The In-Between · 7 May 2026

The In-Between: Issue No. 02 · Ìrìnkèrindò

Issue No. 02 · May 2026 · withzackshittu.com

The In-Between

Yorùbá — History, Identity & the In-Between

Opening Note

When Episode 1 went live, I expected disagreement. I expected questions. What I didn't expect was the recurring shape of the surprise.

People wrote in to say they knew the story — Oduduwa descending from the heavens with a chain and a handful of earth, the founding of Ile-Ife, the dispersal of the crowned princes. What surprised them was that there are also archives. Letters. Treaties. Missionary journals. British colonial dispatches. Oral histories transcribed in the 1850s by Yoruba men who were themselves freed from slave ships. The Ibadan many of us know from a single line in a primary school textbook turns out to have a 19th-century paper trail thick enough to write seven episodes from — and we've barely started.

I want to be careful here, because this is the moment where it would be easy to be condescending, and I refuse to be. The myths are not wrong. They are an inheritance, and they carry truths that no archive can hold — about cosmology, about belonging, about the shape a people gives to its own beginning. The show is not here to replace any of that.

But the documentary record exists. It is sitting in archives in Ibadan and London and Lagos and Birmingham. And for many of us — myself included, until recently — it might as well not have existed. That gap is what Yorùbá: History, Identity & the In-Between lives inside. And it's what this newsletter, this fortnight, wants to sit with.

— Zack

The Big Idea

The Big Idea: The Name That Wandered Into Us

Here is something that surprised me when I first encountered it, and it surprises almost everyone I share it with:

The word "Yoruba," used as a collective name for all the people we now call Yoruba, is not ancient.

For most of the period our show is concerned with — the long centuries before the 1800s — there was no single people called "the Yoruba." There were the people of Oyo. The people of Ife. The people of Ijebu, Egba, Ekiti, Ondo, Owu, Ijesha. They shared a language family, shared cosmologies, shared origin stories that pointed back to Ile-Ife. They knew themselves to be related. But they did not, on the whole, call themselves by one name.

The name "Yoruba" came from outside, before it came from inside. It appears in Hausa and Songhai sources, used to describe Oyo specifically. It travels through Arabic-language scholarship. And then, in the 19th century — the exact period the show is covering — something extraordinary happens.

A man named Samuel Ajayi Crowther, freed from a slave ship as a boy, educated in Sierra Leone, ordained as the first African Anglican bishop, sits down to translate the Bible. He has to make a choice about what to call the language. He chooses Yoruba. He writes a grammar. He writes a dictionary. He produces texts that thousands of people will learn to read in. And in doing so, he helps consolidate a name that had previously described one kingdom into a name that now describes a people.

This is what the historians Hobsbawm and Ranger called invented tradition — but "invented" is the wrong word for the feeling of it, because nothing about Yoruba identity is fake. What is recent is the consolidation. The umbrella. The collective "we."

This is why the Saro returnees matter so much. This is why Crowther matters so much. This is why Episode 6, when it arrives, will spend real time on European arrival — because the name we now wear was forged in that exact century of disruption, displacement, and return.

We did not start as one. We became one. And the becoming is itself a story worth knowing.

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