Before there was a “Yoruba,” there were the Ekiti, the Egba, the Ijebu, the Ijesha, the Oyo, the Ondo, the Egbado, the Ijesa, the Akoko, the Owo, and the Igbomina — each a sovereign republic, each with its own Oba, its own walls, its own laws, its own wars, and its own fierce pride. They were not one people. They did not call themselves one name. They did not need to.
The word “Yoruba” was not born in Ile-Ife. It was not gifted by Oduduwa. It was not coined in any palace court of the ancient kingdoms that gave West Africa some of its most magnificent civilizations. The name was an imposition — one of the quieter tools of colonial consolidation, dressed in the robes of ethnography and missionary Scripture.
As an ethnic description, the word “Yoruba” — or more correctly, “Yaraba” — was originally used in reference to the Oyo Empire and was the Hausa name for the Oyo people, as noted by the British explorers Hugh Clapperton and Richard Lander.  It was a label applied from the outside, not a name chosen from within.
Researcher Hussaini Abdu traced the name’s true origin even further — to the Baatonu people of Borgu, Oyo’s immediate northern neighbors, who called the Oyo people “Yoru” (singular) and “Yorubu” (plural), with “Yoruba” used in third-person references. The name spread through Songhai-Borgu interactions, was later reinforced through interviews with Baatonu slaves in Sierra Leone, and was subsequently popularized by European travelers and missionary records, including Samuel Johnson’s 19th-century writings.
The missionaries who came to lay the groundwork for the eventual colonization of Africa adopted and corrupted this borrowed term into “Yoruba.” As scholar Peter Cohen noted, “The concept of a single ‘Yorùbá’ people and its baptism with the Hausa term for the inhabitants of Òyó was largely the work of liberated captives and their children returning from Sierra Leone, particularly as Protestant missionaries.”
The name was then popularized by Hausa usage and ethnography written in Ajami during the 19th century by Sultan Muhammad Bello. The extension of the term to all speakers of dialects related to the language of the Oyo dates to the second half of the 19th century — due largely to the influence of Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther, the first Anglican bishop in Nigeria, who was himself Oyo Yoruba and compiled the first Yoruba dictionary, introducing a standardized orthography that effectively imposed Oyo as the linguistic baseline for all the separate kingdoms. 
Think about what this means. The Ekiti people — who had waged the great Kiriji War, one of the most remarkable military alliances in African history, precisely to resist domination by Ibadan — were now told they shared an identity with the very people they had fought. The Kiriji War was a 16-year civil conflict between the subethnic kingdoms of the Yoruba — divided between the Western Yoruba, mainly Ibadan and Oyo-speaking kingdoms, and the Eastern Yoruba, including the Ekiti, Ijesha, Ijebu, Yagba, and others.  These were not factions of one nation quarreling. These were distinct peoples with distinct political traditions, fighting for sovereignty.
The Yoruba shared a common language and culture for centuries but were probably never a single political unit. They formed numerous kingdoms of various sizes, each centered on a capital city or town and ruled by a hereditary king — an Oba — with Oyo developing into the largest of these kingdoms while Ile-Ife remained a center of profound religious significance.  Sovereignty was the unit of identity. Not ethnicity. Not the umbrella term that British colonialism and missionary Christianity would later insist upon.
The conceptualization of the Yoruba as a collective identity dates to the nineteenth century, through Christian missionaries and the early Yoruba elite. By the 1890s, when Samuel Johnson completed his monumental book, “Yoruba” had been widely used among the early Christian elite to define the land, the people, and the language.  Johnson’s book — a great work, no question — was also a political act: it helped knit separate histories into a single narrative for purposes that served colonial administration as much as cultural memory.
By the time the British had formally consolidated their hold over the region — annexing Lagos in 1861, defeating the Ijebu in 1892, signing treaties in Abeokuta in 1893, incorporating greater Yorubaland into the British Protectorate — many of the numerous factions within Yorubaland and other surrounding ethnic and linguistic groupings were politically unified by the British colony of Nigeria.  Ibadan, which had served as the administrative center of the old Western Region since the earliest days of British colonial rule, became the geographic anchor of this manufactured unity.
The Ekiti called themselves Ekiti. The Egba called themselves Egba. The Ijebu called themselves Ijebu. The Oyo called themselves Oyo. These were not sub-names. These were their names — full, sovereign, ancient, and sufficient.
“Yoruba” was the administrative convenience that absorbed them all.
This is not an argument against the extraordinary civilization that these peoples collectively produced — the art of Ile-Ife that stunned the world, the military genius of Ibadan, the trading networks of Ijebu, the resistance poetry of the Ekiti warriors. Their achievements belong to human history at its most remarkable. But the name under which they have been gathered deserves honest examination.
Identity imposed from outside — whether by missionaries translating the Bible into a standardized “Yoruba” that erased dozens of living dialects, or by colonial administrators drawing administrative lines across royal territories — is not the same as identity chosen from within. The difference matters. It mattered then. It matters now, as Nigeria continues to stumble over the colonial architecture of identity that the British built and the post-independence generation inherited without questioning.
The children of the Ekiti, Egba, Ijebu, Ijesha, Oyo, Ondo, Akoko, and all the others deserve to know what their names were before the name arrived.
History does not begin with colonization. And it should not be allowed to end there.
By Kio Amachree | Stockholm, Sweden | President, Worldview International
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