Look Around

The decade or more of memorisation before initiation, the stages of entry, how knowledge is checked between practitioners, and the real disagreement about women in Ifá.

Oyeronke Oyewumi's argument that gender was not the primary organizing category of Yoruba society, the serious criticisms of it, and the documented record of women's authority.

How Yoruba oral artists are trained, which genres are open to whom, how gender divides the field, how performers are paid, and the named artists the scholarship documents.

The Yoruba women's headwrap, its meaning as the crown of the female ensemble, its textile choices, its named tying styles from the 1960s onward, the modern professional gele-tying trade, and its central role in the aṣọ ẹbí group-dress economy.

Guide to the ten files on women, gender constructs, political titles, economic institutions, ritual authority, kinship, and historical resistance across Yorùbá history.

An examination of female sacerdotal leadership, institutional authority, theological debates on gender, and the historical dispute surrounding the initiation of female Ifá diviners.

The historical narrative, ritual memorialization, scholarly debates, and cultural legacy surrounding Queen Mọ̀remí of ancient Ilé-Ifẹ̀.

The life, political career, economic empire, and contested death of the nineteenth-century merchant who became the second Iyalode of Ibadan.

A comprehensive analysis of Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí's foundational critique of gender universality, her thesis on seniority in pre-colonial Ọ̀yọ́-Yorùbá society, and the major scholarly debates surrounding her work.

Karin Barber's finding that oríkì in Okuku is held and performed mainly by women, with texts showing what that custodianship does at a wedding, at a festival, and inside a marriage.

How the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century expansion of cocoa farming restructured Yoruba land tenure, labor arrangements, gender roles, and intergenerational wealth accumulation.

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.