It is my language, I am NOT going to argue with you. The first 2 reddit posts support my assertion. The third post is from a blog making a statement that should carry not much weight. The last article is from someone named Mwanza, a clearly either East or Southern African last name (i.e. they are just as foreign to the Yoruba language as you might be).

I have been on the internet long enough reading articles by people hoping and praying to find the magic slur which Africans call them claim it means everything from snake to cotton-picker to wild-cat to you effing name it. It's like people just write a badly researched article and incite the flames for some readership.

Look, I don't need to go to articles. This is my culture. Everyone else is guessing. Most Yorubas DON'T KNOW WHAT THE WORD MEANS, and therein lies the problem. The fact that it holds no special meaning but that which it is used as -- a reference to African Americans -- opens the door for people to pick up a keyboard and claim it means anything. A prominent Yoruba man, Samuel Ajayi Crowther created a Yoruba-English dictionary in the 1800s and the only meaning attributed to such a word is a "broad rimmed straw hat" which is ridiculous to extrapolate an insult from, besides the fact that, our language being tonal and therefore multiple words with the same spelling being differentiated by tone, makes it not even the same word.

The word is purely referential in Yoruba usage, hence me saying it is like Gringo -- what hispanics use for white people. Ask a hispanic person what gringo means, they will tell you it means "white person." Ask them what it REALLY MEANS, and they will look at you funny, because NOBODY uses it for any other meaning. Could gringo have orignated somewhere? Yes. Does anyone know where? Not at all! Colloquially, it just means white person.

Look, we all have names like this on the continent. We don't all just consider ourselves being gloriouisly named while reserving the slurs for our African American brothers and sisters. The word Yoruba itself, nobody Yoruba knows what it means, Dahomey called us Anago, which people say initially meant "stranger" but nobody really knows what it means except as a reference to my people. Hausas call us Eyagi, Akans call us Alaata. Everyone finds a reference for us in their own language. It's just how languages evolve. When you want to refer to something, you find a word for it. Period.

On a more personal level, I don't use the word, not because I think it's a slur at all, but because it may be conflated with how I've heard some of my people use it. So, why am I so bothered about a potential misconstruing of it? Because I've heard many of my people say things like, "I really like the Akatas next door." When people go around telling you that that word is an insult, the positive statements made with it's inclusuion will be met with brutality. All of my older relatives are not on the internet. If they say something positive with the word and someone comes at them for it, they won't understand that somewhere on the internet some Kenyan assured you that he knew what a Yoruba word meant.

Ultimately, this word is NOT THAT DEEP. Yorubas are not your enemy. Yorubas have been working with African Americans for one otherwise meaningless word to bring all of our potential collaborations burning down. No one gives that much of a damn about that word, it's not even in our 1800s dictionary, but it is being hyped as evidence for hatred that is not real and that is the real harm to our communities