The Yoruba

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A child is born into a Yoruba lineage and within the first days is carried to a diviner, who reads from the palm nuts which of the dead has come back in this body, and what destiny the child chose for itself in heaven before it was born. The name follows from the reading. A boy in whom the father’s father is judged to have returned may be called Babatunde — father has come again; a girl in whom a grandmother is seen, Yetunde — mother returns. The naming is not sentiment. It rests on a settled understanding of how persons enter the world and where they go from it, an understanding that an entire civilization of cities held in common, carried in no book, and defended across an ocean.

The Yoruba are a people of the forests and savannas of southwestern Nigeria and the lands westward into the Republic of Benin and Togo — tens of millions strong, one of the largest of the African peoples. They are also the bearers of one of the great religions of the continent: the worship of the orisha, the host of powers that stand between a remote high god and the world, read and served through the divining science called Ifa. The people and the religion are not the same thing, and this entry treats the first; but the two cannot be wholly separated, because what binds the Yoruba into one people across their many cities is precisely a shared origin, a shared company of gods, and a shared art of reading the will of heaven.

The Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove, a surviving forest of orisha shrines along the Osun river in Osun State, Nigeria — Auskid1215, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

A people of cities, from one cradle

The Yoruba did not live in a single kingdom. They lived in a dense world of city-states, each with its own crowned king, its own market at the center, its own quarter-shrines and lineage gods, and its own long memory of rivalry and alliance with the towns around it. Oyo in the open northern grassland, Ijebu behind its lagoons, Egba at Abeokuta, Ekiti and Ondo and Owo in the eastern hills, Ketu and Sabe out west toward Dahomey — these were not provinces of one state but a constellation of polities, sometimes at war with one another, always recognizable to one another as kin.

What made them kin was a shared account of where they came from. In the tradition, the world itself was made at Ile-Ife — Ilé-Ifẹ̀, the navel of the earth — where the high god commissioned a divinity to descend on a chain over the primal waters and shape dry land from a handful of soil. From Ife, the account holds, sixteen crowned lineages went out to found the cities, each king tracing his right to rule back through that first descent. To be a legitimate Yoruba oba was to hold a crown derived, however many removes back, from Ile-Ife; the town was at once the cradle of the species and the source of kingship. This is a tradition-internal claim, and it does political work: it makes every Yoruba king a junior partner of the same sacred center, and Ife the senior house of them all.

The archaeology tells a sober and remarkable story alongside the myth. Ile-Ife was a substantial urban center by the eleventh century, and between roughly the twelfth and fifteenth centuries it flowered as a regional power and produced one of the finest naturalistic sculptural traditions of the pre-modern world: the Ife heads, life-sized portraits in terracotta and in cast copper-alloy, of a serenity and precision that European observers, when they first saw them, refused to credit as African work. The cast heads have been dated by thermoluminescence and by excavation to that window; they are understood as representations of rulers, priests, and notables from the height of Ife’s power. The town’s standing as the origin-place is thus not only a story told but a fact in the ground: a real city, old and accomplished, at the symbolic root of the whole Yoruba world.

Copper-alloy head from Ile-Ife (12th–15th century), among the finest naturalistic castings of the pre-modern world; British Museum — Sailko, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The greatest of the Yoruba states by power was not Ife but Oyo, north of the forest where the grassland opened and cavalry could ride. From its capital at Oyo-Ile, Oyo built a true empire over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — a cavalry power with a constitutional check on its king, the Alaafin, in the council of nobles called the Oyo Mesi. Its weight is treated in full under the Oyo Empire. Ife retained the prestige of seniority and the spiritual primacy; Oyo held the swords and the horses. The other towns ordered themselves between these poles. The point for the people as a whole is that “Yoruba,” as the name of a single nation, is younger than the cities it now gathers. Before the nineteenth century the word referred narrowly to the Oyo; other Yoruba-speakers knew themselves as Egba, Ijebu, Ekiti, Ife. The pan-Yoruba identity that now seems primordial was consolidated in the nineteenth century — partly through the missionary print culture and the returnee communities of Lagos — a documentary fact that the historian J. D. Y. Peel made central to the modern study of the people, and one that does not diminish the deep age of the cities themselves.

The order of heaven and the reading of it

Above everything in the Yoruba frame sits Olódùmarè, also called Olorun, owner of the sky — the source of all that is and the holder of àṣẹ (pronounced roughly ah-SHE), the generative force by which a word or a wish becomes an event. Olodumare governs as a great king governs, from a distance and through deputies; he has no temple and no priesthood, and he is approached by almost no one directly. The daily traffic of the world is delegated to the orisha, the divinities who stand between the human and the absolute. He is treated more fully under Olodumare.

The orisha are many — idiomatically counted as the irúnmọlè, the “four hundred plus one,” a figure that in the tradition is not a sum to be added but a way of saying their number exceeds human reckoning, two hundred to the right and two hundred to the left and one more beyond counting. Some are venerated across all of Yorubaland; some belong to a single town or lineage; the same figure may carry different attributes a hundred miles apart. Obatala, eldest and coolest, is the sculptor who molds each child’s body in the womb, owner of white cloth, patron of moral coolness. Shango was the fourth Alaafin of Oyo, a thunder-wielding king who in the tradition ascended into the sky to become the orisha of lightning and royal justice. The great river-divinities are female — among them Osun, owner of the river at Osogbo, of fresh water, fertility, and wealth, in whose grove the surviving forest-shrines still stand. And at every crossroads and threshold stands Eshu, the messenger who carries sacrifice up to the orisha, the keeper of the road, the principle of uncertainty without whose acknowledgment no ritual functions.

A word is owed here, because the record is distorted at exactly this point. Nineteenth-century missionary translators of the Yoruba scriptures — the work associated with Samuel Ajayi Crowther, himself a Yoruba freed from a slave ship and made the first African Anglican bishop — rendered the Christian devil into Yoruba as Eshu. The equation is a category error. Eshu is not evil; the Yoruba frame does not sort the cosmos cleanly into a good and an evil power, and Eshu belongs to neither pole. He is mediation and ambiguity itself, the enforcer of sacrifice and the agent of àṣẹ. The mistranslation, propagated for a century, is one of the clearest cases of a colonial gloss carried into the record as if it were neutral; it is not.

The science by which the order of heaven is read is Ifa. Its presiding divinity is Orunmila, the orisha of wisdom who was present when each soul chose its destiny, and its master is the babaláwo, the diviner. Ifa is organized around 256 figures called odù — sixteen principal signs raised to the second power — each naming a vast body of memorized verse. The diviner casts sacred palm nuts or a divining chain, the cast yields a figure, and from the verses attached to that figure the babalawo and the client together read the situation and the sacrifice that will mend it. Ifa is treated in its own right under divination; the point for the people is that this was their high science — a method, held in trained human memory, for locating a person within the order of things and adjusting the relation.

An opon Ifa, the carved tray on which the diviner marks the figures read from the oracle; Brooklyn Museum, gift of Dr. Ernst Anspach — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

Beneath the whole system lies a doctrine of the person. Each individual arrives bearing an orí — at once the physical head and the inner head, the destiny chosen in heaven before birth. The orí is itself venerated, in some readings the most decisive of all the powers a person has, because no orisha can grant what one’s own orí has not allotted. The religious life is the work of alignment: to live in accord with the destiny one carries, and to repair, through right conduct and sacrifice, the places where a life has fallen out of true with it. And the person does not vanish at death. The Yoruba hold àtúnwà — reincarnation within the lineage — the dead returning into their own descendants, most commonly along the paternal line; the grandfather come again in the grandchild, the identity confirmed by the diviner and by the marks and ways the child shows as it grows. The doctrine has a near kin in other traditions’ teachings of rebirth, but it is held in a distinctively Yoruba key: not an escape from a wheel but a homecoming, the lineage keeping its own.

All of this was carried without scripture. The Yoruba religious mind is an oral one: the verses of the 256 odù in the babalawo’s memory, the oríkì — the praise-poetry that holds the character of every god, every lineage, every town and king in dense allusive lines — the cosmogony recited from memory, the proverbs, the drum-texts. There is no closed book to consult; there is a living corpus carried by trained people. This is the single most important fact about the source situation, and it shapes what follows.

The written record, and how it distorts

Because the tradition kept itself in memory, almost everything written about Yoruba religion before the twentieth century was written by outsiders, within frames that have since had to be dismantled. The colonial military officer A. B. Ellis produced the earliest synthetic English account in 1894, through brief interpreted contact, assimilating the orisha to Greek and Egyptian parallels and fixing the Eshu-as-devil error in print. The German ethnologist Leo Frobenius, who in 1910 became the first European to document the Ife sculptures systematically, attached to them a thesis now universally rejected: that such art could not be African in origin but must descend from a lost Atlantean civilization transmitted through Greece — a diffusionist fantasy that projected European antiquity onto African achievement, and that is flagged as discredited wherever it appears, though even Frobenius’s error grew from an impulse to take Ife seriously that later art history has vindicated.

The most important early insider source is the Reverend Samuel Johnson, a Yoruba Anglican of Oyo descent, whose History of the Yorubas — compiled in the 1890s, published in 1921 after a long and complicated path through a manuscript lost at sea — drew on the memories of Oyo court historians and remains foundational. But Johnson too wrote within a frame: an Anglican clergyman who treated orisha worship as a phase to be superseded, and whose Oyo-centrism helped project that one empire’s prestige across the whole people. The twentieth century brought a different kind of authority. The Yoruba scholar ‘Wande Abimbola produced the standard scholarly exposition of the Ifa corpus and was named, in 1981, Àwíse Awo Àgbáyé, spokesman of Ifa worldwide — a practitioner-scholar interpreting the tradition from within it rather than an informant for someone else’s. Karin Barber’s study of the oríkì, the American folklorist William Bascom’s work on the divining system, and the art-historical syntheses of Rowland Abiodun rest on that turn. The honest reader keeps the registers apart: the secured facts of date and archaeology and the slave-trade record on one side; the contested matters — Ife as sole origin against the migration traditions, the rivalry of creation accounts, how far Olodumare is a single supreme god in the monotheist’s sense — held as contested; and the tradition’s own truths, the world made at Ife on the chain and the chosen orí and the dead come home, rendered as the coherent world they are.

The gods cross the ocean

The reception of the Yoruba in the wider world was forced by catastrophe. Through the eighteenth and especially the nineteenth century, the Atlantic slave trade carried great numbers of Yoruba across the ocean. The timing was particular and cruel. The Yoruba had largely escaped enslavement while Oyo stood; when Oyo broke apart in the early nineteenth century — pressed by the Fulani jihad out of the north, torn by the wars among its own successor states, the old capital abandoned by 1836 — the wars that followed threw an unusually large number of Yoruba into the trade in its last decades, before it was suppressed at mid-century. They went chiefly to Cuba and to Brazil. This is the load-bearing fact of the people’s afterlife, and it is to be held plainly: a forced dispersion, born of a political collapse, that scattered a people and, with them, their gods.

For the gods went too. The enslaved Yoruba carried the orisha into the Americas and reconstituted them there under conditions of prohibition. Spanish and Portuguese colonial regimes banned African worship and compelled baptism; the response, across a generation, was to seat each orisha behind the figure of a Catholic saint whose image could be displayed without reprisal. Shango stood behind Saint Barbara, Yemoja behind the Virgin of Regla, Osun behind Our Lady of Charity, Cuba’s patron. Under that cover the orisha survived the Middle Passage and the plantation. In Cuba the tradition took form as Lucumí, also called Santería or Regla de Ocha; in Brazil as Candomblé, concentrated in the great houses of Bahia; it fed one root of Haitian Vodou and surfaced again in Trinidad. They are distinct living religions, each its own theology, having drawn in materials from other African peoples — the Fon, the Kongo, the Akan — and from Catholicism, and each elaborated in its own directions. And the saint-behind-the-orisha, which began as concealment, became for many of their practitioners a genuine theology in its own right rather than a disguise to be removed. The scholar J. Lorand Matory has gone further, arguing that the very prominence of Yoruba forms in Atlantic religion owes much to a real nineteenth-century traffic of returnees and travelers between Lagos and Bahia and Havana — that the apparent Yoruba primacy is partly the work of those modern networks, not simply an inheritance carried whole from the forest. The orisha put down roots across the ocean; how those roots were nourished is itself a contested history.

At home, the Yoruba lived a long entanglement with two other faiths. Islam came down the trade routes from the north and is old and deep among the Yoruba, especially in the towns nearest the savanna; Christianity came up from the coast with the missions in the nineteenth century, carried in part by freed Yoruba returnees like Crowther. Today most Yoruba are Muslim or Christian. Yet the orisha did not disappear beneath either. They persist alongside both, in the festivals, in the diviner consulted at a birth or a crisis, in the praise-names, in the deep grammar of how persons and destinies are understood — and, increasingly, in a self-conscious revival that looks back to Ile-Ife as its source. The Osun-Osogbo grove, the last great sacred forest of its kind, rebuilt across the later twentieth century around its shrines and its remarkable sculpture and inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 2005, stands for that persistence: a living center of orisha worship, drawing pilgrims each year, in a country where most of those pilgrims will also pray in a mosque or a church.

So the people that began at one sacred town in the forest is now a people of the homeland and of the diaspora at once — its cities still standing, its gods at home and abroad, its source still at Ife, its reach now global. A single naming-ceremony at a birth, the diviner reading which of the dead has returned, holds the whole of it in small: the city, the lineage, the orisha consulted, the destiny chosen in heaven, the ancestor come home. The Yoruba carried that across an ocean and out into the world, and it is among the living things they are.

→ Related: Olodumare · Obatala · Orunmila · Eshu · Shango · Ile Ife · Oyo Ile · Osun Osogbo · Idanre Hills · The Oyo Empire · The Fon · Christianity · Islam · Reincarnation · Soul · Divination