Kingdoms Of The Yoruba 3rd Edition

The past of the Yoruba of West Africa, who form the population of the Western State of Nigeria, must be reconstructed, so far as the period preceding the penetra- tion of their country by Europeans from about the mid-nineteenth century is concerned, almost wholly from tradition, or ‘oral evidence’ in the cumbersome phrase, a method which is only now achieving respectability among historians. As | J. D. Fage pointed out in his inaugural lecture at Birmingham in 1965, ‘The sense of history, the need for history can be quite independent of the ability to write’; many African societies in the absence of writing ‘developed formal oral records of their past and elaborate methods of maintaining these records for their posterity’. In the case of the Yoruba, the historian who is prepared to use such material is fortunate, since they are a people unusually rich in tradition, expressed and conserved in many ways.