Oyo state governor, Seyi Makinde, has unveiled a book on shared Yoruba kinship and community-based values.
The governor also called for the revival of community-based values as a means to transforming the contemporary society.
The book was authored by Prof. Olufemi Vaughan, currently the Alfred Sargent Lee ’41 and Mary Ames Lee Professor of African Studies at Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts, USA.
The launching of the book entitled “Letters, Kinship And Social Mobility in Nigeria”, held at the Trenchard Hall, University of Ibadan (U.I).
The book is a trove of more than 3,000 letters compiled in a span of 80 years and received by the author from his late father, Abiodun Alfred Vaughan, in 2003.
Speaking as the chairman of the book launch, Makinde underscored the importance of shared Yoruba kinship values and education as critical messages of the major letter writers in the book.
He called on the people of Oyo State and Nigeria to engage important community-based values derived from past to help change and transform contemporary conditions.
The governor also stressed the importance of keeping good records from the past to assist in understanding current social, political, and economic conditions.
He encouraged Nigerians in the Diaspora to lend support to the development and progress of Nigerian society.
Also speaking at the event, a renowned Nigerian historian Prof. Bolanle Awe, advocates the usage of letters and other archival materials in historical writings.
Awe, who was first female lecturer at the Department of History, University of Ibadan and the first female academic staff in a Nigerian university, emphasised the importance of record keeping culture and history for posterity.
The book, “Letters, Kinship And Social Mobility”, was about the first scholarly effort that critically engaged the medium of letter writing to explore the everyday experiences of Africans in the modern world.
The letters, written by four generations of the Vaughan family in Ibadan, Nigeria between 1926 and 1994, were the comprehensive correspondences of some major writers that gave a deep insight on how to critically explore the evolution of modern Yoruba society within the context of the formation of the Nigerian State and society.
The stories constructed from the letters were also narratives about how modern African experiences evolved out of indigenous local structures, values and ideas at a transformative moment in history.
The writers of the letters included Mariam Vaughan 1866-1972); Samuel Ariyibi Vaughan (1887-1985l; Dorcas Olayinka Brainerd (1894-1973); S. A. Oloko (1894-1984) and Rachel Ayodele Akinloye (1898-1993).
Others were Jadesola Juliana Odebunmi (1902-1996); Abiodun Alfred Vaughan (1907-2004); Bamidele Theo Brainerd (1916-2004); Adisa Meredith Augustus Akinloye (1918-2007); and Gladys Aduke Vaughan (1920-2014).
These writers, and many others mentioned in the book, as clerks, administrators, health officers, nurses, writers and students, laid the foundation of modern Yoruba society in Colonial Nigeria in the first half of the 20th Century.
