The Yoruba

A New History

Akinwumi Ogundiran

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780253051486, 9780253051486
• eBook ISBN: 9780253051523
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

The Yoruba: A New History  is the first transdisciplinary study of the two-thousand-year journey of the Yoruba people, from their origins in a small corner of the Niger-Benue Confluence in present-day Nigeria to becoming one of the most populous cultural groups on the African continent. 

Weaving together archaeology with linguistics, environmental science with oral traditions, and material culture with mythology, Ogundiran examines the local, regional, and even global dimensions of Yoruba history. The Yoruba: A New History  offers an intriguing cultural, political, economic, intellectual, and social history from ca. 300 BC to 1840. It accounts for the events, peoples, and practices, as well as the theories of knowledge, ways of being, and social valuations that shaped the Yoruba experience at different junctures of time. The result is a new framework for understanding the Yoruba past and present.

Part I:

Introduction

1

Writing a New History

EVERYTHING HAS A HISTORY. THIS simple, self-evident statement is universally true, whether we are talking about social or natural life; time or tradition; an object, an idea, or an institution; a practice or a person; a community, a place, a polity, or a people.¹ When we apply this maxim to a people and their culture, we immediately face questions of origins and beginnings, the processes of their becoming, and the practices that constituted their experience across different horizons of time. However, this simple truth that “everything has a history” is not always self-evident in the scholarship on African peoples, cultures, and practices, to say nothing of policies and public commentaries about them. This situation is particularly glaring in Yorùbá studies. Although the literature on the Yorùbá is vast and represents some of the groundbreaking works of African studies,² the deep-time history that defines the Yorùbá experience and its process of becoming are poorly understood. There is an abundance of structural analysis of Yorùbá cultural forms, but the historical analysis is lacking or inadequate in most of those studies. As a result of this gap, we have a growing body of literature that flattens the deep-time Yorùbá history and treats culture as fossilized in a timeless past. Traditions are treated as if they have repeated themselves over several centuries without change. At worst, this void has been lately filled with unrestrained and sometimes grotesque speculations by some entrepreneurial members of the public and scholars. At best, the tendency has been to represent the period of the Christian missionaries and colonial encounters of the mid-nineteenth century as the locus and gravitational center of cultural change rather than seeing the effects of colonialism as a continuum of deep-time changes stretching back at least two millennia.

This problem, which I seek to rectify, represents both the legacy of colonial historiography and the unfinished agenda for a decolonized African historiography. The intellectual project of the British, French, and German colonial administrations that partitioned and incorporated the Yorùbá region into Nigeria, Benin Republic, and Togoland respectively was based on the principles of functionalism and structuralism. Both offer an ahistorical perspective of the colonized traditions and their precolonial past. The European colonial administrations, through their institutions of government, the law, and education, succeeded in creating a fossilized sense of the past for the so-called natives (colonized). Both colonial anthropologists and administrative officers obscured the role of colonized people and their ancestors as historical agents, bracketed off native cultures as unchanging, and constituted the colonized as an object rather than a subject of social life.³

In the waning years of European colonial rule in Africa and the early years of independence, the 1950s–1960s, there was a sense of urgency on the part of African intellectuals and political leaders, and their non-African allies, to account for the precolonial history of the erstwhile colonial subjects who were now citizens of independent states. The goal was to develop a new historiography that would indigenize academic history by aligning it with the critical self-awareness of Africans. A large part of this concern focused on the issue of methodology—that is, appropriate sources that would disclose Africa’s deep-time historical sensibility. Another aspect of this decolonizing agenda was the quest to infuse the study of African history with African epistemologies.⁴ Hence, there have been several periodic evaluations of alternative sources and theories for studying African history outside the colonial archives and beyond the limits of Western worldviews and epistemologies.⁵ An early response to this decolonizing agenda in Yorùbá historiography was the eclectic methodology that Saburi Biobaku and his collaborators outlined in Sources of Yorùbá History, published in 1973. However, most of the novel sources discussed in that book have not moved beyond the occasional explorations and reflective critiques. No one has implemented the kind of transdisciplinary research agenda proposed in Sources for conceptualizing and writing a comprehensive Yorùbá history. Of the nine “nonwritten” sources that the book identifies, only archaeology has provided a sustained interest in deep-time Yorùbá history.⁶ However, these archaeological interests have focused on the familiar staples of disciplinary themes such as urbanization, migration, political formation, regional interactions, technology, and trade.⁷ While archaeologists have been able to divide local archaeological assemblages into stratigraphic and chronological sequences, they have not engaged a regional history that is grounded in Yorùbá theories of knowledge, ways of being, logics of value, experience of time, and history of practice.

It is not surprising, then, that the historiography of Yorùbá’s deep past continues to reproduce presentist epistemologies and is unable to recover multiple layers of social temporalities (experiences of time). This historiography not only assumes a static ontology but also privileges an essentialist conceptualization of culture and tradition, even when most scholars agree in principle that all of these are “eternally in motion.”⁸ Moreover, most archaeologists and other scholars of history have generally deferred to Eurocentric periodization schemes that masquerade as universal.⁹ Instead of using their findings to challenge and revise the structures of temporality and periodization imposed (through colonialism) on the Yorùbá experience of time, these scholars have tended to place their stratigraphies, artifact typologies, and oral traditions into European-centered chronologies that speak more to the Western experience of time and global hegemony rather than to Yorùbá social temporality.¹⁰ One of the repercussions of this situation is that scholars of Yorùbá history have been unable to reconcile archaeological stratigraphy with social stratigraphy, events with structure, innovation with tradition, change with continuity, and ideas with practice. Likewise, theoretical reflexivity that is rooted in everyday philosophy has not been used to interrogate historical sources and questions. Oral traditions tend to be taken at face value, and myth-historical accounts are rarely placed in the context of the experiences that produced them. Hence, despite the large volume of scholarship in Yorùbá studies, and Yorùbá history in particular, we still lack an understanding of the events and eventfulness, meanings and motivations, and social actors and processes of social valuation that shaped the ancestral Yorùbá experiences in the long term. Yet this historicized understanding must be foundational to the project of Yorùbá studies. Without this, one cannot understand the local contexts that shaped Yorùbá experience in the long term and gave it its unique qualities as an integral part of global history. Neither can we engage the Yorùbá cultural forms in cross-cultural comparison, the mainstay of anthropological interest.

To begin to fill these gaps, my goal is to write a regional deep-time history of the Yorùbá that places practices and cultural forms in specific historical contexts and delineates new chronologies that are compatible with ancestral Yorùbá experience in local, regional, and global contexts. Other scholars have pursued similar goals for other regions and cultural groups in Africa, mostly in eastern, central, and southern parts of the continent. Those studies are of two types. The first is a rapidly growing body of historical studies inspired by linguistic-historical methodology, a “capacious source of evidence about history and culture.”¹¹ Linguistic history is an autonomous field with its own methods, theories, and assumptions. However, its Africanist practitioners’ commitment to a rigorous interdisciplinary methodology that ties systematic phonological reconstruction to archaeology, historical ethnography, materiality, and oral traditions has made linguistic history an important subfield in African historical studies. As a result, it has made significant contributions to the deep-time cultural history of Africa.¹² Most of those studies have been conducted in East and Central Africa, and they have focused on a wide range of topics, from indigenous technology, agricultural innovations, and subsistence practices to regional interactions, migrations, trade, political tradition, religion and worldview, gender, health, and the environment.¹³ The second group of these deep-time historical studies is primarily based on archaeological data but with additive components of oral traditions and documentary sources. These are mainly regional studies and works of synthesis that seek to write the history of cultural groups and intergroup relations rather than the history of a sociopolitical entity. They have focused on questions about everyday lives, trade, sociopolitical formation and collapse, regional interactions, and technology.¹⁴

The deep-time perspectives of those regional studies, especially the attentiveness of linguist historians to African epistemologies in their interpretation of cultural forms across multiple horizons of time, have inspired my efforts in this book. However, I take a different conceptual and methodological path. The story of deep-time Yorùbá experience that I tell here is grounded in archaeology, material science, everyday objects, oral traditions, everyday language, visual arts, epic poetry, and myth-history, with additional insights from linguistic (phonology) and documentary sources. It is also informed by comparative and cross-cultural analysis and by empirically tested anthropological theories. Beginning with the Later Stone Age / Iron Age transitions in West Africa, the book covers seven overlapping time periods: the Archaic (300 BC–AD 300), Early Formative (250–750), Late Formative (650–1050), Classical (1000–1420), Intermediate (1400–1570s), Restoration (1570s–1650), and Atlantic (1630–1840) periods (table 1.1). These slices of social time are not self-contained. They overlap because practices, events, cultural forms, and ideas—the focus of this book—percolated through them. The story that I will use this periodization framework to tell is one of change and continuity.¹⁵

Yorùbá: Ethnonym and Community of Practice

The book is genre bending in the sense that economic, cultural, environmental, political, gender, and social histories, among others, are intertwined. It is therefore important to examine the conceptual frameworks and scope of the book. The most important place to start is with the term Yorùbá as an analytical category and a unit of study. Today, Yorùbá refers to a language, a culture, and a people who are self-aware of their geographical, temporal, and historical relationships, as well as their internal similarities and differences. Scholars have used the term mostly as an ethnolinguistic category to encompass people who speak a continuum of more than thirty-five mutually intelligible dialects and whose ancestral homeland stretches between present-day southwest Nigeria and Togo.¹⁶ This emphasis on ethnolinguistic conceptualization has led to two dominant approaches in Yorùbá studies. The first is the static ethnographic construct that reduces the Yorùbá to the sum of, or differences between, the dialects that compose the Yorùbá language group. The second approach, dominant in the historiography but not less static in conception, treats the Yorùbá regional history as an aggregate of the history of several kingdoms. Each of these kingdoms is treated as representing one of the Yorùbá dialect groups so that, for example, the history of the Ifẹ̀ subgroup is reduced to the assumed spatially circumscribed political history of Ilé-Ifẹ̀; Iléṣà kingdom served the same purpose for the Ìjẹ̀sà subgroup, and Ìjẹ̀bú-Òde for the Ìjẹ̀bú. Both of these approaches imply that these dialects and kingdoms are fossilized entities and products of a “big bang” simultaneous creation. Yet historical traditions, social memory, embodied practices, material culture, and archaeological data point to the fact that neither approach is accurate. The history of a dialect group is more than the history of a kingdom, and vice versa. Therefore, I depart from these two approaches that reinforce a static and reductionist sensibility of the past.

Table 1.1. Periodization for the Yorùbá Cultural History

Periods	Approx. Years (circa)	Major Characteristics and Events
Pre-Archaic	2500–300 BC	The proto-Yoruboid evolved as a territorial language and cultural group around the Niger-Benue Confluence.
Archaic	300 BC–AD 300	Era of intense drought; southward migrations from the ancestral Yoruboid homeland; and splitting of proto-Yoruboid into three daughter language groups—proto-Igala, proto-Ìtsekírì, and proto-Yorùbá—by AD 300.
Early Formative	AD 250–750	Stable annual rainfall returned; rapid population growth and expansion; proliferation of Yorùbá dialect branching; emergence of a full-fledged House society with formalized p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Birth of the Yorùbá Community of Practice, ca. 300 BC–AD 1420
• Part III: Atrophy and Regeneration, ca. 1400–1650
• Part IV: Atlantic Entanglements, 1630–1840
• Part V: Conclusion
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Notes on Orthography and Glossary of Yorùbá Words
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author