What’s the meaning of Ekùn in Yoruba?

2 min readJun 20, 2020

All my life, what I’ve known is the Yoruba word for tiger is ekùn.

But sometime last year, before the Àmòtékùn matter started at all, I learnt that tigers don’t exist in Africa.

I became confused and puzzled; how could Yoruba have had a name for tiger despite its non-existence in Africa.

I kept the puzzle in one corner of my mind. Hopefully, one day I’ll find a solution for it.

Then the political hullabaloo of Amotekun started.

Muric wrote an article stating that Amotekun is a christianization agenda. It said the word Amotekun is from a bible verse that says:

“A leopard is watching their cities.”
Jeremiah 5:6

One of the responses against Muric was that Amotekun doesn’t mean leopard, rather it means cheetah.

Let’s zoom-in on this "Amotekun is leopard or cheetah" part.

Amotekun literally means "similar to ekun". Therefore, Amotekun will definitely be smaller than ekun.

Based on that:

Many, if not most, Yoruba of this generation believe ekun is tiger.

In fact, some kings who have ekun their titles or eulogy make a statue of tiger in their palace.

Many people have put forward different explanations. Most explanations I’ve seen are flimsy and irrational.

The best of these explanations says that Yoruba people met tigers during colonisation.

This argument itself is far-fetched. Ponder, you’ll see.

Today, I came across a book on archive.org titled

“Nigerian studies; or, The religious and political system of the Yoruba"

The book was published in 1901, that's a century and two decades ago.

In it, the author mentioned that one of the names Yoruba call leopard is ekun.

See screenshot. Below:

Based this, we can conveniently conclude that the meaning of ekùn in Yoruba is Leopard.

Also, we can deduce that the meaning of Àmòtékùn (similar to ekun) means cheetah.

I guess this solves my puzzle. I hope it solves yours.

Thanks for reading.