Henzodaily.ng journalist Ridwan Adeola Yusuf has over 9 years of experience covering public affairs.
Osogbo, Osun state – Wande Abimbola, Professor Emeritus and former majority leader of the Nigerian senate, has said there are 70 million Yoruba people in Brazil.
Speaking in a recent interview with the Nigerian Tribune, Prof. Abimbola, the president and founder of Ifa Heritage Institute, asserted that “Brazil is Yorubaland”.
He said:
“I used to go to Brazil every year. When I began to go to Brazil in 1975, there were three of them left that spoke Yoruba as we are speaking it now. They did not come to us to learn the language. They had never even visited Yorubaland before. Deoscóredes Maximiliano dos Santos, alias Mestre Didi, was the only one who came to Yorubaland in 1968 to visit me in my house. He is dead. An older one in 1975 when I got there was a woman with tiny tribal marks. When she died in 1989, all the countries of the world sent their condolences. I wrote to the Nigerian government to send its condolences, too. She was well-versed in Yoruba. I always visited her first on arrival in Brazil. She would then cry, and people would console her. The next elder to her is dead, too.”
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He continued:
“Brazil is Yorubaland. 70 million Yorubas are in Brazil. In Salvador, Bahia, there are 3,000 shrines of Yoruba gods. The world has accepted us.”
Verification of Abimbola’s claim on Yorubas in Brazil
The Yoruba make up a significant diaspora population. The New World Encyclopedia states that during the decline of the Oyo Empire, Yorubaland degenerated into series of civil war in which military captives were sold as slaves. Some of the slaves who were exported as a result of the civil wars were sent to Brazil and some other countries outside Nigeria and Africa, hence Yoruba-speaking people can be found in Togo, Benin Republic, Sierra Leone, Liberia and some other African countries.
Due to the sensitivity of ethnicity in Nigeria, the National Population Commission (NPC) did not collect data analysed based on ethnicity in the last census held in 2006 to avoid the political row the outcome would have created. This posed a challenge in determining the population of Yoruba people in Nigeria. Similarly, the Brazilian government has no official data for the population of the Yoruba living in Brazil.
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To get around this challenge, data published by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for both Nigeria and Brazil were considered a credible alternative to use. The World Factbook published by the CIA provides regularly updated information on the history, people, population demographics, society, government, economy, energy, geography, communication, transportation, military and transnational issues for 267 world entities. The World Factbook puts the population of Yoruba people in Nigeria at 28.28 million, being 13.9 per cent of Nigeria’s population of 203.5 million as at 2018.
This translates to about three times the number of Yoruba people living in Brazil going by the claim being checked. CIA’s data show that as at 2018, the total population of Brazil was 208.9 million, out of which, by ethnicity, whites made up 47.7 per cent, mulatto (mixed white and black) constituted 43.1 per cent, blacks accounted for 7.6 per cent, Asians for 1.1 per cent while indigenous people for 0.4 per cent.
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The World Factbook, which details the demographics of the global population, estimates that the Yoruba constitute about 105 million people in total, majority of them from Nigeria, where the Yoruba make up 21 per cent of the country’s population.
However, there is no mention of Yoruba people in the breakdown of the ethnicities in Brazil, and at best, the Yoruba were among the sub-ethnic groups captured under mulatto and black.
Further checks from the New World Encyclopedia, which was last updated on September 10, 2019, put the global population of Yoruba at 19.33 million, primarily from Nigeria, Benin and Togo.
Data sourced from the University of Florida’s resource on African Studies indicate that there are 25 million Yoruba globally from Nigeria, Benin, Togo and communities in Brazil, Sierra Leone, northern Ghana and Cuba.
Despite different numbers of the population of the Yoruba globally, available data show the numbers are far less than the population of 80 million in the claim being investigated.
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Supposing all Yoruba people all over the world live in Brazil, numbers show they are far less than the population of 80 million.
The claim that more Yoruba people live in Brazil than in Nigeria is misleading as it is not supported by data-based evidence. At best, evidence suggests that most Yoruba people in the world live in Nigeria.
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Source: Henzodaily.ng