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Yoruba, auch: Iorubá
Ethnic group in the southwest of today's Nigeria, and in the bordering nation of Benin (see map). The Yoruba people share the same language, religion and culture, and have always lived in politically autonomous, city states governed by a king. Even today there exist Yoruban kings.
According to Yoruban mythology Olorun or Olodumaré *) ordered the creation of the world where the city of Ife (also: Ile-Ife) later developed. As early as the 9th century, according to our calendar, Ife was a sizeable settlement. The rise, heyday and fall of the city state spanned a period of time from the eleventh to fifteenth century. But even later, Ife had a great, symbolic meaning. Latter-day Yoruban kings defended their own legitimacy by calling themselves descendants of the kings of Ife.
From the seventeenth to nineteenth century, Oyo, located northwest of Ife, was the dominating power in the Yoruba region. Oyo evolved at the end of the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth century as a small kingdom. It witnessed its greatest expansion between 1730 and 1748, when the powerful Dahomey was obliged to pay tribute to it, and fell apart in the first decades of the nineteenth century. What followed were long and ongoing wars and inner conflicts.
In 1861, the colonization by the British began. In 1960 Nigeria gained its independence in the same year as Dahomey, which was a French colony since 1863, and since 1975 is known as Benin.
The Afro-Brazilian culture is essentially influenced by the Yoruba, for its people being introduced as slaves in such great number from the eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century.
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