This is exactly why I criticize certain forms of Pan-Africanism. They become so obsessed with promoting a single African identity that they begin dismissing the historical identities, ancestry, and civilizations of individual African peoples. In 1894, British military officer and ethnographer A. B. Ellis published The Yoruba-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa. On page 32, Ellis documented something particularly important: the existence of Yoruba sentiments of nationality and patriotism, which he explicitly stated were viewed unfavorably by the British colonial government. Ellis wrote: "He even has the sentiments of nationality and patriotism, and though these are regarded with disfavour by the Colonial Government, they are none the less tokens of superiority." Read that carefully. A British officer was acknowledging Yoruba nationality and patriotism while admitting that the colonial government disapproved of these sentiments. This was written in 1894, twenty years before the amalgamation of Nigeria in 1914. Why would the British colonial government disapprove of Yoruba patriotic sentiments if Yoruba identity was supposedly nothing more than a convenient invention of British colonial administration? The answer is that cultural identity and colonial political control are not the same thing. Ellis recognized the Yoruba as a broader population with related languages, customs, historical connections, and traditions. He also described their long-established urban civilization, commercial networks, and relationships between neighboring towns. His observations demonstrate that British colonial officials encountered existing Yoruba cultural and political consciousness rather than manufacturing it. Furthermore, the Yoruba were never required to exist as one centralized political state to constitute a related people. The Yoruba are a collection of historically interrelated peoples, much like members of an extended family. Cousins, nieces, and nephews can belong to different households without suddenly becoming unrelated. The Egba, Ijebu, Ekiti, Ijesa, Ondo, Ife, Oyo, and other Yoruba communities maintained distinct political institutions while sharing broader linguistic, cultural, and ancestral relationships. Just as cousins can belong to separate households, these communities could maintain independent kingdoms without becoming unrelated peoples. Genetic studies demonstrate identifiable patterns of population structure and shared ancestry among Yoruba populations. This does not mean every Yoruba person possesses a unique Yoruba gene, but it certainly contradicts the idea that Yoruba identity is nothing more than a colonial administrative invention. Now let's address your historical claims. The word Yoruba did not originate with British colonial administration or Samuel Ajayi Crowther Ahmad Baba of Timbuktu recorded the name in the early seventeenth century, more than two centuries before the British colonial administration of Yorubaland. Its presence in West African historical records demonstrates that Europeans did not invent the name. In their 2019 book, The Yoruba from Prehistory to the Present, published by Cambridge University Press, historians Aribidesi Usman and Toyin Falola discuss the early use of Yoruba, Yariba, and Yarabawa in the West African interior. Drawing on historian Paul Lovejoy's research, they explain that the term was already circulating before the sixteenth century and that early references were not necessarily restricted to the Oyo kingdom. Furthermore, Ahmad Baba of Timbuktu used a form of the name around 1613, demonstrating that it was known centuries before British colonial rule. But the evidence goes even further. Historian Professor Stephen Adebanji Akintoye documented oral traditions concerning the origin of the name Yoruba. According to an account he collected from the Olobaagun in 1963, Yoruba was an ancient collective designation associated with traders from the early Ife settlements who traveled into the Upper Niger region. These traders spoke related dialects and originated from communities within the wider Yoruba cultural world. According to this tradition, the name became associated with these related populations through regional commerce, long before Oyo achieved its greatest imperial prominence. Akintoye further explained that during Oyo's later dominance, Oyo traders became so prominent that outsiders increasingly associated the broader name Yoruba with Oyo specifically. In other words, the tradition suggests that Yoruba was not originally an exclusively Oyo designation. Rather, its association with Oyo developed through the kingdom's subsequent political and commercial influence. These connections were not manufactured by a British census officer. Political independence does not equal ethnic unrelatedness. The Kiriji War does not prove that the Ekiti, Ijesa, and Ibadan were unrelated peoples. It demonstrates that politically distinct Yoruba communities could fight one another. By your reasoning, every European kingdom that fought another European kingdom must have belonged to a completely unrelated people. The ancient Greeks had their own independent city-states, including Athens, Sparta, Corinth, and Thebes. And guess what? They frequently fought one another, sometimes in devastating wars. Yet they still recognized a broader Greek identity, shared related dialects, religious traditions, ancestral narratives, and cultural institutions. Did the Peloponnesian War suddenly make the Athenians and Spartans unrelated peoples? Of course not. 🤣 The same principle applies to the Yoruba. The Egba, Ijebu, Ekiti, Ijesa, Ondo, Ife, and Oyo maintained distinct political institutions and sometimes fought one another. That did not erase their shared linguistic, cultural, and ancestral connections. Having independent kingdoms, competing rulers, and different political interests does not erase common ancestry or cultural relationships. Finally, standardizing a written language is not the same thing as creating the languages or the people who spoke them. Yoruba speech varieties existed before missionary printing presses. Their similarities did not appear because Europeans printed Bibles. The fundamental error in your argument is treating the historical expansion of an ethnic label as proof that the underlying people were artificially created. The modern Yoruba collective identity certainly developed over time. But the communities, ancestral relationships, languages, and civilizations from which it developed existed long before colonialism. Pan-African unity should never require Africans to erase their distinct histories or pretend their ancestral connections are inventions of Europeans. The Yoruba were not created by the British. Europeans encountered an already existing network of related peoples, whose political identities were diverse and whose broader collective identity continued to evolve.