My World...Our World: “OBINRIN BII OKUNRIN”: DISECTING A COVERT YORUBA PHILOSOPHY OF FEMININE INFERIORITY

The present century, especially the turn of the millennium, has brought with it the feminist ideology simply labelled in many fields as feminism. And feminism has raged on like wildfire. The wildfire metaphor is deliberately and aptly deployed here to capture not only the sense of how ravaging an ideology feminism has been, how much it has dazzled the onlookers and fire fighters alike or how seemingly unstoppable it has been. More interestingly, this metaphor is deployed to paint a picture also of the difficulty of pinning down its source to a certain force of ignition or a location – although the latter subjects itself to easier explanation than the former which keeps an elusive façade. But also, the wildfire metaphor captures a sense of what is burnt as well as what may yet get burnt as wildfires always carry an undesirable prospect of burning more than the human societies would have projected or imagined.

This essay is however not a pedagogical piece on metaphors. Rather, it is a concentrated peep into the inconvenient fact that the Yoruba society, which prides itself on wisdom and the veneration of women as harbingers of life who are celestially imbued with almost god(dess)-like qualities, somehow secretly (and maybe inadvertently too) deploys language to disallow the woman from being a woman if she must aspire to the highest ideals of the Yoruba culture.

A quick comparison of the various women ‘emancipation’ movements like the Women’s Lib of late 18^th century America, Canada and Europe, the more recent Pussy Riot of 2011AD Russia and even the ancient and agelong Aje sorority of Yorubaland which roughly compares with witchcraft reveals a common goal – to advance the cause of women (universally) and assert the right of the woman to live in freedom and pursue happiness as well as realise her full potential as a female human being. However, there are deeply entrenched biases in Yoruba language that clearly reveal that women are expected, against the spirit of Simone De Beauvior’s (1949) The Second Sex, to either forgo these desires or mutate (maybe metamorphose) into a different kind of specie to attain the recognition which the society bestows on its full-fledged members.

As Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf put it in their classic and widely criticised ‘hypothesis’ which has come to be known in the Linguistic parlance by names like Linguistic Relativism, Linguistic Determinism or the Deficit Hypothesis, people are (forever) at the mercy of the language which has become the vehicle of expression of their culture as they cannot but think, speak and otherwise experience the world outside the boundaries of that code system. Indubitably, long-held and deeply-entrenched expectations and codes of behaviour are stacked for ‘safekeeping’ as well as reference purposes in Yoruba proverbs and axioms. While sets of sayings are reserved for different situations and purposes, there is a level of fascination in this essay with sayings that pretend to praise women but which actually end up reminding them of their inability to reach the level of full personhood that everyone desires and which most – if not all – of their male counterparts achieve by default.

Prominent among such denigrating accolades is the expression “obinrin bii okunrin” which roughly translates as a woman who is just like a man. On the surface, this praise term evokes a sense of pride for a woman who feels respected for being better than just a (an atehinto) woman. A Yoruba woman invariably had to be manlike to be great sine being womanly is tantamount to subjugation and relegation. Being referred to as atehinto is a reminder of the culturally loaded reference to the structure and location of the female genitalia which compels her to pass her urine ‘backwards’ rather than forward like her male counterpart. Another such saying that comes to mind immediately as it is often used to complement the foregoing is “to act like a man”. In other words, women from whom bravery is expected are enjoined to se bii okunrin or se okan akin. Akin is a Yoruba expression for the brave at heart, a warrior or ‘he’ who stands out for some adventurous deed. The use of the “he” preform in the antecedent sentence lays claim to freedom from any gender bias or chauvinism on the author’s part. Rather, a cursory anthropological journey into the Yoruba naming system would reveal that Akin may only be a “he”.

Akin can be semiotically linked to “Kumolu” – another Yoruba name which evokes another saying that a woman would not be named Kumolu except on the ground of some exceptional situation. The reader need not look too far for the exceptional situation as it is simply the lack of or the death of a ‘male’ heir in a family of some nobility. Olu being the heir, the real successor, the real child that bestows pride on the family, every home prays for an Oluomo. The Olu twist brings in another interesting angle to the narrative when one considers the morphological make-up of words like “Oluwa” (God/Lord), “Oluse” (doer) et cetera. In short, a woman is not linguistically catered for in the world of the active and great. No woman is addressed as “my Lord” in the Yoruba culture except she has stripped herself of or been forcefully stripped of the ‘limiting’ female garb in order to effectively become relevant in positions of Lordship like a regent (interim king) or an acting General of an army.

This essay should not conclude without once again establishing the fact that the woman in Yoruba culture has her place. However, her place is to be located in softness, beauty and grace – concepts and virtues which are not essentially the loftiest in the order of greatness among which bravery, royalty, sacrifice, wisdom and heroism rank the highest. A woman who aspires to such virtues as these must become (like) a man, sometimes literally having to dress up, talk and act (like) a man in order to be a true obinrin bii okunrin, a heroic, liberated woman – probably a mutated specie of woman.