More than 200,000 Africans were freed from slave ships after 1807 as a result of British policy. Most were processed by Mixed Commission or Vice-Admiralty Courts and assigned the status of “Liberated Africans,” but their freedom was severely restricted by “apprenticeships” of varying lengths supposedly to prepare them for entering a free labor market. However those entering Cuban or Brazilian jurisdictions had lives little different from slaves. In Sierra Leone, by contrast, apprenticeships were short-term and did not involve plantation labor. Photographic, anthropometric, and per capita income evidence indicates that most did not do as well as the poor European migrants who were emigrating in large numbers to the Americas at this period. Liberated Africans did not have the same opportunities as Whites because of racism. They did not have access to the land distributed by the Homestead Act, and could not enter labor markets on the same terms as Whites. In other words, the anti-Black attitudes that made the transatlantic slave trade possible continued after its abolition. The Liberated African records allow us to examine the African origins of enslaved people. The nineteenth-century slave trade from West Africa had a preponderance of Yoruba, Igbo, and Mende speakers.

Chapter 12 details the economic exploits of Nigeria’s colonial government and private foreign firms and explores the responses from local economic and political forces. The extraction and exploitation of Nigeria’s natural and labor resources were the primary driving factors behind British efforts, aiming to create a lucrative territorial possession that would fit snugly into a global imperial patchwork. To do so, the colonial government and some Indigenous polities promoted the construction of expansive, colony-wide infrastructure projects and extensive investments into its extraction economy, such as the development of commercial cocoa plantations. Such efforts yielded significant economic growth, but, as this chapter details, British actors would receive the most economic gains due to the attempted monopolization of these growing industries. The integration of indirect and legal forms of discrimination would harm local economic actors and non-British foreign firms, resulting in widespread poverty and social disturbance. With the onset of World War I and the economic depressions which followed, even this imbalanced economic growth would slow. Because Britain could no longer focus as much on its colonies, Nigeria’s growing class of educated elites would slowly gain more political representation.

Views of Africa in the Black press evolved dramatically in the ninety years covered by this volume. The first generation of Afro-Latin American journalists had grown up with African parents and grandparents and were often sympathetic to their social and cultural practices. By the turn of the century doctrines of scientific racism, with their visions of Africans and their descendants as the bearers of genetic and cultural inferiority, led to much more negative views of Latin America's African heritage, even within the Black press. Emerging critiques of scientific racism in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s produced a rehabilitation of that heritage, though some doubts persisted. Ethiopia’s tenacious resistance against Italian invasions in the 1890s and 1930s, the region’s role in World War II, and decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s further raised Africa’s profile and image in the Black papers.

This chapter dwells on the beauty of a woman’s hair and explains the cultural value attached to the head. The hair is seen as an agentive part of the body, crucial to the wholesome understanding of the entire human framework. It can distinguish gender. For example, the Kojusoko hairstyle is “forbidden” for men. Furthermore, Kojusoko (meaning “face your husband”) is not only known for distinguishing between gender, but also for describing women. The discipline and values inherent in the message being expressed are the typical moral standards of the Yoruba. Besides the gender role and message being conveyed by hairstyles, hairstyles also express spiritual connotations. For example, there is traditional importance to the loose state of the hair of a mourning woman. Other occasions include “naming, cult festivities, pageantry, and celebrations.” With pictorial evidence, the chapter emphasizes how hair shows age, identity, religion, political status, or social categorization and differences in the styles adopted at executing the patterns and drawing the lines, as well as the length used.

This chapter also appreciates the aesthetics and cultural significance of African arts – celebrating the outstanding creativity inherent in Yoruba history, social life, and artistry; however, with a focus on painting, which, as other Yoruba arts, transforms their cultural ideas into materialization. Yoruba painting in this chapter is portrayed to provide “visual gratification” and “creative inspiration” as well as a means of engaging viewers in “critical commentaries” that promote culture. Also, it is seen as capable of engendering cultural unity with portrayals of “mythological and historical” aspects common to the Yoruba people, for instance. Beyond the above, Yoruba paintings are also used to illustrate the sociocultural principles of the Yoruba via “naturalistic postures and framings” in which individuals are shown to display some of these collective values. With pictorial evidence, the chapter references many of these cultural values, such as “reverence” depicted in the painting of an individual stooping. Like other materials in Yorubaland, paintings have meanings to them and are expressive, albeit in non-verbal communication mode, revealing who the owner is or their “intimacy with the idea, person, motifs, belief” being espoused in the painting.

This chapter is basically a review of a collection of poems mirroring the Yoruba cultural ethos, drawn from Etches on Fresh Waters, Scoundrels of Deferral, A Mouth Sweeter than Salt, and Counting the Tiger’s Teeth. Believing the core of a nation to be its people, the poetry collections seek to present a narration of the nation through poems about the cultural practices, values, and beliefs of the people. Clearly, the chapter depicts poetry as a creative mode of expression, performing a “dialectic function of narrating a group’s culture,” and as a means of “documenting” and “teaching” culture. The chapter launches into the cultural significance of poetry and how poetry reflects the past and present cultural realities of the Yoruba people especially. The cultural ethos include salutations to the revered, celebration of ethnic identity, sermons on moderation, unrestrained freedom, and hospitality, amongst others, while some were used to show women’s sociocultural position.

This chapter is a conclusion, a revisit from the beginning to recapture all that has been written. Analogously and methodically, the West had encountered Africa, witnessed its cultural practices but made the wrong, albeit demeaning, interpretation of it. Then came the “native,” attempting to walk them to the light through vast decades of experience and armed with an arsenal of cultural materials as evidence. The result is the challenge of the colonial matrix of power and resituating African literature at the center of African epistemology via autoethnography. Reemphasizing the points earlier made, the chapter discusses the position of self as an ambassador of the society it (self) comes from, having allowed its cultural ethos to manifest through self. Thus, everything about the individual manifests and reflects the “internal dynamics sustaining society.” This is further backed by the fact that the society shapes an individual through its “mores” and “institutions,” and thus makes it expedient to read a society through the character of an individual (an emissary), as opposed to an alien who cannot know beyond what is visible to the eyes.

The chapter begins with the concept of satire for the reader’s understanding of its broad and deep meaning and its significance. It proceeds to show the methodology of satire, which is to “highlight” and “ridicule” an act of folly to effect change in an individual, group, or society behind the act. It does this using figurative tools such as humor, hyperbole, irony, or sarcasm. In context, the chapter examines the use of satire and satirical expressions in works to mirror the African society. Importantly, the chapter notes that for satire to be birthed, there must be a set societal standard by which the subject’s action is measured against that which has been breached. While “morality is often the end goal of tales, parables, proverbs, etc., for satire, the concern goes above morality to include public interest.” The chapter finds satire in “songs of abuses,” which is very prominent among the Yoruba. These songs are often sung or performed when people are deemed to have fallen short of societal set standards. Or when criminals such as murderers, thieves, witches, and other extreme violators of social conduct are caught and especially exposed.

This chapter furthers the discourse on “narrative” with specificity on “magic, memory, myth, and metaphor.” Herein, the chapter shows that the knowledge of the past is preserved in oral vehicles as “songs, images, poems, rituals and religions, stories and myths,” as memories not only preserve but sustain them by transporting them to succeeding generations, using narrative when evoked. It also examines memory’s limitations, especially when compared to history. They include “bias (of the narrator), misinformation, infallibility and the impossibility of rightly (in)validating (individual) memories”–the lack of corroborator. It is also prone to manipulation and subject to the narrator’s interest, while the information processed and stored as memory can also fade over time owing to the collection of new memories. In the Yoruba context, the chapter highlights the relationship between “Itan” and “Aroba,” with the major distinguishing factor being their timeframe from the period of happening. The chapter also dwells on collective memory, which relies on individuals’ narration to become one because no one person was present everywhere to witness everything at once. Lastly, there is the clarification of the different problems in African epistemology, such as magic and the likes.

This chapter highlights how colonial institutions, especially Western education through academic knowledge, have helped to sustain the “colonial matrix of power.” Its corrupted nature is reflected in the extrapolation of data from Africa (subaltern culture) and rebranding them as Western, which is to the detriment and exclusion of Africans and a support structure for Western hegemony. The solution to this imbroglio as proffered by the author is “decoloniality,” a process that combats the root of the problem seeking to “dismantle the colonial matrix of power,” and enhancing the practice of “subaltern epistemology,” which is the means to achieve what he referred to as “epistemic liberation.” The systematic process to achieving this is what the chapter sets out to do here: show how the academic sustains the colonial matrix of power, examine the biases associated with ethnography, “deconstructs the researcher’s role in it,” bridge the gap between quality research and subaltern epistemology, and lastly, how to achieve epistemic liberation using autoethnography. Using autoethnography as the methodology, the researcher explains and justifies why the researcher, for a proper interpretation of African cultural ethos, has to be the researched.

This chapter beams the light on the artistry achievements of Africans and signifies their “flourishing culture.” The major aspect of artistry being celebrated is sculptures. From this chapter, one is able to deduce that the carvings are such that “Yoruba history and culture can be perceived, interpreted and understood” through them. They manifest in many forms (materially), such as bronze, clay, stone, and wood, all of whom were discussed to fully understand and appreciate the creativity inherent in the African culture before and after colonialism. With several references to specific sculptural works and pictorial evidence, mostly from his personal collection, the author describes how Yoruba sculptors (Gbenagbena or Gbegilere) translate and manipulate natural elements and past-but-relevant happenings into artistic objects. Also discussed is the measure of a sculptor’s worth, which cannot be defined by Western currency but by the level of creativity and beauty apparent in his artwork, some of which depict African cultural ideas, principles, and attributes, such as Omoluabi, Iwapele, Didan, and Idogba. The chapter extensively discusses the importance sculptors place on the head, and also defends African sculptures against Western criticism.

This is an exploration to understand and appreciate another aspect of Yoruba art – the textile – through an interrogation of textiles “as an intelligence” with corroborative references to other scholars. Given that Yoruba textiles are adorned till date, most importantly in their rich varieties, the chapter is filled with enough material evidence to sustain a debate aimed at establishing the beauty and creativity inherent in African culture through the textiles. In this chapter, the “readability” and “intelligibility” of Yoruba textiles is established, with its peculiarity seen as an ambassador of the Yoruba culture. In addition, the importance of textile as a craft, which, by virtue of the peculiarity of its making, portrays the Yoruba art and provides a history of textiles in Africa, is drawn on. Historically too, the chapter shows that Yoruba textiles also contribute to premises that counter the Western assumption that Africa is backward.

This chapter explores cultural themes in Africa with “narrative politics” and its cultural values central to the discourse. In expounding “narrative,” the chapter brings to the fore its two most potent modes (literature and history), which reflect reality but are different in their modus operandi – through imagination (creativity) and verifiable facts. Written beautifully and with references, this chapter blurs the contrast between the two “narrative devices” and focuses instead on espousing their working togetherness. This is because a co-adoption of both in the narrative adds creativity to facts presentation, which thus makes it interesting to read and sustain readers’ interest just as their Yoruba derivative, Alo and Itan, is often a mixture of both.

The chapter also asserts the importance of autoethnography and how through personal experience and identity, the society’s “collective consciousness” is exhibited and manifested. Also, there are references made to the cultural relevance and implication of “time and season,” “taboos and superstitions,” “greetings and reverence,” as well as “namings and places” in Yorubaland.

“My Archive,” as depicted in this chapter, documents the author’s wealth of experience as a “scholar and researcher, teacher and mentor” in the form of a dialogue with his past to interrogate African studies and, in particular, Yoruba history. With a natural life experience, the author having lived in both colonial and postcolonial Africa, the chapter investigates and interrogates the cultural history of Africa (with focus on the Yoruba) vis-à-vis its evolution into modernity. Autoethnography is noteworthy a narrative of (parts of) self. It is composed of primary sources of two facets – the author’s life works and cultural collections. The archive also, via the latter, interrogates the two colonially imposed eco-political systems of capitalism and socialism as with other cultural impositions and their far-reaching consequences. Each chapter’s categorization is summarized at the latter part of the chapter.

The Hausa lexicon has been inundated by loanwords, primarily from Arabic and English but also from Kanuri, Tuareg, Fulani and, more recently, Yoruba. Gender assignment has been based both on phonological patterning, mainly the association of final /a/ with feminine gender, and on semantic patterning with prior words. Phonology has been modified primarily by greater incidence and usage of glottal stop and /h/, increased incidence of the rolled R, introduction of numerous word-final consonants, retention of /e/ and /o/ in closed syllables, the incorporation of new nouns with short final vowels, and the introduction of nouns with a final Low-Low tone pattern.

The African reception of Christianity is compared to that of Islam and found to be similar, with a pattern of quarantine, mixing, and reform. The story in West Africa is told via the connection to the slave trade, slavery itself, and the back-to-Africa movement. Cases from East and South Africa are also presented, and the chapter concludes with a discussion of Pentecostalism.