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The Yoruba kept professional national historians: hereditary families retained by the King at Ọ̀yọ́ who also served as the royal bards, drummers and cymbalists — living archives on whom all reliable early history depends.
The Yoruba kept professional national historians: hereditary families retained by the King at Ọ̀yọ́ who also served as the royal bards, drummers and cymbalists — living archives on whom all reliable early history depends.
A Yoruba child was traditionally named on a fixed day: the 9th day after birth for a boy, the 7th for a girl — and the 8th day if they were twins of both sexes.
Worshippers of Ṣàngó, the deified king of thunder, kept smooth axe-head-shaped stones as his emblems — commonly taken to be thunderbolts fallen from the sky.
Europe first learned of the Yoruba country by its Hausa name: old records such as Webster's Gazetteer list 'YARRIBA', capital 'KATUNGA' — the Hausa terms for Yoruba and for Ọ̀yọ́.
In ancient times pounded yam was served in one large bowl or earthenware vessel, and father, children and grandchildren all sat around it to share the meal together.
Provincial rulers paid the Aláàfin annual visits bearing presents of firewood, fine locally made mats, kola nuts and bitter kolas — and one, the Oworé of Otun, brought sweet water from a cool spring for the king's drinking.
Johnson calls the victory at Osogbo a turning point of Yoruba history: it 'saved the Yoruba country as such from total absorption by the Fulanis' and broke Ilọrin's southward advance.
When the long wars were finally wound up, both armed camps were broken up on the same day, and the Awere stream near Erin was fixed as the boundary between the two states.
Large sums were reckoned in 'bags' of cowries: 20,000 cowries made ọkẹ́ kan — one bag — the standard unit for counting indefinitely large numbers in money and trade.
Before Yoruba was first written down, attempts were made to invent a new alphabet and to adapt Arabic script — but the Roman alphabet won out, fixed by the missionary translators of the 1840s.
In the belief Johnson records, Ọlọrun made man as an unfinished lump — and it is the orisha Orisala (Ọbatala) who shapes each human being, working as 'a co-worker with Ọlọrun'.
Ife tradition holds that Odùduwà was sent down from heaven by Olodumare to create the earth itself — making Ilé-Ifẹ̀, in Yoruba sacred history, the cradle of the world.
Christianity reached Yorubaland in 1843, when the Church Missionary Society entered Abẹ́òkúta by way of Badagry — and from there spread to Ibadan by May 1851.
The pioneer Christian missionary to the Yoruba was the Rev. Henry Townsend, who reached Abẹ́òkúta in 1843 with his Sierra Leonean interpreter Andrew Wilhelm Desalu and was given a cordial welcome by Chief Sodeke of the Ẹgba.
The Rev. David Hinderer, a German missionary of the C.M.S., became the first missionary at Ibadan in 1851; his station at Oke Kudeti grew into a lasting C.M.S. church.
Among the eyewitnesses Johnson draws on is the Rev. Samuel Crowther — a Yoruba who rose to become a bishop of the Church, and whose vivid letters describe the country.
Christianity among the Yoruba was not only Anglican: the American Baptist Rev. T. J. Bowen compiled a Yoruba grammar and dictionary, published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1858.
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