INTRODUCTION

Oriki orilẹ are the oriki of a place of origin, a homeland. What people say is that their people originally came from an ancient town, whose name they remember even when the town has long been defunct. They picture masses of people scattering from these original towns to other places all over Yorubaland. People from the same place of origin - the same orilẹ - say ‘We are one’. When they meet in the course of trade or other travel they recognise an obligation to help each other, and observe a prohibition on intermarriage. They have a number of things in common. They may share certain food taboos, special funeral customs, a particular oriṣa or a specialised occupation such as carving, blacksmithing or egungun entertainment masquerading, all of which are traced back to the town of origin. But the most important thing they have in common is the oriki orilẹ themselves. These oriki are all about the place of origin, and affirm the distinctive attributes of the place and its people. It is mainly through their shared oriki orilẹ that these scattered groups recognise a relationship. They cannot trace the links between themselves, beyond saying that, because they share the same orilẹ, they know they are ‘one’.

When they left the town of origin, the stories say, these small groups settled somewhere else: either they founded a new town, and waited for other groups to join them, or they inserted themselves into an existing one. Within the town where they settled, their oriki orilẹ took on a new importance. Each incoming group took up residence as a unit conceived as a kin group: a patrilineage. A simplified version of local theory would say that each of these localised patrilineages constituted a separate ile, a ‘house’, or compound, and that these ile were the fundamental social and political units in the town. Historical narratives, already described in Chapter 3, represented the town as a collection of ile, each coming from a different place of origin and each having its own traditions; and these separate units were pictured as being held together by their common allegiance to the oba, who was descended from the founder of the town.