O-okun Yoruba in Yoruba art historiography: History, problems and prospects

Abstract

One of the most obtrusive features of Yoruba studies has been its clear pattern of regional preferences and biases in its scholarship. This pattern is reflected in the present concentration of studies on the southwest, the northwest, the central subgroups of Ife, Owo, Ijesha, Egba, Ijebu, Oyo, and Ilorin on one hand, and the paucity of works on the northeast and southeast subgroups of the O-okun Yoruba, the Igbomina, the Ikale and the Ilaje on the other. There is no other subgroup where this particularistic trend in Yoruba studies and especially, art historiography can better be observed than with the scholarly neglect of the O-okun peoples, the most northeasterly of the Yoruba subgroups. An important goal of this thesis is to foreground the multi-culturalistic tendencies among the Yoruba and underscore the necessity to provide comparable scholarly attention to neglected subgroups, the O-okun peoples in particular.