Atunto, a global Yoruba socio-cultural organisation, has strongly condemned recent claims suggesting that the Igbo people once occupied Ile-Ife, the ancestral homeland of the Yoruba.
In a statement jointly signed by its Chairmen, Chief Banji Ayiloge (Diaspora) and Dr. Oluwatoyin Atte (Homeland), the group dismissed the assertion as a deliberate distortion of history, asserting that at no point in time did the Igbo occupy or have any historical ties to Yoruba land.
“We want to state without any equivocation that this latest claim is false and can only be seen as an attempt to appropriate the prestige and culture of the Yoruba people through revisionist history,” the statement read.
The group was reacting to a self-published book on Amazon, which it said peddled falsehoods about Yoruba origins, warning that such publications pose a dangerous precedent for historical misinformation.
Atunto also clarified that a statement by the Ooni of Ife, Oba Adeyeye Ogunwusi—connecting Ile-Ife to the Ugbo Kingdom in Ondo State, was grossly misinterpreted by some individuals, including the Obi of Onitsha, to support the unfounded claims of Igbo links to Ile-Ife.
“Oba Obateru Akinruntan of Ugbo town is a living custodian of the history and the tradition of his people and has never at any time acknowledged any relationship with the Ibo people, but has strenuously proclaimed Ile-Ife as the source of the Ugbo people as the original inhabitants of Ile-Ife.
“Moremi Ajasoro has been prominently featured in the Ooni and Oba Akinruntan discussion.
“We condemn the false claim of some ill-conceived Ibo people that any town that has “Igbo” as part of its name belongs to Ibo people, such as Igbo Ora, Igbosere, Oke Igbo, Ijebu Igbo, Igbomina, etc.
“Indeed, all right-thinking people know “Igbo” in Yoruba means forest and not Igbo, a recent adoption by the people traditionally referred to as Ibos until very recently.
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“It is interesting to note that the use of the name Igbo to describe the people of the South East is a recent phenomenon.
“For an extended period, the people of the South East were known as “Ibo” as in the Ibo Descendant Union founded by Chief Nnamdi Azikiwe.
“Suppose the recent adoption of Igbo as a reference to the Igbos is designed to enable them to appropriate Yoruba towns, it has failed as those towns’ history spanned many centuries,” the group said.
According to the group, some ethnic groups in Nigeria are willing to appropriate the esteemed culture, history, and land of the Yoruba and called on people to stop desecrating Yoruba culture and its well-documented history.
The group noted that Igbo people have also claimed the entire South-South as part of their land to the consternation of Rivers and Delta people, and have for many years claimed that they were Jewish people from the Middle East. That claim has been refuted by the Israelis using DNA.
“It is bizarre that they were claiming to be everywhere but their little corner in the Southeast,” the group noted.
Atunto then urged Ibo people to desist from insulting and provoking Yoruba people by engaging in infantile fabrications of history.