Formation of Yoruba identity

Waterman, p. 368ff:

"It appears that a good number of the societies represented in authoritative books about Africa...areat least in part the products of colonialism, which had to create its objects in order to control its subjects.'"

"There were no Yoruba-that is, no one who would have said "I am Yoruba"-before the early 19th century. ... The peoples of southwestern Nigeria, the Benin Republic, and Togo who are today referred to by scholars as "the Yoruba" were, until the late 19th century, organized into a series of some 15 to 20 independent polities, linked by shifting patterns of allegiance and competition...."

"The term Yariba or Yarba appears to have originated among the Hausa, who applied it to their southern neighbors, the Oyo. By 1800 Muslim Hausa clerics used this term to refer to the subjects of other kingdoms that had fallen under the suzerainty of the Oyo Empire, ....

The Oyo themselves had adopted the designation Yoruba as a mode of self-reference by the early 19th century, a process probably encouraged by the high status associations of Hausa regal culture and Islam."

The British administration, ...and indigenous power brokers in hinterland towns, who sought strategic advantage in a still fluid colonial setting, were important agents in the emergence of modern pan-Yoruba identity.

Of paramount importance, however, were two groups of repatriated slaves, the Saro-educated at mission schools in Sierra Leone-and the Amaro-emancipados from Brazil and Cuba who introduced distinctive syncretic styles of worship, food, dress, dance, and music developed under slavery in the Americas.

These repatriate communities provided paradigms of a modern black culture grounded in indigenous tradition yet oriented toward the wider world."

"Consciousness of a common Yoruba identity appears first to have emerged among the Sierra Leonean repatriates, who formed a literate black elite in the colonial power center of Lagos in the 19th century.

The printing press, like the two world religions, was a crucial factor in the construction of modern Yoruba identity.

Standard Yoruba, a lingua franca based on the Oyo dialect, was reduced to Roman script by Saro missionaries and disseminated via early translations of the Qur'an and bible, grammar school texts, and the first authoritative histories of the Yoruba.

Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther, published his Yoruba Vocabulay and Yoruba Grammar,both based upon the Oyo dialect, in 1842.

The first newspaper in Standard Yoruba was printed in 1859 in the hinterland town of Abeokuta, a center for Christian proselytization.

The most influential example of historical reconstruction by a Sierra Leonean repatriate, The Reverend Samuel Johnson's The Histoy of the Yorubas, accepted Oyo mythology and imperial propaganda as historical fact, and served as the model for textbooks until the mid-20th century."

The racist exclusion of blacks from the highest ranks of the colonial hierarchy beginning in the 1890s led to the formation after World War I of nationalist alliances between Western-educated Saro leaders ...Muslim clerics and indigenous royalty, and the expanding population of migrant workers from hinterland towns and villages.

The 1920s and 1930s saw an efflorescence of political activity, the formation of scores of independent syncretic churches (e.g., Cherubim and Seraphim, Christ Apostolic Church), the rise of modern Muslim associations formed to provide a combination of Qur'anic and European education (e.g., Ansar-Ud-Din, Nawar-Ud-Din), and the emergence and diffusion of popular theatrical and musical styles that self-consciously referred to a generalized Yoruba tradition, and for the most part utilized Standard Yoruba dialect.

In the period following World War 11, the contemporary pattern of tripolar competition among the Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa crystallized, and the cooptation of traditional symbols-such as chieftaincy titles and the dundun talking drum-became a crucial resource for politicians seeking to mobilize the newly enfranchised masses. The need to create allegiances across precolonial boundaries lent added intensity to the manipulation of symbols of Yoruba unity.

...what most scholars and government cultural officers refer to as Yoruba music is an amorphous category comprised of numerous, often quite distinctive local practices. When ethnomusicologists write about "traditional Yoruba music" they are generally referring either to a core set of genres disseminated over a wide area by the indigenous empires of the 18th and 19th centuries (for example, dundun or bata drumming and certain specialized styles of praise singing), or to localized styles performed by and for people who would identify themselves as Yoruba only in interethnic contexts and certainly not while participating in community-based ceremonial events.

For most individuals, the most common and deeply felt allegiances are still focused on the ancestral kingdoms, symbolized by facial scarification patterns and dialect.

In 1982 a juju bandleader from the eastern region of Ekiti, in discussing marketing strategies, told me that he commonly recorded the A side of a record in his dialect, and the B side in what he called "Yoruba," so that it would sell over a wider area.

Local allegiances endure, yet it is clear that the image of a unified Yoruba people has increasingly gained a foothold as a hegemonic (that is, a taken-for-granted) framework for cultural identity.

This is particularly true for those individuals most closely articulated with the capitalist world system that links Nigeria to Europe and the Americas.

We have seen how the focusing of Yoruba identity has depended at every stage upon interaction with others; that the nascent sense of belonging to a larger cultural collectivity has been catalyzed by external perspectives introduced through regional and international political and economic networks.

Distance encourages generalization, and it is easier to see the Yoruba as an undifferentiated whole from Sokoto, London, Freetown, or Bahia.