This comprehensive book presents a history of the Yoruba people, about 30 million of whom live in south-west Nigeria today, with enclaves and diasporas in other African countries and beyond. On over 500 pages and in 18 chapters, the book explores the transformations and continuities which have shaped Yoruba life since the first millennium CE. Combining categories of academic and other forms of history writing, the book draws freely on proverbs, myths, songs, and other texts while also including some scholarly references. In scope and ambition, it presents itself as a refashioned and updated version of Samuel Johnson's The History of the Yorubas (1921), a foundational text of modern and nationalist Yoruba historiography. But unlike Johnson, Steven Adebanwi Akintoye does not focus on the precolonial Oyo Empire and the warrior city of Ibadan. Instead his history centres on the importance of Ile-Ife, widely acclaimed as the spiritual centre of Yoruba civilization before the rise of Oyo. This focus allows the author to extend the historical sweep of his discussion to the first millennium, while at the same time confirming the political validation of Ile-Ife by the Yoruba leader Obafemi Awolowo and his followers during the twentieth and twenty-first century. As a result, the book offers not only an interesting and engaging reflection on Yoruba history, but also a fascinating text on what it means to be Yoruba today.

In the first three chapters, Akintoye explains that early Yoruba society had a low degree of centralization and social stratification, even though many of its smallish settlements were closely linked through shared language, trade, religion, and Ifá divination. This pattern of settlement changed after some villages now contained within the city of Ile-Ife were united by the hero Oduduwa, who became the new city's first ruler (chapter four). As Ile-Ife became the region's most important political and economic centre, its urban ethos and constitution were exported by princes from Ile-Ife throughout Yorubaland, thus contributing to the emergence of a network of city-states linked by trade and other forms of exchange (chapters 5–11). This section of the book draws on some archaeological research, but it strongly relies, directly or indirectly, on oral historical genres and forms of traditional practice which are difficult to date. Undoubtedly due to the challenge of assessing a diverse range of materials from a large geographical area, the text also contains some errors. For example, the town of Ago-Iwoye was not founded in the first wave of migration from Ife but in the nineteenth century (p. 109). Elsewhere, for example in the discussion of the Ijebu kingdom, the author gives little consideration to existing historical traditions which challenge the locally dominant myths of origin from Ile-Ife. But irrespective of such niggles, the work of historical conjecture is, especially at this scale, important and impressive.

By the late sixteenth century, the author explains, the town of Oyo-Ile emerged as the region's most powerful polity, which established increasing control over both Yoruba and other towns and cities. However, in the early nineteenth century the Oyo Empire collapsed and the resulting wars, including different Yoruba groups, led to a second wave of urbanization in which refugees and warriors created large camps, the most important of which was the city of Ibadan. Large-scale population movements associated with social and political change helped the spread of Islam and Christianity as well as the growth of a modern national consciousness (chapters 12–15). Meanwhile, Yoruba slaves in Brazil, Cuba, and Haiti contributed to struggles for liberation and recognition elsewhere (chapter sixteen). In a continuation of rapid social transformation at home, the twentieth century saw the establishment of European rule over Yoruba polities. Under the leadership of Yoruba nationalists like Obafemi Awolowo, as well as the leaders of other groups included into the colonial Nigerian state, political independence was achieved in 1960, but external as well as internal disagreements meant that the country has not fulfilled its promise to date, even though the ‘Yoruba vision’ (p. 427) continues to offer a template for reform and development beyond Yorubaland. At the same time, historically and in the present, internal disagreement has remained a constant threat to the Yoruba, thus pointing to the need for, and the difficulty of, attaining unity (chapters 17–18).

Overall, Akintoye offers his audience a narrative in which the contemporary Yoruba nation emerges apparently naturally from its historical antecedents, thus challenging the idea, perhaps most strongly associated with the work of J. D. Y. Peel, that the Yoruba exist in their present form as the result of conscious cultural work in the nineteenth century. Akintoye's argument appeals to many Yoruba-speakers because some aspects of precolonial life in the region including Yorubaland – such as shared notions of political order and the existence of wider institutions for trade and religion – suggest forms of mutual recognition that hint at the imagined community of the nationalist imagination. But if the roots of the Yoruba nation have even some of the historical weight suggested by Akintoye, the precariousness of the national project to date – including recurring forms of resistance and opposition to the national project – becomes a much more urgent question than Akintoye implies. While this inherent contradiction is not resolved here, the book will make fascinating reading for historians and anthropologists of Southwest Nigeria and scholars of non-Western nationalisms more generally. Resonating with the ambitions of important sections of the Yoruba elite, it will undoubtedly also appeal to a wide audience of local intellectuals and politicians.