Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba

J. D. Y Peel is on the faculty of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. He is author of Aladura and Ijeshas and Nigerians, for which he won the Herskovits Award. He has been editor of Africa and is former president of the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom.

• Preliminary Table of Contents:Acknowledgments1. Narratives of Religion and of Empire2. Yorubaland at War3. Living in an Age of Confusion4. Making Country Fashion5. The Mission and the Powers6. Preaching the Word7. Engaging with Islam8. The Path to Conversion9. Leaf Becomes Soap10. The Making of the Yoruba11. Looking BackNotesSources and ReferencesIndex

"Peel is by training an anthropologist, but one possessed of an acute historical sensibility. Indeed, this magnificent book achieves a degree of analytical verve rare in either discipline."—History Today"For three decades Peel has published on the Yoruba—Aladura: A Religious Movement among the Yoruba (1968) has become an anthropological classic. Now Peel sets an anthropological aim (studying the impact of the Church Missionary Society on a group of Africans who became the Yoruba) but takes form and mode from history (employing events and missionary journals as sources). Early missionaries in the later 19th century included Europeans and ex-slave returnees from Sierra Leone; these men were the quintessential cultural middlemen, adapting Christianity and transforming Yoruba identity in a single seamless process. This 11-chapter book presents a useful discussion of narratives of religion and of empire, and Peel makes a very important point: early missionaries saw heathenism as an absence or vacuum, rather than as something with durability, style, and an ethos of its own. Further chapters are titled Yorubaland at War, Missionary Power, Preaching the Word, Paths to Conversion, and The Making of the Yoruba. In Engaging with Islam, Peel explains that Islam and Christianity were in competition and both religions had to .. offer a means to individual and collective empowerment and they had to offer attractive, viable identities. Well documented with valuable notes and references-cited section. General readers; all academic levels.November 2001"—B. M. du Toit, emeritus, University of Florida"[T]his is scholarship of the highest quality. . . . Peel lifts the Yoruba past to a dimension of comparative seriousness that no one else has managed. . . . The book teems with ideas . . . about big and compelling matters of very wide interest."—T.C. McCaskie". . . a magnificent excursion into Yoruba religious history of the nineteenth century."—International Journal of African Historical Studies