The Twentieth Century to Now
Cultural nationalism and the African church movement, the Abẹ́òkúta women's revolt, Awólọ́wọ̀ and the Western Region, the Yoruba in the Nigerian federation, and the present revival of interest in traditional knowledge.
The twentieth century for the Yoruba runs from a conquered and reorganised set of colonial provinces to a region of roughly forty million people that is among the most educated in Africa, is politically central to the largest country on the continent, and is in the middle of a broad reconsideration of the traditional knowledge its own grandparents were taught to reject. The through-line is a repeated pattern: Yoruba institutions were dismantled or captured by colonial administration, and Yoruba people rebuilt equivalent capacity through education, print, party politics and voluntary association, generally faster than the administration expected.
Four things in this century deserve close attention because they are widely misremembered. The African church movement was an assertion of cultural authority, not a schism over doctrine. The Abẹ́òkúta women's revolt was the recovery of a specific institutional power that colonial rule had removed, not a novel feminist departure. Awólọ́wọ̀'s free education was funded by cocoa and had costs as well as achievements. And the current revival of interest in òrìṣà tradition among Yoruba Christians has an unusual driver: the diaspora.
Cultural nationalism, 1880s to 1920s
The generation after Crowther turned against the terms on which Christianity had been offered. The trigger was institutional racism inside the mission itself. Crowther had been made a bishop in 1864; by the 1880s European CMS staff were systematically undermining his Niger Mission, and he died in 1891 having been effectively stripped of authority and replaced by a European. The message to educated Yoruba Christians was unmistakable.
The response was the African church movement. Mọ́jọ́lá Agbébi, born David Brown Vincent in 1860 and dying in 1917, changed his name in the wave of African nationalism of the late 1880s and became the leading proponent of an African-centred Christianity . He was central to the establishment of the Native Baptist Church in Lagos in March 1888, the first indigenous church in West Africa . The argument was not about doctrine. It was about who had the right to determine the language, the music, the drums, the dress and the names under which worship happened, and Agbébi challenged directly the missionaries' claim to decide these for another culture .
Alongside this ran a broader Lagos cultural movement. There was a Yoruba party among educated Lagosians that sought to give the vernacular the prominence English had, and Agbébi was a central figure in the campaign for Yoruba dress and Yoruba language . Yoruba names replaced English ones. Yoruba-language newspapers multiplied. Herbert Macaulay, an engineer and later the founder of the first Nigerian political party, came out of the same circle .
This movement is the direct ancestor of the position this corpus occupies. It was the first organised argument, made by Yoruba Christians, that being Christian did not require accepting a European account of Yoruba culture. It was not a return to òrìṣà religion, and its leaders were not proposing one. It was a claim that the culture was not the property of the mission to define.
The historical writing followed. Samuel Johnson's History of the Yorubas was published in 1921. E. A. Ajisafe's The Laws and Customs of the Yoruba People appeared in 1924. These were Yoruba men writing Yoruba history and law for Yoruba readers, and while they carry the assumptions of their moment, they established that Yoruba society had a documentable legal and political tradition worth setting out in a book.
The Abẹ́òkúta women's revolt
The most instructive political event of the colonial period in Yorubaland is the Abẹ́òkúta Women's Union campaign of 1946 to 1949, because of what it recovered.
Colonial indirect rule had dealt with male chiefs and had eliminated the women's title hierarchy from government, while continuing to tax women traders and to regulate the markets they ran. The Ìyálóde and Ìyálọ́jà had held formal authority over exactly this domain and had held seats in council; under colonial administration women were taxed without any institutional channel of consent.
The Abẹ́òkúta Women's Union was formed in 1947 from an alliance between market women's associations and the Christian-educated women of the Abẹ́òkúta Ladies Club, led by Fúnmiláyọ̀ Ransome-Kuti . That composition is the point: the traders who held the older market authority and the mission-educated women who held literacy and organisational technique, combined.
In November 1947 an estimated 10,000 women marched on the Aláké's palace, singing and dancing in protest, demanding an end to taxation without democratic representation . A further demonstration in December denounced the arrests of market women and the corruption of the colonial legal system, and this time demanded the Aláké's abdication . A march through Abẹ́òkúta in April 1948 secured the suspension of direct taxation on women and a tentative increase in women's political representation . The Aláké, Ademola II, held out until 3 January 1949, when he abdicated . The tax on women was abolished, the tax on men was increased, and four women including Ransome-Kuti were appointed to a new interim council .
Note the structure of the demand. The women were not asking for a new right. They were demanding representation in the body that taxed them, which is precisely what the Ìyálóde office had provided before colonial administration removed it. And they targeted the Aláké, a ruler whose paramountcy over the Ẹ̀gbá sections had itself been a colonial simplification, and who had been made unaccountable by colonial backing. The revolt is a direct hit on the specific damage indirect rule did.
Ransome-Kuti went on to found the Nigerian Women's Union and the Federation of Nigerian Women's Societies, and became one of the most consequential political figures of the independence period. She was thrown from a window during the 1977 military raid on the Kalakuta compound of her son Fela Anikulapo-Kuti and died of her injuries in 1978.
Education and the Yoruba intelligentsia
Mission schooling from the 1840s gave the Yoruba region an early and compounding lead in Western education. Yaba Higher College opened in 1934 and University College Ibadan in 1948, the latter becoming the principal producer of the Nigerian professional and academic class.
The intellectual output of this class is the reason a corpus like this one is possible. Ibadan's history school, associated with K. O. Dike and including Ade Ajayi, Saburi Biobaku and Bolanle Awe, made the case in the 1950s and 1960s that African history existed as a discipline with usable sources, against a still-dominant European view that it did not. Biobaku's Yoruba Historical Research Scheme in the 1950s systematically collected oral traditions across Yorubaland. Bolanle Awe's work on Ìbàdàn and on oríkì as historical evidence, and her insistence on women's political roles, opened lines of research that were not being pursued elsewhere. Wándé Abímbọ́lá's transcription and translation of Ifá literary corpus material from the 1960s onward made ẹsẹ Ifá available as text for the first time, which is the foundation for every subsequent scholarly treatment of Yoruba thought.
Alongside the academy ran a cultural movement of comparable weight. Duro Ladipo's Ọba Kò So, first performed in 1964, took the Ṣàngó tradition and made it a work of theatre performed internationally. The Mbari Mbayo club at Ọ̀ṣogbo, Ulli and Georgina Beier's workshops, and the artists who came out of them, including Twins Seven-Seven and the sculptor Sùsáànnè Wenger's work at the Ọ̀ṣun grove, produced a body of visual and performance work grounded in òrìṣà tradition. Wọlé Ṣóyinká's plays and his critical writing, Amos Tutuọla's The Palm-Wine Drinkard in 1952, and the Yoruba-language novels of D. O. Fágúnwà from 1938 onward, established a literature that drew directly on ìtàn and on Yoruba cosmology without apology.
Awólọ́wọ̀ and the Western Region
Ọbáfẹ́mi Awólọ́wọ̀ formed Ẹgbẹ́ Ọmọ Odùduwà in 1945 in London as a cultural organisation to unite Yoruba traditional and educated elites . In 1951 he founded the Action Group in Ìbàdàn as a political party, built substantially on the Ẹgbẹ́'s networks . The Action Group's platform demanded an end to British rule together with universal primary education, expanded rural health services, economic diversification and democratised local government .
In the Western Region it delivered. Free primary education was introduced in 1955, and unlike the schemes in the other regions it was compulsory as well as free, requiring every child aged 5 to 13 to attend . Enrolment went from 381,000 in 1952 to 811,432 in 1955 . The region also established the first television service in Africa in 1959 and expanded rural electrification .
The funding is important and is usually left out. All of it came from cocoa. The Western Region was among the world's largest cocoa producers, and the regional government took revenue by regulating the crop's sale through state marketing boards, paying farmers a controlled price below the world price and retaining the difference . The education, the television station and the electrification were paid for by a transfer from cocoa farmers to the regional state. That is a defensible development strategy and it was also a real burden on rural producers, and the resentment surfaced in the Agbẹkọ̀ya farmers' revolt of 1968 to 1969, when farmers in the west rose against taxation and produce prices, killed officials and burned courthouses, and forced tax reductions.
The Action Group's national trajectory ended badly. The party split in 1962, a state of emergency was declared in the Western Region, and Awólọ́wọ̀ was tried for treasonable felony and imprisoned in 1963, released in 1966. The Western Region crisis and the disputed 1965 election there, remembered as Wétìé for the burning of opponents, were among the immediate causes of the January 1966 coup and thus of the sequence leading to the civil war.
The Yoruba in the federation
The structural position of the Yoruba in Nigeria has been consistent since independence in 1960: a large, educated, economically significant bloc that is nonetheless one of three and cannot govern alone.
The regional structure of the First Republic gave the Yoruba the Western Region as a coherent political unit. Successive subdivisions, from three regions to twelve states in 1967 and eventually to thirty-six, dissolved that unit into what are now Ọ̀yọ́, Ògùn, Ọ̀ṣun, Ondó, Èkìtì and Lagos states with Yoruba populations in Kwara and Kogi. Yoruba political weight has since had to be assembled from separate state governments rather than exercised through one.
The recurring political themes across the republics have been federal restructuring and resource control, both positions with strong Yoruba constituencies. Awólọ́wọ̀'s defeat in the 1979 and 1983 presidential elections, the annulment of Moshood Abiola's apparent victory in the June 1993 election and his death in detention in 1998, and the NADECO opposition to the Abacha regime, form a sequence in which Yoruba political actors repeatedly contested for the centre and were repeatedly blocked. Olusegun Obasanjo's presidency from 1999 to 2007 and Bola Tinubu's from 2023 changed the arithmetic but not the underlying structure.
Lagos deserves separate mention. It has grown from a colonial port to one of the largest cities in the world, and it is simultaneously a Yoruba city and a Nigerian and West African one, which produces continuous tension over whose city it is. Its economy is larger than most African countries'.
Urbanisation, migration, the language
Yorubaland was already the most urbanised region in precolonial West Africa, and the twentieth century intensified this. The consequences for cultural transmission are direct: òrìṣà worship, oríkì and Ifá are all anchored in the lineage compound and in place, and the movement from compound to nuclear flat in a city is the movement that most reliably ends transmission.
The Yoruba language is spoken by tens of millions and is not endangered in the ordinary sense, but its position in educated urban households is weakening, with English displacing it as the language of the home in a growing minority of families. The three-layer translation discipline this corpus uses exists partly because a growing number of Yoruba readers cannot read a Yoruba text unaided.
Emigration since the 1980s has produced substantial Yoruba populations in Britain, the United States and Canada. That diaspora is a significant part of the current revival, for a specific reason.
The revival
There is a genuine and accelerating reconsideration of Yoruba traditional knowledge underway, and its drivers are worth naming precisely because they are not what one would expect.
The academic corpus arrived. Abímbọ́lá on Ifá, Bascom on divination, Idowu and Awolalu on belief, Barber on oríkì, Peel on the religious encounter, Ogundiran on the archaeology and long history, Abiodun and Lawal and Drewal on the art. There is now a body of serious scholarship in English that treats Yoruba thought as thought. Someone raised to believe the tradition was superstition can now encounter it as an intellectual system, in university-press books.
The diaspora returned the argument. Santería in Cuba, Candomblé in Brazil, and their spread to the United States, kept òrìṣà practice as living institutions through a period when it was in retreat in Yorubaland itself. Practitioners in Havana, Salvador and New York have come to Nigeria to train and to trace lineages, and the fact that Americans and Cubans and Brazilians take this seriously has changed how it looks to Yoruba people who were taught it was primitive. The Ọ̀ṣun-Ọ̀ṣogbo festival, a UNESCO World Heritage site since 2005, draws an international pilgrimage that is heavily diasporic. This is an inversion worth stating plainly: the tradition is being revalued at home partly because it was valued abroad.
Ifá's structure was recognised. The binary architecture of the 256 Odù, its combinatorial completeness and its resemblance to other formal systems drew attention from outside religious studies entirely, and made it difficult to describe Ifá as unstructured folk belief. UNESCO listed the Ifá divination system as an intangible cultural heritage of humanity in 2005.
Digital access. Recordings, transcriptions and translations that previously existed only in university libraries are now reachable, which matters most for exactly the diaspora and urban Christian readership that had no other access.
Two honest qualifications. First, the revival is largely cultural and intellectual rather than religious: most Yoruba people remain Christian or Muslim, and interest in Ifá and òrìṣà as heritage and as a body of thought is much more widespread than conversion to their practice. Second, the recovery is uneven and some of it is not recovery at all. A good deal of material circulating online as Yoruba tradition is invented, or is diaspora practice presented as Nigerian, or is drawn from unreliable colonial-era compilations. The discipline of checking a claim against a named scholar and a citable source, which this corpus tries to model, is not pedantry. It is the only thing separating a real inheritance from a market in confident assertions.