are yet to establish that. Indeed, it is implausible that Crowther would have meant a one-to-one correspondence. Crowther’s work is a translation of a work conveying a different metanarrative. He could not have arbitrarily changed the attributes of Satan to those of Èṣù Ẹlẹ́gba.

Moreover, the assumption that Crowther corrupted Yoruba metaphysics through his translation work is guilty of severely belittling Crowther’s contemporary Ifa priests and adherents. Even if Crowther were so angry that he believed Satan and Ẹlẹ́gbara to be the same person, Ifa priests would have begged to differ. They would have pointed out to Crowther that his Èṣù (and Ọlọ́run, in fact) are only superficially like traditional Yoruba divinities by those names. More importantly, the Ifa priests would have ended such a conversation with exactly zero change to their beliefs. Hence, Crowther would not have corrupted anything.

Besides, we know that Crowther was not such an irrational being. In his encounters with Islam, a religion that claims historical reliance on the Bible and adherents of which Crowther could be justified to hate since Oyo Muslims sold him into slavery, Bishop Crowther “reflected the patience and the readiness to listen that marked his entire missionary method (Walls, 19). Though the Quran claims contrary to some cornerstone Christian beliefs, “Crowther sought common ground and found it at the nexus of Qur’an and Bible: Christ as the great prophet, his miraculous birth, Gabriel as the messenger of God (Walls, 19). Crowther befriended many Muslim rulers and clerics. In the final analysis, and regarding his apologetics works to Muslims, Crowther concluded: “After many years’ experience, I have found that the Bible, the sword of the Spirit, must fight its own battle, by the guidance of the Holy Spirit” (Walls, 19). This picture is not of a man taken over by anger or seeking revenge. Those who believe differently must prove their case.

Similarly, Adefarakan’s critiques are also misguided. Her claim that Crowther targeted the Yoruba traditional Èṣù for his central role and function in Yoruba metaphysics may be valid. But this does not amount to much. Crowther could have appropriated “Èṣù” to stimulate the minds of his readers—actually, primarily hearers—to consider the similarities and differences between the Christian Èṣù and Ẹlẹ́gbara and how the worldviews contrast. He could also have chosen “Èṣù” for its tonal similarity to “Jésù,” Crowther’s rendition of “Jesus.” This move would have made for easy mental connections (and conversations) in a primarily oral culture. However, if anyone confused the identities of Crowther’s and Yoruba traditional Èṣù figures, she would only need to attend a service at Ẹlẹ́gba’s temple to be reminded that the divine beings are different. In any case, Crowther may not be blamed for the confusion.

Adefarakan also writes (40):

The figure of the devil is central in Euro-Christian cosmology, hence an essential figure to the project of missionarism. The Bible is not the same without the devil, for he is needed as the quintessential antithesis to all that is good and all that is God. Esu is a central figure in the Yoruba cosmos, while Satan is a central figure in the Euro-Christian worldview.

The claim that “the devil is central in Euro-Christian cosmology” may be correct, but that is only because Adefarakan addresses “Euro-Christianity,” not Judeo-Christianity. The epic poems of Dante and John Milton enormously elevated Satan beyond Biblical bounds (See Steadman, John M. “The Idea of Satan as the Hero of ‘Paradise Lost.’” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 120, no. 4, 1976, pp. 253–94.). However, Adefarakan’s claim that “The Bible is not the same without the devil, for he is needed as the quintessential antithesis to all that is good and all that is God” is undoubtedly not a Judeo-Christian truth. As already demonstrated, the Devil does not get a mention in the Hebrew Bible, so that portion of the Bible is just fine without the devil. In the New Testament, where the Devil is referenced many times, he is not “the quintessential antithesis to all . . . that is God.” The devil is not equal but opposite to God. He does not even get the credit for much of what is wrong in the world. For instance, many people will undoubtedly name death as the foremost human enemy. Yet, the Bible does not give Satan credit for human death. Indeed Satan, sin, and death are treated as distinct enemies who are already judged by the Christ event and will be finally judged in the eschaton. See Derek Brown’s “The Devil in the Details” for a survey of research on Satan in Biblical studies. Hence, while Èṣù may be a central figure in Yorùbá cosmology, Satan does not play a similar role in the Judeo-Christian worldview.

Nevertheless, it is plausible that Crowther might have believed in an exaggerated view of Satan under the influence of a British education. However, that belief does not seem to feature in Crowther’s translation. If it does, it only amounts to an appropriation of a label, not confusion of identities, as already argued.

Surely, Bishop Crowther knew the Biblical story differed from the Yorùbá metanarrative. Yet, he must communicate his foreign myth in his native tongue. He might have appropriated “Èṣù” for its similarity to “Jésù.” In any case, a close reading of his translation work would reveal that Crowther’s Èṣù differs from the Yorùbá deity. Crowther’s critics have ignored the simple notion of a name and its referent that the philosophy of language has resolved. Slapping a label of “alcohol” on a bottle of water will not change the bottle’s content. Similarly, Crowther’s appropriation of “Èṣù” for “the devil” does not somehow confuse the respective deities.

Works Cited

Adefarakan, Temitope. “‘At a Crossroads’: Spirituality and The Politics of Exile: The Case of the Yoruba Orisa.” Obsidian, vol. 9, no. 1, 2008, pp. 31–58. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44489275. Accessed 21 Jun. 2022.

Aiyejina, Funso. “Esu Elegbara: A Source of an Alter/Native Theory of African Literature and Criticism.” St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago: The University of the West Indies, 2009. Internet resource.

Ney, Stephen. “Samuel Ajayi Crowther and the Age of Literature.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 46, no. 1, 2015, pp. 37–52. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.46.1.37. Accessed 21 Jun. 2022.

Walls, Andrew F. “Samuel Ajayi Crowther (1807-1891) Foremost African Christian of the Nineteenth Century.” International Bulletin of Missionary Research, vol. 16, no. 1, 1992, 15–21. doi:10.1177/239693939201600104. Accessed May 25 2022.

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Èṣù Ẹlẹ́gbara and the Evolution of Satan (Series Part 2)

Èṣù in Yoruba Metaphysics: A Brief Note

Traditionally, Yoruba conceives of the world as an interconnected three-tiered cosmos: Ọ̀run (meaning, heaven), Aiyé (meaning, the earth) Ilẹ̀ (meaning, underground; netherworld). Ọlọ́run (literally, “heaven’s owner”) inhabits Orun with the over four hundred gods in the Yoruba pantheon, many of whom walked the earth as humans with supernatural abilities. Ọlọ́run, also known as Ẹlẹ́dàá (literally, “the creator”), is the supreme being. Aiyé is the world of humans, and Ilẹ̀ is the world of departed souls, especially of ancestors. The dividing wall between Ọ̀run and Ilẹ̀, especially regarding deified souls, is quite ethereal.

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Bishop Ajayi Crowther and the Yorùbá Bible (Series Part 1)

Background

Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther’s contributions to African Christianity are well attested in the Christian world, especially in the Global South. In his native land, however, the Bishop is mainly seen as a villain than a hero. He is seen as an able instrument of colonialism used to undermine Yoruba metaphysics. His significant achievement, a Yoruba version of the Bible, is critically described as a courier of “Euro-Christian ideas, beliefs, and cultural logics” (Adefarakan, 45) written in the Yoruba language. Among the adherents of the traditional Yoruba religion, Bishop Crowther is a traitor who willfully allowed himself to be used in the corruption of what he once held dear.

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Reflections on the State-Sponsored Lekki Shooting and a Way Forward

On October 20, 2020, the Nigerian Government almost broke my brain as it did my heart when it sent out its historically reliable instrument of evil, the Nigerian Army, against peaceful protesters in Lekki, Lagos, and other parts of the country. It was a day reminiscent of the era of dictators in the execution of orders, and the resulting chaos was apocalyptic in spirit. It destabilized me. I could not even motivate myself to read source materials, let alone write–though I have a list of subjects that I would like to explore. That was a day never to be forgotten. Interestingly, the days leading up to October 20 were quite inspiring in the raw display of human togetherness that politicians have slowly led Nigerians to believe no longer exists. There were moments of intense pride and even of proto-patriotism. Bravery was displayed for all to see. In this piece, I want to focus primarily on how we may proceed from here. 

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Sàngó and the Aláàfin: Ancient Yorùbá Use of Religion in Politics

Source: Rowland n-e via Ooduavoice

Background

Sàngó’s story belongs to the very beginning of the Yorùbá nation which is believed to be founded by Odùduwà after migrating from “the East” to Ilé-Ifè. According to Samuel Johnson, Odùduwà might have originated from somewhere near modern-day Sudan or Egypt (5). People lived in the land before Odùduwà and his entourage got there (Johnson, 18); indeed, Odùduwà met Setilu, the father of Ifá worship, in the land (4). As is true of all empires, not all the people in the Ọ̀yọ́ empire were originally natives. Many of the different tribes that self-identify as Yoruba today likely had ancestors who identified differently. As Odùduwà and his army advanced, they absorbed natives of the land into the dominant culture of proto-Yorùbá. As I shall show later, the narrative fed to the people of an empire can be a powerful political tool having the effect of conferring a common identity and solidarity to a people group.

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Achebe Rewrites Africa’s History: The Glorious “Primitive Tribes” (Part 4, Finale)

While there are a significant number of people who do not feel positive about the deeds of the white man, none suggests violence. The thoughtful Obierika thinks such an act will not be wise: “It is already too late. . . . Our own men and our sons have joined the ranks of the stranger. They have joined his religion and they help to uphold his government” (124). Being his typical self, Okonkwo calls for immediate war to cleanse the land. He boasts of how Umuofia is immeasurably greater than the clan that the white man has wiped out: “We would be cowards to compare ourselves with the men of Abame.

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Achebe Rewrites Africa’s History: The Glorious “Primitive Tribes” (Part 3)

Achebe portrays Okonkwo as having a non-representative faulty view of leadership

Okonkwo’s view of leadership is simply deficient. Not only is he very prone to irrational behaviour, but he also does irrational things because of his view on gender roles. Driven by fear of being seen as weak and a failure, like Unoka, Okonkwo deifies masculinity. His primary motivation, “to hate everything that his father Unoka had loved,” includes hating “gentleness.” He thinks gentleness is a feminine or agbala trait. As mentioned en passant earlier, it is this extreme view on masculinity that encouraged him to kill his adopted son. This is also the reason he thinks his closest friend is a coward. Besides, Okonkwo is also psychologically unstable. As Polycarp Ikuenobe, an Igbo critic, points out, “In order to achieve [leadership], an individual must be ‘psychologically wholesome,’ emotionally and rationally stable, communally well adjusted, and must consistently show excellent judgment” (125). If this “Ikuenobian” requirement were a sacrosanct litmus test for leadership, Okonkwo would be nowhere close to passing it. Okonkwo has an emotional instability syndrome; in fact, it seems like his overall phenotype bears witness to this condition. Achebe writes about Okonkwo:

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Achebe Rewrites Africa’s History: The Glorious “Primitive Tribes” (Part 2)

Achebe Portrays Okonkwo As Having a Non-representative Faulty View of Family Relationships

The tribal Igbo community of Okonkwo has its mores that every child learns as it grows up. A man is the head of his family meaning that he is the primary provider. The people’s staple food is yam, and “Yam, the king of crops, was a man’s crop” (16) because it requires a lot of muscular work over a relatively long period to grow it. When the harvest comes, the man feeds his family primarily from the produce; it was a subsistent kind of farming. As Achebe emphatically reiterates, “Yam stood for manliness, and he who could feed his family on yams from one harvest to another was a very great man indeed” (24). Often the woman helps the man by growing “women’s crops, like coco-yams, beans and cassava” (16) alongside with him. It is, however, the woman who typically runs the house since the man often spends most of the hours on the farm. Achebe writes, for instance, about Okonkwo that “During the planting season Okonkwo worked daily on his farms from cock-crow until the chickens went to roost” (10). She ensures that the family meals are prepared in time, teaches the kids family values, make sure the house constantly have enough water to run on, and represents the man in absentia. Above all, the woman respectfully and lovingly submits to the man as the head of the house.

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Achebe Rewrites Africa’s History: The Glorious “Primitive Tribes” (Part 1)

The Commissioner went away, taking three or four of the soldiers with him. In the many years in which he had toiled to bring civilization to different parts of Africa he had learnt a number of things. One of them was that a District Commissioner must never attend to such undignified details as cutting down a dead man from the tree. Such would give the natives a poor opinion of him. In the book which he planned to write he would stress that point. As he walked back to the court he thought about that book. Every day brought him some new material. . . . There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting out details (147-48).

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Orí, Soft-Determinism, and the Preacher’s Dilemma (Series Part 4, Finale)

Third Scholarly Approach: Soft-Determinism

Another approach that scholars have taken to make sense of the Yoruba worldview through a metaphysical lens is soft-determinism. Hard determinism (or determinism) is the view that all events are completely determined by antecedent causes. This view holds that all things are in causal relations so that if we know sufficiently about a cause, we can know the future effect. It is commonly held that this view excludes freedom and that we cannot do other than we do. We are compelled to do what we do by factors beyond our control. Soft-determinism argues to the contrary. It maintains that determinism allows for freedom. Also known as compatibilism, soft determinism argues that determinism is compatible with freedom. The “freedom” in compatibilism is crucially different from what we normally mean by freedom. It is akin to the freedom of the example of armed robbers on Lagos streets discussed earlier.

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