Nupe Historians Say the Original Ilé-Ifẹ̀ was Located in Nupe Land

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Nupe Historians Say the Original  Ilé-Ifẹ̀ was Located in Nupe Land

I have read a very long piece of historical analysis on the origins of Odùduwà published on https://nationalsportslink.com.ng/amp/oduduwa-the-nupe-man-by-ndagi-abdullahi/ . The writer claimed that Odùduwà was a Nupe demigod by the River Niger and that the name of Odùduwà came from Odù, the Nupe name for River Niger and so Odùduwà means the man from the river. And that the Yoruba were Nupe people who migrated from KinNupe to the South West region of Nigeria.

He quoted historians and scholars, including Bishop Ajayi Crowther, Rev. Samuel Johnson and Prof. David D. Laitin, he called authorities whose analyses are indisputable and irrefutable facts of history. But unfortunately for him and his hypotheses, he did not provide any archeological evidence. If the original Odùduwà and Ilé-Ifẹ̀ were in KinNupe, then how come the sculptures of ancient Ilé-Ifẹ̀ were discovered in the present location of Ilé-Ifẹ̀ and not by the banks of the River Niger? The only sculpture found in Nupe land is included in the history of Ifẹ̀ Art on https://africa.uima.uiowa.edu/chapters/ancient-africa/ife/?start=13.

He said an Arabian historian, El Bakri, "writing in the 1060s, made it clear that the Nupe Nation, or Ed-Denden, was the greatest and most powerful empire in Africa south of the Sahara". But he failed to give any archeological evidence of this so called greatest and most powerful empire in sub-Saharan Africa. 

How come we have not discovered Bronze sculptures of ancient KinNupe in the present location of Nupe people?

Not a single archeological evidence in Nupe Art and not a single link to IFA Divination.

History is full fairy tales and hearsays, but archeology is full of concrete works of facts of life.

From the dating of Ifẹ̀ Art , I can emphatically state that the history of Ilé-Ifẹ̀ dates back to 600 BCE and not in KinNupe. 

- EKENYERENGOZI Michael Chima,

Publisher/Editor, 

NOLLYWOOD MIRROR®Series 

247 Nigeria (@247nigeria) / Twitter

https://mobile.twitter.com/247nigeria

https://www.amazon.com/author/ekenyerengozimichaelchima

SOYINKA and the Quest for the Ori Olokun

 SOYINKA and the Quest for the Ori Olokun

The first African Nobel Laureate in Literature Prof. Wole Soyinka is 80 years old today, born on July 13, 1934. And the enigmatic and phenomenal genius is famous for his dare devil exploits including the one that landed him in jail. 

In 1965, he seized the Western Nigeria Broadcasting Service studio and broadcast a demand for the cancellation of the Western Nigeria Regional Elections. In 1967 during the Nigerian Civil War, he was arrested by the federal government of General Yakubu Gowon and put in solitary confinement for two years after he secretly and unofficially met with the military governor Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu in the Southeastern town of Enugu (August 1967), to try to avert civil war. Go and read his "The Man Died" for his prison notes.

In 1978, Wole Soyinka was made aware of the existence of a bronze head in a private collection in Brazil – similar to the disputed one discovered by the famous German archaeologist Leo Frobenius (29 June 1873 – 9 August 1938) in 1910, which now stood in the Ife Museum, but of far greater quality. In his memoir "You Must Set Forth at Dawn" (2007), Soyinka recalls how, in a spirit of cultural duty, and with the knowledge of the Nigerian authorities, he mounted a kind of guerrilla raid with a group of friends, stealing the object from the apartment in question in near-farcical circumstances, and removing it to the Senegalese capital Dakar, where experts proclaimed it genuine. Suspicious, however, of the lightness of the object, Soyinka examined it further to find the letters “BM” stamped on the back: it was a British Museum replica, once sold in the museum’s shop. Soyinka then declared the British Museum’s head to be the real 'Ori Olokun", even though it was excavated 18 years after Frobenius’s original discovery.

~ By Ekenyerengozi Michael Chima, aka Orikinla Osinachi, prize winning Nigerian writer since age 13, author of Children of Heaven, Sleepless Night, Scarlet Tears of London, Bye, Bye Mugabe (now being revised with the new title of Bye, Bye Zimbabwe and other books.