How Olorisa adherents faced persecution in colonial Nigeria

A Nigerian historian, Ibrahim Anoba, has documented how practitioners of traditional Yoruba religion, known as Olorisa, suffered systematic persecution during the colonial era through laws, court actions and property confiscations that forced many adherents to abandon their faith.

Mr Anoba, whose doctoral dissertation examines the history of Yoruba indigenous religion, said his research challenges the widely held belief that Yoruba people voluntarily embraced Christianity and Islam in large numbers.

In the dissertation, titled “Olórìṣà: Alternative Decolonisation, Spiritual Identities, and Recasting the African Postcolony”, Mr Anoba argues that colonial authorities and local actors used legal and administrative mechanisms to suppress traditional religious practices until the practices became less attractive.

In an interview with PREMIUM TIMES, Mr Anoba described the treatment of practitioners of indigenous religion at the time as one of the most significant religious injustices in Nigerian history.

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He argued that discussions about religious persecution in Nigeria often focus on violence against Christians and Muslims while overlooking the historical experiences of traditional worshippers.

“I think you can include this as one of the, if not the greatest injustice ever done to particular people in Nigeria, has been to the practitioners of indigenous religion,” he said.

“Today, we still have Christians in great numbers, we still have Muslims in great numbers. But imagine the intensity of the same violence committed against a religious people. So much so that they almost disappear today.”

Aside from the doctoral dissertation, he disclosed plans to develop the findings into a book manuscript.

Thesis Methodology

Mr Anoba explained that his work is an enquiry into the Olorisa as a people, not simply about the religion.

“A lot of people have written about Olorisa religion as a worship, system of belief, but I am looking at Olorisa as a people and how they come about to be identified as Olorisa,” he said.

According to Mr Anoba, the research employed a multi-method historical approach that combined archival research, oral history, court records, newspapers, memoirs and anthropological sources to reconstruct the history of the Olorisa.

For this research, Mr Anoba said he examined colonial-era records and interviewed descendants of Olorisa practitioners across several Yoruba communities, including Oshogbo, Ogbomoso, Ife and Ibadan.

He also accessed archival materials, including court records from the period, at the archives of the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), the National Archives in Ibadan, Abeokuta and Enugu, as well as the National Archives of the United Kingdom at Kew Gardens.

Other archival materials for the research were accessed at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley and the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University.

The decline of Olorisa

Mr Anoba said his work challenged the established narratives that the Yoruba people converted to Islam and Christianity in order to gain access to education, skills and jobs.

“That is what scholars have been saying since we started writing African history in a new way since the 1960s. But my own research is saying, well, that might be true, but that’s not entirely the story,” he said.

“I’m arguing that the Yoruba people left Olorisa religion in great numbers, in numbers unprecedented, starting in the late 19th century. Starting between 1890 and 1920.”

Mr Anoba said his research found that the population of Olorisa in Yoruba land remained above 90 per cent in the late 1890s, despite Islam having existed in the region for over 300 years and Christianity for over 60 years.

“But something remarkably happened, that if you now go to the population census of Nigeria, starting from the 1920s, the population of Olorisa began to tank, began to reduce significantly by half, or even more than half,” he said.

According to Mr Anoba, shortly after the Anglo-Aro war, the British colonial government realised that the resistance from the Igbo people ended after they ‘conquered’ the deity.

“When the British conquered and found that shrine of Ibini Obabi in Archukwu, that pretty much ended the war. So Britain now came back to Lagos and made a lot of adjustments. And one of the key things they did was to introduce a set of laws that, in simple terms, repressed indigenous religion, including Olorisa.”

Mr Anoba said the court documents from the period between 1903, when those laws began to take effect, and 1920, showed that “a massive number” of Olorisa were tried, jailed, and their properties confiscated in court.

“It was an era of intense persecution in the court for Olorisa people,” he said.

The lawfare against Olorisas

Mr Anoba argued that the Olorisas were forced to leave the religion because of decades of persecution in courts, the introduction of sets of laws that criminalise their practices and made it less attractive.

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He said the period also marked the introduction of new vocabularies like witchcraft and juju to describe the practices of the traditional religions.

He explained that the persecution was often driven by local Yoruba political and administrative actors who operated within colonial institutions.

He said colonial courts became important instruments in the suppression of indigenous religious practices.

According to him, local chiefs and kings often served as judges and court officials, applying colonial laws against traditional worshippers, frequently charging practitioners with offences linked to witchcraft.

“After Britain (colonial government) introduced the laws and established the courts, they pretty much left everything alone…Our own people had a hand in that persecution,” he said.

The historian described the process as “lawfare”, explaining it to mean the use of legal systems to weaken and marginalise a religious community.

Mr Anoba estimated that hundreds of religious traditions and deities that once existed vanished during the colonial period.

He also said the campaign against indigenous religion destroyed valuable historical artefacts.

According to him, court records show that police sometimes confiscated ritual objects, sacred items and historical materials from shrines and later destroyed them.

“When the police go and confiscate those properties, there is evidence in the court cases that they sometimes burn those things. They just burn them,” he said