Aladura: A Religious Movement Among the Yoruba

J. D. Y. Peel was an anthropologist and historian of African religion, and this Oxford University Press volume, published for the International African Institute, is his academic monograph on Aladura, the independent Christian prophetic movement that emerged among the Yoruba in the early twentieth century. Its strength is that Peel's own fieldwork and historical research made this one of the founding academic studies of African independent churches as a serious field of scholarship, tracing the movement's emergence from within Yoruba religious and social history rather than treating it as a simple offshoot of missionary Christianity. Its limit is that it documents the movement as it stood by the late 1960s, so a claim about how Aladura churches have developed since needs a more recent source.