The In-Between · 30 April 2026

Issue No. 01 - April 2026

Issue No. 01 · April 2026 · withzackshittu.com

The In-Between

Yorùbá — History, Identity & the In-Between

Opening Note

I grew up Yorùbá. I just didn't know what that meant.

Not really. I knew the myths — Odùduwà descending on a chain from the heavens, Ilé-Ifẹ̀ as the place where the world began. I knew the proverbs, the food, the rhythms of the language. But history? The actual sweep of who the Yorùbá are, where they came from, what they built, what was taken from them and what survived anyway? That I didn't know. Nobody sat me down and taught it. It was simply assumed — the way you assume a foundation is solid without ever checking what it's made of.

I lived in Nigeria into my mid-thirties. The history was all around me. I just wasn't looking.

It wasn't until I left, and the distance gave me a kind of clarity, that I started asking questions I should have asked much earlier. And what I found when I started digging stopped me in my tracks. Not because it was tragic — though parts of it are — but because it was fascinating. Vast. Contested. Alive. This wasn't the decorative mythology of my childhood. This was a civilization with its own philosophy, its own diplomacy, its own arguments about power and identity that echo loudly into the present.

I have children now. And I refuse to let them inherit the same silence I did.

The In-Between is the companion newsletter to my podcast Yorùbá — History, Identity & the In-Between. But it's also a personal record — of learning in public, of filling in gaps I didn't know I had, of trying to pass something real on to the next generation. Each issue I'll go deeper than the audio allows, and share what's on my desk: what I'm reading, arguing with, photographing, sitting with.

This first episode asks the simplest and most impossible question: Who are the Yorùbá? I grew up inside that question without ever knowing it was a question. I'm still finding the answer. Come with me.

— Zack

The Big Idea

Here's a question worth sitting with: if the Yorùbá never had a single king, a single capital, or a single army — were they ever really one people?

It depends on what you mean by "people."

What the Yorùbá had was never political unity. It was something more durable — a shared cosmology, a common language, a pantheon, a moral vocabulary. Ilé-Ifẹ̀ wasn't a seat of government. It was a point of origin. You could be from Ọ̀yọ́ or Ìjẹ̀bú, at war with your neighbor, and still recognize each other as coming from the same root. Rivals. Kin. Both, simultaneously.

The rest of this issue is for subscribers. Subscribe to The In-Between to read it.