{"id":53270,"date":"2022-01-15T06:18:53","date_gmt":"2022-01-15T06:18:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/journalist101.com\/?p=53270"},"modified":"2022-01-15T06:18:53","modified_gmt":"2022-01-15T06:18:53","slug":"kanuri-origins-of-the-tinubu-family-in-lagos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journalist101.com\/2022\/01\/15\/kanuri-origins-of-the-tinubu-family-in-lagos\/","title":{"rendered":"Kanuri Origins Of The Tinubu Family In Lagos"},"content":{"rendered":"

NOTES FROM ATLANTA WITH FAROOQ KPEROGI<\/strong><\/h4>\n

There is probably no \u201cindigenous\u201d Lagos family that is more famous than the Tinubu family. But, although the family is now clearly culturally Yoruba, its ethnic provenance is traceable to what is now Borno State, according to Lagos historians, underscoring the historical and sociological inaccuracy of notions of ethnic purism in Nigeria.<\/p>\n

The patriarch of the Tinubu family, historians of Lagos say, was a Kanuri man known as Momodu [it was most probably Modu since Kanuris tend to shorten Muhammad to Modu] Bugara who was also alternately called Momoh Abubakar, Momoh Bukar, or Alfa Ibunu. He was an Islamic scholar who migrated from the defunct Bornu Empire to what was then the Lagos Colony in the 1800s and achieved some renown in the Lagos society.<\/p>\n

In the mid-1800s, he was employed as an Islamic spiritual guardian by Madam Efunroye Tinubu, a famous wealthy slave trader, power broker, and agitator in Lagos (who was later banished to Abeokuta by the Lagos Oba of the time). In time, the spiritual guardian fell in love with his employer, and they got married.<\/p>\n

But the marriage didn\u2019t produce children. Apparently, the childlessness of the marriage was a consequence of Madam Tinubu\u2019s infertility because she consented to Bugara marrying other women with whom he bore children.<\/p>\n

A mark of the cordiality that existed between Madam Tinubu and Alfa Bugara in spite of Bugara\u2019s marriage to other women and having children by them was evident in the fact that Bugara\u2019s children adopted Tinubu as their family name even though they didn\u2019t share any filiation with Madam Tinubu.<\/p>\n

I distilled these tidbits about the history of the Tinubu family from an insightful inaugural lecture titled \u201cThe Undertaker, the Python\u2019s Eye and Footsteps of the Ant: The Historian\u2019s Burden\u201d delivered by Professor Siyan Oyeweso at the Lagos State University (LASU) in 2006. Oyeweso, one of Nigeria\u2019s well-regarded historians who had an extensive academic career at LASU, now teaches at the Osun State University.<\/p>\n

Professor Oyeweso quoted Madam Tinubu\u2019s biographer by the name of Oladipo Yemitan as saying that while most people who bear the Tinubu name were children of Bugara who had no direct blood link with Madam Tinubu, scions of her former slaves and relatives from Abeokuta also bear it.<\/p>\n

\u201cDuring this association of Momoh Bukar and Efunroye Tinubu, the latter\u2019s name was so pervasive and all-embracing that all within the household perforce assumed the name \u2018Tinubu\u2019,\u201d Oyeweso quoted Yemitan to have written. \u201cIncluded in this household were the children of Momoh Bukar by his other wives and Madame Tinubu\u2019s relatives from Abeokuta who had joined her in Lagos and lived with her. Of course, a number of slaves also assumed the name.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, based on my own knowledge of the people and sociology of Kanem-Bornu, Momodu Bugara was not Kanuri\u2014at least not on his patrilineal side. He was most certainly a Shuwa Arab. Shuwa Arabs, who have been integral to the Bornu society for centuries and who number a little over a million in contemporary Borno State, are called \u201cBaggara\u201d by Middle Eastern Arabs. I am certain that \u201cBugara\u201d is the corruption of \u201cBaggara\u201d by Lagosians of the 1800s.<\/p>\n

Although several Baggara people (whom Kanuris call \u201cShuwa Arabs\u201d) still speak their dialect of the Arabic language, often called Chadian Arabic in the linguistics literature, many of them have intermarried with the dominant Kanuri people in Borno and have adopted the Kanuri language. The late Abba Kyari was a KanurizedShuwa Arab\/Baggara. For all you know, Abba Kyari and the \u201cBugara\u201d line of the Tinubu family in Lagos may share distant ancestral links!<\/p>\n

Now, why is this history important? For one, it helps to exemplify the complexity and syncretism of ethnic identity in Nigeria. For another it says something about the name \u201cTinubu\u201d particularly in light of Bola Ahmed Tinubu\u2019s declaration that he wants to be the next president of Nigeria.<\/p>\n

When Professor Oyeweso delivered his lecture in 2006, Bola Tinubu was the governor of Lagos State. This fact wasn\u2019t lost on Oyeweso.<\/p>\n

\u201cMr Vice \u2013 Chancellor, Sir, today, the current administration of Lagos State is headed by a Tinubu,\u201d he said. \u201cThe Tinubu\u2019s [sic] are also generally acknowledged as Lagosians. Another Tinubu headed the Lagos State Civil Service for five years. Others had distinguished themselves in journalism, security and community services, the organized private sector and in other walks of life.\u201d<\/p>\n

But this is where Oyeweso got it all wrong. Bola Ahmed Tinubu is not a member of any version of the Tinubu family. He is neither from the original Abeokuta Tinubu bloodline, the \u201cBugara\u201d pedigree, nor the slave line of descent.<\/p>\n

Bola Tinubu is from a town in Osun State called Iragbiji, which is the headquarters of Boripe Local Government Area. His older sister is the mother of Alhaji Gboyega Oyetola, the current governor of Osun State. By several credible accounts, including from informants in Iragbiji, Bola Tinubu\u2019s original name was Amoda Lamidi Sangodele.<\/p>\n

Amoda is the Yoruba Muslim domestication of Ahmad (which underwent phonetic transformation from Ahmad to Amadu to Amoda). The vowels in the name (\u201co\u201d and \u201ca\u201d were merely transposed.<\/p>\n

Lamidi is the Yoruba Muslim domestication of Abdulhamid. As I wrote in my July 13, 2014, column titled \u201cTop 10 Yoruba Names You Never Guessed Were Arabic Names,\u201d because of Yoruba people\u2019s fondness for the short forms of names, they often dispense with \u201cAbdul\u201d in Muslim names that begin with that prefix. So that leaves us with Hamid.<\/p>\n

Now, there is something some people call the \u201ch-factor\u201d in Yoruba, which is the tendency for Yoruba speakers to unconsciously eliminate the \u201ch\u201d sound in words in which it is normally pronounced and to add it to words that don\u2019t have it when they encounter a foreign language. So \u201ceat\u201d is often pronounced as \u201cheat\u201d and \u201cheat\u201d is pronounced as \u201cit.\u201d<\/p>\n

Given this phonological characteristic, \u201cHamid\u201d becomes \u201cAmid,\u201d but the interference of the \u201cl\u201d sound in \u201cAbdul\u201d also causes it to be rendered as \u201cLamid.\u201d Like in all Niger Congo languages, it\u2019s unnatural for words to not have a terminal vowel in Yoruba, so a terminal vowel is added to Lamid to produce Lamidi.<\/p>\n

In other words, in his current name, only \u201cAhmed\u201d is faithful to his original name since Amoda is the domestication of Ahmad, which is often orthographically Anglicized as \u201cAhmed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pastor Tunde Bakare helped to push this aspect of Tinubu\u2019s past into the center of national consciousness during a dishonest sermon in December 2020 that pretended to defend Tinubu. In my December 26, 2020, column titled \u201cBakare Didn\u2019t Defend Tinubu; He Defanged Him,\u201d I unpacked Bakare\u2019s sly unmasking of Tinubu\u2019s identity chicanery.<\/p>\n

I wrote: \u201cIn Bakare\u2019s political homily, he basically affirmed all the hitherto fringy whispers about Tinubu: that he is from Iragbiji in Osun State; that his current name is not his original name; that he has disowned his biological parents and \u2018adopted\u2019 the Tinubu family of Lagos with whom he has zero consanguineal affiliation; that the late legendary Alhaja Abibat Mogaji of Lagos is not Tinubu\u2019s biological mother\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also intriguing, by the way, that \u201cMogaji,\u201d the last name of Tinubu\u2019s adopted mother, is the Yoruba domestication of the Hausa name Magaji, which means successor or inheritor. I am curious to know what Alhaja Abibat Mogaji\u2019s ancestral story is. Like her last name, Tinubu\u2019s daughter, Folashade, has become an inheritor of Alhaja Abibat\u2019s \u201c\u00ccy\u00e1l\u2019\u1ecd\u0301j\u00e0 of Lagos\u201d title and privileges.<\/p>\n

Well, I can understand Bola Ahmed Tinubu\u2019s opportunistic adoption of the Tinubu name as his family. After all, most people identified with the Tinubu family name in Lagos today aren\u2019t related to Madam Efunroye Tinubu who popularized it in nineteenth-century Lagos.<\/p>\n

If descendants of Kanurized Shuwa Arabs (or Baggara) can be Tinubu, why not an Amoda Lamidi Sangodele, a Yoruba man from Iragbiji? But I don\u2019t and can\u2019t understand why he would also \u201cadopt\u201d Alhaja Mogaji as his mother to the point of shunning the funeral of his own biological mother in Iragbiji, according to the late Yinka Odumakin. Well, make of that what you will.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NOTES FROM ATLANTA WITH FAROOQ KPEROGI There is probably no \u201cindigenous\u201d Lagos family that is more famous than the Tinubu family. But, although the family is now clearly culturally Yoruba, its ethnic provenance is traceable to what is now Borno State, according to Lagos historians, underscoring the historical and sociological inaccuracy of notions of ethnic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":43906,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rank_math_lock_modified_date":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-53270","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-opinion"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/journalist101.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/20210710204425_318607264_13854760492031031_640_360_85_webp.jpg?fit=640%2C360&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4LVjE-dRc","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journalist101.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journalist101.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journalist101.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journalist101.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journalist101.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53270"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journalist101.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53270\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53271,"href":"https:\/\/journalist101.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53270\/revisions\/53271"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journalist101.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43906"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journalist101.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journalist101.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journalist101.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}