Reviewer: Kofi Akosah-Sarpong in Ottawa, Canada

Prof. Toyin Falola’s Yoruba Gurus not only attempts to fix the African intellectual typology but counter the erroneous view held by ignorant Africans and their Western accompliances about African indigenous thinkers or chroniclers. Said the back of the book," In the quest to promote "universal knowledge" and create Western institutions in Africa, the intellectual contributions of Africans without university certificates or connections to the academy have been maligned, ignored or slighted. Yet, as Toyin Falola’s book points out, there are African scholars and thinkers without academic credentials doing important works. Here is book that shows that intellectual contributions need not be divorced from the concerns of local communities or deliberately promote narrative inequality and distance."

Falola’s mission in this enjoyable book is the intellectual production of top Yoruba intelligentsia outside academia. One need not overstretch one’s imagination, when there is any serious crises in Nigeria, various governments, despite their pretensions, have been running to the indigenous Nigerian sages for not only sense of direction but vision. Despite this, Falola argues that the Western academic mode has been privileged at the cost of indigenous Yoruba gurus. Falola’s broad thesis, therefore, is to tell us the chroniclers in Yoruba and English, and the contributions of the thinkers among them.

We are told that the 20 million Yoruba ethnic group are the second largest group in Nigeria and one of the populous and better-known among Africa’s 2,000 ethnic groups. The Yoruba occupy southwestern Nigeria, but can also be found in the Benin Republic and Togo, and as members of the African diaspora, in the western hemisphere. They are divided into many sub-groups, each with its own dialect. Chroniclers have written about the history of these groups. Falola’s intend in this book to give us the context that gave emergence of this Yoruba gurus writing tradition, the phases that took place in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, and the different kinds of writings including the authors.

Why Yoruba writers in a largely oral culture? Falola informs us that, "Chroniclers began in the nineteenth century, as a cultural project by a new intelligentsia interested in presenting to the European world a rich and different heritage. This intelligentsia was connected with the church. It believed in "legitimate" commerce and the recently inaugurated process of Westernization, as long as it did not rob Africans of political and economic power."

The abolition of the slave trade saw many liberated slaves from Sierra Leone and Brazil between 1830s and the 1880s to their Yoruba homeland. The returnees from Sierra Leone in particular were acculturated to Western influences and had accepted Christianity, while those from Brazil had Catholic influences. Many, though were Muslims. These developments met with British secular agents penetrating Yoruba land and establishing colonial control in the 1890s. This snowballed into intellectual development, seeing many ex-slaves taking interest in education and the Yoruba language became a written form, including the translation of the Bible. The outcome of this was a small circle of elites in Lagos, Ibadan, Abeokuta and other Yoruba areas.

This elites, armed with writing skills, began to record known Yoruba traditions and events of the day into histories. And this gave birth to a Yoruba intellectual tradition that has survived till today. The early Yoruba elites also tried to record Yoruba past. As the elites flourish, they encountered discriminations, which laid the foundation for modern Yoruba nationalism. The Yoruba nationalism was expressed more in cultural than political terms, and as Falola informs us, "especially the search for the knowledge to affirm their past and the connection to the African milieu." This new Yoruba elite attempted to reconcile Western values with theirs without rejecting the past of their own people. This though created tension in the attempt to blend the two cultures.

Toyin Falola, a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, covers Yoruba gurus such as Samuel Johnson, described as the pioneer and patriarch; M.C. Adeyemi, said to be the historian of Oyo; King Isaac Babalola Akinyele, touted as the scholar of Ibadan; Chief Samuel Ojo Bada, praised for his work on the frontier city of Ilorin; Kemi Morgan and his reconstruction of Ibadan history; Theophilus Olabode Avoseh and his major and minor works of Epe and Badagry, and others who did superb works on the histories of Igbomina.

This is a pioneering book that showcase knowledge on African local historians. It is addition to the boom in African cultural studies.