The Yoruba in Transition: History, Values, and Modernity (review)

This book has its origin in papers presented at the "Perspectives on Yoruba History and Culture" conference, held at the University of Texas at Austin in March 2004. The fourth book on the conference (see Falola and Genova 2006a, 2006b, and 2006c), it is a good addition to the numerous publications that make the Yoruba attractive to scholars. Covering a range of subjects and themes, it seeks a multidisciplinary study of the Yoruba of Nigeria and their engagement and negotiations ("transition") with "modernity," "internationalism," and globalization. In particular, it is concerned with the relationship between the Yoruba elite, politics, and mass mobilization and the deployment of identity consciousness. How did the Yoruba invent an ethnic awareness? for what purpose? and how did this affect them and their neighbors?

The book is divided into three parts: "Histories Reconstructed," "Identity at the Crossroads," and "The Future of Modernity." Starting with the Iwe Iroyin, a Yoruba language newspaper set up by the Church Missionary Society at Abeokuta in 1859, a literate culture developed through which a Christian, Western-educated elite mobilized the hitherto multiethnic Yoruba-speaking peoples to adopt a common identity. Obafemi Awolowo, the Yoruba hero of mid-twentieth-century Nigerian politics, built upon this to the extent that some wrongly perceived him as the first "proto-Yoruba"—a title that had been given variously to Samuel Ajayi Crowther (1806–1891), a Yoruba ex-slave who became the first black Anglican bishop, and Samuel Johnson, the Anglican pastor-author of a classic book, History of the Yorubas.

A question at the heart of political debate in Nigeria since the 1930s has been whether Yoruba nationalism compromised the evolution of a broader national identity. Ihenacho thinks it did. He believes Awolowo was a socialist, whose free education program weakened "Yoruba traditional education," fed the Nigerian civil war (1967–1970), and the attendant persecution of Igbo in Nigeria (pp. 68–70). But as the book demonstrates, Yoruba society is not monolithic but diverse. Ethnic solidarity, rather than obviating intragroup struggles, intensified them. In Lagos, the grip of the old elite-cum-patrons has weakened since the 1970s, creating a more diffused patron–client relationship and new power structures. The Bamidele movement, believing that blind adherence to Arabic education has been detrimental to the Yoruba and to Islam, embraces Western education and culture, benefiting from multiple civilizations.

Parts two and three reflect the editors' choice of title: Yoruba in Transition. The papers in these sections examine subjects including identity and ethnic politics; health and medicare; literacy, education, and the elite; religion; economy; crime; law enforcement, gangsterism, and ethnic militias; road accidents; social stratification; agriculture; gender relations; and studies of Yoruba women. The topics show how the Yoruba are negotiating the path of modernity. Like most collective series, especially those with so many contributors and divergent expertise, this collection exhibits an inevitable unevenness. Part one has four chapters united by a historical analysis, but parts two and three, though thematically more diffuse, have 11 and 12 chapters respectively. Readers in search of a coherent theme might be disappointed, but they are compensated with a diversity of issues, whose implications should lead to more research. Some chapters are supported by rich source materials. Here, I would single out Olunlade's extensive list of newspapers published in the Yoruba region since 1859. Kolawole has two interesting Oriki (Yoruba praise poems) that one wishes were discussed more in her essay. One wonders what is Yoruba in "Road accidents, AIDS Explosion" (the chapter is more on traditional birth attendants than AIDS), and in "Cyber Crime" in Nigeria. Are the Yoruba worse drivers than other Nigerians? or were the accidents, as in Lagos State, caused by urban congestion, bad roads, and/or overcrowding of roads in Yoruba states? Similarly, thoughts about the problems of modernity lead some writers to suggest the "restoration of older values," but without examining the imperfection of these values. And how does a return to the...