The Yoruba: A New History by Akinwumi Ogundiran; Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana, USA; 2020; 532pp
By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
The respected Oxford University, England, Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper, once stated that Africa has no history, not minding that Samuel Johnson had published History of the Yorubas as far back as 1921 in London. Akinwumi Ogundiran, Chancellor’s Professor and Professor of Africana Studies, Anthropology and History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA, has in his new book The Yoruba: A New History, offered the world “the first transdisciplinary study of the two-thousand-year journey of the Yoruba people, from their origins in a small corner of the Niger-Benue Confluence in present-day Nigeria to becoming one of the most populous cultural groups on the African continent.”
The Yoruba: A New History is a groundbreaking study of the foundational Yoruba world between ca. 300 BC and 1840 AD. Ogundiran undertakes a “cultural-historical approach” intervolving the gamut of oral interviews and personal communications; colonial primary documents; research notes and papers in private collections; unpublished dissertations, theses, and long essays; unpublished academic presentations; unpublished archaeology reports; published personal accounts, diaries, and primary reports; online publications and databases; newspaper publications; and published secondary works.
In The Yoruba: A New History, Ogundiran sets the base thusly: “One day in the third or second century BC, a young adult of about twenty to twenty-four years old was laid to rest in Itaakpa rock shelter (Ife-Ijumu), in southwest Niger-Benue Confluence.” History is writ large in the personhood of the ancestor that Ogundiran gives the bona-fides of “Oni Itaakpa”, to wit, “the person of Itaakpa”. From the Person (Oni), there is growth to the House (Ile), and then the Estate (Ilu) emerges.
Oni Itaakpa was born soon after the onset of the six-hundred-year climactic crisis, dubbed “the Big Dry” that lasted from the fourth century BC to the third century AD across West Africa.
The Ife Glass Bead and diverse genres of arts and crafts in Ile-Ife became landmarks on the march of Yoruba civilization and history. The Ife Empire, as the “city of daybreak”, came to grief with the advent of the Nupe brigandage. After the atrophy, there was regeneration and the eventual rise and fall of the Oyo Empire. Further ahead lay the Atlantic slave trade in which about half a million Yoruba “crossed the Atlantic in chains” while “a few thousand more, especially from the Okun subgroup, also crossed the River Niger in chains to enter the Sokoto Caliphate.”
According to Ogundiran, “Between 1843 and 1861, the intertwined triple forces of Christianity, Western Education, and European colonial rule began to make inroads into the region.” Yoruba communities temporarily lost their political independence to three colonial powers, British (Nigeria), French (Benin Republic), and German (Togo).
The Yoruba: A New History by Akinwumi Ogundiran through the rendering of culture, history, archaeology, anthropology, and sociology enshrines history with a capital H.
Uzor Maxim Uzoatu is a renowned poet, journalist, and author.
Ayodelé is a Lagos-based journalist and the Content and Editorial Coordinator at Meiza. All around the megacity, I am steering diverse lifestyle magazine audiences with ingenious hacks and insights that spur fast, informed decisions in their busy lives.
