Yorùbá, the language spoken by over thirty million Yorùbá people, is native to south western Nigeria as well as the Republic of Benin and Togo as these regions are historically part of ancestral Yorùbá territory, or Yorùbáland. The Yorùbá diaspora have travelled, both willingly and forcibly, far and wide across the globe taking their culture and language with them. Through the transatlantic slave trade, Yorùbá cultural practices are recognisable in the Caribbean in the preservation of religion and musical traditions.
As a result of Britain’s ties with West Africa in the sixteenth century it would have been entirely possible that some Yorùbá existed among the Africans brought to the UK during that time. However any British-Nigerian whose genealogy is traceable to then has not been discovered. The Yorùbá of concern in this study are those who settled in Britain in the years after the second world war.
Migration – From Lagos to London
One of the primary purposes of Yorùbá migration to Britain post-WWII was to study; to train and become qualified and then return to jobs waiting for them back home. At the time of these student migrations, Nigeria was rich. The national income is quoted as having increased from an estimated total of £593 million in 1950-51 to £812 million in 1956-57. In 1959 growth was estimated at 4% pa due to exceptional conditions between 1951-57 such as rising prices for Nigeria’s exports and demand for goods (Akpofure & Crowder 1966:241). The oil boom of the 1970s contributed to a stable Naira-Sterling exchange rate at 1:1, meaning these elite Yorùbá expatriates were among the wealthier communities of emigrants to Britain living in properties in well-to-do neighbourhoods in London like Finchley, Maida Vale, Highgate and Kensington (Oyètádé 1993).
The vast majority of the Yorùbá students in the 50s, 60s and 70s returned to Nigeria and took up positions of responsibility in government (ibid). However, through the creation of tangible ties to Britain; property, jobs and new families, some did stay after their studies, with the vast majority making their home in London and larger cities in the UK.
In more recent times, the motivation for migration shifted from education to escaping the declining political, social and economic conditions in Nigeria. The military regimes of Generals Mohammadu Buhari (1983-85), Ibrahim Babangida (1985-93), and Sani Abacha (1993-98), coupled with the stifling policies of the IMF’s structural adjustment programs, resulting in high levels of inflation, led to the flight of many elite and middle-class Nigerians seeking a better life abroad (Ajibewa and Akinrinade, 2003).
The largest population of Nigerians is in Peckham as a community of Yorùbá owned shops and Nigerian churches and mosques grew up in the neighbourhood, so that it has affectionately come to be known as Little Lagos.
However, despite the Yorùbá appearing to replicate the comforts of home, the lamentations of cultural loss with the emergence of the British born generation became a common narrative. In 1993, Oyètádé wrote that
“many Yorùbá have a negative attitude toward their mother tongue” Oyètádé (1993:88)
And a BBC article from 2005 states:
The trouble is that many London Yorùbás have neglected to pass their traditions on to their children. A few insist on Yorùbá being spoken at home, but many have given up the struggle of teaching Yoruba to unenthusiastic children, and English has become the family language. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/4182341.stm
According to the ONS between Jan-Dec 2018 there were 205,000 people (with a confidence interval (CI) of 22,000) that were born in Nigeria living in the UK. It is difficult to know exactly how many Yorùbá are living in the UK. Although information on ethnicity is collected through the census, the breakdown stops at ‘Black African’, and in terms of language the (ONS) only collects information on the population’s main language. This means either the Yorùbá in Britain do not record Yorùbá as their main language, or the numbers who do are too small to be significant.
As a result it would also be near impossible to know exact figures of how many British people born in Britain are of Yorùbá heritage thereby making it difficult to conduct any research that can be used to generalised to the wider population. However the purpose of this research was not to make generalisation about language transmission within the Yorùbá population as a whole, but rather to draw out the salient themes from the collected data.