Early Yoruba Historiography

The pre-colonial history of the Yoruba has attracted considerable attention from academically trained historians in recent years. This academic historiography–in Yorubaland as elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa–does not antedate the 1950s, but it was preceded by a tradition of historical writing by local amateur historians which stretched back well into the nineteenth century. The modern academic historians owe a great deal to these amateur predecessors: much of the “oral tradition” utilized by the academic historians comes in fact at second hand from the writings of the amateurs, and the current generation of local historians has figured prominently among the informants from whom the academics have collected their oral evidence. This fusion of academic and amateur historiography was, indeed, given some institutional recognition in the Yoruba Historical Research Scheme launched by the government of the Western Region of Nigeria in 1956, in which both academics and local historians were employed as research associates to collect traditional material. Despite their importance, however, little serious work has been done on the early historians of Yorubaland. The existence of a local tradition of historiography in Yorubaland has been mentioned in general surveys of historical writing on Africa, and attention has been drawn to it as constituting an aspect of the development of “cultural nationalism” among western-educated Africans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These discussions of early Yoruba historiography, however, have dealt with only a few of the better known works and have given little idea of the wealth of the published material or of its character—nor is there any comprehensive bibliography of the writings of the early Yoruba historians. The present article, therefore, attempts to present as complete a survey as possible of historical writing on Yorubaland in the period before c. 1950 and seeks to make some contribution towards assessment of the value of the Yoruba local histories as sources by giving some information on the context in which the local historians wrote and the way in which they went about the task of reconstructing Yoruba history.