Yoruba: Àìmọore and Òdàlẹ̀ — The Twin Yoruba Cardinal Sins of Ingratitude and Betrayal

Any lover of Yoruba culture and epistemology can only grieve as he watches the sickness eating through Yoruba society. No, it’s not poverty. We do not deny that it is now chronic in a land renowned for its ethos of hard work.

We do not deny that poverty is painful and humiliating, but it does not necessarily make a person contemptible. Both a poor man and an uneducated woman may possess more dignity and more wisdom than an entire university senate. A person without office may command greater respect than an army of ministers.

We need no divination, just common sense, to see that the disease eating at the soul of our Yoruba society is something more dangerous than material deprivation. It is the deliberate destruction of our collective moral memory - the growing inability, or unwillingness, to remember those who helped us when we were helpless.

Sadly and unfortunately, we Yorubas, once celebrated for cultured manners, are becoming notorious as a people who remember kindness only for as long as we need the people who showed it to us. But once the ladder has lifted us to the rooftop, we kick it into the mud and announce loudly that we climbed by ourselves. Once the hand that pulled us from the ditch becomes inconvenient to our new ambition and image, we pretend that the hand never existed. Once the person who opened the door when we knocked in the rain becomes inconvenient, we rewrite history and convince ourselves we entered through our own brilliant efforts.

This is àìmọore, ingratitude. Our ancestors see it as more than failing to say thank you.

In the Yoruba moral universe, it is the repudiation of obligation and the deliberate erasure of another person’s contribution to one’s advancement. It is moral amnesia turned into a survival and ambition strategy.

We have always understood that no human being is entirely self-made. We know that behind every successful person are parents who sacrificed, teachers who taught, friends who encouraged, benefactors who opened doors, and generations whose labor created the society that made success possible.

We have the proverb: Àgbájọ ọwọ́ là fi ń sọyà / It is with joined hands that we beat our chest to tell us that even the most celebrated individual stands upon a mountain of other people’s efforts.

Yet modern vanity today has persuaded many people that acknowledging those who helped them somehow diminishes their achievement.

It does not. It only reveals the character's moral bankruptcy.

That is where the profound Yoruba concept of ìwà becomes indispensable. Ìwà l’ẹwà - character is beauty.

Our ancestors were not speaking of material beauty bought in boutiques, displayed in expensive automobiles, or announced by magnificent agbádá lace or expensive wonyosi.

They spoke of the beauty of personal conduct: the character revealed when nobody is watching, when power makes character assassination possible, and when a man becomes so successful he forgets those who once stood beside him.

It is easy to appear humble when one is powerless. The real test comes when fortune changes. What does the beneficiary become when he becomes powerful enough to disregard his benefactor?

Does prosperity enlarge his humanity or merely enlarge his appetite? Does political office make him more responsible or more arrogant? Does he remember the people who stood by him when he had nothing, or does he suddenly acquire the convenient amnesia of the successful?

Sadly for us, many of us in Yorubaland today wear achievement as though it were a license to behave abominably. A beneficiary acquires influence and begins treating the person who helped him as though the relationship had never existed. We then dress this behavior in the respectable language of “political maturity” and “looking after one’s interests.”

It is neither. It is moral bankruptcy.
The Yoruba concept of the ọmọlúàbí offers a different standard of human worth.

The ọmọlúàbí is not simply someone who knows how to greet elders or behaves politely in public. He represents a conception of personhood founded upon restraint, responsibility, reciprocity, courage, and fidelity to one’s obligations. The ọmọlúàbí understands that the ability to do something does not automatically confer the moral right to do it. He knows success does not cancel obligation, and power and ambition do not erase history.

In Yoruba epistemological gradation of vices, above àìmọore stands the more poisonous òdàlẹ̀, betrayal.

Our Yoruba stories are full of instances that teach that while enemies announce hostility, the betrayer enters through the door trust opens. The òdàlẹ̀ sits at the table, learns the household's secrets, and then turns confidence into a weapon once he discovers its vulnerabilities.

We ought to realize that betrayal is destructive not only because it injures the victim, but because it poisons the possibility of trust itself.

It deeply damages society when people learn that generosity will be repaid with treachery; they become reluctant to help others. When friendship becomes a potential source of political ammunition, relationships become transactional.

Yoruba political history of Yorubaland offers uncomfortable illustrations. The rupture between Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Chief S. L. Akintola remains one of the most contested episodes in the old Western Region's political history.

Chief Akintola’s talents, political abilities, and sophisticated oratory were real and undeniable. The question, therefore, is not whether he was talented, but whether talent and ambition can ever provide a moral exemption for perceived betrayal.

The Yorubas refused to forgive him.
That question remains relevant because, sadly, contemporary politics has elevated opportunism into a virtue. Men and women rise through the networks of political patrons, benefit from their confidence and resources, and then, when circumstances change, suddenly describe yesterday’s loyalty as foolishness.

The same distinction must be applied to another Yoruba son, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo. We cannot deny his personal achievements or his enormous place in Nigerian history, but we Yorubas do not conflate political achievement with moral authority.

We do not consider Chief Obasanjo an ọmọlúàbí and, as such, would never be elevated to a Yoruba leader.

OBJ is an example of our belief that a man may command a country without commanding genuine affection, just as a title may compel obedience without producing reverence.

Our proverb Agbára kì í ṣe ìwà, power is not character, contains a warning the contemporary Yoruba society desperately needs.

Our ancestors did not regard authority as unlimited personal possession. Even the ọba operated within a moral and communal framework. Àṣẹ, or authority, carried obligations; without restraint, authority could become tyranny.

Unfortunately, modern political culture in Yorubaland has forgotten this. Today, we admire and applaud success, regardless of how it was achieved.

Today, we call cunning “ọgbọ́n,” crass opportunism “strategy,” and betrayal “political sophistication.”

In doing so, we confuse cleverness with wisdom and ambition with worth.

How did a badly flawed character get to occupy the presidential palace because of Emilokan?

And why do we still pretend not to know that the absence of moral dimension produces only societal mess, like what we see today in Yorubaland?

Robert Ingersoll told us that in nature there is neither reward nor punishment, only consequences.

We are reaping what we sow.
As we have advocated on this blog, we should stop blaming colonialism for the current moral failure in contemporary Yoruba society.

There is no doubt that colonialism damaged our institutions, distorted our economies, and imposed structures whose consequences remain visible. We have done our share of chronicling the atrocities in several posts here.

But we should admit that it is not colonialism that taught us to betray our brother over property. Colonialism did not compel a beneficiary to insult his benefactor.

At some point, a people must stop borrowing history as an alibi and accept responsibility for the rot they themselves permit.

We are not calling for a sentimental return to an imaginary Yoruba golden age. Our ancestors were human, with their own contradictions and injustices.

We advocate recovering the moral principles that gave meaning to Yoruba personhood: ìwà, reciprocity, restraint, responsibility, and the obligations created by human relationships.

If, as we see in Yorubaland today, àìmọ̀rẹ̀ becomes normal, generosity will die. If òdàlẹ̀ becomes cleverness, trust will disappear. If entitlement becomes the governing principle of family and community life, relationships will become marketplaces in which every human connection is measured by what can be extracted from it.

We may continue to build universities, skyscrapers and mansions. We may produce billionaires, professors, ministers and presidents. We may continue wearing magnificent agbádá and displaying our titles before our names.

But none of these things can compensate for the destruction of character.

The real question facing the Yoruba, therefore, is not how successful we have become, but what kind of people our success is producing.

As we watch, sadly, Yorubaland descend into moral mess, it should tell us that a society can become materially prosperous while becoming morally impoverished. We can preserve our beautiful Yoruba language while losing the philosophy that once gave the language meaning. We can celebrate Yoruba identity while abandoning the very conception of ọmọlúàbí that made that identity morally significant.

We should all remember that when society elevates ingratitude as the fastest path to advancement and treats betrayal as cleverness, it does not merely injure individuals; it destroys the memory, trust, and reciprocity on which civilization depends.

And when those things disappear, we may still have the fanciful agbádá, the long convoy, the big mansion, the doctorate, the chieftaincy title, and the political office. Still, we will have lost something far more precious: the character that makes a people worthy of the civilization they inherited.

Perhaps it is time we relistened to Chief Hubert Ogunde: Yoruba Ronu!

Ọ̀dọ̀fin Fẹ́mi Akọ́mọláfẹ́ (1st Dan, Ọ̀dọ̀fin I of Kasoa)

Blog: https://femiakogun.substack.com