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The High Cost of Blind Respect in Yorubaland
When does respect begin to actively stifle progress?
In Yoruba culture — and across much of Nigeria — we’ve turned “respect” into a weapon of silence and compliance. Age becomes a free pass for control. Tradition, a tool to suppress dissent. You’re taught not to ask why. You’re taught that challenging an elder — no matter how wrong — is inherently disrespectful. Even when they’re wrong, their word is law.
Ọmọdé fẹ́ kú, ó ní ẹnu àgbà árùn.
A child seeks death [when] he says the mouth of an elder stinks. (Disrespect for elders is a death wish.)*
This isn’t just a proverb. It’s a cultural gag order. And it’s rotting our society from within.
My life has been a living contradiction of these values.
My late father was a proud Yoruba man — first son of his lineage, raised between Osun, Oyo, and Ogun, before moving to Lagos for work. He carried the Ogunmodede name with pride, along with the unspoken rule: you do not challenge your elders.
My mother came from a radically different world. Born in a small town in old Bendel State (now Bayelsa), raised across the South-South — Yenagoa, Port Harcourt, Odi, Benin — she came from a culture where calling elders by their first name wasn’t taboo, and questioning authority wasn’t…
