Yorùbá History in Fifteen Minutes

Yorùbá history is not the history of one people who were always one people. It is the history of a set of related peoples speaking related languages, organised as separate kingdoms and city-states for most of the period covered here, who came to be called by a single name and to think of themselves as one in the nineteenth century. Holding that in mind changes how everything before 1850 should be read.

The dating below is marked in the same way the corpus's history section marks it, because Yorùbá dates come in different kinds and presenting them as one undifferentiated list would misrepresent all of them. [Archaeological] means a radiocarbon or thermoluminescence range from excavated material. [Reconstructed] means derived by argument from king lists, cross-references and internal consistency, with margins of a decade or much more. [Traditional] means the tradition places it there and there is no independent verification. [High] means a document produced at the time. [Contested] means competent scholars actively disagree 1.

Deep origins, roughly 2000 BCE to 300 CE

Historical linguistics places Yorùbá within the Volta-Niger branch of Niger-Congo, and reconstructs Proto-Yorùbáoid, the common ancestor of Yorùbá, Ìgálà and Itsẹkiri, as spoken near the confluence of the Niger and Benue rivers 2. The relationship between the languages is secure; the absolute dating rests on assumptions that historical linguists themselves regard as unreliable for absolute chronology [Reconstructed, low confidence on dates] 1.

Akínwùmí Ògúndìran's synthesis, which is the current standard account, has Yorùbá society forming on the western side of that confluence around four thousand years ago and expanding southwestward into the forest and forest margin, with a period of rapid expansion between roughly 300 BCE and 300 CE associated with a severe drought episode and with the adoption of iron metallurgy [Reconstructed] 3. Iron smelting in the wider region is attested archaeologically from as early as the sixth century BCE [Archaeological] 1.

The point to take from this is that the Yorùbá formed where they are, through a long process in West Africa, rather than arriving from somewhere else already formed. Claims of Egyptian or Middle Eastern origin are addressed in the foundations section and are not supported by the linguistic or archaeological evidence.

Ilé-Ifẹ̀ and the classical period, roughly 800 to 1500 CE

What the tradition says. Ilé-Ifẹ̀ is where the world was made and where Odùduwà established kingship, and the crowned rulers of the Yorùbá towns descend from his children who dispersed from there. There is a competing tradition centring Ọbàtálá and an autochthonous population that Odùduwà's people displaced. [Traditional] No independent dating exists for Odùduwà, the versions conflict, and Robin Law has argued that the Odùduwà charter itself spread over time as a political device rather than recording a single event [Contested] 1.

What excavation shows. Substantial occupation at Ilé-Ifẹ̀ from the eighth to twelfth centuries at Òrun Ọba Adó, and eleventh to thirteenth at Ita Yemòó [Archaeological] 1. A potsherd pavement tradition across more than thirty Yorubaland sites dated mostly to the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, coinciding with centralisation and urbanisation [Archaeological] 1. Primary glass production at Igbo Olókun in the early second millennium, with over twelve thousand beads and hundreds of crucible fragments, and a high-lime high-alumina composition that establishes manufacture locally from raw materials rather than importation; this is among the most secure findings in the entire Yorùbá record [Archaeological] 1. Thermoluminescence dates of 1221 to 1369 for two of the Wunmonije copper-alloy heads found behind the Ọ̀ọ̀ni's palace in 1938, and 1295 to 1435 for the Ita Yemòó castings [Archaeological] 1.

The Ifẹ̀ sculpture is the reason this period is called classical. Naturalistic heads and figures in copper alloy and terracotta, technically accomplished, individualised, and produced by a workshop tradition. When they reached Europe, the initial response was to attribute them to Greek or Mediterranean influence, because an African origin was not entertained. That episode is itself part of the history.

Ijẹ̀bú deserves a mention here because it disturbs the Ifẹ̀-centred picture. Sungbo's Eredo, the Ijẹ̀bú earthwork system southwest of Ijẹ̀bú-Òde, involved an estimated 3.5 million cubic metres of moved earth and dates from around 800 to 1000 CE [Archaeological], which predates the Ijẹ̀bú dynastic tradition by several centuries 1.

The first firm documentary date for a named Yorùbá polity is 1505, when a Portuguese source describes a very large city surrounded by a great moat, ruled by a figure rendered Agusale, recognisably Ijẹ̀bú-Òde and the Awùjalẹ̀ [High] 1.

Ọ̀yọ́, roughly 1600 to 1830

Ọ̀yọ́ became the dominant Yorùbá power on the northern savanna, where cavalry was usable, and its empire was built on horses. Ọ̀yọ́-Ile was sacked by Nupe forces under Tsoede around 1535, followed by roughly eighty years of dynastic exile, with recovery under Aláàfin Ọ̀finràn and repopulation under Abípa from around 1608 [Reconstructed] 1.

At its height Ọ̀yọ́ extended west to Dahomey, which it invaded in 1728 and reduced to tributary status by 1730, the tribute set at forty men and women, guns, and four hundred loads of cowries and coral, with full subjugation by 1748 [Reconstructed, well supported] 1.

The constitutional structure is the part most worth knowing. The Aláàfin was not an absolute ruler. The Ọ̀yọ́ Mesì, a council of seven led by the Bàṣọ̀run, held a formal power to reject a king, and a rejected Aláàfin was required to take his own life. Ògbóni operated as a further counterweight. This is a genuine constitutional constraint on monarchy, and it was captured: Bàṣọ̀run Gaha forced four Aláàfin to suicide between June and October 1754 before Aláàfin Abíọ́dún had him executed in 1774 [Reconstructed] 1. A check that can be used to force four deaths in five months has stopped being a check.

Ọ̀yọ́'s collapse came from the north and the inside together. Àfọ̀njá, the Aàrẹ Ọ̀nà Kakanfò, rebelled at Ilọrin in 1817, allying with Muslim fighters under Shehu Àlímì [Reconstructed] 1. Ilọrin became an emirate aligned with the Sokoto Caliphate under Abd al-Salam in 1829, and destroyed Ọ̀yọ́-Ile between roughly 1833 and 1836, the survivors founding Àgò d'Ọ̀yọ́, the present Ọ̀yọ́ town [Reconstructed, contested on the exact year] 1. Dahomey threw off the tributary relationship in 1823 [Reconstructed] 1.

The nineteenth century: wars, slavery, mission

The century after Ọ̀yọ́'s fall was catastrophic and it made everything that came after.

The wars. The Ọ̀wu war of 1817 to 1822 ended in the destruction of Ọ̀wu and was the first major Yorùbá conflict decided by European firearms [Reconstructed] 1. Refugee populations founded new cities: Abẹ́òkúta around 1830 under Ṣódẹkẹ́, and Ìbàdàn in the 1830s on a former Ẹ̀gbá site by a mixed force of Ọ̀yọ́, Ifẹ̀, Ijẹ̀bú and Ẹ̀gbá warriors [Reconstructed] 1. Ìbàdàn became the dominant military power, checking Ilọrin at Ọ̀ṣogbo around 1840 and then sacking Ilé-Ifẹ̀ in 1859, destroying Ìjàyè in 1862 and sacking Ilésà in 1870 [Reconstructed] 1. The Sixteen Years War at Kiriji, in which the Èkìtìparapọ̀ combined against Ìbàdàn, ran until British intervention dispersed the camps on 14 March 1893 [High] 1.

The slave trade. The Yorùbá entered the Atlantic trade late and left it heavily, because it was the wars that generated the captives. Model-based estimates from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database put roughly 121,000 people exported from the Yorùbá-speaking region between 1817 and 1836, roughly 42 percent to Brazil and roughly 40 percent to Cuba, with 75,700 documented on 243 ships and over 47,000 Lucumí arrivals recorded in Cuba [Reconstructed, statistical] 1. These are estimates from a model, not counts.

Two things follow and both need saying. The concentration and lateness of that departure is why Yorùbá religion and language survived in Cuba and Brazil with unusual completeness: the arrivals were numerous, they were culturally homogeneous, and they were recent. And Yorùbá states and individuals participated in the trade as sellers, not only as victims. Captives taken in the wars were sold, and the trade and the wars fed each other. The corpus does not soften this.

The mission. The CMS entered at Badagry in 1842, drawn substantially by Sàró returnees, Yorùbá liberated from slave ships at Freetown who had been coming home since the 1830s [Reconstructed] 1. Samuel Àjàyí Crowther, himself captured around age thirteen and freed by a British patrol in April 1822, was ordained in 1843, published the first Yorùbá grammar and vocabulary the same year, translated four New Testament books in 1852, and was consecrated bishop in 1864, the first African Anglican bishop; the complete Yorùbá Bible followed in 1884 [High] 1.

Islam had arrived earlier, overland, spreading through trade, Arabic literacy and Quranic schooling without conquest, and it kept spreading through the century including in states at war with Ilọrin.

Conversion to both was overwhelmingly voluntary, which is the problem J. D. Y. Peel's Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba sets out to explain. His answer runs through the wars, which disrupted the place-bound and lineage-bound institutions carrying òrìṣà practice; through literacy, which the mission supplied and which was immediately valuable; through the broken lineages of a displaced population, for whom a religion not requiring a functioning lineage had obvious appeal; and through the visible success of the returnees 4.

Conquest, 1861 to 1914

Lagos was bombarded in December 1851 and ceded on 6 August 1861, Ọba Dòsùnmú signing after eleven days of resistance under threat from HMS Prometheus [High] 1. Ijẹ̀bú was invaded in 1892 to break its trade monopoly, in a campaign that demonstrated the Maxim gun; after Ijẹ̀bú, military resistance was understood to be futile. Governor Carter's tour in 1893 produced treaties with Ọ̀yọ́ and the Ẹ̀gbá presented as peacemaking and functioning as protectorate agreements. Abẹ́òkúta's recognised independence under the Ẹ̀gbá United Government lasted until 1914, when it was abolished and Nigeria was created by the amalgamation of the Northern and Southern Protectorates [High] 1.

Indirect rule then reshaped Yorùbá institutions. It made the ọba more powerful and less accountable at the same time, because a ruler backed by the District Officer could not be removed by his own chiefs; Toyin Fálọlá's assessment is that Yorùbá ọba wielded arbitrary powers under indirect rule and many abused their offices 5. It hollowed out the councils, moved judicial functions to Native Courts, and broke the women's title hierarchy by recognising and dealing with male chiefs only, which is a direct cause of the tax revolts of the 1940s 5.

The making of "Yorùbá"

"Yorùbá" was originally a Hausa term for the people of Ọ̀yọ́, not a self-designation and not a name covering the whole region. Before the nineteenth century a person's primary identity was Ijẹ̀bú, Ẹ̀gbá, Ìjẹ̀ṣà, Èkìtì, Ọ̀yọ́ or a town.

Peel's argument is that the Yorùbá came to know themselves as one people through the nineteenth-century missionary encounter, and the mechanism is concrete: a single written standard based substantially on Ọ̀yọ́ speech, made by Crowther and the CMS, turned the dialects into one language with one name; the Sàró at Freetown, thrown together from many polities, discovered their mutual intelligibility in exile and came home with a category; Yorùbá-language print and the first Yorùbá-authored histories addressed a Yorùbá readership and thereby created one; colonial administration made ethnicity administratively real through provinces and census categories; and the wars supplied the lesson that combination worked 4.

This does not make the identity artificial. All ethnic identities are historically constructed and the question is only when and how. It does mean that "the Yorùbá" as one people with one name is roughly as old as the Yorùbá Bible, while the deeper continuities in language, in Ifá, in the òrìṣà, in kingship and in oríkì are real but were not previously organised under a single label.

The twentieth century to now

Mọ́jọlá Agbébí and the African church movement contested European control of the churches; the Aládùrà churches from the 1920s built a Christianity in Yorùbá idiom. The Abẹ́òkúta women's revolt led by Fúnmiláyọ̀ Ransome-Kuti in the 1940s forced the abdication of the Aláké and is a direct consequence of what indirect rule had done to women's authority. The Ìbàdàn school of history from the 1950s rewrote African history from African sources. Ọbáfẹ́mi Awólọ́wọ̀'s Western Region, funded by cocoa, built free universal primary education and the first television service in Africa. Nigeria became independent in 1960 and has been through civil war, military rule and civilian government since.

The present picture: a Yorùbá population near fifty million, majority Christian and Muslim in roughly equal parts, heavily urbanised, with Lagos as one of the largest cities in the world; a continuing Yorùbá cultural and scholarly reclamation; UNESCO inscription of Ifá in 2005 and 2008 and of the Ọ̀ṣun Sacred Grove as a World Heritage Site; and a large and active diaspora in the Americas and in the Anglophone world with a complicated and sometimes contentious relationship to the continental tradition.

What to take from this

Three things. The Yorùbá built cities, states, constitutional constraints on kingship, and a sculptural and intellectual tradition on their own account, in West Africa, over a long period, and the evidence for this is archaeological rather than assertive. The nineteenth century was a catastrophe whose effects, the wars, the trade, the conversions, the conquest and the invention of a single Yorùbá identity, produced almost everything that now looks traditional. And the history contains material that is uncomfortable in every direction, including Yorùbá participation in enslaving other Yorùbá, which is documented and is not going to be argued away.