Since readers of this blog have been fascinated with the last two posts on the etymology of common Yorùbá root morphemes, we might as well tackle the big and most controversial one: Èṣù.

Born into old Yorùbá mythology, lionized in the various Odù Ifá as a trickster god of some sort, servant to many of the other dominant gods, Èṣù enjoyed his run as a clown and Falstaff known for his mischief as well as an amorphous personality determined by situation, master, or purpose. He was not a harmless fellow, to be clear, but his character was usually determined by a lot more things than “good/evil” or “death/life” or “heaven/hell”. Then came Christianity.

I haven’t read enough about Nigeria’s pre-colonial missionary days to know the process by which certain expressions were agreed upon as representing specific ideas in the new Christian religion. (Please feel free to suggest in the comment below which books I should read for this purpose). But we know that when Bishop Àjàyí Crowther and his team decided on rendering the famous Biblical character known as Satan or Devil into Yorùbá, they settled on Èṣù, the Yorùbá trickster god. With the benefit of hindsight, the choice made some sense. To the new converts hoping to leave behind a culture in which one god wielded a lot of power to make or mar relationships depending on who was paying the bills or – as I’ll illustrate below – on the innate character of the people un/fortunate enough to interact with him, this was the perfect fall guy (or “fall god”, if we’re being technical). The Yorùbá had no conceptualization of heaven or hell as Christians did, so had no “devil” or “hell”. But since the bible needed translation and the missionary journey needed its fervent converts, Èṣù took the fall and acquired a new role.

I was once asked on Facebook, by the author Yẹ́misí Aríbisálà, the following question: ‘Why do the Yoruba say “Èṣù má ṣe mí, ọmọ ẹlòmíi ni o ṣe” when he is such a harmless just-slightly mischievous fellow, so useful at helping us understand the contradictions of our lives?’ Here was my response, in full:

There is a famous story of Èṣù in his most mischievous element, one day walking on the street and (perhaps bored) deciding to confound two friends who had displayed what he considered an irritating level of public affection for each other. What he did was to wear an outfit that had two different colours on each side, one part red and the other black. But the colours were split such that each was on two sides of his body – the red on the right and the black on the left. For some reason, the friends didn’t see him until he walked right between them, so each only saw one colour. But as soon as he had gone and disappeared, they began to argue between each other about what colour the stranger wore. One said “red” while the other said “black”, and the argument degenerated. Needless to say, that was the end of the “friendship”. What’s the lesson here? I don’t know. Perhaps, that you never really know how friendly you are with one person until you’ve had a disagreement, or that if you let a difference in perspectives change who you are, then you were never close in the first place. What I took away, referring to your question, is that the Yorùbá often wish never to be subjected to such test, not because it is always harmful, but because it can sometimes have unintended consequences. But as far as Èṣù is concerned, he’s just providing just one more way to test what we’ve agreed upon as conventional truth.

Anyway, since the Holy Bible became our primary source of interpreting this new foreign idea, the language adapted to it, with everything evil becoming associated with “Èṣù”. If you didn’t go to church, or did things that the church frowned upon, you were “ọmọ Èṣù”. It was probably also helpful that it contrasted easily with “ọmọ Jésù” which is the good child, son of Jesus”. Jésù, the saviour, was on one side, and Èṣù, the devil, the accursed one, was on the other. Eventually, all those previously named with Èṣù began to change their names. If the psychological bullying of the Pentecostal movement didn’t get you, your mates in school, who came from Christian homes and knew of Èṣù only in that one context of the church, would ensure that you make required changes.

Names like Èṣùbíyìí (Èṣù gave birth to this) or Ẹṣùgbadé (Èṣù received royalty) slowly disappeared from use, to be found only in literature and television. Even in the case of the latter, children were warned off too much familiarity with such forms of entertainment with the worry that one might get tainted by that contagious evil. Others just changed them to Olúbíyìí or Olúgbadé. See previous post on Olú.

But there was a slight break. Crowther and his other translators, for some reason, decide to translate “Deliver us from evil” as “Gbà wá lọ́wọ́ bìlísì”. Bìlísì was a Yorùbá corruption of Iblis, which is the Arabic word for evil and had also entered the Yorùbá vocabulary due to Hausa/Arabic influence from the north. That was fine. But why wasn’t it used in all all the other cases where “Devil” or “Satan” needed translation help? “Satan” sometimes was translated as “Sàtánì”, which was good, but in popular usage Èṣù became more famous than them all.

In October 2015, before I started working at Google, I was tagged by Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina on Facebook about someone who wanted to know why Google Translate had “Devil” and “Satan” translated as “Èṣù” when they were not the same thing. I answered that it was probably the fault of earlier translators of the bible where Google engineers likely got their data. I began working at Google later that year but totally forgot about the tag.

Then sometime in January 2016, something else brought the issue to my attention. I was now an employee of the company and now ostensibly in a position to make a change. The idea that generations of Yorùbá children/readers and non-speakers would grow up getting a wrong impression if all they had was Google Translate to learn from felt very disturbing. Technology was replacing books anyway, and we needed it to better represent the culture.

At the time, however, I had no idea that I could do anything about it. My role in at Google was on a totally different project. Google Translate is manned, contrary to what people outside think, not by linguists but by engineers. And I didn’t know that I could convince these guys who worked many miles and time zones away to pay attention to something seemingly mild, and with agreed-upon roots in the foundation of Yorùbá literacy. But it turned out that I could, and I did.

For ideas, I crowdsourced an open conversation on my Facebook page about prospects of each new translation suggestion. And a week later, the translate engine had begun to reflect a more acceptable approximation of evil/devil/Satan in Yorùbá to users of that Google service. I made a tongue-in-cheek post to that effect on January 16th: “Early this morning in Mountain View California,” it read, “the trickster Èsù was relieved of its perceived demonic duties.”

Èṣù now translates as Èṣù, devil as Bìlísì, and Satan as Sàtánì, and Demon as ànjọ̀nú (also with an arabic Etymology). Only fair. The tone marking on the translations were the cherry on top. I wish all the Yorùbá words in the machine had tone marks, but that would mean replacing the engineers behind Google Translate with actual linguists. A long shot.

Now this probably would not change the public perception of what had taken generations to ingrain, but one hopes that it might begin a new way of restoring the true role of what was just another character in the Yorùbá religious pantheon in the public consciousness. At least one way of being true to the word’s cultural and linguistic history.

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Postscript

A year or so after I left Google, people started pointing out to me that the translations had reverted to Devil, Demon, and Satan for Èṣù. Being out of the system, I couldn’t do anything about it. I returned to Google in February of 2019 as NLP Linguist for African Languages, and the original changes are back, hopefully for good this time.