Share Chancellor’s Professor and Professor of Africana Studies, Anthropology and History at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, US, Akinwumi Ogundiran, is the author of ‘The Yoruba: A New History.’ The remarkable book, which was published in the last quarter of 2020 by Indiana University Press, provides a new way and style for imagining and writing Yoruba history. The academic shares some findings that challenge extant beliefs and knowledge in this e-conversation about the book. Excerpts:
CONGRATS on the publication of this seminal and interesting work titled ‘The Yoruba: A New History’. Could you please let us into how it came to be? The conception and execution?
George Yancy
George Yancy: Here in the West, where a few monotheistic religions dominate the culture, knowledge and understanding of Indigenous African religious practices is rare. Is Yoruba monotheistic or polytheistic? Or is it something else entirely?
Jacob Kehinde Olupona: Yoruba religion manifests elements of both. It differs from many world religions that define their cosmology primarily in theistic terms. Yoruba religion focuses on the lived religious experience of the people rather than on systematized beliefs and creeds as we see in other world religions such as Islam and Christianity. Yoruba religious traditions are woven around oral traditions and practices. The spiritual realm exists parallel to the human realm and it accommodates the Supreme Being, gods, ancestors and minor spiritual entities who interact with the human realm at different levels.