The Contradiction Onabanjo Hopes You Won’t Notice

Stop and let that sit.

If the blood comes through his mother’s great-grandfather, it runs on the mother’s side. If his father is also a grandson of that same man, it runs on the father’s side too. They are telling us the line comes through the mother and through the father, from one and the same ancestor.

That is not a lineage. It is impossible.

Think about what it would actually mean. For both your mother and your father to descend from the one man, your mother and your father would have to be of the same blood, from the same grandfather. Brother and sister. Close cousins of one house. No family tells that story about itself, and no ruling house is built that way.

So there are only two doors here, and both are locked against them.

Door one: they mean what they wrote, that both parents spring from the same ancestor. That is a shameful thing to claim about anyone’s parents, and it is plainly not true.

Door two, the real one: they do not actually know which parent carries the blood, so they threw both onto the page and hoped no one would read slowly. One sentence says mother. The next says father. At least one of those sentences is false. A statement that contradicts itself cannot be true. That is not an opinion. That is arithmetic.

This is the tell of a story that was invented, not inherited. A true son of a ruling house never confuses the parent who gave him his blood. He does not say “my mother’s line” and “my father’s line” about the same man. He knows. He says it once, he says it plainly, and it never changes, because he did not make it up.

And notice who is doing the talking. Not Bimbo Onabanjo, who to this day has never explained his own lineage in his own mouth. Not a recognised head of the Fusengbuwa house. A media group writes his family tree for him, and even they cannot keep the story straight for two sentences.

His father, in his own published words at eighty, placed his people in Ijebu Ogbeere and never once said Fusengbuwa. That is the one account we have in a principal’s own voice, and it points away from the throne, not toward it. And the man is alive. Ask him.

Our elders already warned us about a day like this. Irọ́ ní ẹsẹ̀ kúkúrú: a lie has short legs, it cannot run far before it falls. And they said more: bí irọ́ bá lọ fún ogún ọdún, ọjọ́ kan ni óótọ́ á fi bá a, though a lie travels for twenty years, in a single day the truth catches up with it. This lie did not even last twenty years. It did not last two sentences.

So we will not insult anyone. We will simply hold up their own paper and ask the question a child could ask:

Is it the mother, or is it the father? It cannot be both from the same man. One of your two sentences is false. Which one?

Until they can answer that without contradicting themselves, this is not a lineage and it is not history. It is a claim that could not survive its own second sentence.

- Adejumo Olanlegbe an indigene of Ijebu-Ode writes from the United Kingdom.