Yorubaland

Yorubaland is the region of southwestern Nigeria, Benin and Togo where the Yoruba live, and it is the source of a tradition now practised on four continents.

Its structure has a distant creator, Olodumare, who is not the object of a cult, and a large population of orisha, powers associated with rivers, iron, thunder, smallpox, the sea, wisdom and much else, each with their own priesthood, praise poetry, colours, foods, drum rhythms and prohibitions. Devotees are attached to particular orisha rather than to all of them, and possession by the orisha during ceremony is a normal and expected event. Ile-Ife is held to be where creation began and remains the tradition's ritual centre.

Ifa is the divination system, and it is the tradition's library. Sixteen basic figures combine into two hundred and fifty six, each attached to a body of verse that a diviner must memorise, containing narratives, precedents, prescriptions and proverbs. William Bascom's studies documented both Ifa and the simpler sixteen-cowrie method used more widely, recording large numbers of verses from practitioners in Nigeria and in Cuba. The system is consulted for decisions of every scale, and its verses are the principal vehicle in which the tradition's knowledge is transmitted.

The sacred grove on the Osun river at Osogbo remains an active shrine with an annual festival, and was inscribed as a World Heritage site.

Yoruba religion is unusual among African traditions in the scale and the documentation of its diaspora.

The nineteenth-century wars in Yorubaland produced very large numbers of captives at exactly the period when Cuba and Brazil were importing the most, which is why Yoruba practice is so heavily represented in Santeria, or Lucumi, in Cuba, in Candomble in Brazil, and in Orisha worship in Trinidad. In each place the orisha were identified with Catholic saints, which permitted practice to continue under a Catholic surface, and the house structures that emerged, with an initiating elder and a lineage of initiates, replaced the lineage and territorial organisation that could not survive the crossing.

The traffic has since reversed. Practitioners from Cuba, Brazil and the United States have travelled to Nigeria for initiation and for the recovery of practices lost in the diaspora, Nigerian priests have travelled to teach and to initiate abroad, and a substantial international literature has developed in Spanish, Portuguese and English. J. Lorand Matory's work on the Brazilian case argues that this exchange is not recent contamination of an authentic tradition but has been going on since the nineteenth century, with a class of literate travellers moving in both directions.

A separate development is the Aladura churches, Yoruba-founded Christian bodies emphasising prayer, prophecy and healing, which grew from the 1920s and are now large and international in their own right.