HAIL ORISHA!
A phenomenology of a West African Religion in the mid-Nineteenth Century

Peter McKenzie
Brill, 1997. xii + 578 pp.
Reviewed in The Nigerian Field, 63 (1998), p. 159


The author, of the Department of Religion, University of Leicester, is still remembered in Ibadan from the time he was a member of the Department of Religious Studies, University of Ibadan. He has contributed several articles on the subject of Yoruba religion to its journal Orita, and has published extensively elsewhere.

Since African religion has been continually evolving, everyone would like to turn the clock back and see what it was like in past centuries. Interviewing old people does not bring us very far. Fortunately, as seen in this book, there is much documentation from the 19th century that gives us a good glimpse at Yoruba religion at that time.

It is to the author's credit not only to have amassed such a great volume of testimony but to have organized the data under twelve different headings in Part One, which is the bulk of the book. Going through the mound of evidence, the reader's mind goes to many theoretical questions about Yoruba religion, some of which are the subject of hot debate. But there is no attempt to answer these questions in this section. It keeps strictly to phenomenology.

Part Two partly satisfies the reader's curiosity about these questions. This is on the conceptual world of Yoruba religion, and a synthesis is presented on the basis of the phenomenological data, without straying far from it.

The contention of Thomas Mákanjúolá Ilésanmí (1) that Olódùmarè has only recently, and for political reasons, been awarded supremacy over the pantheon of Òrìsà, whereas before each locale had a different Òrìsà as the high-God, finds considerable support in McKenzie's data.

So also does the frequently reiterated contention that the Òrìsà worshippers were not very loyal and committed to their gods, but would easily abandon one in favour of another if the first did not delivera practice that is continued by many Christian Yoruba who jump from church to church to find their miracle.

The value of McKenzie's monumental work is not that it argues for any particular theory or interpretation of Yoruba religion, but that it is a well organized mass of 19th century documentation that no student of Yoruba religion can dispense with.

1. "The traditional theologians and the practice of Òrìsà religion in Yorùbáland," Journal of Religion in Africa, 21 (1991), 216-226. McKenzie makes no reference to this article.