Parcourir

How the collapse of Ọ̀yọ́ and the wars that followed fed the last decades of the Atlantic trade, why so many Yoruba ended up in Cuba and Brazil, and what returned.

Captured as a boy at Òṣogun and sold three times in a day, he became the first African Anglican bishop, wrote the first serious Yoruba grammar and dictionary, translated the Bible into Yoruba, and was broken at the end of his life by younger European missionaries.

James "Holy" Johnson, Mọjọlá Agbébí and the generation of Sierra Leonean returnee clergy who took mission Christianity, found it would not admit them to leadership, and built African churches instead.

The Kakanfò who went to war over a constitutional principle and lost his town, and the hunter who led the Ẹ̀gbá refugees to the rock at Abẹ́òkúta and governed them without a king.

How Abẹ́òkúta went from a chief without a crown to a crowned Aláké in 1854, and the attempt by returnee intellectuals and traditional chiefs to build a modern state there that collapsed in 1874.

The pastor at Ọ̀yọ́ who wrote the book that made Yoruba history, the manuscript's loss and reconstruction, and the generation of Lagos men who first wrote Yoruba people into the record themselves.

The Yoruba people who came back, from Sierra Leone and from Brazil and Cuba, and what they built in Lagos: the mosques, the Brazilian quarter, the newspapers, and a babaláwo who carried Ifá back across the Atlantic.

The island town with three overlapping origins, its Àwórì land-owning chiefs, its Benin-derived kingship, the 1851 bombardment and 1861 cession, and the Brazilian quarter the returnees built.

What the century of wars did to Yoruba women: as captives and ransomed persons, as provisioners and arms dealers, as slaveholders and traders, as returnees building a new elite, and what it did to their position overall.