Yoruba-Speaking Peoples in Dahomey

Abstract

Opening ParagraphIt is one of the disadvantages of the division of West Africa between various colonial powers that, in many instances, tribal and language groups are cut across or artificially limited. It is not always realized that the Yoruba-speaking peoples, so numerous in Nigeria, extend beyond the frontiers of that colony. Right across the centre of what is now the French colony of Dahomey is a band of Yoruba-speaking peoples, and even in Togoland this wave continues. These are not isolated groups of traders, such as may be found in many large coastal towns, but continuous towns and villages of people who, whatever their origins, speak dialects of the Yoruba language. These peoples are often denominated ‘Nago’ on French ethnographical maps, and the use of this term has been an additional factor in obscuring their kinship in language, and also probably in race, with their Yoruba neighbours in the adjoining British colony of Nigeria. The word Nago has entered maps and official documents; frenchified as Nagot, it sometimes even takes on the ugly feminine form of Nagote.