The first half century of British pacification, left erstwhile Yoruba kingdoms in political disarray, marginalized, bereft of collective identity, and with no popular leader or generally shared conception of Yorubaness. This situation was not ameliorated by Britain’s principle of indirect governance, which had the contrary effect of creating additional centers of internal dissention and civic disinterest. By 1950, the people who answer to the ethnological label, Yoruba, had concretized, not into a cohesive nation-state, but instead, into disparate fiefdoms, strewn across the map, from Eko to Porto Novo and across the West-North-West boundaries, in active diaspora. The splintering of the Yoruba rewarded Northern and Eastern Nigerian political organizations, under the NCNC, NPC, and NEPU, and occasioned bold, opportunistic incursions into traditional Yoruba domains. As the respective regions staggered toward self-rule, Awolowo saw that, for the

Yorubas to become politically viable, post-independence, a resculpting of Yoruba identity and institutions was necessary. Ilewe ofe became the epistemological vehicle, for that reconstructive enterprise, such that, by 1952, while students in the other regions, labored under the yoke of unaffordable tuition fees, levied upon them, by state and religious educational institutions, the Western region and Lagos enjoyed universal, free, primary education. In this paper, I will examine the social, cultural, and political epistemology for iwe ofe, and the legitimate imperative, which justified such a bold, economically risky experiment-in-educational socialism. I hypothesize that, whereas there was a link between the project and Awolowo’s ambition for political power, the essential roots lie in Yoruba, cultural welfarism, and an epistemology, which sanctioned prosocialism, wherever such surgical reconstruction was called for, as in the search for a lebensraum.