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Pondering Stereotypes

What do you think of when you hear the words “British”? Well, it depends on who you are, doesn’t it? I bet the French, the Irish, the Scots, and the Americans think of them differently than the Germans, South Africans, Indians and Nigerians do. Stiff upper lipped, stoic and unyielding. My first impression of Britain started and ended at the UK Border Agency counter at Heathrow Airport in London en route to Boston, and it wasn’t very heartwarming. Portrayals in Mel Gibson’s The Patriot and Braveheart didn’t help either, and if those were all I had, I’d have re-routed my plane flight to go through France. But then, there was Colin Firth in The King’s Speech that brought much humanity back to the name. And there is the delightful Queen. In any case, this post – which is merely supposed to explore my contact and thoughts with stereotypes has just merely started. I chose “British” as the first example in my head. Imagine if I’d chosen to start with “Jewish.”

Now, I have just listened to a nine minute video by Andy Borowitz, one of my best living comedians. His tweet feed was named the funniest of 2011 and he has provided the best commentary on every contemporary news since I’ve started reading him. He makes twitter a fun place to spend one’s day. So, back to the story. One day, I discovered that he was also a stand-up comedian. I’d always thought that it was hard to combine being funny in 140 characters to being funny in real life. He does both very well that now I can’t tell which one I like better. (Well, that was a lie. His tweets take the cake.) What was notable about him today that I discovered was that he is Jewish. Now it all makes perfect sense. See – and I’m not an aspie like my friend Clarissa – I sometimes tend to look for patterns, for no good reason. I discovered sometime ago that Jon Stewart was Jewish, and then I knew of Lewis Black, and then Larry King, then Jimmy Kimmel, and Jerry Seinfeld. The only other thing that connected them all was that they were funny, brilliant people. Then Woody Allen.

Now, a few steps back again. My favourite authors weren’t Jewish. They were Irish. George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, Seamus Heaney, Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Becket, W.B. Yeats, (and Barack Obama 🙂 ). I had grown myself into the idea that the most brilliant authors/people had some Irish in them. Oh, and let me now forget George Carlin. So it was such a shock to find out that when it came to intelligently interrogating ideas through literature and the arts, the Irish were not just the ones out there, and were definitely not the funniest. Thinking about it now, I should have taken a hint from the fact that Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman also had Jewish ancestry. So where does that leave me? Nowhere, actually. Like I said in a much earlier post, the link between the Yoruba people of West Africa to the Middle East – as plausible as it sounds on the surface – leaves many questions than answers. And that’s fine. I’ll just watch the Daily Show, Jimmy Kimmel Live, read Borowitz Report and go watch Larry King (whose last name is actually Zieger) on his comedy tour. There is an interesting, notable pattern in the talent of those who carry the ethnic (if not the religious) identity into the public sphere.

And there ends my post on stereotypes. I’m sure this wasn’t what you were expecting, but I have a feeling that a sequel will come sometimes soon when I come up with the other recollections of contact with people based on expectations, observable patterns of behaviour, hearsay, and yes, stereotypes. And yes, my friend Clarissa, and my head of department are Jewish as well. Regarding that expectation of brilliance – if only through contact – now I have nowhere to hide, and no excuse.

Pondering Stereotypes was published on May 25th, 2011, with the tags , , , , , , under the Opinion, Soliloquy category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

So Where Are We From Then?

(Photo credit: RAJESH JANTILAL/AFP/Getty Images)The most famous story about the origin of the Yoruba people is that we all descended from one man called Oduduwa. It is also the most misleading of stories because the man called Oduduwa who was said to have come from a place called Mecca (or, as historians have agreed, somewhere in the Middle East) most possibly found some indigenous people already living in the area now called Yorubaland when he landed with his travelling party from Mecca, and could not have been the sole progenitor of the now over thirty million people. In any case, he was said to have had only one son, who later had seven. So, for all intent and purposes, it was a conquest, kind of like the Founding Fathers arriving on the American continent from Europe, or Christopher Columbus “discovering” America after a long ride on the ocean, or Mungo Park “discovering” the Niger river. If that is the case, then when as citizens we use the now famous self reference “Omo Oduduwa”  to refer to ourselves, we engage in a kind of deceit, or self-disservice, or at least a subservient acceptance of the prehistoric conquest. The verifiable children of the man Oduduwa were the original seven kings who descended from his son Okanbi, and their own living descendants who now occupy the kingship thrones in Oyo, Benin, Popo, Sabe, Ife and two other Yoruba towns. That said, we are all Yorubas, just like the occupants of Britain are now all Brits, not Normans, or Romans, or Celts just because they were once occupied by those forces.

Image from http://www.agalu.com/biography.htmlBut where did we come from, the Yorubas? Going by the Oduduwa story, we (at least those Yoruba citizens that have “royal” blood) are all descendants of Oduduwa, who in turn is a descendant of Lamurudu.  Lamurudu interestingly is the Yoruba’s corruption of the name Nimrod from the bible, according to the Reverend Johnson in his book The History of the Yoruba. So there it is! We’re confirmed descendants of the Jews. Yet history does not rule out the possibility that Lamurudu/Nimrod was not even the immediate ancestor of the man Oduduwa, or that Oduduwa himself was not the immediate ancestor of Okanbi, so it is fair to take liberties with the fact. It is possible, almost certain by these accounts, that we were descendants of Nimrod the son of Cush, grandson of Ham, great-grandson of Noah. Now, even to me, that’s far removed. Why? Because Nimrod’s personality has never been fully established, and every once powerful civilization from Egypt to Greece to Jewish cultures have their own written perception of him that are not always complimentary.

Image from http://obatalashrine.org/000004.phpSo where did we come from then? A literal mecca? Quite possibly. The islamic civilization has it recorded that many years before/after Mohammed the prophet, many so called idolators were expelled from the city into the world outside. The man Oduduwa and his entourage who later settled South West of the Niger river were believed to have arrived there not only with magic and graven images (which were markers of idolatory for which they were said to have been expelled from the religious middle eastern city in the first place), they also came with peculiar forms of dressing, communication and way of life that marks them as from that part of the world. They worshipped man-made gods, they made sacrifices to them through priests, they wore long robes, greeted each other in a particular way, and their women covered their heads as part of their cultural identity. The staff of Oranmiyan in Ile-Ife today still has the words “Oranmiyan” engraved on it in Jewish letters, and it was erected before the coming of the Europeans to that side of the world. Have you ever wondered why the Yorubas name their children on the eighth day of the birth of the child? I have. Could it be, as suggested to my surprise by an American student in my Yoruba class on Wednesday, that we are following the tradition of the old Hebrews who always circumcised their children on the eight day after birth, as ordained by their God? I don’t know, but I won’t bet against it. There is so much that I don’t know, that I wish I knew. There is so much more we need to know about ourselves.

The real wonder for me is where we are from, we Yorubas who are not descendants of kings or the patriarch Oduduwa. Any takers?

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So Where Are We From Then? was published on January 14th, 2010, with the tags , , , , , , , , , , , under the Academic, Observations, Soliloquy category. There are currently 44 comments on this article so far.