Who are the Yoruba?
Forty million strong, heirs of Ife’s bronzes and the Oyo Empire, their gods crossed the Atlantic in slave ships — and came back as world culture.
Last updated: October 2026
The Yoruba are one of Africa’s largest ethnic groups, numbering over 40 million people, concentrated in southwestern Nigeria with communities in Benin and Togo. Creators of the Ife bronze masterpieces and the Oyo Empire — pre-colonial West Africa’s greatest power — they built one of the world’s oldest urban civilizations.
The Yoruba are among the most urban peoples in African history. Long before European colonisation, they lived in large walled towns and cities in what is now southwestern Nigeria, with communities in present-day Benin and Togo. Ibadan, one of the great Yoruba cities, grew into one of the largest cities in sub-Saharan Africa. Lagos, on the coast, began as a Yoruba fishing and trading settlement before becoming Nigeria's commercial capital. This urban habit shaped Yoruba politics: power was exercised in towns, through councils, markets, and palaces, rather than by lone rulers over scattered villages.
The Yoruba language belongs to the Niger-Congo family and is tonal, meaning that pitch changes the sense of a word. It is spoken by tens of millions of people, and it is one of the most studied African languages in the world. Yoruba identity is not defined by a single state or a single king. Historically, Yoruba people organised themselves into many city-states — Ife, Oyo, Ijebu, Egba, Ilesa, Ondo, and others — each with its own ruler, traditions, and rivalries, yet bound together by a shared language, a shared origin story centred on the sacred city of Ife, and a shared religious world.
Ife, in what is now Osun State in Nigeria, is the spiritual heart of the Yoruba world. Yoruba tradition holds that the world itself was created at Ife, and the city's rulers, the Ooni, carry a prestige that reaches across all Yoruba lands. Between roughly the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, artists at Ife produced some of the most celebrated sculpture ever made in Africa: naturalistic heads in brass, bronze, and terracotta, with finely modelled faces, elaborate hairstyles, and serene expressions. When these works first reached European museums in the early twentieth century, many Western scholars refused to believe Africans had made them — a prejudice the evidence has long since demolished.
The Ife bronzes matter for two reasons. Artistically, they show a tradition of portraiture and metal-casting as sophisticated as anything in the world at the time, produced with the lost-wax technique. Historically, they prove that West Africa had wealthy, complex, urban civilisations centuries before the Atlantic slave trade — a corrective to the old idea that African history began with European arrival. Today Ife remains a living religious and royal centre, and its art is studied in universities and museums around the world, including in debates about the return of African cultural heritage held abroad.
From around the seventeenth century, the Oyo Empire became the dominant power in the Yoruba region and one of the strongest states in pre-colonial West Africa. Oyo's strength rested on cavalry: horses, bought with trade goods from the north, gave Oyo armies a mobility its forest neighbours could not match. The empire grew rich on trade in kola nuts, cloth, and, in its later years, enslaved people, and its influence stretched from the savanna toward the coast. At its height, Oyo exacted tribute from neighbouring states, including Dahomey to the west.
Oyo's government is remembered for its system of checks. The Alaafin, the emperor, ruled alongside a council of state, the Oyo Mesi, led by the Bashorun, and a powerful secret society. The Oyo Mesi could, in principle, compel an Alaafin who had become a tyrant to take his own life — an early form of constitutional restraint, even if it was enforced by aristocratic power rather than by popular vote. The empire declined in the early nineteenth century amid succession disputes, the pressures of the Atlantic slave trade, and the rise of new powers. Its collapse unleashed decades of war among Yoruba states, which in turn made the region more vulnerable to British expansion. Lagos was annexed by Britain in 1861, and by the end of the century the Yoruba lands were inside the British protectorate that became Nigeria.
Yoruba religion is one of the most influential faith systems in the world, and many Yoruba people practise it alongside Christianity or Islam. At its centre is Olodumare, the supreme creator, and a host of orisha — deities and divinised ancestors who govern domains such as thunder, iron, the sea, and fertility. Each orisha has colours, foods, dances, drums, and praise names. Worship is communal and embodied: festivals fill streets with processions, drumming, and masked performances, and shrines anchor neighbourhood life.
The intellectual core of the tradition is Ifa, a divination system built around a vast corpus of verses, the Odu Ifa, memorised and interpreted by priests known as babalawo. Ifa verses contain myth, proverb, medicine, and moral counsel, and consulting Ifa is, in effect, consulting a library of Yoruba philosophy. In 2005, UNESCO proclaimed the Ifa divination system a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. For Yoruba people, the tradition is not a relic: it remains a living source of ethics, healing, and identity, and its scholarship now spans universities on several continents.
The Yoruba are also a global people, and that global presence was shaped by catastrophe. During the Atlantic slave trade, large numbers of Yoruba captives were taken to the Americas, especially in the nineteenth century, when the wars that followed Oyo's collapse fed the trade. In Cuba, Yoruba religion became Santería, also called Regla de Ocha; in Brazil it became Candomblé; in Haiti, Trinidad, and elsewhere it fused with other African and Catholic traditions. The orisha travelled under new names — Shango as Santa Bárbara in Cuba, for instance — and the drums, dances, and divination survived slavery to become living religions practised today by millions.
The movement went both ways. In the nineteenth century, freed Yoruba people returned from Sierra Leone and Brazil to Lagos and Abeokuta — the Saro and Aguda communities — bringing building styles, trades, and new forms of Christianity and education. Later migrations took Yoruba people to Britain, the United States, and across the world. The result is a culture that is at once deeply rooted in southwestern Nigeria and genuinely diasporic: a Yoruba festival in Havana or Salvador, in Brazil, is not a copy of a Nigerian original but a branch of the same tree, with its own history.
Today the Yoruba are one of the largest ethnic groups in Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, and Yoruba language, music, and film reach far beyond their homeland. Yoruba-language films are a major strand of Nollywood, Nigeria's film industry, one of the largest in the world by output. Yoruba musicians have carried styles such as jùjú, fuji, and Afrobeat to international audiences, and Yoruba writers, scholars, and artists work in Lagos, Ibadan, London, and New York alike. Wole Soyinka, a Yoruba playwright and poet, became in 1986 the first African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Yoruba people are not a monolith. They hold every political opinion, practise several religions, and argue constantly among themselves — about Nigerian politics, about the role of traditional rulers, about what should be preserved and what should change. That argument is itself part of the tradition: a culture built on councils, proverbs, and public debate. What endures across the centuries is a distinctive combination — urban life, artistic ambition, religious depth, and a diaspora that has carried Yoruba ideas to every continent — and a people who have kept remaking themselves without losing the thread that runs back to Ife.
Further reading in works of reference and scholarship:
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, entries on Yoruba, Ife, and the Oyo Empire
- Samuel Johnson, The History of the Yorubas (Cambridge University Press)
- Robert S. Smith, Kingdoms of the Yoruba (University of Wisconsin Press)
- UNESCO, proclamation of the Ifa Divination System as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity (2005)
- Henry John Drewal, John Pemberton III, and Rowland Abiodun, Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought (Center for African Art)
- Toyin Falola, A History of Nigeria (Cambridge University Press)