Yoruba

Yoruba tradition holds that Ile-Ife, in what is now Osun State, Nigeria, is the site where the orisha Oduduwa founded the first Yoruba kingdom and from which the ruling houses of the other Yoruba city-states trace their descent, a founding account rather than a single verified date. From Ife, Yoruba settlement organized into a network of walled city-states, each with its own oba (king) and council rather than one central throne: Oyo, Ijebu, Egba, Ijesa, Ekiti and many others, sharing language and religion while remaining politically independent and often at war with one another.

The Oyo Empire, built on cavalry drawn from the northern savanna, became the dominant Yoruba power from roughly the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, extending tribute across much of what is now southwestern Nigeria and into the Republic of Benin. Oyo collapsed in the early 1800s under succession disputes and Fulani jihadist expansion from the north, triggering decades of Yoruba civil wars that also fed captives into the final, most intensive decades of the Atlantic slave trade, the direct route by which large Yoruba populations, and Yoruba orisha worship, arrived in Cuba, Brazil, Trinidad and Haiti.

British colonial rule from the late nineteenth century folded the Yoruba city-states into Southern Nigeria and later independent Nigeria, where the Yoruba remain one of the country's largest peoples alongside the Hausa-Fulani and Igbo, concentrated in the southwest but present nationwide and, through a large modern diaspora, in the United Kingdom, the United States and elsewhere. The old obaships persist as traditional, largely ceremonial authorities, most prominently the Ooni of Ife and the Alaafin of Oyo, alongside Nigeria's elected federal government.

Traditional Yoruba religion holds Olodumare as the remote, singular supreme being, creator and ultimate authority over destiny, approached not directly but through a pantheon of orisha, each governing a domain of the world: Ogun over iron and the forge, Sango over thunder and royal authority, Oshun over rivers and fertility, Yemoja over the sea and motherhood, Obatala over creation and moral purity, and Eshu as trickster and guardian of the crossroads. Orunmila, tied to Ifa divination, is the orisha of wisdom and destiny who witnessed creation and can therefore be consulted about it. E. Bolaji Idowu's Olodumare: God in Yoruba Belief remains the standard study of this supreme being.

Ifa divination is the primary way of consulting Orunmila: a trained babalawo casts a divining chain or palm nuts to identify one of two hundred and fifty six Odu, each carrying its own memorized verses and prescribed remedies, a corpus William Bascom documented in Sixteen Cowries as it traveled with enslaved Yoruba to the Americas and re-formed there as Cuban Santeria, Brazilian Candomble and related traditions that still address prayer to Yoruba-named orisha far from West Africa. At home, the Ogboni society, studied by Peter Morton-Williams among the Oyo Yoruba, historically combined religious, judicial and political authority as a council of elders bound to the earth cult.

Religious life among the Yoruba today is plural: Islam arrived from the north well before colonial rule, and the indigenous Aladura churches J. D. Y. Peel documented, combining Protestant scripture with prophecy and healing in a Yoruba idiom, have become the majority affiliation for many communities. Traditional orisha worship, Islam and Christianity coexist within extended families rather than replacing one another.