Dr. Zack Shittu

• PhD in Organizational Development
• Technology Solutions Architect
• Fine-Art Photographer

History is never just about the past. It's a mirror. And the Yoruba story has been told incompletely for too long—often filtered through the lens of colonial administrators, distant anthropologists, or fragmented oral traditions that lose their context in the modern world.

Yorùbá: History, Identity & the In-Between was born from a personal necessity. As a Yoruba man living in the diaspora, navigating the spaces between cultures, I found myself constantly searching for a history that reflected the complexity of my heritage. What I found was often academic and inaccessible, or popular but lacking in rigorous detail.

Professionally, I have spent 24 years as a Technology Solutions Architect, building complex systems, alongside earning a PhD in Organizational Development. But my passion has always been the visual and narrative arts—specifically fine-art photography, where the goal is always to reveal the deeper truth beneath the surface.

I approach this podcast with that same architectural and photographic lens. We aren't just recounting dates and battles. We are reconstructing the 19th-century Yoruba world—the rise and fall of Oyo, the devastating civil wars, and the colonial encounter—with cinematic care, academic rigor, and a deep respect for the ancestors who lived it.

This project is for those who carry this history, and for anyone who believes that African histories deserve the highest standard of storytelling.