Though a top player in the corporate Nigeria with experience drawn from the financial and the integrated digital payments and commerce sector, including Interswitch, Tunde Leye’s passion for history and culture is unrivalled. After years of studying Western Literature and History, he took a break recently to dwell on African literature and history, which informed his decision to research the stories around Afonja, a onetime Aare Ona Kakanfo of the Oyo Empire, who clashed with the then Alaafin of Oyo – Aole Arogangan. Leye spoke with Assistant Editor (Arts) OZOLUA UHAKHEME on how the research of the book changed his world view about African literature.
With this book, one could imagine you are a Yoruba Language or History scholar but your resume states that you study Computer Science. What inspired you to write this?
I’ve always loved history generally not just the Yoruba language. Before my sojourn into this, I took it for granted that everybody know our history. I have a couple of friends and we discussed history but most of what we discussed was Western history. Of course, they were very knowledgeable at it. One day I just mentioned Kiriji War and they looked at me like; what is Kiriji War? Meanwhile, these are guys that if you ask them about the battle of Waterloo, they will tell you the type of Calvary and artillery used. I became confused that how could they be knowledgeable in other people’s history and as Yoruba guys, they didn’t know about Kiriji War. Young people who have moved to the city and even those in the villages are not aware of our history. We engage history as if it started when the white men came. So when you mention history they tell you about the Amalgamation and those things, but are unable to tell what happened before the white men came. I realised that I wanted to write about Kiriji War, but when I started researching, it became very clear to me that I can’t start the story from Kiriji War because something led to the Kiriji War. During the research it became clear that the magical point to start the story was from the decline of the Oyo Empire. And everybody says that the person responsible for the decline of the Empire is Afonja. So this story is my take on who Afonja is and his role in the decline of the Oyo Empire.
Have you always been showing interest in literature?
As you already pointed out through my profile, I did Computer Science but I’ve always loved to read. As a nine year old, I would put together all small money people gave me and used them bought books. When I’m eating I have a book on the other hand. I remember my wife was fighting me that I read from my phone even while eating. She complained to my mum and she told her it didn’t start today. I think writing naturally flows if you are a reader. Formally, writing started for me during my NYSC in Yobe. I was lecturing at Federal Polytechnic, Damaturu, and I had a lot of time on my hands. So, I began to write my own stories when I got bored. By the time I came back to Lagos, I had written some stories and I continued. My first work was the Children’s book, Rat Race. It was actually an experience. I did what I thought was AFAIK job. It was printed well but didn’t sell well. So I realised I hadn’t built my brand. I began to write on my blog. Then it wasn’t popular to write fiction on blog, what people wanted to read on blog was gossip. Fortunately, my first story was popular, it was called “Finding Hobby”. So my brand began to become popular. On the back of that I published my second book; Golden Sands, then Guardians of the Seals. This is my fourth book. If you noticed, my former books were more European. But this is my first that is core African.
How were you able to shuttle between nine to five jobs and writing four books?
I would say thanks to Lagos traffic for this. What I did was essentially to use my transit time to write and to read as well. My work was more customer facing so I was on the road a lot. I live in Ajah area of Lagos and work in Victoria Island. Going to work is over an hour and coming back home is also over an hour. It means I had about three hours daily to either read or write. Fortunately, I had a driver and that make things easy. But beyond that, there’s a committee of writers you have to be part of if you want to do the writing work and that required a deliberate investment of time. I would invest my weekends in meeting other writers and going for writers’ events and mentoring people as well. And thank God for social media, I could be sitting in my office in between reading and editing a contract and I remember something, and then go on social media. Combination of these three things helped me.
This goes beyond social media, you must have visited some places?
Yes. I went to Igboho to look at the tomb of the four Alaafin buried in Ighoho. There, I talked to the keeper of the tombs. I went to Ilorin to look at things but I didn’t go to old Oyo. The place is now a park and really a bush.
Why did you go for this ancient story?
It comes from this issue around our history. Our history did not start with the white men. I remember reading about when the first white man got to Borno; he met the king of Borno doing mathematics because the man was educated in Arabic and knew Arabic numerals. A lot of us have forgotten about this part of our history. If you look at writers like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and Elechi Amadi, one of the key things they did was to tap into the history before the white men came or outside of the white men. Things Fall Apart was our history before the white men and our encounter with the white men. One of Wole Soyinka’s most popular stories was Death and the King’s Horsemen and it was about an Alaafin that died and the clash of the old with the new. So, a character as important as Afonja, or an Alaafin as pivotal as Aole should not be unknown to our generation because there are lessons to learn and parallels that can be drawn on how our world is going today. So for me it was important to tell this story so that people will learn.
What was the greatest challenge of putting this together?
The first and major challenge was finding research material. One of the things that pain me the most is that writing was not a thing we developed ourselves. So a lot of our history is not recorded. I first had to find research from the perspective of white people. A lot of the history about us was by the white men. The challenge was that they wrote it with their own biases, from the prism of their culture. For instance, when you tell a white man that this is the mother of the Alaafin, from the white man’s culture he takes it that that is the person that gave birth to the Alaafin. And when he records it, he says I met the mother of the Alaafin. In Yoruba or Oyo culture, the woman they refer to as the mother of Alaafin is the ceremonial mother not his biological mother. These are the types of nuances the white people would miss that I had to correct for as I read our history. Fortunately, there’s a man that is a Yoruba, an Oyo man but a lot of Oyo people say he’s biased. But he’s one of the few who recorded Yoruba history; Rev. Samuel Johnson. So the biggest challenge was finding materials. What this taught me was to look for research in the unorthodox places, like going to Igboho to talk to the woman that kept the tomb. She’s a treasured trove of Knowledge. For example, if you tell some people that Oyo was a Calvary based empire, they will dispute it. But if you look at the arts of the Oyo Empire, you see them on horses. Arts depict the life of the people. Those are some of the things that were a challenge.
Why make it a fiction when it’s actually something that happened?
I talked about Soyinka’s story, Death and the King’s Horsemen. Anybody that knows history knows he wrote about Alaafin Adeyemi the first that was deposed by Awolowo. But Soyinka wrote it as fiction because people remember stories more than they remember lessons and lectures. So if I had written it as a purely factual historical work, it will be restricted in the rich and recall value. But what I’ve done is to essentially build a house, in which the history is the pillars of the house. So most of what happened in the work happened within the boundaries of those pillars, all the embellishment, character and their motivations. That’s how I call it. Sometimes we look at these historical figures, but we forget they are humans and would have had motivations. Why was Alaafin Aole called Aole Elepe? There’s a reason he became that type of person. Those are the interrogations I did in this work to see how the characters behaved the way they did. Why was Alimi interested in conquering Ilorin? Why did Afonja defy his Alaafin?
Literary excursions like this are rarely appreciated in this part of the world. Did you get funding from anywhere in support of this?
Fortunately, I had a 9-5 job like you have rightly pointed out and it was funding some of this and I had previous works that sold very well. But you are right; there’s not much money in writing as it should be. But the kind of work Lola Shoneyin, the Director of the Ake is doing with Ake is putting writers on the map. Thankfully again, all of us have a lottery we try to win every year. The LLNG prize and they’ve added the Wole Soyinka prize now. So writers are beginning to wake up to the business of writing. Before, a lot of writers were brilliant, they wrote brilliant books and after the launch, nobody finds the book. But now writers are waking up to what can be done after the launch. For example, “Afonja The Rise” will be formally presented tomorrow, January 27. It has almost sold a thousand copies already. After the launch we will intensify the sales further. Beyond that, we are planning to adapt it for stage. This story is in prose; we will adapt it for stage and do a series of stage productions as well. That will make some money maybe more than the book sale. We will adapt it for film hopefully and we have a veteran director on board to direct it to film. Nigerians can look forward to it. It’s going to be massive.
Can you shed a little more light on the Calvary nature of the Oyo Empire?
When you watch Nollywood today and they try to show Yoruba warfare, you see a couple of men wearing cowries and are shooting dane guns, and a lot of people assume that’s how the Yorubas fought even at the height of their empire. But this is a misconception because the Oyo Empire was a calvary based empire that bought horses from the Nupe, Igbira, Hausa before the Fulani took over and from the Borno Empire. They fielded horse of up to thirty thousand calvary men. If you read the account of Oyo fighting Dahomey, you will see that Oyo went to Dahomey with three thousand horses. If you know where the old Oyo was, it’s more northern than the present day Ilorin. And for people to travel with three thousand horse to Dahomey which is close to the coast, you realised they must have been a sophisticated and established empire to have done that. Oyo had armies that fought on horseback. It was an empire that chose not to fight with firearms for a very clear reason. A lot of people they fought confronted them with firearms and Oyo won. So why use firearms when you keep defeating those who use it? If you think about the decline of the Oyo Empire which is one of the themes I explored in this book, people find it convenient to scapegoat Afonja as the reason the Oyo Empire collapsed but there are couple of other reasons. Oyo used to buy horses from several places but never really reared their own horses. And the strength of the Empire was on the back of the Calvary.
