Early Oyo History Reconsidered

Abstract

The old Oyo ‘empire’ was the largest and best-known of the Yoruba kingdoms. Located in the savannah below the bend of the river Niger in the Bussa-Jebba region of southwest Nigeria, it achieved prominence during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but collapsed and disintegrated in the early years of the nineteenth. Its origins and early history are imperfectly known because the traditions dealing with this period are enmeshed in myth and legend. This state of affairs has led one writer to conclude that the history of this period “is beyond meaningful’ enquiry.Two major problems confront anyone attempting to reconstruct early Oyo history. The origins of the kingdom are linked both to the process of the settlement of the Yoruba people in their present location and to that of state formation among them. Furthermore, information about these processes is to be found in traditional accounts that seem to have been fossilized since the publication of Samuel Johnson's The History of the Yorubas in 1921. Indeed, many subsequent ‘traditions’ seem in no small measure to be derived from this work. It is therefore appropriate to begin this paper with a discussion of the influence of Johnson's work, followed by an analysis of Johnson's sources and motives, insofar as these can be determined. In 1901 an Iiebu man found it necessary to make an emphatic declaration on Yoruba history: I deny that Oyo is the capital city of Yoruba land. Ife, the cradle home of the whole Yorubas and the land of the deified Oduduwa, has been recognised by every interior tribe (including Benin and Ketu) for all intents and purposes as the capital city.