Parcourir

A documented history of the process by which Yorùbá religion was reframed as satanic, from the missionary encounter through colonial vocabulary, Nigerian Pentecostalism and Nollywood, followed by what the tradition actually holds.

What Yorùbá proverbs do in speech and in law, and a worked collection of more than forty proverbs in original, literal gloss, and idiomatic English.

How missionary and colonial translation produced the English words now used for Yorùbá religion, what Crowther's Bible did to Yorùbá religious vocabulary, how Èṣù came to mean Satan, and how to read older sources critically.

The CMS mission and Crowther, how and why Yoruba people converted to two world religions, the British annexation, indirect rule and what it did to kingship, and the making of "Yoruba" as one identity.

The two-part Yoruba cosmos, why translating orun as "heaven" and aye as "earth" gets it wrong, how the two are joined rather than opposed, and what the calabash image actually claims.

The concept that runs from "so be it" at the end of a prayer to the force by which anything happens at all, why both "power" and "life force" are inadequate translations, and how ase works in speech, ritual and art.

What Esu is in the Yoruba sources, why the divination system cannot function without him, and the documented history of the missionary translation that turned him into Satan.

How Yoruba philosophical concepts map and fail to map onto Greek, Christian, Islamic and modern Western categories, and what goes wrong when the translation is made anyway.

The verses filed under each Odù are case reports in verse, built to a described eight-part structure, held collectively across practitioners rather than by any one person.

The competing scholarly definitions of òrìṣà, why "god" and "idol" are bad translations, what the numbers 201 and 401 are doing, and how òrìṣà relate to Olódùmarè and to the dead.

Yoruba song across work, ritual, nursing, children's play and social comment, with texts, and the problem of translating a song so that it can still be sung.

What àwọn ìyá wa actually names, why "witch" mistranslates it, the ambivalence built into the power, Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ as the institutional answer to it, and the Atinga witch-hunt of 1950-51 with Apter's cocoa-economy explanation.

Samuel Àjàyí Crowther was an enslaved Yoruba youth who became the first African Anglican bishop, standardizer of the written Yoruba language, and primary translator of the Yoruba Bible.

The life, academic scholarship, spiritual office, and global cultural impact of Wande Abimbola, the pioneer of academic Ifa literary studies and Awise Awo Agbaye.

Scholarly biography and linguistic evaluation of Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún, detailing his contributions to Yorùbá digital lexicography, computational language technology, translation, and cultural archiving.

A comprehensive scholarly analysis of Ọ̀wọ́nrín Méjì, examining its binary signature, regional ranking variations across West Africa and the diaspora, verse morphology, and documented academic literature.

Àṣẹ is not power, life force, or the word for "amen." It is what makes an utterance take effect, and holding that single fact explains why Yoruba tradition invested so heavily in oral art instead of writing.

How oríkì is built from independent units rather than narrative sequence, and the specific mechanisms, tonal, structural, and referential, that make it resist translation.

A historical and scholarly examination of the translation of the Yorùbá deity Èṣù into the Christian Satan, the nineteenth-century colonial mechanisms of that conflation, and twentieth-century academic rehabilitations.

An analysis of colonial and missionary vocabulary shifts, examining how European terms like fetish and juju, alongside translated Yoruba concepts like Èṣù, Òrìṣà, and Olódùmarè, were reconfigured during nineteenth-century religious encounters.

An analysis of how English kin categories distort indigenous Yorùbá social organization by replacing seniority and lineage membership with biological sex and nuclear family assumptions.