By Bamidele Ademola-Olateju
When one court favors a deity that is not one’s to court, one invites suffering upon oneself. I offer this not as ornament but as warning, because what unfolded around the emergence of Olóòlù was never a contest between faiths. It was a trespass against a covenant older than the scriptures carried across the desert or the sea. It is the covenant of Ibadan with its own guardian spirit, a covenant that predates every minaret and every steeple raised within its walls.
I have watched, with a grief that curdles into anger, as both the mosque and the church conspire, sometimes wittingly, sometimes not, to hollow out the very Yorùbá genius that made room for them both. Ours is a civilization that absorbed Islam and Christianity as a river absorbs tributaries, without once demanding that the river cease to be itself. Traditionalists did not ask the Imam to abandon Mecca, nor ask the priest to abandon Rome. Their only ask is; what Olódùmarè himself models in the vastness of his creation: that every òrìṣà, every law, every taboo be permitted its portion of the compound. This is ìwà, the Yorùbá ethic that character, not conquest, is the measure of a people’s worth. It is what E. Bọlaji Idowu spent his scholarly life defending; a theology so capacious it could accommodate difference without dissolving into indifference.
And yet it is precisely this hospitality that some now mistake for weakness, a door left open that they believe gives them the right to rearrange the furniture of the house. Let me be unambiguous, because the matter demands it. It is Ibadan custom, older than any of us, that women do not lay eyes upon Olóòlù. This is not negotiable folklore for a TikTok caption. It is taboo – èèwọ̀, and èèwọ̀ does not consult your convenience before it exacts its due. Wasila did not merely allegedly disguise herself as a man to breach that boundary. She filmed the very masquerade our ancestors shrouded in dread reverence, and she flung it onto a platform built for spectacle. That is not curiosity, it is not fashion, it is desecration performed for applause.
What galls me most is the theater of grievance that preceded it. The Trojan horses among us who cried “violation of rights” before Olóòlù had even stepped into the street, as though the masquerade’s mere existence were an affront requiring pre-emptive complaint. I ask them plainly: where is that same tender concern for rights when the loudspeaker’s call to prayer detonates over a sleeping city five times before dawn, uninvited into every bedroom within its reach? Where is it when Jumat service annexes the public road, and the rest of us; Muslim, Christian, traditionalist alike are expected to reroute our lives around it without complaint? Tolerance, I am learning, is a garment some wish to wear only when it drapes over their own shoulders.
It is not I who must remind them of this. The final verse of Sūrat al-Kāfirūn is unambiguous: “Lakum dīnukum wa-liya dīn” – for you is your religion, and for me is mine. It is a verse of boundaries, not of erasure. That verse is a divine acknowledgment that coexistence requires each tradition to remain sovereign within its own sphere, unmolested by the other. And the Christian scripture arrives at the same wisdom by another road via “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” Both faiths, in their own tongues, counsel the very restraint their most zealous adherents now refuse to extend to Yorùbá tradition.
So let this be understood, plainly and without apology: what is taboo remains taboo. Olóòlù does not require your permission to exist, and Ibadan does not require your amendment to remain Ibadan. A people who forget their òrìṣà to please their guests will one day find themselves guests in their own compound. I refuse, for my part, to let that forgetting pass in courteousness.
