Yoruba People

The Yoruba people ( ; , , ) are a West African ethnic group who inhabit parts of Nigeria, Benin, and Togo, which are collectively referred to as Yorubaland. The Yoruba constitute more than 50 million people in Africa, are over a million outside the continent, and bear further representation among the African diaspora. The vast majority of Yoruba are within Nigeria, where they make up 20.7% of the country's population according to Ethnologue estimations, making them one of the largest ethnic groups in Africa. Most Yoruba people speak the Yoruba language, which is the Niger-Congo language with the largest number of native or L1 speakers.

Geography

In Africa, the Yoruba are contiguous with the Yoruboid Itsekiri to the south-east in the northwest Niger Delta, Bariba to the northwest in Benin and Nigeria, the Nupe to the north, and the Ebira to the northeast in Central Nigeria. To the east are the Edo, Ẹsan, and Afemai groups in Mid-Western Nigeria. To the northeast and adjacent to the Ebira and Northern Edo, groups are the related Igala people on the left bank of the Niger River. To the south are the Gbe-speaking Mahi, Gun, Fon, and Ewe who border Yoruba communities in Benin and Togo, to the west they are bordered by the Kwa-speaking Akebu, Kposo of Togo, and to the northwest, by the Kwa-speaking Anii, and the Gur speaking Kabiye, Yom-Lokpa and Tem people of Togo. Significantly Yoruba populations in other West African countries can also be found in Ghana, Benin, Ivory Coast, and Sierra Leone.

Outside Africa, the Yoruba diaspora consists of two main groupings; the first being that of the Yorubas taken as slaves to the New World between the 16th and 19th centuries, notably to the Caribbean (especially in Cuba) and Brazil, and the second consisting of a wave of relatively recent migrants, the majority of whom began to migrate to the United Kingdom and the United States following some of the major economic and political changes encountered in Africa in the 1960s till date.

Etymology

The oldest known textual reference to the name Yoruba is found in an essay (titled – ''Mi'rāj al-Ṣu'ūd'') from a manuscript written by the Berber jurist Ahmed Baba in the year 1614. The original manuscript is preserved in the Ahmed Baba Institute of the Mamma Haidara Library in Timbuktu, while a digital copy is at the World Digital Library. ''Mi'rāj al-Ṣu'ūd'' provides one of the earliest known ideas about the ethnic composition of the West African interior. The relevant section of the essay which lists the Yoruba group alongside nine others in the region as translated by John Hunwick and Fatima Harrak for the Institute of African Studies Rabat, reads:

"We will add another rule for you, that is that whoever now comes to you from among the group called Mossi, or Gurma, or Bussa, or Borgu, or Dagomba, or Kotokoli, or Yoruba, or Tombo, or Bobo, or K.rmu – all of these are unbelievers remaining in their unbelief until now. Similarly Kumbe except for a few people of Hombori"

This early 1600's reference implies that the name Yoruba was already in popular demotic use as far back as at least the 1500s. Regarding the source and derivation of this name, guesses were posited by various foreign sociologists of external sources. These include; Ya'rub (son of Canaanite, Joktan) by Caliph Muhammed Bello of Sokoto, ''Goru Ba'' by T.J Bowen, or ''Yolla Ba'' ( Mande word for the Niger river) etc.
These guesses suffer a lack of support by many locals for being alien to (and unfounded in) the traditions of the Yorubas themselves. In his work, ''Abeokuta and the Camaroons Mountains'' c.1863, the English ethnologist Richard F. Burton reports of a Yoruba account in 1861, noting that the name "Yoruba" derives from ''Ori Obba'', i.e. -The ''Head King''. It was applied ex-situ originally in reference to the Yoruba sociolinguistic group as a whole. Centuries later however, it evolved to be applied exclusively to the Ọ̀yọ́ subgroup when this subgroup rose to attain imperial status, particularly at its apogee (c.1650 – c.1750) until in the mid-1800s when this trend was reversed back to the original context.

Names

The name Yoruba is the most well known ethnonym for the group of people that trace a common origin to Ife, but synonymous terms have been recorded in history such as; Nago/Anago, Lucumi/Olukumi and Aku/Oku.

Some Exonyms the Yoruba are known by across West Africa include; Alata in southern Ghana, Eyagi in Nupe which produced descendant terms such as; Ayagi (the pre-modern Hausa word for the Yoruba people) and Iyaji in Igala.

The Yoruba people also refer to themselves by the epithet "Ọmọ Káàárọ̀-oòjíire", literally meaning, "The People who ask 'Good morning, did you wake up well?". This is in reference to the mode of greeting associated with Yoruba culture. Through parts of coastal West Africa where Yorubas can be found, they have carried the culture of lauding one another with greetings applicable in different situations along with them. Another epithet used is, "Ọmọ Oòduà", meaning "The Children of Oduduwa", referencing the semi-legendary Yoruba king.

History

The historical Yoruba developed in situ, out of earlier Mesolithic Volta-Niger populations, by the 1st millennium BCE. By the 8th century, a powerful city-state already existed in Ile-Ife, one of the earliest in Africa. This City, whose oral traditions link to figures like Oduduwa and Obatala, would later become the heart of the Ife Empire, the first empire in Yoruba History. The Ife Empire, flourishing between roughly 1200 and 1420 CE, extended its influence across a significant portion of what is now southwestern Nigeria and eastern Benin and to modern-day Togo.

Oral history recorded under the Oyo Empire derives the Yoruba as an ethnic group from the population of the City State of Ile-Ife. Ile-Ife, as the capital of the former empire, held a prominent position in Yoruba history. The Yoruba were the dominant cultural force in southwestern and west-central Nigeria as far back as the 11th century.

The Yoruba people have centuries long tradition of living in large urban centres. They are a people who have a propensity for living in cities and their settlement pattern usually tend towards concentric nucleation, making them one of the most historically urban ethnic groups on the African continent. Prior to the era of colonialism, the Yorubas existed as a series of well structured large kingdoms and states with an urban capital core (''Olú Ìlú'') sharing filial relations with one another. These urban capitals were built to encapsulate the palace of the Oba (king) and most of the kingdom's central institutions such as the premier market (Ọjà Ọba) and several temples. Many of these city-states had extensive defence structures such as moats and trenches (Iyàrà) such as those of the Ife Empire and the better known Eredo Sungbo that completely circumferenced the nascent Ijebu Kingdom, while others had tall walls and ramparts such as Oyo ile, capital of the Oyo empire, reported to have ten gates in the outer wall which was more than 20 feet high. These Yoruba urban centres were historically some of the most populated not only in West Africa, but also on the continent. Archaeological findings indicate that Òyó-Ilé or ''Katunga'', capital of the Yoruba empire of Oyo (fl. between the 16th and 19th centuries CE), had more than 100,000 inhabitants. For a long time also, another major Yoruba city, Ibadan which expanded rapidly in the 1800s, took the title. Today, Lagos () has become the largest urban centre of the Yoruba people and on the continent displacing Ibadan to second place with a populace of over twenty million.

Archaeologically, the settlement of Ile-Ife showed features of urbanism in the 12th–14th-century era. This period coincided with the peak of the Ife Empire, during which Ile-Ife grew into one of West Africa's largest urban centers. In the period around 1300 CE when glass bead production reached an Industrial scale, floors were paved with potsherds and stones. The artists at Ile-Ife developed a refined and naturalistic sculptural tradition in terracotta, stone, and copper alloy – copper, brass, and bronze many of which appear to have been created under the patronage of King Obalufon II, the man who today is identified as the Yoruba patron deity of brass casting, weaving and regalia. The dynasty of kings at Ile-Ife, which is regarded by the Yoruba as the place of origin of human civilization, remains intact to this day. The urban phase of Ile-Ife before the rise of Oyo, which represented a peak of political centralization in the 14th century, is commonly described as a "golden age" of Ife. The Oba or ruler of Ile-Ife is referred to as the Ooni of Ife.

Oyo, Ile-Ife and Lagos

Ife continues to be seen as the " spiritual homeland" of the Yoruba. The city was surpassed by the Oyo Empire as the dominant Yoruba military and political power in the 11th century.

The Oyo Empire under its Oba, known as the Alaafin of Oyo, was active in the African slave trade during the 18th century. The Yoruba often demanded slaves as a form of tribute of subject populations, who in turn sometimes made war on other peoples to capture the required slaves. Part of the slaves sold by the Oyo Empire entered the Atlantic slave trade.

Most of the city states were controlled by Obas (or royal sovereigns with various individual titles) and councils made up of Oloye, recognized leaders of royal, noble and, often, even common descent, who joined them in ruling over the kingdoms through a series of guilds and cults. Different states saw differing ratios of power between the kingships and the chiefs' councils. Some, such as Oyo, had powerful, autocratic monarchs with almost total control, while in others such as the Ijebu city-states, the senatorial councils held more influence and the power of the ruler or ''Ọba'', referred to as the Awujale of Ijebuland, was more limited.

In more recent decades, Lagos has risen to be the most prominent city of the Yoruba people and Yoruba cultural and economic influence. Noteworthy among the developments of Lagos were uniquely styled architecture introduced by returning Yoruba communities from Brazil and Cuba known as Amaros/Agudas.

Yoruba settlements are often described as primarily one or more of the main social groupings called "generations":
* The "first generation" includes towns and cities known as original capitals of founding Yoruba kingdoms or states.
* The "second generation" consists of settlements created by conquest.
* The "third generation" consists of villages and municipalities that emerged following the internecine wars of the 19th century.

Language

The Yoruba culture was originally an oral tradition, and the majority of Yoruba people are native speakers of the Yoruba language. The number of speakers was estimated to be about 30 million as of 2010. Yoruba is classified within the Edekiri languages, and together with the isolate Igala, form the Yoruboid group of languages within what we now have as West Africa. Igala and Yoruba have important historical and cultural relationships. The languages of the two ethnic groups bear such a close resemblance that researchers such as Forde (1951) and Westermann and Bryan (1952) regarded Igala as a dialect of Yoruba.

The Yoruboid languages are assumed to have developed out of an undifferentiated Volta-Niger group by the first millennium BCE. There are three major dialect areas: Northwest, Central, and Southeast. As the North-West Yoruba dialects show more linguistic innovation, combined with the fact that Southeast and Central Yoruba areas generally have older settlements, suggests a later date of immigration into Northwestern Yoruba territory. The area where North-West Yoruba (NWY) is spoken corresponds to the historical Oyo Empire. South-East Yoruba (SEY) was closely associated with the expansion of the Benin Empire after c. 1450. Central Yoruba forms a transitional area in that the lexicon has much in common with NWY, whereas it shares many ethnographical features with SEY.

Literary Yoruba is the standard variety taught in schools and spoken by newsreaders on the radio. It is mostly entirely based on northwestern Yoruba dialects of the Oyos and the Egbas, and has its origins in two sources; The work of Yoruba Christian missionaries based mostly in the Egba hinterland at Abeokuta, and the Yoruba grammar compiled in the 1850s by Bishop Crowther, who himself was a Sierra Leonean Recaptive of Oyo origin. This was exemplified by the following remark by Adetugbọ (1967), as cited in Fagborun (1994): "While the orthography agreed upon by the missionaries represented to a very large degree the phonemes of the Abẹokuta dialect, the morpho-syntax reflected the Ọyọ-Ibadan dialects."

Group identity

Yoruba people have a sense of group identity around a number of cultural concepts, beliefs and practices recognizable by all members of the ethnic group. Prominent among these, is the tracing of the entire Yoruba body through dynastic migrations to roots formed in Ile-Ife, an ancient city in the forested heart of central Yorubaland and its acceptance as the spiritual nucleus of Yoruba existence. Following this linkage to the ancient city of Ife is the acknowledgement of an historic crowned king, Oduduwa, a personage nominally considered the 'father' of the Yoruba people. According to Ife's own account, Oduduwa 'descended' into the originally thirteen semi-autonomous proto-Ife communities which existed in a state of confederacy based around a swampy depression surrounded by seven hills that would later on become Ife from the community of Oke Ora, an elevated abode located at the summit of a hill to Ife's East. The intervention of Oduduwa, a native of Oke Ora and considered an outsider in the politics of the Ife valley, is widely acknowledged in Ife to be the turning point that revolutionized the politics of the confederacy which was at the time, led by Obatala.

Beyond the historical accounts surrounding Ife and its ancient rulership, more cultural markers which unite the Yoruba people as members of the same ethnicity include the universal recognition of a number of spiritual concepts and chief divinities (Orisha), who have achieved pan-Yoruba statuses. These divinities are venerated as embodiments of natural forces and divine power. They are also the mediators between the common people and Olodumare, God. They include some now well-known divinities as; Obatala, Ogun, Orunmila, Osun, Eshu, Olokun, Yemoja, Osanyin, and Shango, Among others. These are now recognizable in the New World as divinities brought across the Atlantic by people of Yoruba descent. There in their new ex-situ environment, they serve as a mechanism of maintaining group identity, as well as a powerful connection to the Yoruba homeland among people of Yoruba descent and others. Examples of such new world practices are: Santeria, Candomble, Umbanda, Kélé and Trinidad Orisha, which are not only religious societies, but also actual ethnic societies for those who sought to maintain their unique heritages over time, although anyone could join as long as they became immersed in the Yoruba worldview.

Linguistically, the Yoruboid languages, and in particular the Edekiri subgroup, form a closed group of mutually intelligible dialects which strongly bound the people who speak them together as members of the same linguistic community. This dialectal area spans from the lands of the Ana-Ife people in central Togo and eastern Ghana eastwards to the lands of the Itsekiri people in the western Niger Delta around the Formosa (Benin) and Escravos river estuaries. This span of land, inhabited by geographically contiguous and culturally related subgroups, were divided into separate national and subnational units under the control of different European powers as a result of the Berlin Conference in 19th century Europe and the resultant administration. The Yoruba also notably developed a common identity under the influence of Oyo, a regional empire that developed in the northwestern savanna section of yorubaland as a result of a kingdom founding migration from Ife. As opposed to Oyo which was a highly militaristic grassland polity, the Ife Empire was forest based and spread its influence rather through religion, politics, philosophical Ideology and commerce between 1200 and the mid-1400s. With the decline of Ife, Oyo expanded as the new Yoruba power and established its own influences over Kingdoms stretching from central Togo in the west to central Yorubaland in the east, and from the Niger river in the north to the Atlantic coast in the south, taking in the whole of Dahomey, southern Borgu, the Mahi states, southern Nupe and the Aja people. Between the 16th and 19th centuries, Oyo had numerous campaigns in the region and established a reputation among the neighbouring kingdoms of; Ashanti, Dahomey, Borgu, Nupe, Igala and Benin as well as further afield in the lands of the Songhai, Hausa Kingdoms and others, solidifying its place in the greater region as a powerhouse strategically placed between the forest and the Savanna and representative of a cultural unit it powerfully defended and stood in association with. During the 18th century, in the days of Ajagbo, an Oba of Oyo, the rulers of the Yoruba-speaking kingdoms of Oyo, Egba, Ketu, and Ijebu styled each other "brothers" while recognizing the leadership role Oyo plays among them.

At the beginning of the 19th century, the Yoruba community was made up of the following principal units; The British colony of Lagos, traditionally called Eko; Ketu, a western Yoruba state bordering the kingdom of Dahomey; Egba, with its capital at Abeokuta; Ijebu, a southern Yoruba kingdom in the immediate vicinity of an inland lagoon; A confederation of Ekiti sub-tribes in the hilly country to the northeast; Ibadan, a successor republican state to Oyo; Ijesha; The historic kingdom of Ife which continued to maintain its sacred primacy; Ondo, on the east; The littoral Mahin/Ilaje on the southeastern maritime coast, and several other smaller states such as the Egbado, Akoko groups, Yagba, Awori as well as independent townships, consisting of a town and its outlying dependent villages such as Oke odan, Ado, Igbessa.

Various other cultural factors which bind the Yoruba people include historic dynastic migrations of royals and the micro migrations of people within the Yoruba cultural space which has led to the mixing of people evidenced by the duplication and multiplication of place names and royal titles across Yoruba country. Today, places with names containing; Owu, Ifon, Ife, Ado, etc., can be found scattered across Yorubaland regardless of subgroup. The same can be observed of certain localized royal titles, e.g. Ajalorun, Owa, and Olu. Olofin, the original title of Oduduwa in Ife, is remembered in the lore of most places in Yorubaland. Occupational engagements like farming, hunting, crafting, blacksmithing, trading, as well as fishing for the coastal or riparian groups are commonplace. Joint customs in greeting, birth, marriage and death, a strong sense of community, urbanism, festivities and a respect for the elderly are also all universal Yoruba concepts.

Pre-colonial government of Yoruba society

Government

Monarchies were a common form of government in Yorubaland, but they were not the only approach to government and social organization. The numerous Ijebu kingdom city-states to the west of Oyo and the Egba people communities, found in the forests below Ọyọ's savanna region, were notable exceptions. These independent polities often elected a king though real political, legislative, and judicial powers resided with the '' Ogboni'', a council of notable elders. The notion of the divine king was so important to the Yoruba, however, that it has been part of their organization in its various forms from their antiquity to the contemporary era.

During the internecine wars of the 19th century, the Ijebu forced citizens of more than 150 Ẹgba and Owu communities to migrate to the fortified city of Abeokuta. Each quarter retained its own ''Ogboni'' council of civilian leaders, along with an ''Olorogun'', or council of military leaders, and in some cases, its own elected ''Obas'' or ''Baales''. These independent councils elected their most capable members to join a federal civilian and military council that represented the city as a whole. Commander Frederick Forbes, a representative of the British Crown writing an account of his visit to the city in the ''Church Military Intelligencer'' (1853), described Abẹokuta as having "four presidents", and the system of government as having "840 principal rulers or 'House of Lords,' 2800 secondary chiefs or 'House of Commons,' 140 principal military ones and 280 secondary ones." He described Abẹokuta and its system of government as "the most extraordinary republic in the world."

Leadership

Gerontocratic leadership councils that guarded against the monopolization of power by a monarch were a trait of the Ẹgba, according to the eminent Ọyọ historian Reverend Samuel Johnson. Such councils were also well-developed among the northern Okun groups, the eastern Ekiti, and other groups falling under the Yoruba ethnic umbrella. In Ọyọ, the most centralized of the precolonial kingdoms, the ''Alaafin'' consulted on all political decisions with the prime minister and principal kingmaker (the ''Basọrun'') and the rest of the council of leading nobles known as the '' Ọyọ Mesi''.

Traditionally kingship and chieftainship were not determined by simple primogeniture, as in most monarchic systems of government. An electoral college of lineage heads was and still is usually charged with selecting a member of one of the royal families from any given realm, and the selection is then confirmed by an Ifá oracular request. The Ọbas live in palaces that are usually in the center of the town. Opposite the king's palace is the ''Ọja Ọba'', or the king's market. These markets form an inherent part of Yoruba life. Traditionally their traders are well organized, have various guilds, officers, and an elected speaker. They also often have at least one '' Iyaloja'', or Lady of the Market, who is expected to represent their interests in the aristocratic council of oloyes at the palace.

City-states

The monarchy of any city-state was usually limited to a number of royal lineages. A family could be excluded from kingship and chieftaincy if any family member, servant, or slave belonging to the family committed a crime, such as theft, fraud, murder or rape. In other city-states, the monarchy was open to the election of any free-born male citizen. In Ilesa, Ondo, Akure

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