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This is a reference corpus on Yorùbá culture, history and thought, built for the curious, the practising, the skeptical and the scholarly alike. It is not a devotional text, it is not an apologetic, and it is not an attack on anyone's faith. It describes what is documented, names who documented it, and marks clearly where the documentation runs out. The method is the same regardless of why you came: a claim earns its place by evidence, not by which conclusion is comfortable.

The Yorùbá are one of the largest ethno-linguistic groups in Africa, numbering somewhere near fifty million people, concentrated in southwestern Nigeria with substantial populations in Benin and Togo and a diaspora across the Americas that is older than most modern nations 12. They built cities before contact with Europe, ran a divination system with a mathematically formal structure and a memorised corpus in the hundreds of thousands of verses, produced sculpture in copper alloy that European curators initially refused to believe was African, and are today majority Christian and Muslim in roughly equal parts 34. All of these are true at once, and the difficulty of holding them together is most of what this corpus exists to address.

Who the Yorùbá are

Numbers

Estimates vary by method and none of them are census-precise. Nigeria's own census figures are politically contested and have not been reliably disaggregated by ethnicity since 1963. Working figures in current use put the total Yorùbá population at roughly fifty million or above 12. Ethnologue counts around forty-eight million first-language speakers of Yorùbá with a further two million second-language speakers, which is a language count rather than an ethnic one but is the more methodologically defensible number 2. Benin holds on the order of 1.6 million and Togo on the order of a hundred thousand 1.

Treat all of these as orders of magnitude. What is not in doubt is that Yorùbá is among the most widely spoken African languages and that the Yorùbá are among the three largest ethnic groups in Nigeria alongside the Hausa and the Igbo 1.

The homeland

The Yorùbá-speaking region occupies southwestern Nigeria and extends west across the international border into the Republic of Benin and into eastern Togo. In Nigeria this covers Ọ̀yọ́, Ògùn, Ondó, Ọ̀ṣun, Èkìtì and Lagos states, along with Yorùbá-majority areas of Kwara and Kogi. The region is not one polity and never has been. It is a set of related peoples, historically organised as separate kingdoms and city-states with their own dynasties, their own institutions and their own dialects: Ọ̀yọ́, Ijẹ̀bú, Ẹ̀gbá, Ìjẹ̀ṣà, Èkìtì, Ondó, Ọ̀wọ̀, Àwórì, Kétu, Sábẹ̀ and others.

Ilé-Ifẹ̀ holds a particular position as the place the traditions name as the origin of the Yorùbá world and of kingship. That is a claim internal to the tradition and is treated as such in the history section of this corpus, alongside what excavation at Ifẹ̀ has independently established.

The Yorùbá are among the most urbanised populations in pre-colonial Africa. This matters because "traditional African religion" in the popular imagination is village religion, and the Yorùbá case does not fit: the òrìṣà and Ifá were the religious apparatus of walled cities with resident kings, palace bureaucracies, guild-organised craft production, long-distance trade and market systems run substantially by women.

The diaspora

The Atlantic slave trade carried very large numbers of Yorùbá-speaking people to the Americas, disproportionately in the final decades of the trade during the nineteenth-century wars 3. Because they arrived late and in concentrated numbers, and because the trade to Cuba and Brazil continued after British abolition, Yorùbá religious and linguistic forms survived in the Americas with unusual completeness. Lucumí and Santería in Cuba, Candomblé Ketu in Brazil, Orisha religion in Trinidad, and the later North American Òrìṣà movements are all in a documented line of descent from Yorùbá practice, transformed by their circumstances rather than preserved unchanged 3.

A more recent diaspora, driven by twentieth and twenty-first century migration, has put substantial Yorùbá populations in the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada. Its relationship to the tradition is different again, because most of its members left Nigeria already Christian or Muslim.

What this corpus is

Six commitments govern every file.

Three registers are never blended. What the tradition says of itself, what historians and archaeologists document, and what colonial and missionary sources claimed are three different kinds of statement with three different kinds of warrant. Mixing them is how both the hostile and the celebratory versions go wrong. The next file, on how this corpus handles evidence, sets out the rule in full.

Every substantive claim carries a source. Inline markers point to a Sources block at the foot of each file. Where a source is weak, that is said. Where scholars disagree, the positions are named and neither is quietly preferred.

Confidence is marked. Each file carries a confidence rating in its frontmatter, and contested material is flagged as contested rather than smoothed into consensus.

Gaps are left open. Some Yorùbá knowledge is initiate-held and is not published. Where that is the case this corpus says so and stops, rather than filling the space with speculation dressed as description.

Yorùbá is written properly. Full diacritics throughout, tone marks and subdots, because ọkọ̀ and ọkọ and ọ̀kọ̀ are different words and writing them all as oko destroys information. Quoted Yorùbá text appears in three layers: original, literal gloss, idiomatic translation, with the translator named.

No advocacy in either direction. This corpus does not argue that Yorùbá tradition is true, does not argue that Christianity or Islam is false, and does not romanticise the pre-colonial past. Description, sourced, is the whole method.

How to use this

The corpus is organised in ten sections. Foundations, which you are reading, is orientation. Language covers Yorùbá as a language, its tone system, its etymology and its oral genres. History reconstructs the past from the archaeological, oral, linguistic and documentary records. Cosmology covers the conceptual system: destiny, character, personhood, the structure of existence. Ifá covers the divination system and its literary corpus. Òrìṣà covers the deities, their priesthoods and their festivals. Arts covers sculpture, textile, architecture, drumming and masquerade. Diaspora covers the American traditions. Social covers kinship, kingship, law, markets and medicine. Onboarding holds plain-language explainers, a glossary, learning paths and a FAQ.

If you are new to all of this, read this file, then the conceptual map at the end of this section, then the fifteen-minute explainers in the onboarding section. That is about ninety minutes and it will orient you completely.

If you practise, or are reconnecting with the tradition, the practice section covers practitioner roles, ẹbọ, ethics and the misconceptions that circulate about all three, and the learning paths file in onboarding has a route built for diaspora Yorùbá specifically.

If you came for Ifá as an information system, read the fifteen-minute Ifá explainer in onboarding first, because it establishes the mechanics correctly, and then the Ifá section. Resist the temptation to skip to the binary structure without the mechanics; the interesting part is not the analogy to computing, it is the actual architecture.

If you want to know how the tradition came to be characterised as devil worship, that history is documented in full in the file on the demonization in this section, with the missionary, colonial and Nollywood record traced to specific decisions and dates. It is the longest and most carefully sourced file here.

The onboarding section also holds a glossary of every Yorùbá term used anywhere in the corpus, with literal glosses, and a pronunciation guide for the diacritics. Both are designed to be kept open in another tab.

What this corpus will not do for you

It will not tell you what to believe. It will not resolve a personal question about faith, inheritance or practice, because that is not a question evidence answers. It will not initiate you into anything, and it cannot: the material that belongs to initiation is not in print and is not here.

It will also not flatter. Some of what is documented here is uncomfortable in both directions. Yorùbá states participated in the Atlantic slave trade as sellers as well as being devastated by it as victims. Human sacrifice existed in specific documented forms in the nineteenth century and was also grossly exaggerated by European observers with an interest in exaggerating it. Some of the most confident claims circulating today about Yorùbá antiquity, Egyptian origins and the invention of computing are not supported by evidence and are addressed directly in the file on what Yorùbá tradition is not. A corpus that could not say those things would not be worth trusting on anything else.