Yoruba As a City-State Culture

Yoruba as a City-State Culture J.D.Y. Peel Yoruba “towns” (z7h) are well known as an excep north, based on the exchange of coastal and forest tional case within African studies, as showing the products for those of the interior, eventually highest level of pre-colonial “urbanization”, that is of connecting with the trans-Saharan trade through the the proportion of the population living in large, dense Hausa kingdoms of what is now Northern Nigeria. nucleated settlements, in the whole continent south of Later the Yoruba were also directly or (in most cases) the Sahara. And not just this, but more directly rele indirectly connected to the Atlantic trade, which grew vant to the topic in hand, these settlements have char in its strategic significance for relations between their acteristically had distinctive political institutions, the polities. The greatest Yoruba state of this period, the organs of government of small polities of which they so-called “Oyo Empire”, drew its power from the fact were the centre, and to which they gave their name. that it straddled these two spheres of external trade, The Yoruba meet so many of the criteria that Hansen stretching from the Atlantic lagoons to the River has built into his ideal-types of “city-state” and “city- Niger (Law [1975]). Despite strong affinities of state culture” that it is not surprising that their ilu have language and culture, and shared traditions of origin, sometimes been compared to the poleis of Classical these peoples did not know themselves by a common Greece. Yet the most interesting thing about Yoruba- name until the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen land is not that it makes a neat typological fit, but that turies, when the term “Yoruba” - a Hausa name for its communities and sub-regions are so diverse - some Oyo, first adopted by missionaries - came into gen of them fit the ideal type closely, others hardly at all - eral use. We thus have the paradox that the ethnic that it presents an ideal terrain for exploring the label by which we designate the Yoruba city-state dynamics of city-state formation. In so doing we need culture belongs to the period when the Yoruba ilu to combine two traditions of work in Yoruba studies were, through their incorporation into Nigeria, fast which have tended to be pursued somewhat independ losing their character as city-states. ently of one another: one by geographers and anthro While the very idea of a statistically average ilu pologists on Yoruba urbanism and urbanization would be meaningless, such is the variation in both (Bascom [1955, 1962]; Schwab [1965]; Mabogunje population and territory, it is helpful to begin with a [1968]; Krapf-Askari [1969]), and one mostly by his brief description of an ilu that stands in roughly the torians on state-formation (Smith [1969]; Lloyd middle of the range, and also fits Hansen’s ideal-type [1971]; Obayemi [1976]; Adediran [1994]). fairly closely. This is Ilesha, the capital of the Ijesha The Yoruba-speaking peoples occupy a territory of kingdom, which has existed continuously since at some 90,000 square km, between the lower Niger and least the late sixteenth century (for a full account, see the coast of West Africa, the great bulk of it in what is Peel [1979-80, 1983]). The town, about 3 km across now south-western Nigeria. Set deep in the humid within its circuit of mud-built walls and ditch, had a tropics, the southern part of their country was rain population of perhaps 30-40,000 people at its pre forest, while to the north lay drier, more open colonial maximum, before its sack by the Ibadan army savannah. The basis of the economy was farming - in 1870. Ilesha lay at the centre of a territory yam and maize being the staples - and there was an extending outwards some 20-30 km in each direction, extensive practice of crafts: iron-working, weaving which included over 160 subordinate settlements in and dyeing, tanning, potting, wood-carving, food-pro- the mid-nineteenth century, none of them anywhere cessing. Though most farming was to meet subsis near Ilesha in size - a handful of the largest perhaps 2- tence needs, there was also was a widespread com 3,000 people. These settlements were of varied char mercial network, with cowries as its medium of acter: some were ancient settlements of independent exchange, and local markets for farm produce and foundation later brought under Ilesha’s hegemony, manufactures. Long-distance trade routes ran south others had been founded as out-settlements from 508 J.D.Y. Peel Fig. 1. The Ilu of Ilesha, the town and its quarters. Ilesha; some had their own ruling dynasties, others as a political unit; the old-fashioned way of referring were headed by a scion of the Ilesha royal lineage; to the United Kingdom is as Ilu Geesi, “the ilu of the some were communities in their own right, with their English”.) A native or citizen, the equivalent of the own local cults and festivals, others - a large number, Greek polites, was an omo ilu (“child of the town”), either close to Ilesha itself, or in newly cleared land with a connotation of membership by descent. In the towards the southern forests - were farm-hamlets of paradigm case - of the exceptions, more anon - the people who lived there much of the time, but whose name of the town or chief settlement also served as home-base was still a compound in Ilesha. Yet the dis the name of the people and the polity. In this concep tinction between Ilesha and her subordinate settle tual unity of town and kingdom - the defining mark of ments did not rest on economic complementarity, the city-state - Yoruba ilu differ from most of the since Ilesha’s citizens were mostly farmers. other West African kingdoms with which they are If we are to determine whether the Yoruba consti often compared (Forde and Kaberry [1967]). Among tuted a city-state culture, we need to complete our the Akan states of what is now Ghana, the political description of the external forms of their communities unit was the oman (“state” or “nation”), which typi with an understanding of how they conceived of them. cally did not take its name from the capital-town (e.g. What exactly does the key term ilu mean? Nowadays, the Asante nation had its capital at Kumasi). Like when the Yoruba are more “urbanized” than ever wise, Abomey was the capital of the Fon-speaking before but are fully incorporated into a large territorial kingdom of Dahomey, a small territorial state divided state, it is most often used to refer to a “town”, but into six or seven provinces. less as a physical aggregation than a community of a But as well as meaning a state, comprising both the certain kind, a “home-town” to which all Yoruba are capital and its dependent territory, ilu also refers to the presumed to belong. Before colonialism, ilu were the capital-town in contrast to its rural hinterland - sim main political units, there being no other term that can ilar to the whole-and-part usage of polis among the be translated as “state”, “kingdom”, “nation” or Ancient Greeks (Hansen [1998] 17-34). In Ilesha the “country” in a political sense. (The modern word contrast was expressed as ilu vs. ileto, the latter term ijoba, derived from oba, “king”, refers to rule or insti meaning “village” or the rural area generally (Peel tutions of government - such as the British adminis [1983] 55). The essential feature of ileto - as of such tration of colonial Nigeria - rather than to a kingdom other terms as aba and the even smaller abule (“ham- Yoruba as a City-State Culture 509 Fig. 2. The Ilu of Ilesha, the kingdom. let”) - was not so much their size, or even that in today’s Nigerian English as “bushmen”). But farming was their principal activity, but that they were though this was a hegemonic view of the capital not places that their inhabitants considered as “home”: town, it could be challenged. For if the ilu was where that is, they were not where people were buried, or people’s homes were, then wherever people lived was where they held their festivals, or exercised their main a potential ilu for them. I well remember asking the rights and duties as omo ilu. Hence the capital/hinter- chiefs of Isaobi, a small place of barely more than two land distinction was sometimes simply put as He dozen houses about 10 km out of town, which Ilesha (“house, home”) vs. oko (“farm”). A corollary of this people regarded as very “bush”, what its status as distinction was the notion that only in the ilu could a community was. They replied indignantly, ‘7/w naa cultural ideals be fully realized, while people who ni o! [It certainly is a town]”. It had not been lived most of the time in villages were uncouth yokels founded from Ilesha as a village, they insisted, but or ara oko (“farm residents”, rendered disparagingly incorporated in Ilesha’s territory at a later stage; it had 510 J.D.Y. Peel distinctive cults of its own; its sons took their family political order at Ife (Law [1973]; Akinjogbin titles and, would be buried there. [1992]). The Ife bronzes alone indicate that culturally something exceptional happened at Ife, and modem * * * archaeology suggests an occupation that began before the end of the first millennium and reached an apogee The dynamics of city-state formation, so far only associated with Ife’s most important artefacts around hinted at, cannot be approached without a fuller pic 1400 AD.

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