The Physical Form of a Yoruba Town
What a Yoruba town is made of, the palace at the centre, the market before it, the wards and compounds around it, and the wall and ditch that closed it in.
A Yoruba town has a standard form, and once you know it you can read any of them. At the centre is the palace. Immediately in front of the palace is the market. Roads run outward from the palace like the spokes of a wheel, and the town's wards are strung along them. Each ward is a set of compounds, each compound a group of buildings around a courtyard behind a single gate. Around the whole thing runs a bank and ditch, and beyond that the farmland of the descent groups, and beyond that the forest belt with the shrines in it.
That form was in place long before the nineteenth century and it produced one of the most urbanised societies in pre-colonial Africa. In the nineteenth century six Yoruba cities exceeded forty thousand inhabitants, another six held between ten and twenty thousand, five held between five and ten thousand and five more between one and five thousand . The six largest were Ìbàdàn, Ìlọrin, Ìwó, Abẹ́òkúta, Òṣogbo and Èdè .
The palace
The ààfin is not a house. It is a walled quarter, a sprawling complex of buildings, courtyards, public rooms, shrines and private apartments, housing the ruler's wives, functionaries, eunuchs, messengers, priests, clients and slaves . It is simultaneously residence, court, shrine, treasury and administrative office.
The scale can be very large. The Ọ̀yọ́-Ilé palace was enclosed within a perimeter wall of about 7.5 kilometres, and the estimate for its extent runs to about a square mile; the New Ọ̀yọ́ palace as recorded in the 1930s consisted of thirty courtyards over seventeen acres . The palace at Ọ̀wọ̀, Aghọfẹn, is described with up to a hundred courtyards, each with a function and dedicated to a deity, and about a thousand rooms over a hundred and eighty acres .
The internal unit is the courtyard, ugha in the Ọ̀wọ̀ usage, and its multiplication is how the palace grows. Each courtyard has a function and often a dedication, which means the palace is also a map of the town's ritual obligations.
Building was in solid earth, rectilinear, with rooms in parallel ranges around courtyards . These structures leave few standing remains, but the melted mud survives as low banks preserving the ground plans, which is why the ruined palace at Ọ̀yọ́-Ilé is still legible to archaeological survey . Palace floors and courtyards were paved: with potsherds set on edge in the Ifẹ̀ tradition, with quartz pebbles or broken pottery at Ọ̀wọ̀ . Verandah pillars were carved, at Ọ̀wọ̀ with the king mounted on a horse or with his senior wife , and the carved post, door and lintel ensemble is the standard Yoruba palace art form, of which Olówè of Ìsẹ̀'s work for the Ògògà of Ìkẹ́rẹ́ is the best-known example.
The market
The ọjà ọba, the king's market, sits directly before the palace, and its position is not incidental. Putting the market at the palace gate places commerce under the ruler's eye and the ruler under the market's, and it makes the two central institutions of the town physically adjacent.
Yoruba markets run on a cycle rather than daily, conventionally every four or five days on the Yoruba week, with the periodic market drawing from a wide catchment and a smaller daily market operating alongside. The market is organised and policed by women through the Ìyálóde and the trade-head system, which is why the Ìyálóde is a real office with real authority and not a courtesy title, and why the Abẹ́òkúta and Lagos market women's organisations could mount serious political action in the twentieth century.
At Ondó the connection is made explicit in the institution itself: the Lóbùn, the female king, is in charge of the community market and is priestess of Ajé, the deity of wealth, and lóbùn is glossed as owner of the market .
Wards and compounds
The town divides into wards under title-holders, and the word differs by region: adúgbò at Ọ̀yọ́ and Ifẹ̀, ìtun in Ìjẹ̀bú, ìdìmí at Ondó . Wards are subdivided into compounds, and compounds into separate houses .
The compound, agbo ilé, is the basic residential and social unit: a cluster of buildings behind a single gated entrance around a large courtyard . It houses a patrilineage, its wives and dependants, and it functions as a property-holding, labour-organising and dispute-resolving body. A Yoruba person's primary social address is the compound, not the town.
There is a real regional difference in how compounds sit together. In the northern cities compounds share perimeter walls, so that the built fabric is continuous; in the southern cities, Ìjẹ̀bú-Òde as the type case, houses follow more regular grid patterns with separated alleyways . Dr Irving, writing of Ìjẹ̀bú-Òde in 1854 to 1855, recorded neat well-built houses and clear open spaces with regular alleys, alongside walls higher than elsewhere and buttressed on the outside, and a two-storey square vermilion-coloured tower, thatched and loopholed for musketry .
The house form is the impluvial courtyard house, with rooms opening inward onto an open court that catches rain into a sunken basin. It is the standard Yoruba domestic form and it is documented archaeologically at Ifẹ̀ in open impluvial-courtyard compounds with stone and potsherd mosaic areas and semi-circular cutaway sections for earthen altars .
The radial plan and its exception
The palace is the focal point from which roads radiate outward like the spokes of a wheel, continuing through the town gates and becoming the routes to the frontiers of the kingdom . Wards cluster along those roads, and the farms belonging to descent groups extend beyond the wards .
Ilésà is a clean example: the classical layout with the palace at the centre, roads radiating outward, wards clustered along the main roads and descent-group farms beyond, within mud-built walls and a ditch three kilometres across .
Ìbàdàn is the exception and it proves the rule. Ìbàdàn grew as clusters of compounds settled by the followers and clients of individual war chiefs, with districts named after the chiefs or early residents who anchored them, and it has no systematic administrative quarter structure of the kind Ifẹ̀, Ọ̀yọ́ or Ìjẹ̀bú-Òde have . A town founded by a coalition of warlords rather than by a dynasty produces a map of patronage rather than a map of office, and Ìbàdàn's is the only major Yoruba town whose plan records that.
The potsherd pavement
The distinctive Ifẹ̀ urban feature is the potsherd pavement: floors and streets laid in broken pottery set on edge, frequently in herringbone patterns, sometimes with stone. It dates the built city to roughly the twelfth to fourteenth centuries and pavement fragments are found within a six-kilometre radius of the town centre .
Ifẹ̀ at its fourteenth or fifteenth-century peak is estimated at seventy thousand to a hundred and five thousand people, which is to say a medieval city as large as a nineteenth-century walled town .
Population figures and how to handle them
The figures available are estimates and they should be reported as such. The documented ones include Ọ̀yọ́-Ilé at sixty thousand to a hundred and forty thousand at its eighteenth-century peak over more than five thousand hectares ; Ìbàdàn reaching a hundred thousand in the nineteenth century and later exceeding two hundred thousand ; Abẹ́òkúta at about sixty thousand by the 1850s ; Ilésà at thirty to forty thousand at its height with territory extending twenty to thirty kilometres and more than a hundred and sixty subordinate settlements ; and Ifẹ̀ at seventy to a hundred and five thousand in the classical period .
What those numbers support is the general point: this was an urban society, with a substantial proportion of the population living in towns and farming out from them, which is the reverse of the pattern usually assumed for pre-colonial West Africa.
The farm and the forest
Beyond the wards lie the farms of the descent groups , and beyond the farms the forest belt. The forest belt held the groves, and the groves held the shrines.
That outer ring has almost entirely gone, cleared for cultivation and settlement over the last century, and its disappearance is the single largest change to the Yoruba town form in the modern period. The Ọ̀ṣun grove at Òṣogbo, at seventy-five hectares with a forty-seven-hectare buffer, is described as one of the last remnants of the primary high forest that once bordered every Yoruba city . The grove is on the World Heritage List; the form it represents is otherwise nearly extinct.