Historian and author of ‘The Yoruba: A New History, a major new book on Yoruba history, Akinwumi Ogundiran, will, on Saturday, May 8, hold a reading in Lagos.
The event featuring the Chancellor’s Professor and Professor of Africana Studies, Anthropology and History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA, will hold at Pages Bookstore, 82, Allen Avenue, Lagos, at 2 pm.
Former Lagos State Commissioner for Tourism, Arts and Culture, and publisher of The Culture Newspaper, Steve Ayorinde, will tease out essential portions of the book in a conversation with the author at the reading.
The veteran culture journalist/editor will also engage Ogundiran on the Old Oyo Archaeological Project, an ongoing 10-year archaeological project that holds the key to a better understanding of the Oyo Empire in particular and Yoruba history in general.
Published in November 2020 by Indiana University Press, ‘The Yoruba: A New History’ is the first transdisciplinary study of the two-thousand-year journey of the Yoruba people. It traces their origins from a small corner of the Niger-Benue Confluence in present-day Nigeria to becoming one of the most populous cultural groups on the African continent.
Weaving together archaeology with linguistics, environmental science with oral traditions, and material culture with mythology, the author examines the local, regional, and even global dimensions of Yoruba history.
The book also accounts for the events, peoples, practices, and theories of knowledge, ways of being, and social valuations that shaped the Yoruba experience at different periods.
Ogundiran, who has been on the field in Oyo-Ile since late March conducting archaeological digs, will autograph copies of the book at the reading.
