The Yoruba call themselves the people who ask if you slept well
One Yoruba nickname translates as the people who greet you with good morning, did you wake up well? It celebrates an elaborate culture of greetings for every occasion. Behind it stands one of Africa's largest peoples, over 50 million strong, with a city-state at Ile-Ife dating back some 2,500 years.
Yorubaland stretches across parts of Nigeria, Benin and Togo. Most Yoruba live in Nigeria, where Ethnologue puts them at about a fifth of the population, and more than a million live outside Africa, with deep roots in the diasporas of Brazil, Cuba and the Caribbean. The Yoruba language has more native speakers than any other in the vast Niger-Congo family.
The earliest written use of the name comes from 1614, in an essay by the Berber jurist Ahmed Baba, whose manuscript survives in a Timbuktu library. He listed the Yoruba among ten groups of the West African interior he classed as unbelievers. That offhand mention implies the name was already common by the 1500s. Where it came from is murky. Outsiders proposed everything from a biblical ancestor to a Mande word for the Niger, and the explorer Richard Burton recorded an 1861 claim that it meant the head king; locals have rejected most such guesses as foreign to their traditions.
Other names circulate too. Nago, Lucumi and Aku all describe people who trace their origin to Ife, while neighbours coined exonyms such as Alata in southern Ghana. Another self-description, children of Oduduwa, honours a semi-legendary king.
Archaeology and oral history agree that the Yoruba grew largely where they are, from older Volta-Niger populations, by the first millennium BCE. A powerful city-state stood at Ile-Ife by the fifth century BCE, among the earliest in present-day Nigeria, and its traditions feature Oduduwa and Obatala. It later anchored the Ife Empire, which flourished from 1200 to 1420 and reached into eastern Benin and Togo. By the eleventh century the Yoruba already dominated the culture of southwestern Nigeria, and later accounts preserved under the Oyo Empire kept Ile-Ife at the centre of their story.
Source: Yoruba people
