Yoruba

Yoruba is a huge group of people, who occupied the southwestern corner of Nigeria along the Dahomey. "Yoruba" was originally the Hausa name for the Oyo kingdom, meaning "the people of the state of Oyo." Indeed Ife was the first city of Yoruba. Oyo and Benin came later. Ife doesn't developed to be a true kingdom but it remained important as a Yoruba's as the original sacred city. To the east and north the Yoruba culture reaches its approximate limits in the region of the Niger River. However ancestral cultures directly related to the Yoruba once flourished well north of the Niger.The Yoruba cities and kingdoms were discovered by Portuguese explorers in the fifteenth century but the cities had existed for at least five hundred years before the European arrival. The proto-Yoruba were at north of the Niger in the first millennium B.C. Yorubaland has a variety of the cultures, which makes it unique. Thhe urbanized social structure is evident in their ceremonies-naming, wedding, chieftaincy itles, celebration of life in death, etc. These occasions show the richness of the culture. Moreover, Yoruba culture also emphasised onTraditional music, which implied to the aesthetic sense of the high average of Yoruba culture


http://www.molli.org.uk/yoruba/1_about_yoruba/index.htm
http://www.yorubanation.org/yoruba/Culture.htm
http://www.cultural-expressions.com/ifa/ifahistory.htm