Oluwo of Iwo: The necessity of preserving our collective heritage, By Mukaila Kareem

Your Majesty, a king may hold firmly to his religious convictions while recognising that the institution he occupies contains a history larger than those convictions. He may decline ancestral worship without denying its historical significance, and he may introduce reforms without assuming that everything associated with an earlier religious understanding has lost its value. The responsibility of custodianship may be most demanding precisely when one is called upon to preserve something whose original meaning one does not personally accept.

Your Imperial Majesty, Oba Abdulrasheed Adewale Akanbi, Telu I, the Oluwo of Iwoland,

I write with respect for the ancient throne of Iwo and with an interest in a question that extends beyond the religious convictions of any individual who occupies it. What happens to the historical inheritance of a people when the person entrusted with its custodianship does not accept some of the beliefs through which that inheritance was created? A traditional institution is not simply the residence or office of its present occupant, but the accumulated work of generations whose convictions, customs, and understanding of the world contributed to its identity.

Every year, people visit Jerusalem’s Western Wall, a sacred site in Judaism where some Christian visitors also offer prayers. They may place their hands against the ancient stone wall while praying, but this physical gesture does not necessarily mean that they worship the wall itself. Understanding the practice requires knowing what the structure represents to those who approach it, rather than interpreting their actions solely through what an observer can see.

In Mecca, Muslims gather around the Kaaba, the cube-shaped building situated near the centre of the Grand Mosque, towards which Muslims throughout the world face during their daily prayers. During pilgrimage, they walk around the Kaaba seven times, while some kiss, touch, or gesture towards the Black Stone – a separate sacred object embedded in the building’s eastern corner. The difference between the Kaaba and the Black Stone is important because an unfamiliar observer might see these actions without understanding the objects involved or the religious meanings attached to them.

In fact, an account recorded in Sahih al-Bukhari, Hadith 1597, illustrates this distinction. Umar ibn al-Khattab, the second caliph of Islam, approached the Black Stone and kissed it, explaining that he knew it was a stone that could neither benefit nor harm anyone and that he kissed it only because he had seen Prophet Muhammad (SAWS) kiss it earlier on. His explanation made it clear that the physical action was not an acknowledgment of independent divine power in the stone, but an expression of religious obedience within the Islamic tradition.

If Muslims rightly expect others to understand these practices according to Islamic teaching, rather than appearances alone, should we not exercise similar care when interpreting the practices of Yoruba traditional worshippers? When someone approaches an ancestral shrine, makes an offering, or addresses an Òrìṣà through a sacred object, do we know what that person understands the object to represent, or are we interpreting the practice without first asking those who inherited it?

Islam, Christianity, and Yoruba traditional religion have important theological differences, and understanding another religion does not require accepting its beliefs. People may disagree with the theological beliefs of another religion, while still recognising that its sacred objects, places, and practices carry meanings that cannot always be understood through outward observation alone. The distinction between religious disagreement and accurate understanding is essential when the practices under discussion form part of a people’s historical inheritance.

Yoruba religious traditions developed over generations through ideas concerning Olódùmarè, Òrìṣà, àṣẹ, ancestors, and the relationship between visible and invisible realities. Their practices are not uniform, but the objects, shrines, and ceremonies associated with them provide evidence of how earlier generations understood existence and organised their communities. Even when later generations no longer share those beliefs, the historical significance of what their ancestors created does not necessarily disappear.

Across the Atlantic, descendants of Africans displaced through the trans-Atlantic slave trade continue to preserve elements of Yoruba religious knowledge. In Brazilian Candomblé, particularly traditions associated with Ketu, and Cuban Lukumí, Yoruba-derived sacred names, chants, prayers, and ceremonies remain important, although centuries of transmission have changed aspects of the language and practice. Some practitioners preserve expressions they do not fully understand in conversational Yoruba, while others study their linguistic and historical meanings, much as some Muslims recite Qur’anic Arabic faithfully, while relying on translations to understand its contents.

What should we make of the fact that communities separated from Yorubaland centuries ago have preserved elements of this inheritance, while some surviving expressions of the same traditions in Yorubaland have become subjects of rejection? Their preservation abroad does not mean that every inherited practice must continue unchanged at home, but it compels us to consider what future generations may lose when the material evidence of their ancestors’ beliefs disappears.

Your Majesty, this brings me to your publicly expressed understanding of traditional kingship and the religious inheritance of the Oluwo’s palace. In an interview published by The Punch on 2 September, 2017, you described relocating an Òrìṣà that you said had been associated with the palace for more than 800 years. In a separate interview published by Nigerian Tribune on 19 January, 2019, you discussed the demolition of a shrine at the palace frontage. These are separate actions, and relocating a sacred object does not necessarily mean destroying it, but both raise questions about how an institution preserves its historical inheritance when its present custodian rejects the beliefs associated with particular objects.

Religious freedom does not eliminate the responsibility of every community to observe laws protecting public safety and the rights of others, whether the religious activity is traditional, Christian, or Muslim. But the freedom to reject a religious practice and the freedom of others to continue that practice are related principles. If the religious conscience of a monarch deserves respect, how should the conscience of his subjects be accommodated within the same community?

In another The Punch interview published on 29 June, 2024, you described yourself as a reformer of traditional kingship and distinguished Yoruba cultural practices, from ancestral deity worship. Particularly interesting was your suggestion that historical objects and records should be preserved in museums, allowing people to learn about earlier generations without necessarily practicing their religions. That distinction provides common ground for this discussion, because it recognises that preserving an object does not require accepting its original religious significance.

You also expressed the desire to write your own history, just as earlier generations had written theirs. Every reigning king undoubtedly contributes to the history of the institution he occupies, but does writing a new chapter require removing the surviving evidence of earlier chapters? Could the historical achievement of a monarch include not only the reforms introduced during his reign, but also the inheritance he protects for those who will occupy the throne after him?

In August 2025, The Punch reported your argument that Yoruba kings should not be compelled to worship ancestral deities and that traditional kingship needs not be tied to a particular religion. This is an important principle because inheriting a throne should not necessarily require surrendering one’s religious conscience. A Muslim king should not be compelled to participate in worship that contradicts his beliefs, just as a Christian king should not be required to profess convictions he does not hold.

However, this principle raises another question. If religious freedom protects a king from compulsory ancestral worship, should it not also protect traditional worshippers who sincerely practice the religion of their ancestors? A report published by The Guardian on 14 August, 2023, described instructions attributed to Your Majesty restricting certain traditional sacrifices and the Oro festival in Iwo. The report does not establish whether those instructions were enforced, but it raises an important distinction between regulating religious activities for legitimate reasons of public safety and restricting them because their beliefs differ from those of the reigning monarch.

The question becomes particularly important when ancestral objects remain sacred to living practitioners. A shrine may be historical evidence to one person, a symbol of communal identity to another, and a place of active religious devotion to someone else. Preserving such an object in a museum may protect its material existence, but it does not automatically resolve questions about customary custodianship, ownership, religious access, or the wishes of those who continue to regard it as sacred.

Your Majesty, consider the antiquity of the object you described in your 2017 interview. Its claimed age of more than 800 years would require independent historical verification, but if an object has survived within the institution for anything approaching that length of time, it would have outlived generations of rulers, religious transformations, colonial administrations, the Nigerian independence, and everyone alive today. The people who established, maintained, and passed responsibility for it to their successors are all gone, while the object itself would remain as material evidence of their existence, if it has been preserved.

An inheritance may take centuries to acquire its historical significance, but it can be diminished within a single reign. An object relocated with proper documentation and protection may remain available for study or worship, while a shrine demolished without adequate recording may lose architectural features, historical context, and knowledge that cannot easily be recovered. In either case, the questions concern what has been preserved, what has been lost, who was consulted, and what future generations will be able to understand.

Iwo’s long association with Islam does not erase its earlier Yoruba history, just as the adoption of Islam or Christianity by successive generations did not eliminate Yoruba language, kinship, chieftaincy, and other inherited institutions. Religious identities have changed while many aspects of cultural and political life have continued, demonstrating that historical continuity does not always require theological continuity.

A palace is not an ordinary residence merely because a king lives within it. Its historical character comes partly from the objects, spaces, customs, and records through which generations have expressed the identity of the institution. A reigning king inherits more than a building and a title, because he also occupies a place within a history that began before his birth and will continue after his reign.

The freedom of a king to worship according to his conscience and the responsibility to preserve the historical inheritance of his institution need not be opposing obligations. They offer an opportunity to demonstrate that religious conviction can coexist with historical understanding, that the freedom claimed by a ruler can also be respected in those he rules, and that an institution can change without losing the evidence of the generations through which it became what it is.

If each succeeding king were to remove whatever historical object or religious symbol that conflicted with his personal convictions, what would remain after several generations? One might remove a shrine, another a ceremonial object, and another an inherited practice whose significance no longer appeals to him. Each decision might appear reasonable to its author, but their cumulative effects could be the gradual disappearance of the physical and ceremonial evidence through which the palace’s earlier history can still be understood.

The institution might retain its title, its succession arrangements, and its recognised royal authority, while losing much of the historical character that distinguishes it from an ordinary compound. Royal legitimacy does not depend exclusively upon ancestral objects, but those objects can provide evidence of the continuity through which an institution acquired its identity. The responsibility of custodianship therefore extends beyond deciding which inherited beliefs a reigning monarch personally accepts.

Your Majesty, your own suggestion that ancestral objects and records could be preserved in museums offers an opportunity to consider practical arrangements for their protection. Could surviving objects be documented and conserved through consultation with their customary custodians, traditional worshippers, historians, and museum professionals? Where continued worship is lawful and appropriate, could practitioners retain access to their religious heritage without requiring the king to participate? And where relocation is necessary, could arrangements be made to preserve the object’s historical setting, associated knowledge, and significance to the community?

These questions matter because the people who may suffer the greatest loss from the disappearance of historical inheritance have not yet been born. Those living today may remember the location of a shrine or the meaning of a ceremonial object, but after their deaths, and particularly when the material evidence has also disappeared, future generations may inherit little more than incomplete accounts of what once existed.

The descendants of Yoruba people in Brazil and Cuba remind us that cultural inheritance can survive extraordinary disruption when communities consider it worthy of transmission. Their experience compels us to ask whether the ancestral institutions of Yorubaland should approach their own surviving historical objects with comparable seriousness, even when the beliefs associated with those objects are no longer shared by everyone.

The throne of Iwo has outlived generations of its occupants, and its inheritance belongs to a historical community that includes those who established it, those who sustain it today, and those who will inherit it in the future. Every reign contributes to that continuing history, but no single reign constitutes the whole of it.

I therefore return to a question that I hope Your Majesty will consider in the spirit in which it is offered. Must we believe what our ancestors believed before we are permitted to preserve what they left behind, and if an inheritance has already survived everyone alive today, should its continued existence depend entirely upon whether its present custodian accepts the beliefs of those who created it?

As a son of Iwo, I offer these reflections with respect for its ancient throne, for the religious diversity of the people whose history it represents, and for the generations yet unborn who will one day ask what their ancestors inherited, what they preserved, and what they chose to leave behind.

Mukaila Kareem is an indigene of Iwoland and writes from the United States.