BINI AND THE REAL NUPES There is hardly any single group of people that can be pinpointed as the real Nupes today. This is because Nupe is a nationality comprising of different and varied languages and dialects. The people we call the Nupe people today are actually just one of the various people that goes into the formation of the actual Nupe Nation. The Nupe Nation founded by Tsoede was a vast conglomerate and amalagamation of various ancient peoples of the Nigerian Middle Belt and its neighbours. It is difficult to define the proto typic Nupe man because what we call Nupe today was not what was known as Nupe in the days of Tsoede who is said to be the founder of Nupe. The language we speak in Bida, Agaie, Lapai, Kutigi, Mokwa, Patigi, Lafiagi, Tsaragi, Tsonga, etc, etc, is actually Bini and this Bini is simply one of the Nupe languages. It is wrong, as we do today, to refer to only the Bini as the real Nupe people. The Bini, the Dibo, the Kakanda, Kupa, Gupa, Kame, Bassange; and even the Koro, the Gbagyi, the Kambari, the Igala, the Yoruba, the Igbira, and so on and on, are all Nupe people. The only thing here is that of all these Nupe languages, Bini is the one that is centrally located at the very centre of KinNupe today. But in former times the Kakanda, the Dibo, the Gbagyi and even the Igala and Yoruba have, at various times, been the sole inhabitants of Central KinNupe. Most people today are not aware of the fact that in the past there was a Nupe language called the Bini. This Bini language, or dialect, at a time became the paramount Nupe language in the whole of KinNupe. Bini was a major Nupe language in the past. It is the same that have survived, in a variety of forms, among the Edo-Benin people, the Kebbi, and many others. In any case the ancient Bini language is the same that have also survived in to modern times as the ‘Nupe’ language. The point here is that the language or dialect we call ‘Nupe’ today is actually the highly corrupt and diluted end-result of the original Bini language. And a complicating sideline to this issue is the fact that the Bini language we speak as Nupe today is actually a pidgin collection of a variety of ancient Nupe languages, dialects and lects many of which have become extinct today. The original language of the Akanda peoples, for instance, is lost today but it was one of the many languages that went into the formation of the Modern form of the Bini language. The Apaor Ife, the Gara or Koro or Ibara, and many other ancient languages, dialects and lects went into the corruption and dilution of the ancient Bini language into its modern form. Remnants of the ancient Akanda Nupe people are the ones we know as the Kyadya, Kakanda, Bataci, Igala, Yoruba, Kebbi, etc, etc,today. Actually Tsoede came with the Akanda people, the twelve Kyadya canoe men of the Tsoede Mythical Charter – who immediately got acculturated or merged into the erst while Bini Confederacy constituent subtribes. Although there was an original Bini language it became flooded with so many loan words from so many languages in the days of the Bini Confederacy when Bini language was used as the Lingua Franca over all the territories over which the Bini Confederacy reigned supreme.
Posted on: Wed, 31 Jul 2013 00:07:56 +0000
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