Conjugal histories

Project Lead: Insa Nolte

This project offers a re-reading of West African social and religious history from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century through the prism of marriage. It focuses on the Yoruba-speaking region, broadly located in contemporary southwest Nigeria and deeply embedded into distinct global networks focusing on the Atlantic and the Islamic world respectively, through oral narratives called ìtàn. Ìtàn reveal that Yoruba conceptions of marriage constituted a template for community-making which allowed for internal difference, and for the management of social and political relations in a context of inequality and diversity.

While the adoption of Islam, and later of Christianity, transformed some marital practices, marriage remained a template for the formation of communities that included others, albeit not always as equals. Conjugal practices shaped both the distinct trajectories of conversion to Islam and Christianity and their coexistence with Yoruba ‘traditional’ religion.

By the late nineteenth century, locally published pamphlets show that debates about marriage also facilitated the close engagement of Yoruba Muslims and Christians, and that Yoruba Christians drew on Islam both for the establishment of African-led churches which accepted polygamy, and for debates about what it meant to be Yoruba, African, and Black.