Yoruba

The Yoruba are one of West Africa's most urban peoples, organized since medieval times into walled city-states across Yorubaland's forest and savanna in southwestern Nigeria and adjoining Benin and Togo. Their spiritual homeland is Ile-Ife, founded by the middle of the first millennium BCE and seat of the Ife Empire at its height around 1200 to 1420, whose artists made naturalistic brass and terracotta heads.

Yoruba dynasties trace descent from the semi-legendary Oduduwa; each state was ruled by an oba, checked by chief councils. From the fifteenth century the Oyo Empire, with its cavalry and capital Oyo-Ile, overshadowed Ife and built a dominion from the Niger to the coast, drawing tribute from Dahomey and Nupe.

Oyo's power crumbled in the early nineteenth century under Fulani pressure and the loss of Ilorin; Ibadan and Abeokuta then rose as rival states. Traditional Yoruba religion centres on the high god Olodumare and orisha such as Shango and Ogun, whose worship spread with the Atlantic slave trade into Santeria and Candomble.