Origins: Ile-Ife, Oduduwa and the Creation Accounts
Ile-Ife as the sacred centre, the creation account of Obatala and Oduduwa, Oduduwa as founder of the crowned kingdoms, the eastern-migration tradition recorded by Samuel Johnson and its critics, what archaeology and linguistics say, and how to read oral tradition as a source.
Where the story begins
Every Yoruba crowned ruler (oba) traditionally traces legitimacy to Ile-Ife and to Oduduwa. The traditions survive in oral form: oriki (praise poetry), the verses of Ifa divination, and the histories kept by palace historians. They were first written down systematically in the 19th century by Yoruba Christian scholars, most famously the Rev. Samuel Johnson, whose History of the Yorubas was completed in 1897 and published in 1921.
How to read them: oral traditions are shaped by the purposes of their tellers. An Ife version and an Oyo version of the same event can differ because each city had reasons to tell it its own way. Throughout this course, oral tradition is marked [oral tradition] and set beside written and archaeological evidence where it exists.
Samuel Johnson, The History of the Yorubas (1921); Robin Law, "The Oyo Empire" (1977) on traditions as sources; Toyin Falola and Akinwumi Ogundiran (eds.), Yoruba Identity and Power Politics (2006); Jacob Olupona, City of 201 Gods: Ilé-Ifẹ̀ in Time, Space, and the Imagination (2011).
The early Yoruba world on a map
Positions of the main early centres. Ile-Ife sits at the forest-savanna edge; Oyo-Ile (Old Oyo) lay far to the north in the savanna, where horses could be kept; the Ijebu, Ondo and Ekiti kingdoms lay in the forest to the south and east.