16/05/2026
FADU ORO ONIMEWON, ALALE EJIGBO A GBE WA...WON O NI PADA LEYIN WA!!!
Saturday 16th May 2026
OFU RURU: Where Memory Sings and the Land Refuses to Forget
Abstract
Before ink learned to cling to paper, before archives rose as monuments to selective remembrance, there was the voice, raw, unbroken, eternal. Among the Awori people of Ejigbo, memory does not sit quietly in dusty corners. It breathes, chants, trembles and rises. Ofu Ruru (Songs of My Memory) is a living pulse, a trembling bridge between the seen and the unseen. Rooted in the sacred vibrations of Ifá and the ancestral footsteps of Ifadunlaiye Onimewon, it stands as remembrance, reckoning and refusal. Here, memory is not passive. It is war, worship and immortality.
When the Voice Was the First Archive
Close your eyes. Listen, not with your ears, but with that ancient place in your chest where drums remember what tongues forget. Long before the arrogance of ink, and before history was caged in foreign alphabets, the Onimewon children understood that a people who sing their story cannot be erased.
“History is a people’s memory,” said Malcolm X. Among the children of Onimewon, memory is not stored. It is performed. It walks barefoot through generations. It sits in the throat of our elders. It trembles in the lullabies of our mothers. It erupts in chants when the night grows heavy with forgetting. Ofu Ruru is born from that knowing, not written, but summoned.
There was a time when Ejigbo was not yet Ejigbo. The land lay listening, waiting, unclaimed, not by absence, but by destiny yet to be spoken. Then came the utterance:
“Ó fùn rùrù l’ówù… ó kè rírì l’Éjìgbò…”
Not a sentence. Not a description. A happening. “Rùrù” is not sound. It is vibration, the force that splits silence open and asks no permission to exist. It was the earth shivering into identity, the unseen announcing itself to the seen, the moment when land ceased to be soil and became inheritance. Ejigbo was not found. It was called forth.
From the ancient cradle of Ile-Ife came a man who did not wander. He answered. Ifadunlaiye Elejigbo, hunter, priest, king in the making, walked with prophecy stitched into his breath. Imu-Ewon received him first, a land of thorns that tests before it yields. Destiny does not retreat before thorns. It bleeds and continues. Ifá spoke. The land listened. A name was given, Ejigbo. In that naming, a covenant was sealed between man and soil, between ancestors and the unborn, between memory and time. Kingship was not crowned. It was revealed.
There is a proverb that the hand that feeds you should not fear your hunger. History often chooses another path. Ejigbo opened its arms. Strangers came, tired, hunted, broken by wars not their own. Like a mother who does not count the cost of kindness, the land gave shelter, food, breath and future. Time, that patient witness, began to whisper another story. The guest grew roots. The roots began to claim soil. One day, the hand that was fed reached not in gratitude, but in possession. The host became a stranger in his own courtyard. Memory was dragged to the marketplace and haggled over like cheap cloth. Truth, once sacred, became negotiable.
And so we did what our ancestors taught us. We sang:
“Ofuu Ruru loorere o… Okee ruru l’Ejigbo…”
To an outsider, it is melody. But to us, the Onimewon of Ejigbo, it is armour. Each note bears witness. Each repetition refuses. Each breath reminds that paper may be rewritten, but the wind cannot be silenced. “Ruru” rises again, echoing, insisting, a vibration that refuses burial. Songs do not crumble like monuments. They migrate. They hide in memory. They wait.
There is always one who leaves, the child who trades ancestral rhythm for foreign grammar, who measures worth in borrowed tongues, who forgets the taste of home. Memory does not surrender. It knocks. It whispers. It refuses exile. In sleepless nights and crowded cities, the song returns, not as comfort, but as summons. Come back, not to a place, but to ourselves. When the child returns, it is not with empty hands, but with fire in the mouth.
“Awa o mọ̀ yàwà bátẹtẹ kọ…”
This is no lyric. It is a line drawn in the sand of history. We will not scatter. We will not forget. We will not hand over our names like abandoned inheritance. Identity is not a garment to be changed. It is skin. Those who try to peel it away will learn that memory has teeth.
They tried to silence, to erase, and to bury us. How do you kill what has learned to live in echoes? Onimewon did not endure by accident. We understood a truth older than conquest: a people who become memory cannot be destroyed. We are the Undying, not because we do not fall, but because we do not disappear. We live in chants whispered at dusk, in names that refuse translation, and in stories that refuse to end.
Ejigbo is not quiet. It remembers every footstep, every betrayal, every promise broken and oath upheld. Through Ofu Ruru, it speaks, not in anger alone, but in warning. Hence, do not mistake silence for absence. Do not mistake patience for surrender. The land called into being by vibration still knows how to rise.
In the end, Ofu Ruru does not ask to be heard. It demands remembrance. It stands where poetry becomes prophecy, where history becomes resistance, where memory becomes both weapon and shield. It leaves a truth as old as the first chant: as long as the song is sung, Ejigbo lives. As long as memory breathes, Onimewon can never die.
Chorus: “Ofuu Ruru loorere o… Okee ruru l’Ejigbo…”
--- Prince Adeola Goloba
https://adeola-goloba.blogspot.com/2017/12/ofu-ruru-songs-of-my-memory.html?spref=fb&m=1&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQPMjc1MjU0NjkyNTk4Mjc5AAEeuHCbQsLPH67hIrelMxifYeCOfZDmnE6MVpEHWhTLt536w44OLPJhVmoLBE0_aem_Mgu4PmxwtGmvxAHdiY7HCg
https://adeola-goloba.blogspot.com/2017/12/ofu-ruru-songs-of-my-memory.html?spref=fb&m=1&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQPMjc1MjU0NjkyNTk4Mjc5AAEeuHCbQsLPH67hIrelMxifYeCOfZDmnE6MVpEHWhTLt536w44OLPJhVmoLBE0_aem_Mgu4PmxwtGmvxAHdiY7HCg
