Growing up as a Yoruba boy, it has always fascinated me how the same expression is deployed to label the art of worship of God and the art of breeding animals. Theism’s and animal husbandry’s equal claim to the term however leaves a little allowance for categorisation which can be located in polysemy. But this polysemy is only afforded by the latter field – animal husbandry. In Yoruba, the lexico-semantic equivalent of “breed” is “sin”. To say “I breed dogs” either as a pet, for meat or even for sale (which in turn metaphorically returns one to the idea of money or food as meat) is to say “mo n sin aja”. It therefore becomes obvious that the word “sin”, like its English counterpart is a lumped expression which, often in certain contexts or after a little more interrogation, can be unpacked to reveal different dimensions which all stem from the idea of ‘ownership’. In short, the breeder (olusin) owns the animal.
Yet, while theism seems to be free of such demarcation of either breeding for meat or as pet, at least denotatively, it does not take too much struggle to access it connotatively when one takes some time to examine the practices of theistic worshippers in any of the world religions. Besides, if anything, theism retains the idea of ownership and it grudgingly accepts that fact, even though it is designed to present God as the supreme owner of the universe. The way religion proselytising is carried on reveals something akin to an attempt to sell what you own or have bred meticulously. Likewise, the fact of different forms of ‘God’ as presented by Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, and some modern forms of Pantheism and others points at a semblance of different breeds of what is sold.
A deeper interrogation of the Yoruba’s choice of the word “sin” (worship) in connection to God often leads one to the advent of monotheism in Yorubaland. Yoruba historians have always referred to the early Yoruba as polytheistic or pantheistic (taking all the gods as necessarily working together and venerating all, albeit while devoted to one or a few). And the choice word for veneration or worship was “bo (Orisha)” which more faithfully reflects the processes involved in worship – pouring of libations, offering of sacrifices, total subjection even in the face of being ignored or unrecognised for such devotion. At this stage, “sin” was more aptly deployed for a relationship of indebtedness. For instance, to “sin’gba” (sin ogba) meant to serve term as a bond servant usually as a means of repaying some loan or debt; the full payment of which leads to the total freedom of the servant and cessation of the devotion. A slight semantic shift applies for the use of the word in animal husbandry where the human owner is said to own/breed “sin” the animal due to the fact that s/he performs the devotion. After all, the animal mostly only enjoys the services of the human until it is time for it to also serve some purpose – as meat, carrier of burden, a means of exchange and so on. In these two senses interrogated, one thing is clear: to “sin” is to serve with an expectation of some end (both temporally and economically).
Fast forward some decades to the age of hybrid Christianity/Islam among the Yorubas. The worship of God seems to be attached to the provision of the daily bread. In fact, the Yorubas have since found out that embracing the religion was a way of getting access to the world of the European coloniser whose intension in the first lace was to use the religion to gai access into the world and wealth of the African. While many devotees of the monotheistic God worship him for love and in simple wonder about His awesomeness and ethereal mystery, many simply, either covertly or overtly hang on to Him because of the promise of meat. Meat, again in its metaphorical sense, include food, wealth, health, safety, good life and other needs as suggested by the scholar Abraham Marslow. For them, it is more sincere to say they serve God in the sense of “sin Olorun” than worship God in the sense of “bo Olorun”. And being in the majority, their use of language has seeped into the popular consciousness where everyone now ‘serve’ rather than ‘worship’ God.
*This essay relies heavily on the Sapir-Whorfian Hypothesis (linguistic determinism/relativism) which argues for the fact that the peculiarities of our languages have the ability to determine or largely influence the way we see the world and interact with it.
...highlighting events, people and ideas that touch us in different ways.
