FAMILY
The Yoruba inhabit an area that stretches about 120 miles along the coast of the Gulf of Guinea, east from the Benin border, to about 200 miles inland into the savannah belt of West Africa. The Yoruba are the most urbanized and possibly the most industrialized ethnic group in sub-Saharan Africa. About 20 per cent of Nigerians and 10 per cent of West Africans are Yoruba. Yorubaland has at least nine cities with populations of more than 100,000, and has a 60-70 per cent rate of urbanization overall. Lagos, the home of our urban sample children, is the centre of a greater metropolitan area with a projected population in 1991 of 10 million (Federal Republic of Nigeria and UNICEF 1990). South-western Nigeria has the country's highest concentration of industries, with more than 50 per cent of the country's manufacturing output, predominantly in light industrial manufacturing products such as furniture, textiles, clothing, plastics, paper, leather goods, foodstuffs, confectionery, beverages, and tobacco products.
The Yoruba had a complex precolonial system of urban residence, economic production, and trade (Bascom 1969). Their precolonial town crafts, dating from the Middle Ages, were among the earliest developed in Africa. Yoruba towns are mentioned in written records of the sixteenth century (Gugler and Flanagan 1978). These towns were composed of enclosed compounds, with descent groups varying in size from 20 to 2,000 persons living together in each compound. The towns had divine kings who were selected from a royal lineage by governing bodies of chiefs and elders, who represented the different wards and constituencies of the town. Originally, most towns had broad, straight streets crossing at the centre, where a palace adjoined the most important market. The tendency of refugees from tribal wars and other inmigrants to locate and build within the towns later led to more compact, less systematically planned, residential neighbourhoods (Mabogunje 1968)
Today, about three-quarters of the adult men living in the smaller Yoruba towns are farmers who commute between their town compound and a hamlet at the farm perhaps five miles away (Lloyd 1974). Urban-rural distinctions are blurred by the fact that farm dwellers view the towns as their true homes, where they return for important ceremonies and for burial. Through most of Yorubaland, rural farm hamlets spring up as temporary shelters. Farmers working in hamlets near the town may spend five nights a week there and two in the town. As the radius of farmed land expands, the more distant hamlets become increasingly permanent but continue to be viewed as daughter settlements to the town. Many migrants to the large cities continue to view their towns of origin as the homes to which they will retire and locations in which they should invest in building family houses.
Class is not a particularly useful distinction in studying Yoruba families. Although Aronson (1980, 176-182) argues that the highly educated lite represent an emerging upper class, with lifestyles and attitudes similar to those of the middle class everywhere, these major shifts appear mainly among the small percentage who are university educated. Precolonial Yoruba society was not a class society, nor are class terms in widespread use today.
Differences in wealth and lifestyle between the educated lite and the uneducated exceed those between Western social classes. While the writers know members of the professional lite whose adolescent children have never visited villages near their homes, most of the lite retain an identification with their more traditional and poorer relatives. Despite status barriers, there are no class barriers, per se, to upward mobility. Disparity in status also was pronounced in precolonial days. At that time, status was based on prestige, power, and evidence of agricultural surplus (Tuden and Plotnicov 1970; Lloyd 1974), whereas wealth and consumer goods increasingly determine status today (Babatunde 1992). In precolonial Yoruba society, sex, age, descent group, and political role determined social rank.
Concepts of descent group, lineage, family, and community
Family |
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YORUBA:
Egba Timeline &
Egba_Egbado, USA
EGBA: Ransome-KUTI Josiah |
Ademola II: Profiles |
Old Owu |
ABEOKUTA>,
2 |
Tinubu |
ThisDay: Egba |
Couleur Locale: Abeokuta [Q]
King Kosoko: Benin Reconciliation |
OnWar: Ibadan-Ijaye War |
Precolonial Yorubaland |
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