Farooq Kperogi : The new Pope is “black,” now what?

In the aftermath of Pope Francis’ death, many Africans on the continent and in the diaspora wondered if the Catholic Church would, for a change, elect a Black Pope. Well, they got one in Pope Leo XIV even if this isn’t apparent on the surface.

Although the Pope doesn’t identify as Black, he has Black African bloodline flowing in his veins through his mother.

Robert Francis Prevost, who changed his name to Leo XIV upon becoming the pope, traces maternal ancestral roots to grandparents in the state of Louisiana whose ancestry is part Black African.

According to the New York Times, “The pope’s maternal grandparents, both of whom are described as Black or mulatto in various historical records,” lived in a part of New Orleans, Louisiana’s biggest city, “that is traditionally Catholic and a melting pot of people with African, Caribbean and European roots.”

Records from the 1900 census, the New York Times reports, show that the man who gave birth to the pope’s mother, identified as Joseph Martinez, described his race as “Black” and his birthplace as “Hayti,” the older English spelling for Haiti.

Haitians trace ancestral descent from six major West African ethnic groups: Fon and Ewe from what is now Benin Republic and Togo; Yoruba from what is now Nigeria and Benin Republic; Igbo and Kongo from what is now Nigeria and Central Africa respectively; and Akan from present-day Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire.

That means there is a high likelihood that the pope has distant cousins from Nigeria. That won’t be surprising because, as I pointed out in my February 13, 2021, column titled “Surprising American Cousins Through My Mother’s Ancestry,” my own AncestryDNA record, which I initiated with my mother when she visited me from Nigeria between 2017 and 2018, matched us with several phenotypically white distant American cousins.

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“As we went through the photos of hundreds of distant cousins that AncestryDNA’s matches showed, [my mother] was struck with astonishment to find lily white people as her eight cousins,” I wrote. “She asked how that was possible. I explained to her that in the American South, where most Black people were enslaved, many slavers sexually exploited the enslaved, the consequence of which DNA results are now revealing.”

The new pope’s story is another possible explanation.

It should be noted that the pope’s maternal grandfather obviously also had European, possibly French and Spanish, ancestry in addition to his African ancestry. He was probably so light-skinned that he could pass for a white man outside the United States.

He probably chose to identify as Black only because of America’s strange “one-drop rule,” which held that a person with even the faintest scintilla of Black African blood in his/her pedigree is Black.

As Madison Grant wrote in his unbearably racist book titled The Passing of the Great Race, “The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a negro is a negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.”

In other words, whiteness symbolizes purity, and any other color line that touches it inevitably soils it. So, the American notion of Blackness conceives of it as an inerasable genetic stain on whiteness, so that the remotest ancestral connection with Black Africa defines one as Black.

That is why the legendary three-time heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali whose great-grandfather was an Irishman is celebrated as a Black American. That’s why former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who is probably just about 15 percent Black in his gene pool, is celebrated as a Black American success story.

It is why Mariah Carey, who would be called “bature” or “oyinbo” in Nigeria, or “muzungu” in eastern Africa, is accepted by Black America as a Black woman. And that is why it is only in America that a white woman can have Black children, but a Black woman cannot have white children.

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This preposterous logic, this scandalously hidebound, hopelessly essentialist notion of Blackness would make most Europeans “Black” since recent DNA evidence suggests that about 75 percent of Western and Southern Europeans have vestiges of African blood in them.

In the eighteenth century, a German physician and anthropologist by the name of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, on the basis of his flawed analysis of human skulls, taxonomized the human family into five races: Caucasian or white race, Mongolian or yellow race, Malayan or brown race, Negroid or black race, and American or red race.

This arbitrary division of the human family is often fingered as the foundation for scientific racism. It was used by eighteenth-century American judges as the intellectual and moral basis for the promulgation of so-called anti-miscegenation laws (laws that forbade interracial marriage or interracial sex) in a misguided bid to police racial boundaries.

One of the reasons interracial marriages were frowned upon by advocates of racial purism was that mixed-raced children disrupted the easy certainties of Blumenbach’s simplistic racial taxonomy.

As Yale University professor of history Glenda Gilmore once noted, interracial liaisons “resulted in mixed race progeny who slipped back and forth across the color line and defied social control.”

The pope’s maternal grandmother was Creole, who are descendants of the racial alchemy between French, Spanish, and African ancestors but who are nonetheless categorized as “Black” in the United State because of the (il)logic of the one-drop rule. Famous American musicians with Louisiana Creole heritage are Beyonce (through her mother) and Prince.

Creoles can be so light-skinned that they can pass for white. Throughout the nearly two years I lived in Louisiana, I often had difficulty telling a white person from a Black person. People I considered unambiguously white took offense when I identified them as such; they would tell me they were “Black.”

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On other occasions, however, people I thought would self-identify as “Black” based on my previous encounters with seemingly white “Creoles” would take offense when I called them Black. Before I left Louisiana, I stopped guessing or discussing people’s racial identity. Yes, racial identification is that tenuous, that fluid, and that notoriously unstable in southwest Louisiana!

It was unsurprising that the pope’s mother, Mildred Martinez, identified as white. With a light-skinned Black Haitian father and a probably even more light-skinned Creole mother from New Orleans, she most certainly would look phenotypically white.

She chose to escape the chains that Blackness imposed on her and embraced whiteness. In America’s racial terminology, she would be described as having performed “passing.”

Passing is defined as a phenomenon when a phenotypically white but legally Black person (because of traces of African ancestry in them) intentionally present themselves as white to evade racial discrimination and gain access to social, economic, or legal advantages in a racially stratified society where white people occupy the upper end of the totem pole.

During the Jim Crow era in southern United States, when segregation and anti-Black laws were codified in the law books, “passing” was often a survival strategy for light-skinned Black people who could physically blend into white society. I have no doubt that that was what happened with the pope’s mother.

John Joseph Prevost, the pope’s brother, told the New York Times that they don’t discuss their mother’s Black heritage. “It was never an issue,” he said. In fact, USA Today and many American newspapers describe the pope’s mother’s heritage as “Spanish.” The African part of her rich racial tapestry is elided.

The New York Times reported on the pope’s maternal African heritage only because a Black New Orleans genealogist by the name of Jari C. Honora unearthed it with powerfully compelling documentary evidence and shared it with the paper.

Well, going by America’s peculiar logic of racial classification, the pope is “Black” because his whiteness is mediated by the invisible, imperceptible, maybe even genetically negligible, but nonetheless undeniable Black African blood coursing through his papal veins.

Farooq Kperogi is a renowned Nigerian columnist and United States-based Professor of Journalism.

Farooq Kperogi : The new Pope is “black,” now what?

Alaafin Owoade: Thy bata drum is sounding too loudly (1)

Tunde Odesola

(Published in The PUNCH, on Friday, May 9, 2025)

After about 500 years of imperial dominance—extending into present-day Republic of Benin and Togo, and reaching the Sahelian fringes of Nupe, Borgu, and parts of Hausaland—the fall of the Old Oyo Empire was total by 1835, when Fulani forces burned down Oyo-Ile, the imperial capital, following the death of Alaafin Olúéwu.

The royal family, elite, and many other survivors of the Fulani onslaught on Oyo-Ile, also known as Katunga, fled southward and relocated the capital to Àgó d’Òyó, a more southerly and defensible site than the original seat of power.

One hundred and ninety years after the fall, there seems to exist in modern day Oyo, an umbilical cord that ties the mystique of the lost empire to the pride of a people, who forlornly wish to reinvent the uniqueness of a paradise lost, “A ji se bi Oyo la n ri, Oyo o se bi baba enikankan.”

The demise of the Old Oyo Empire signalled a lull in the Yoruba economy, as trading shrank due to dwindling economic opportunities.

However, efforts at Yoruba renaissance gained global attention in 1970 when an African-American, Walter Eugene King, founded Oyotunji village in Sheldon, South Carolina, USA. King, who was later christened and crowned Oba Efuntola Oseijeman Adelabu Adefunmi, was born on October 5, 1928, in Detroit, Michigan, USA, but he had never set foot on Nigerian soil when he founded Oyotunji.

According to the website of Oyotunji village, oyotunji.org, Adefunmi graduated from Cass Technical High School and was baptised at Hartford Avenue Baptist Church at 12.

“He began African studies at age 16 to begin his quest for the deities of Africa. Exposure to African religion began with the association with the Katherine Dunham Dance Troupe at the age of 20. Travelled to Haiti the same year, and founded the order of Damballah Hwedo, Ancestor Priests in Harlem, NY, the following year.

“On August 26, 1959, (Adefunmi) became the first African born in America to become fully initiated into the Orisa-Vodun African priesthood by African Cubans in Matanzas, Cuba. This marked the beginning of the spread of Yoruba religion and culture among African-Americans. With a few followers, and after (the) dissolution of the Order of Damballah Hwedo, (Adefunmi) founded the Sango Temple in New York. (He) incorporated the African Theological Archministry in 1960. The Sango Temple was relocated and renamed the Yoruba Temple the same year,” the website says.

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Furthermore, the website explains that the cultural aficionado introduced the dànsíkí dress and started small-scale manufacture of African attire in 1960, establishing the Yoruba Academy for academic study of Yoruba history, religion and language in 1961.

Adefunmi, who opened Ujamaa Market in 1961, started a trend of African boutiques, which, like the dànsíkí, spread throughout African-American communities.

The website continues, “Baba published several pamphlets – The Yoruba Religion, The Yoruba State and Tribal Origins of the African-American, to name a few. He participated in the Black Nationalist rallies of 1969 and during that time formed the African Nationalist Independence Partition Party, aimed at establishing “an African state in America by 1972!”

“In the fall of 1970, he founded the Yoruba Village of Oyotunji in Beaufort County, South Carolina, and began the careful reorganisation of the Orisa-Vodu Priesthood along traditional Nigerian lines. He was initiated into the Ifa priesthood by the Oluwa of Ijeun at Abeokuta, Nigeria, in August of 1972. Baba Adefunmi was proclaimed Alase (Oba-King) of the Yoruba of N. America at Oyotunji Village in 1972.

“Oba Adefunmi convened the first official Ogboni Parliament of Oyotunji Chiefs and land owners in 1973, and later that year founded the Igbimoolosa (Priest Council) to oversee priestly education and training, organise laws and rules to govern priestly conduct, ethics and behaviour, and adjudicate disputes among Orisa-Vodu priests. Also in 1973, he commenced the construction of the Osagiyan Palace at Oyotunji Village. Oba Adefunmi I has been called the “Father of the African Cultural Restoration Movement”.

“In 1981, the Caribbean Visual Arts and Research Centre in New York sponsored Oba Adefunmi to be a presenter at the first World Congress of Orisa tradition and culture at the University of Ile-Ife, Nigeria. After his presentation, his Divine Royal Majesty King, Okunade Sijuwade Olubuse II, the ‘Ooni’ of the ancient Yoruba city of Ile Ife, Nigeria, summoned Adefunmi and ordered the Ife Chiefs to perform coronation rites on him; thereafter becoming Oba Efuntola Oseijeman Adelabu Adefunmi I. Oba Adefunmi I became the first in a line of new world Yoruba Kings consecrated at the palace of the Ooni of Ife. He was presented with a special ceremonial sword of state, incised with the name of his Liege Lord, the Ooni of Ife.”

Less than seven days after the coronation of Alaafin Abimbola Owoade, on April 5, 2025, I wrote an article titled “Letter to Alaafin Abimbola Owoade,” in which I expressed happiness over his ascension. In the letter, I assessed how the Alaafin had carried himself since he was named the oba-elect, and I said, “Alaafin, so far, your feet appear to be set on the path of honour, I beseech thee not to depart from it. I love your demeanour; I love your grace and face. I love the sheen of your blackness, ‘adu ma dan, okunrin ogun’; you are truly the son of your father.”

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But the sound emanating from the bata (drum) within the walls of the Oyo palace is no longer sweet to the ears nor danceable to the feet. There are so many cacophonous sounds coming from Oyo now. One of such sounds is the issue surrounding the death of the Baba Oba of Oyotunji, whom some news media said was attacked in your palace, and that the alleged attack led to his death.

Another inharmonious sound from Oyo is the communication breakdown that led to the shoddy treatment of the Orangun of Ila, Oba Abdulwahab Oyedotun, and his entourage.

Yet another discordant tune from Oyo Alaafin is the alleged cold war brewing between the paramount head of all Yoruba traditional kings, Ooni Adeyeye Ogunwusi, and the incumbent Iku Baba Yeye, over Oyotunji, among some other tiffs.

Specifically, a report by an online national newspaper, Sahara Reporters, on May 4, 2025, alleged that a Yoruba traditional ruler based in the United States, Chief Lukman Ojora Arounfale, who is the Baba Oba of Oyotunji African Village, South Carolina, “died following an alleged assault ordered by the Alaafin of Oyo, Oba Abimbola Akeem Owoade.”

The report claimed that the late Arounfale and his wife were beaten inside the Oyo palace on the orders of Alaafin, and that the assault led to the death of the visiting chief.

However, in a rebuttal published in The PUNCH on May 8, 2025, Owoade spokesperson, Bode Durojaye, said the Alaafin was not responsible for the death of Arounfale.

A statement by Durojaye, who is the Head, Media and Publicity Office of the Alaafin, urged members of the public to disregard the report of any feud between the Alaafin and the Ooni, insisting the Alaafin holds the Ooni in esteem.

Juju music superstar, Chief Commander Ebenezer Obey, was not the original composer of the evergreen songs, “Eni ri n kan e,” and “Bi o si temi.” Commander Obey fell in love with the two didactic songs after Pa Ambrose Campbell released them, remixing both songs separately, and they became much more popular than when they were released by Campbell.

“Eni ri n kan e,” is the story of a treasure “Lost, Found and its Loser.” The once-upon-a-time story says a man suddenly finds something of value, and he goes berserk with joy. Campbell, the storyteller, asks, “If someone who finds a treasure goes wild with joy, what should the one who lost it do?”

Oyotunji is truly a treasure, but it shouldn’t be a battleground for the Ooni versus Alaafin war for reasons I will adduce later in this article.

After Oba Adefunmi joined his ancestors on February 11, 2005, one of his princes, Adejuyigbe Adefunmi, was crowned king on July 3, 2005, and Oyotunji kingdom grew in leaps and bounds under his leadership – until that tragic morning of Monday, July 29, 2024, when death, through a knife stabbed by his sister, stole into the Oyotunji village and snatched the king, who had seven children and seven wives.

When he reigned, Adefunmi II was in the habit of paying glowing tributes to Ooni Olubuse, Oba Sijuwade Okunade, whom he saw as his feudal lord, with his American throne being a vassal to Ife.

Rites of passage performed by agbada and buba-wearing African-Americans for the departed monarch were done in Yoruba. Very instructive in the rites was the copious reverence of Ile-Ife as the ancestral and spiritual home of all Yoruba. There was no mention of Oyo Alaafin by any of the African-American traditionalists who buried Oba Adefunmi II.

* To be continued.

Email: [email protected]

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Alaafin Owoade: Thy bata drum is sounding too loudly (1)

Farooq Kperogi: In 2027, Tinubu won’t win; the opposition will lose

If economic health, social vitality, and the raw pulse of public opinion were the only indicators relied upon to prognosticate the chances of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s reelection in 2027, I would say with cocksure certitude that he is condemned to be a one-term president. 

Not even the most hopelessly unthinking defenders of the Tinubu presidency can deny that his reign so far has been defined by unrelieved economic hardship, staggering inflation, a collapsing naira, and a deepening sense of despair among Nigerians. In other words, the objective conditions for his political repudiation are overripe.

Nonetheless, elections, especially in Nigeria, are not won on the basis of public frustration alone. They are won — or lost — on the strength of political organization, elite consensus, strategic emotional manipulation, and the ability to convert popular anger into electoral mathematics. Call those the subjective conditions of electoral triumph, if you like. And this is where the tragedy of the opposition begins.

The opposition is undisciplined, hopelessly spineless, irredeemably fragmented, strategically bankrupt, and is falling cheaply into the trap set for it by Tinubu.

First, the opposition is shaping up to be disappointingly provincial. It is dominated by elements from a slice of the North that seems to be suffering from withdrawal symptoms from loss of political power. This is reminiscent of the narrow-minded opposition to former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s second term, which helped him to create a coalition of southern Nigerian, Christian northerners, along with portions of the North that felt excluded from the regional mainstream.

Perhaps the most egregious expression of naïve, historically inaccurate, self-sabotaging provincial self-importance from the region came five days ago from Dr. Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, a former appointee of the Tinubu administration who, before his sojourn in the administration, was a higher-up at the Northern Elders’ Forum.

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“In the next six months, the North will decide where it stands,” Dr. Baba-Ahmed said in a viral post. “If the rest of the country wants to join us, fine. If not, we will go our own way. One thing is clear: nobody can become president of Nigeria without northern support.”

Well, Olusegun Obasanjo was elected for a second term in 2003 without “northern” support. I inserted scare quotes around “northern” because, although Baba-Hakeem appeared to be ecumenical in his conception of the North (he referenced “Muslims, Christians, Fulani, Baju, Mangu” — the Baju and Mangu being ethnic groups from southern Kaduna and Plateau — indicating pan-Northernism), we all know that the North has never been a monolith and is often riven by religion.

When people like Baba-Ahmed talk of the “North” in such tyrannizing, self-aggrandizing terms, they often mean a particular part of the North.

Obasanjo deployed the perks of incumbency to mobilize the entire South, appeal to the Christian North, and to make offers to parts of the Muslim North that Muhammadu Buhari didn’t consider “northern” enough to deserve his electoral entreaties. Even if the election wasn’t rigged, Buhari didn’t stand a ghost of a chance of winning the 2003 election.

Former President Goodluck Jonathan used Obasanjo’s 2003 template in 2011 to defeat Muhammadu Buhari. But in 2015, Jonathan lost the Southwest to Buhari, which led to Jonathan’s loss and Buhari’s epochal, unexampled triumph.

This shows that no region can win a national election without the other, making Baba-Hakeem’s self-lionizing boast a rhetorical gift to Bola Tinubu. We’re already seeing its effect.

Several southerners who are wriggling in the torment of Tinubu’s economic policies have chosen to rather live with the sting of his policies than embrace the provincial arrogance of people like Baba-Ahmed who arrogate to themselves the exclusive power to determine who is president and who isn’t.

Similarly, in Nigeria’s informal power-sharing arrangement, the expectation is that after eight years of a northern presidency that ended in 2023, no northerner should be president again for the next eight years. But the northern opposition to Tinubu seems to be anchored on a desire for premature power grab back to the North.

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Unless the northern politicians who have stuck out their necks to oppose Tinubu support another southerner with widespread appeal, their opposition will only strengthen Tinubu’s southern coalition and buy him sympathy from parts of the north that don’t enjoy regional political hegemony.

This is particularly so because since the start of the Fourth Republic, the South has never expressed opposition to northern presidencies by sponsoring southern candidates. The South supported Atiku Abubakar, a northerner, in 2019. Umar Musa Yar’adua’s main opponent in 2007 wasn’t a southerner. It was Muhammadu Buhari, a northerner.

But when it was the South’s turn to get presidential power in 2023, the North presented a formidable candidate in the PDP. In fact, the APC hierarchy, with the support of Muhammadu Buhari, settled on former Senate President Ahmad Lawan as the “consensus candidate.” That was embarrassing.

 Already, there are insinuations that PDP governors who are defecting to APC are doing so not just because they are being bludgeoned into it through subtle EFCC prosecutorial threats but also because they fear that their party’s standard-bearer in 2027 will be a northerner.

I understand the dilemma of the northern politicians in opposition. Should they support a southern candidate to dislodge Tinubu, such a candidate would, as sure as tomorrow’s date, seek a second term. That would defer the presidential aspirations of the northern politicians by eight years instead of four.

If they sit by listlessly as Tinubu shoves them to the margins of the orbit of power, they will be like fish flailing out of water. They will be so disoriented and weakened that by the time presidential power drifts back to the North, they probably won’t even have the strength to fight for a place.

Northern opposition politicians like Nasir El-Rufai also don’t seem to realize that the Social Democratic Party (SDP) they have embraced as the vehicle to displace Tinubu is, in fact, Tinubu’s spare car.

It is fully fueled, tuned, and parked in his garage for contingencies. As early as April 2022, BusinessDay reported that Tinubu had opened backchannel talks with the SDP and explored it as a fallback platform in case his APC ambitions stalled.

 In other words, the opposition is not commandeering an independent vehicle; they are clambering into a car whose engine hums to Tinubu’s touch and whose keys he can reclaim at will. They are, quite literally, riding shotgun in a machine built for their defeat. Unfortunately, he has also hijacked their car, the PDP!

Adewole Adebayo, SDP’s 2023 presidential candidate, unintentionally echoed this sentiment a few days ago when he used the metaphor of a car to send a not-so-subtle dig at El-Rufai.

“As for the coalition, we’re listening to them,” Adebayo said. “What we don’t want to be—we don’t want to be a get-away car for a conspiracy and robbery we did not plan. So, if you planned something somewhere and you want to use the SDP as a get-away car, that’s not available.”

 Adebayo added another pointed dart to El-Rufai when he said, “if the coalition is a crying center for disappointed Tinubu followers, they should go back to Tinubu who gave the promise to them and resolve their differences there.”

In the end, Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s greatest electoral asset may not be the loyalty of the masses, the success of his policies, or even the cunning of his political machinery. It may well be the disarray, hubris, provincialism, and strategic myopia of his opposition.

They are too divided to form a coalition, too impatient to build trust across regions, and too blinded by immediate resentments to think in terms of long-term electoral triumph.

In 2027, Tinubu may stagger into a second term not because he inspires, but because he survives; not because he triumphs, but because those who should have dethroned him will, through a toxic mix of arrogance and amateurism, hand him victory on a silver platter.

It won’t be Tinubu who wins; it will be the opposition that loses. And Nigeria, trapped in the wreckage of broken possibilities, will pay the price.

Farooq Kperogi: In 2027, Tinubu won’t win; the opposition will lose

Farooq Kperogi is a renowned Nigerian columnist and United States-based Professor of Journalism.