6 - The Oriki of Big Men

Summary

BIG MEN, REPUTATION AND ORIKI

Okuku, like other Yoruba towns, is hierarchical. As we have seen, it was part of a larger system of authority, nominally subordinate in turn to Ọyọ, Ilorin and Ibadan, and also claiming overlordship over a number of neighbouring towns in the Odo- Ọtin area. Internally too, Okuku was and is hierarchically structured. The immense privilege and mystically-conceived authority of the Olokuku made him ‘second to the gods’. Beneath him, the chiefs constitute a hierarchy that is elaborately ranked and graded, and the holders of titles regard these distinctions of status as being of supreme importance. Within the community at large, steep differences of status are permanently maintained. As the last chapter showed, each compound is internally stratified; and outside the compound too, everybody has to know who is senior and junior to them in order simply to be able to address them correctly. Consciousness of relative seniority is acute, in some situations even overriding gender distinctions. ‘You are a small boy to me’, ‘I had given birth even before you married’, ‘I was walking before you were bom’ are comments that are heard continually as the hierarchy of seniority is reproduced in daily life.

In the past this hierarchy was animated by a dynamic, competitive struggle for self-aggrandisement which permeated the society from top to bottom. There was scope for people to create a place for themselves and expand it by their own efforts. Like the ‘Big Men’ of New Guinea, they did it through the recruitment of supporters. A Yoruba proverb, often written up as a motto on parlour walls and the sides of lorries, says ‘Mo lòwò, mo léníyàn, kí lò tún kù ti mi ò tíì ni?: ‘I have money, I have people, what else is there that I have not got?’ Money was one of the principal ways of gaining public acknowledgement as a big man; but ‘having people’ constituted that acknowledgement itself. Wives and children, visiting matrilateral relatives, attached ‘stranger’ segments in long-term residence, bondsmen, labourers, visitors, friends and adherents of all kinds, from the most permanent to the most casual - all were the ‘people’ on whose acknowledgement the ambitious man's standing depended.