The Yoruba people, of which there are currently over 25 million, occupies the southwestern corner of Nigeria, around the Dahomey border and extends to the same Dahomey. To the east and north, the Yoruba culture reaches its limits in the Niger River. However ancestral cultures directly related to the Yoruba flourished north of the Niger (Map). Archaeological findings and genetic studies indicate that the ancestors of the Yoruba may have lived in this territory from the archaeological prehistoria.Evidencias indicate that a proto-Yoruba society with high levels of technology and art, were living in northern Niger in the first millennium AD, and had knowledge of iron.

Ifa Theology argues that the creation of mankind occurred in the holy city of Ile-Ife, where land Oduduwa water created. Long after an unknown number migrated to Ile Ife. At this point synergize East and West Africans. Some scenarios, based on the similarity of the Egyptian sculptures and those found in the city state of Ife, the Yoruba say the Oduduwa can descend from Egypt and that they founded the first kingdom. The Yorubas are still called themselves "Children of Oduduwa".
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These Yoruba city-states were among more than 25 kingdoms, all centralized. Of these, Ile-Ife is the universally recognized as the most important. Its foundation is believed to date from 850. His eternal rival, the kingdom of Oyo, northwest of Ife, was founded about 1350 AD to the. The Oni (king) of Ife and Oyo Alafin are still considered as the Yoruba kings and pays respect to them as such in Nigeria. Other major kingdoms were Itsekiri, Ondo and Owo in the southeast, northwest Ekiti and Ijesha and Egbado, Shabe, Ketu, Ijebu, and Awori in the southwest

Portuguese explorers "discovered" the Yoruba cities and kingdoms in the fifteenth century, but cities such as Ife and Benin, among others, have been in the same place for hundreds of years before Europeans arrived.

The kingdom of Oyo was founded with the help of the Portuguese arms. In the late 18th century there was a civil war in which one side wins the support of the Fulani, who in 1830 will take control of the whole empire Oyo. The Fulani invasion pushed many Yoruba to the south where they founded the towns of Ibadan and Abeokuta. In 1888, with the help of a British mediator, Yoruba and Fulani sign an agreement that the first regain control over their land. Yorubaland in 1901 is officially colonized by the British Empire, who establish an administrative system that retains much of the governance structure of Yoruba.

During all these years Ife maintained its vital importance as a sacred city-state, cradle of the Yoruba and the basis of their religious thought. Until recently, the Yoruba were not considered themselves as one nation. Rather, it is considered as citizens of Oyo, Benin, Yagba, among other cities. These cities regarded the inhabitants of Lagos and Owo, for example, as foreign residents. The Yoruba kingdoms warred not only against Dahometanos, but also among themselves. The name Yoruba was applied to all these people related linguistically and culturally by its northern neighbors, the Hausas.

Typical old Yoruba cities were urban centers around farms that stretched for dozens of miles or more. Oyo and Benin were founded by kings of Ife and his descendants. Benin rituals gained his knowledge directly from Ife, and the religious system of Ifa divination spread from Ife not only throughout Yoruba territory, but it reached everyone. A common Yoruba belief system dominated the region from the Niger, moving east to the Gulf of Guinea in the south.

It was no accident that the Yoruba culture has spread across the Atlantic to America. European slave hunters violently captured millions of Africans and shipped them to their fate in overloaded slave ships to America. Started wars of enslavement from the kingdom of Dahomey against some of the Yoruba kingdoms, and the like Yoruba wars between them, made these prisoners of war, slaves available for shipment to America. Yoruba slaves were sent to British colonies, French, Spanish and Portuguese in the new world and a large proportion of these places, the Yoruba traditions survived strongly. In Cuba, Brazil, Haiti and Trinidad, Yoruba religious rites, beliefs, music and myths are enthroned today. In Haiti the Yoruba were called Anaga. Afro-Haitian religious activities were a place of honor Yoruba rites and beliefs, their pantheon includes numerous deities of Yoruba origin.

Slavery in America was very different from other colonized regions. The language and culture of these captives was ruthlessly eliminated, where Africans generally received the death penalty for exercising their practices.

In Cuba, there was a process of syncretism of Yoruba religion with Catholicism, giving rise to a new system known as Santeria or Regla de Osha, which is harder than it has spread to Latin America, the U.S. and Europe. This resurgence in popularity and interest in the adaptation of Yoruba and Ifa with Catholicism, came to the United States through Puerto Ricans in the 40's and 50's (which previously had received from Cuba) and then in the 60's with the flow of Cuban refugees.

In Cuba, the pantheon of Yoruba deities has survived intact, along with a complex of rites, beliefs, music, dances and myths of Yoruba origin.

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