Why did I get this book?
I’m teaching my survey course on West African history again this fall and I’m always desperate for newer scholarship that offers a broad overview of a place, a particular state or society, or of a people and culture. There’s a great new range of work on early West African history that is comparative or regional, focused primarily on Senegambia and the Central Niger/Sahel, but much of the work on societies and states from the Guinea Coast to the Bight of Benin is either older, focused on relatively specialized subjects, or is focused on West African societies in relationship to the Atlantic world. This is a really welcome new work that aims to provide a comprehensive historical understanding of Yoruba societies and polities. I’d love to see work very much in this mode dealing with Dahomey/Aja, Igbo, Benin, Kru and other states and societies. (Asante there’s still Wilks and McCaskie’s scholarship, but that also feels like there could be something newer that’s not as technical or specialized as McCaskie.)
Is it what I thought it was?
Yes, and more—it’s really rich in how it works difficult conceptual, definitional, and historiographical problems.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
I expect to be teaching from this for the rest of my career. It’s also a very helpful work of reference for me since my own specialization is southern Africa.
Quotes
“Although the literature on the Yorùbá is vast and represents some of the groundbreaking works of African studies, the deep-time history that defines the Yorùbá experience and its process of becoming are poorly understood. There is an abundance of structural analysis of Yorùbá cultural forms, but the historical analysis is lacking or inadequate in most of those studies. As a result of this gap, we have a growing body of literature that flattens the deep-time Yorùbá history and treats culture as fossilized in a timeless past. Traditions are treated as if they have repeated themselves over several centuries without change.”
“I demonstrate that individuals and social groups became Yorùbá through learning, and creating and participating in emergent knowledge production, communicative interactions, and regional social networks. For a long time, we have lacked the vocabular and conceptual framework to make sense of this reality because of the encumbrance of the atemporal, geographically bounded, static and tribal model of ethnicity and identity that European colonial ethnography and historiography has bequeathed to African studies. As a result, many contemporary scholars continue to privilege the Western social science’s ‘nation’ paradigm when writing about the ‘other’—the colonized. They thereby persist in confusing culture with ethnicity and language with biological kinship, a perspective that is incompatible with the ancestral Yorùbá historical experience.”
“This book is not a parade of kingdoms and city-states, kingdom rule, and dynastic histories, an approach that has dominated Yorùbá historiography. Neither is it my goal to account for every kingdom, big or small, or the minutiae of their rise and fall. Such an agenda is impossible to achieve, as there were hundreds of such kingdoms and polities in the long history of the Yorùbá community of practice.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
As I said above, this feels to me like the kind of work that historians writing about Africa (and other regions of the world) to some extent moved away from several decades ago. I understand why (and so does Ogundiran): there were two models for “deep histories” of a given ethnic group/culture in much of Africa by the 1970s and they were both troubled. One was basically the outgrowth of British and French colonial administrative knowledge production, the consequence of naming African subjects as belonging to particular “tribes” and then needing to provide a highly defined and bounded account of a given tribe and its customs. Even when this sort of work was produced by relatively sympathetic scholars and officials, the way that this kind of work traced contemporary ethnic labels back into the past to some distant moment of ethnogenesis retained the instrumental stink of its administrative purpose. That fed into a second mode of scholarship produced after independence, much of it by the first generation of African scholars writing in newly created national universities, that took some of the body of the colonial-inflected scholarship and transplanted it into the “usable past” that nationalism in Europe worked to provide in the late 19th and 20th Century, of a coherent “people” who had lived where they lived back into the distant past, within a variety of political structures (that were nevertheless taken to be influences on or visible within the new nation). Scholarly history done with an eye to provisioning new nations with usable histories that rooted them in the precolonial era had to thread the needle carefully because it did not want to see various regional or ethnic histories within the nation as the prologue to a nation that should have been—an especially sensitive problem in Nigeria’s post-independence history. So afterwards increasingly social and cultural historians, especially those based outside of sub-Saharan Africa, moved away from providing these kinds of books and articles that offered a comprehensive history of a particular people or even of a particular state or kingdom. And yet we still have had to teach that sort of information in our courses, so I’ve often found myself having to lecture just to provide a coherent, compact body of information which I can then problematize in various ways.
So this book feels to me like a very welcome historiographical turn, as I said earlier. I hope there will be more like it. Because even if “Yorùbá” is (like many ethnonyms and national identities around the world) significantly a product of the 19th Century, there’s still a recognizable culture, language and political history that foregrounds “Yorùbá” that can and ought to be set out in this kind of comprehensive overview that extends back into “deep time”. I keep thinking a lot about my chance reading of Peter Heather’s Empires and Barbarians, which works its way very carefully towards a historiographical revision of “German” societies from the Roman era into the medieval period. Heather lays out very clearly why post-Nazi German historians recoiled so forcefully from seeing various groups and communities in North-Central Europe as recognizably and coherently “German” in some proto-national sense, but he then tries to bring newer work into the picture to soften that sharp rejection. His reinterpretation reminds me in some ways of Paul Landau’s recent revisionary critique of the history of various ethnic groups in southern Africa (shared in other recent work) that argues that what once looked like the migrations of entire coherent linguistic/cultural groups looks more like small groups of armed men moving into settled agricultural communities and establishing complex forms of dominion and collaboration within those communities. Meaning, on some level, it’s not just that the nationalist/colonial template is wrong for Yorùbá, it’s wrong for pretty much every modern cultural/linguistic identity. These are hard stories to tell in the narrative form that wider audiences expect, but I think it can be done and it can even keep the “deep history” of languages, cultures and political forms in view. I think Ogundiran provides a great model that balances narrative clarity with historiographical and theoretical sophistication.
In my teaching, I’ve long been prone to use the word “polity” instead of kingdom, state or chiefdom, and to use phrases like “Shona-speaking peoples” or “Yorùbá-speaking peoples”, which I know drives my students nuts, because it’s hard to compactly explain what I’m trying to avoid (and it ends up reifying what I’m avoiding anyway, because students can’t really keep in mind the alternate, vaguer thing those terms are trying to reference). I’m hoping that the introduction of this book will help me lay that out more clearly.
One of the challenges of teaching—and reading—a deep, “thick” history of this kind of a particular culture and language in sub-Saharan Africa if it is not your particular area of specialized knowledge is that you have to build up a substantial vocabulary as you go along and hold on to it without quickly translating it into a familiar Western-inflected “universal” that lets you compare those concepts to others even in the region or area that you’re reading about. This is the point where many generalists complain not just about the field of African history but about most historians precisely because most of us have such a strong preference for specificity. It’s hard not to get annoyed with that complaint because typically the complaining person has no trouble at all grasping why it would be important to know about the details of the Punic Wars, the specifics of medieval European ecclesiastical law, or the distinction between Flemish and French in Belgium. At the same time, I acknowledge the challenge--and it is a basic intellectual problem with the idea of “African history” as a field, in that it is expected that experts in that field will have that level of specialized knowledge about many regions whose “deep histories” are not connected or interacting until the period of the Atlantic trade or with European imperial conquest. The major plus here for this book for me is that Yorùbá history, despite its historiographical problems as described by Ogundiran, is one of the most discussed in the wider field of African history and anthropology, so most specialists in African history pick up some of the vocabulary and reference points that Ogundiran goes over. So, as a result, when he talks about the emergence of the Ògbóni in the socio-political structure of Ile-Ife, I’m able to follow along on the specifics of the analysis because I know the word from teaching and reading about Yorùbá history, most specifically the history of Òyo. The details matter—there’s a point I think where you’re entitled to climb up out of the details and begin thinking comparatively again, but it’s important to earn that perspective so that the comparison doesn’t quickly revert to “so is this a kingdom like France in 1200 CE?” Moreover, I think Ogundiran does a good job of providing “top-level” conceptual frames where even if the details are hard to hold onto, a student or a scholarly reader in another field could still walk away saying “ok, I understand what he means by House society”.
I also really appreciate that Ogundiran uses myth-history without reifying myth as such. What do I mean by that? For example, the polity and society of Ilé-Ifè during what Ogundiran calls the Yorùbá Classical Period now plays a huge role in contemporary Yorùbá spirituality and oral tradition, which is treated often as just something that explains itself: an important past period that becomes naturally venerated. Whereas in this book, this is the product of an active history, a somewhat instrumental creation of a “ritual field”—thus the contemporary veneration is taken as evidence of something that was done in this past moment as ideology, as culture and politics-making, rather than just a naturalistic, inevitable product of some golden age. Here I will venture a comparison to help people who know Western history better: the fact that Rome is a reference point for centuries in Europe and remains very available in the consciousness of modern Westerners as a ready source of metaphors, concepts, and examples is not just a natural by-product of Rome having been a Big Deal for a long time. It’s a consequence first of the fact that the Western Roman Empire never actually “fell” in the sense that many people imagine and thus continued to be incorporated into Western European political and social systems, but also the intellectuals, priests and authorities of the Roman Republic and Empire actively worked to make themselves known and knowable, to become a central defining point of reference. So Ogundiran talks here about how those investing in Ilé-Ifè during its active period worked to create a “universal history” that placed Ilé-Ifè at its center.
I have about another hundred pages left to read carefully, but I’m also pleased at how this book re-centers or reconceptualizes the influence and significance of the Atlantic world after 1500. This is a question I’m going to try and work with as a major theme in the survey this fall—the difference between a book like Howard French’s Born in Blackness and Ogundiran’s The Yorùbá is how they locate and center the history of Atlantic Africa. I don’t want to say it’s “Eurocentrism” vs “Africa-centered” because both concepts carry an excess of politicized weight and I think that both French and Ogundiran are doing something important and useful. But it is a difference and it is often a difference that matters.