The Idea behind

The story of how this blog has come to be is long and winded.

It started out as an idea I had to catalogue stories and family lore from my maternal great-grandmother almost 10 years ago now. As a child of two cultures, born in Nigeria and raised in the UK, I was losing some aspects of my Yoruba culture, key amongst them was the loss of stories I used to hear around the playground and at bedtimes. I wanted to preserve this rich tradition of our culture, but as a naive 15 year old, I thought I had all the time in the world. So the idea faded from my mind and I got stuck into teenage rebellion and all the ills that come with growing up.

Shortly before my 18th Birthday, my Great Grandmother died.

It wasn’t a huge shock, she’d lived a long and fulfilling life. She was 96 when she passed.

But I’d never gotten round to collecting the stories and family history, suddenly, all the time I thought I had vanished. And with her passing, my mum’s family lost not just the matriarch of the family, the whole town of Ilesha lost a treasure trove of information regarding life, culture, history.

You see, my culture has a strong oral tradition, information is generally passed down from grandparent to parent. Parent to child, child to grand child and so on. But the advent of modernisation and the growth of western style nuclear families has meant the fracturing of traditional family life and the loss of many oral traditions. Family jewels no longer passed on to the first daughter of the youngest daughter when a matriarch dies for example. Cultural traditions are being lost at an astounding rate.

Now this is not to diminish some of the benefits of westernisation and it is not to vilify the changing cultural environment. It is simply to draw attention to the plight of most West African cultures that rely heavily on oral tradition.

Back to my great grandmother, her passing was the equivalent of a library being burnt to the ground, the knowledge she possessed about Yoruba culture and traditions, obscure folk tales and aspects of life that were little touched by colonialism are now forever lost to the mists of time. I cannot reclaim them and I cannot turn back time.

So I thought up this blog, as a way to document these folk tales and aspects of our culture, a way for me to curate the information from the remaining family members.

A harder task than it sounds, most of the hundreds and hundreds of stories I heard as a young child in Nigeria are forgotten by both me and my dad who used to tell some of them as bedtime stories.

So the blog will be slightly different, I’m hoping it will grow in time to encompass not just Yoruba folk tales but Igbo ones, Fulani ones, Edo ones, Ashanti stories, Wolof stories and many more from across the continent. And I hope I get contributions from other Africans to add to this blog.

I’m hoping to add background on the different cultures these stories come from, what their traditional beliefs were, their creation myths, music, their philosophical beliefs, language and how their worldview was shaped by the stories they told.

Africans were just as cultured as the Ancient Greeks, Assyrians, Mughal empire and the Han dynasty. We had heroes and villain stories, love stories and conqueror stories, art and culture.

How did West African Mythology influence the World?

And I’m hoping through this, I can also do my part in helping diasporic Africans connect with the cultures they were ripped from forcibly. A DNA test saying I’m Yoruba is good, but it does not add a sense of belonging, it does not help inform and it provides no information about the people I’m from. A resource like what I’m proposing will flesh out and add colour and life to the metaphorical coming home of diasporic Africans.

As a final note…

I’ve always criticised the dearth of literature pertaining to African mythology and stories. Today I finally bit the bullet and decided to make the encyclopedia myself. After all, we cannot expect the white man to write all the books, perpetually taking all the glory.

“Until the Lion learns to speak, Tales of the hunt will always glorify the hunter”