The History of the Yorubas: The People, Country, and Language

Before you ever set foot onto the first chapter of the book The History of the Yorubas, you are met with a lengthy introduction which gives a brief comprehensive summary of the people, the country, and the language... but most especially, the language.

This 40 page introduction, is enough to be an entire chapter of its own! And I am not sure why the author chose to make it a preamble. Because the whole time I was reading this part of the book, I couldn't help but wonder just when I was actually going to officially start reading the book. As it stands, I have read 40+ pages, and I am only now just beginning chapter one of this voluminous tome.

That said, this is not the first time I have tried to read this book, and perhaps it is because I have tried before, that I determined to persist past the lengthy introduction even though a good chunk of it was not new to me. I do remember however, when it was new to me, and how the section on the Yoruba language blew my mind.

It went into copious detail about how Yoruba grammar worked: The alphabet; The vowels, consonants, and accents; how words are formed; parts of speech; numbering; and every other aspect you can think of. In fact, it was while reading this section of the book that I realised why I have always struggled to understand Yoruba. I was even inspired to start a project building my own Yoruba Dictionary which I called Yorudi.

Now that I'm reading this book once again, maybe I will start coding that project again too. But that aside, my impression of the book so far, is that it has A LOT of useful information... you just have to be determined to read it all :D.