ABSTRACT
Yoruba-speaking peoples number approximately twenty-five million, constituting Nigeria’s second largest language group (Abiodun 1990: 64). Composed of some twenty-five distinct subgroups, which extend approximately three hundred kilometers in from the Atlantic coast, the Yoruba have a certain linguistic coherence, but in many ways they are culturally and socially diverse. This in part led J. S. Eades (1980: ix) to suggest that writing a general account of the Yoruba is foolhardy. The term “Yoruba” as a cultural designation dates only to mid-nineteenth-century colonialism (Law 1977: 5). People identify with hometowns or areas first and foremost and with being Yoruba only in relation to outsiders.
