By Toyin Falola
Thanks to Dr. Michael Afolayan, who organized a one-day conference on “Mother-Tongue Education and the Challenge of Modernity” on November 25, 2025, at Bowen University, I was offered a golden opportunity to question the unwise decision of the Federal Minister of Education to abolish the use of indigenous languages to teach in schools. This is a significant setback, based on a juvenile decision that using our languages affects performance in the English Language in official examinations. Where is the data? Where is the logic? All the key participants at the conference condemned the primitive decision of the Minister at a time when we should escalate our epistemic insurgency to sustain our languages. Perhaps because he is a medical doctor disconnected from organic communities, let me use this piece to offer him a crash course.
Toyin Falola
The implementation of our indigenous languages goes beyond communication purposes. They are connected to our identity, knowledge, history, creativity, power, and the future of our societies. Taking the Yoruba language as an example, this is an ever-existing archive of knowledge that also doubles as a repository of our history and philosophy used to interpret the world. This can be put side by side with how the Greek people embedded their ideas in the Greek language. I have maintained a position in several of my works that language is a platform for people to understand themselves and negotiate their place in the world. Èdè Yorùbá – the Yorùbá language- is an identity carrier, and the philosophies of ìwà, omolúàbí, àṣẹ, òrìṣà, ìwàpẹ̀lẹ́, among several others that define the true meaning of a well-rounded human from the Yoruba perspective, are embedded in its linguistic framework. These concepts cannot be explained in foreign languages without distorting their meaning. I presented these concepts in my long book, Yoruba Metaphysics.
According to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, language is the “bank of memory.” His position is supported by the Yoruba language, which serves as a repository of philosophical and historical knowledge of societies through oral traditions, cosmology, and lineage systems. Language as a medium of storage is not an art that is restricted to the Yoruba people in Yorubaland. From Ife – the spiritual origin of the Yoruba people – to Yoruba-dominated areas outside Nigeria – in Ghana, Togo, Benin, Sierra Leone – and even further to the Americas, this system is present. When it comes to naming, the language becomes an identity statement and a philosophical text. To name a child, Ifalola, is to awaken Yoruba theology, and to title a woman Iya Agbomola is to affirm her role in society. This way, culture and history continue to thrive through language.
In my book, Yoruba Gurus, I provide a breakdown of how Yoruba knowledge systems survived and thrived during the eras of colonialism and postcolonialism. The Odu Ifá is a form of theology that houses knowledge of medicine, mathematics, history, psychology, and ethics. Therefore, it cannot be said that this system is primitive; rather, it is sophisticated and futuristic. Through it, the Yoruba people are recipients, creators, and transmitters of knowledge. Although the Odu Ifá has now been translated to mean the Ifá corpus in English, words associated with it, such as àṣẹ, orí, ayànmọ, among others, cannot be translated into other languages, as their meanings would be distorted by the multiple layers of meaning they carry. Our indigenous language, therefore, is a medium through which real civilization reveals itself.
The Yorùbá language is as creative as it is innovative because it embeds aesthetic expressions through performances like singing, chanting, and a drumming system that speaks the language – the talking drum. Oral performances like the oríkì – which is documentation of identity, the owe (proverbs) – that presents history in miniature intellectual forms, and many other mediums like panegyrics, riddles and so on are traditions that existed from the precolonial era down to the colonial era where they continued to thrive through for example, Hubert Ogunde theater activities in the colonial era and even in the postcolonial era with examples of Fela Anikulapo Kuti who infused them in his widely accepted Afrobeats music, Sikiru Ayinde Barrister’s Fuji genre and now in contemporary times, they still live on through blockbuster Nollywood movies and sold out concerts. The dominant features of these music genres and Nollywood are evidence of how intense creativity can be when embedded in their natural languages. Therefore, the abandonment of language can equate to the abandonment of a portion of creative potential, and the loss of an indigenous language can impoverish a society’s aesthetics.
African scholars like Ngugi and Kwesi Prah have argued that decolonizing knowledge cannot be achieved through the imposition of foreign languages. Therefore, the continued preservation and use of the Yoruba language are steps toward intellectual decolonization and freedom. Colonial languages restructure our consciousness and impose new knowledge systems that force our rationality down a path that becomes productive in a framework not designed for us. Therefore, the full acceptance of colonial languages is a direct repression of indigenous knowledge systems. African tertiary institutions cannot achieve intellectual independence by teaching and thinking through colonial mediums. The complete integration of African languages into scholarship and research would allow the resurrection of the African intellectual system. It could be easily expressed through historical documentation, literature, philosophy, and so on.
Around the world, all major civilizations rely on their indigenous languages to advance technology, using them to explore the realm of science. The survival of the Yoruba language, like that of other indigenous African languages, therefore plays a significant role in the scientific and technological development of their societies. The Yoruba language can be used as a medium of instruction in STEM education for youngsters in elementary and secondary schools to aid better understanding and develop a strong foundation. The vocabulary of the language can be expanded to include fields of modern science, medicine, engineering, and technology. Natural Language Processing tools are already being developed for the Yoruba language, and as the language becomes more involved in science, it can have a greater impact in the future.
The continued use of the Yoruba language can also serve as a link between the past, the present, and the unborn generations. Through the language, history, philosophy, and epistemology can flow easily. The children can trace their origins and be clear about their identity, as when Jews traced their ancestry through the Hebrew language. Through language, cultural assimilation is reduced, and a communal sense of belonging is strengthened. A generation that loses its indigenous language can be culturally disposed and forced into a rebuild from borrowed history. When the Yoruba culture diffused into the Americas through the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, the Yoruba people were able to secure political and cultural power by preserving their language, after several generations were persecuted through slavery. The preservation of language led to the creation of hybrid Yoruba religions, such as Candomblé, Lucumi, and Santería. When people can control their linguistic narrative, they can shape their destiny.
In matters of economy, the Yoruba language remains significant through its support of tourism, literature, theater, religious festivals, and so on. Across countries and continents, the Yoruba language has more than forty million speakers, and its identity as an economic ecosystem can be viewed from different angles, such as the success of Nollywood, where Yoruba movies make waves domestically and internationally, thereby generating revenue for individuals and the country. This same character can be seen in the Nigerian music and fashion industries. Building on this, the full implementation of the Yoruba language in education, business, and media may become a trump card for Nigeria’s economic strategy.
For the preservation of African knowledge, African languages must become tools for research, creativity, governance, and development. Africa must be able to define itself from its perspective. For the continent to shape intellectual, economic, political, scientific, or aesthetic discourses worldwide, its languages must be designated as media for knowledge production and dissemination. African universities should not replace indigenous languages with colonial languages like English, French, Portuguese, and others. Instead, these languages should be implemented alongside indigenous languages to generate novel ideas. The repression or loss of the Yoruba language, or of other indigenous languages, is the repression or loss of a civilizational archive. This would lead to the transfer of broken history to the coming generation, which would now be forced to relearn their identity through colonial languages. To ensure that development does not repress identity, knowledge must be produced with the language of its people. To achieve this kind of development, we have a simple task: our languages must stay. They must be preserved and disseminated. They must be incorporated into modern science, not relegated to relics.
We are here to serve you news and information.
Your donations, reactions and advert placement are welcome.
Contact us on 08033783144 (WhatsApp)
08023469999(WhatsApp)
idowuadelusi@gmail.com,thepathfindernews0@gmail.com
Follow our reports also on X @idowuadelusi and Facebook (Idowu Oluwole Adelusi)