Yoruba religion

The Yoruba people live in south-western Nigeria and in neighbouring Benin and Togo. Their traditional religion, which they call Isese, “tradition”, has no founder and no founding date. Yoruba myth tells that the world was created at Ile-Ife, where the orisa came down from heaven; Ile-Ife flourished as a sacred city from about 1000 CE, famous for its bronze and terracotta heads.

From the 15th to the 18th century the Oyo empire spread Yoruba culture and the worship of orisa such as Sango, its royal god. Each town had its own shrines, priesthoods and festivals.

In the 18th and 19th centuries hundreds of thousands of Yoruba were carried across the Atlantic as slaves. In Cuba, Brazil and Trinidad they rebuilt their worship, often hiding the orisa behind Catholic saints. Today most Yoruba in Africa are Christian or Muslim, while the orisa religions of the Americas have spread to the United States and beyond.

Yoruba history is told in two voices: the oral traditions of kings and priests, and the evidence of archaeology. Tradition names Oduduwa as the first king of Ile-Ife and the ancestor of the rulers of the Yoruba kingdoms, whose crowns trace their right to rule back to him. Archaeology shows that Ile-Ife was a large town by about 1000 CE and reached its height in the 12th to 15th centuries, when its artists cast the naturalistic copper-alloy heads, probably of kings, that are now among Africa’s most celebrated works of art. Religion and kingship were inseparable: the king was a sacred figure surrounded by priests and shrines.

The Oyo kingdom, said to have been founded by Oranmiyan, a prince of Ife, grew into the most powerful Yoruba state. Its cavalry dominated the savanna, and in the 17th and 18th centuries it ruled or received tribute from a wide region, including the kingdom of Dahomey to the west. Its king, the Alaafin, ruled alongside a council of nobles, the Oyo Mesi, and royal religion centred on Sango, remembered in tradition as an early Alaafin who became the orisa of thunder. Through Oyo’s power the worship of Sango, together with Ifá and other cults, spread through much of Yorubaland.

Islam reached Yoruba towns from the north, carried by traders and scholars, and gained followers from at least the 17th century. In the early 19th century Oyo fell apart. In 1817 the general Afonja rebelled at Ilorin with the support of Muslim forces; Ilorin later became an emirate of the Sokoto Caliphate, and by the 1830s the old capital of Oyo had been abandoned. Decades of wars among Yoruba states followed, producing great numbers of captives who were sold to European slave traders on the coast.

These wars made the Yoruba one of the largest groups among the last generations of Africans taken to the Americas, especially to Brazil and Cuba, where the slave trade continued into the mid-19th century. In Cuba, where the Yoruba were known as Lucumí, mutual-aid societies called cabildos helped preserve their songs, drums and rites, and the religion later called Santería, or Regla de Ocha, took shape, with orisa linked to Catholic saints: Sango with Santa Bárbara, Obatala with Our Lady of Mercy. In Bahia, Brazil, Yoruba people known as Nagô founded the first Candomblé houses, led above all by women, in the 19th century. In Trinidad, liberated Africans, many of them Yoruba, who arrived as indentured labourers from the 1840s, helped create the Orisha tradition.

In West Africa the 19th century also brought Christianity. The Church Missionary Society reached Badagry in 1842 and Abeokuta soon after, and Samuel Ajayi Crowther, a Yoruba freed from a slave ship, became the first African Anglican bishop in 1864. Britain annexed Lagos in 1861 and by the end of the century ruled Yorubaland as part of what became Nigeria. Under colonial rule Christianity and Islam spread rapidly, and in the 1920s and 1930s Yoruba Christians founded the Aladura, “praying”, churches. Many families came to follow Christianity or Islam while keeping some orisa festivals and consulting Ifá.

In the 20th century the orisa traditions found new respect. Scholars and artists recorded and championed Yoruba religion; the Austrian-born artist Susanne Wenger, a priestess of Osun, helped restore the sacred grove of Osogbo, which became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2005. In the Americas, emigration after the Cuban Revolution of 1959 carried Santería to Miami, New York and beyond, and in 1970 African-American devotees founded the village of Oyotunji in South Carolina. In 1993 the United States Supreme Court, in a case brought by a Santería church in Hialeah, Florida, upheld the right to perform animal offerings. Some devotees in the Americas now seek to return to African forms, removing Catholic elements, while others keep the blended traditions of their ancestors.

Above all stands Olodumare, the supreme creator, distant from daily affairs. Between Olodumare and humans stand the orisaorisa The deities of Yoruba religion, such as Ọ̀ṣun, Ṣàngó and Ọ̀rúnmìlà. Glossary, divine beings linked to forces of nature and human life: Obatala, the creator of human bodies; Ogun, iron and work; Sango, thunder; Osun, rivers and love; Esu, the messenger who carries offerings and guards the crossroads.

Everything that exists has asease Àṣẹ: the power to make things happen, the life force that flows through gods, people and words. Glossary, the power to make things happen. Every person chooses a destiny, oriori The inner head or personal destiny that each person chooses before birth. Glossary, before birth; life is about fulfilling it well, with the help of the orisa and ancestors. The highest virtue is iwa pele, good and gentle character.

Ancestors remain part of the family and are honoured with offerings and festivals.

At the centre of practice is Ifá divination. A priest called babalawobabalawo A priest of Ifá, trained to perform divination: “father of secrets”. Glossary, “father of secrets”, casts sacred palm nuts or a divining chain and marks the resulting sign on a wooden tray. He then recites the verses linked to that sign, which tell stories and prescribe offerings.

Devotees of each orisa are initiated into its service and wear its beads and colours. Offerings of food, kola nuts, palm oil and animals are made at shrines. At ceremonies, sacred drums and songs call the orisa, who may come to possess dancers in trance.

Yoruba religion has no written holy book, but it has a vast oral literature. The corpus of Ifá contains 256 figures (oduodu One of the 256 signs of Ifá divination, each with its body of verses. Glossary), each with many verses of myth, proverb and counsel, memorised by priests over years of training. UNESCO recognised the Ifá divination system as a masterpiece of intangible heritage in 2005.

Oriki, praise poems for the orisa, kings and families, are chanted at rites and festivals.