Akin Ogundiran is the 2022 Winner in the Book Category for the Isaac Oluwole Delano Prize for his book, The Yoruba: A New History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020).

By their default social nature, humans are always seeking ways to connect with their fellow humans, concepts, or phenomena. This desire to connect is replicated in other aspects of human endeavors, particularly in academic disciplines. The interconnected nature of academic disciplines is well explained by the linkages between history, anthropology, and archaeology. Anthropology and archaeology lend credence to historical portrayals and studies, while history helps bring perspective and solidity to archaeology and anthropology. These three fields of study complement one another and are intertwined so that a skilled historian is also knowledgeable in anthropology and archaeology. In other words, it is difficult to trace the history of a people if we do not have some understanding of archaeology and anthropology.

This outstanding book, The Yoruba: A New History, is about connections at multiple levels. It is an intellectually stimulating book for anyone, particularly for academics and scholars in history, anthropology, and archaeology. The book takes the reader on a journey that begins at the climax of its message, reverts to the genesis of the Yoruba, then maneuvers readers through different historical developments in the existence of the Yoruba people, and then returns to the starting point — the climax — in such an all-around intellectual stimulation. Every chapter of this 562-page commentary on the Yoruba is a matching piece in the academic puzzle that Professor Ogundiran has neatly arranged to form the insightful book on a new Yoruba history with complex and understandable analysis. Readers are immediately drawn into the deep, propelled by Ogundiran’s deft use of language to unravel the wide-cracking gap that has classified the study of African civilization and history. Ogundiran criticizes the disposition towards African study from early on, which sees the advent of Christianity and colonialism as the defining point in the cultural evolution of Africa.

In the book, Ogundiran walks the reader through the need to study Yoruba history from the perspective of a holistic approach, one that includes comparative, theoretical, and empirical methods. This type of holistic study could help advance the research into the existence and evolution of the Yoruba people. It is easy to fall prey to the possible shallowness that mostly results from a study that does not look at history from varied perspectives. Ogundiran’s emphasis on portraying evolution and development during a distant time, not as independent capsules of time but as overlapping periods in continuous existence, is brought to the fore by how the book explores seven-time capsules as they overlap one another in the study of a new Yoruba history.

Furthermore, Ogundiran unearths the four pillars of the Yoruba cultural identity, starting with the “House,” a symbol of the socio-political organization of the Yoruba people; to “Divine Kingship,” which represents governance and its structures in a deeply political society; the complementary existence of the two recognized genders in Yoruba history — the one complementing the other, and vice-versa; to what is perhaps represented across cultures and not only with the Yoruba people, which is fundamental to the reasoning and being of all humans — a search for meaningful living, the thirst after immortality, which in itself births religion. Also, Ogundiran captures the turbulences that characterized Yoruba civilization in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Although these upheavals did not destroy the Yoruba population, they displaced certain cities and engulfed other places like Owu.

Remarkably, the narration is rich and powerful, aided by archaeological, linguistic, anthropological, and historical evidence that one can almost feel as being present at the locations mentioned and connected with the individuals whose stories the book narrates to show the evolutionary development of the Yoruba people across timeframes. The Yoruba: A New History is a well-rounded book that has registered its place among the invaluable scholarly outputs of our time.