The Yoruba-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa

Record summary

A. B. Ellis’s The Yoruba-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa contains descriptions of Yoruba religious traditions, deities, origin accounts, ritual practices, and historical claims gathered in the late nineteenth-century colonial setting. It is a significant comparison lead for studying how European writers organized complex oral and ritual knowledge into a system of mythology. Ellis’s scheme may encourage readers to treat locally distinct traditions as a single uniform pantheon. The reliability, language competence, informant networks, and regional scope of particular statements require checking against Yoruba scholarship and indigenous textual traditions.