Reverend Samuel Johnson, born on 24 June 1846 in Freetown, Sierra Leone, became one of the most influential historians to emerge from nineteenth century Yorubaland. He is best known as the author of The History of the Yorubas, a foundational work that gathered Yoruba origin traditions, political memories, and accounts of the nineteenth century upheavals into a single narrative.
Johnson’s parents belonged to the community often described as recaptives and returnees, Yoruba people who were freed from slave ships by British naval patrols, resettled in Sierra Leone, and later reconnected with homelands across what is now southwestern Nigeria. In that environment, Johnson grew up hearing Yoruba speech, proverbs, praise names, and family history alongside Christian teaching and formal schooling. This mix mattered, because it formed the intellectual bridge he later used, he could listen deeply to Yoruba oral tradition and present it in a written form that Europeans and Africans trained in Western literacy could read.
The move to Ibadan, and a generation interrupted by war
In 1857, Johnson moved with his family to Ibadan to join the Church Missionary Society mission associated with the work of Reverend David Hinderer. Ibadan at the time was not merely a large town, it was a rising military and political power, populated by warriors, migrants, and refugees reshaping their lives after the decline of the Oyo Empire and the spread of regional conflict.
Johnson’s youth and education unfolded against the background of Yoruba civil wars. One of the conflicts that affected the Ibadan area in the early 1860s was the Ibadan, Ijaye war, widely dated from 1860 to 1862 in many church and missionary accounts. The practical result for families and schools was disruption, travel became dangerous, learning was delayed, and communities carried the pressure of siege, alliance, and displacement. This atmosphere helps explain why later Yoruba writers placed such value on recording memory, not as nostalgia, but as survival.
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From 1863 to 1865, Johnson completed training at the Church Missionary Society Training Institution in Abeokuta. He then worked within mission schools in Ibadan, first as a schoolmaster and later as a senior figure overseeing Anglican mission education at key stations in the town. His life was not that of a distant scholar, it was rooted in daily community work, teaching, organising, and mediating relationships between local realities and missionary structures.
Ministry, mediation, and the widening Yoruba crisis
By 1875, Johnson had become a catechist. His career expanded as Yoruba political conflicts escalated into wider wars, including the prolonged struggle often known as the Ekiti Parapo War. Educated Yoruba Christians, including many from returnee backgrounds, were frequently involved as messengers, interpreters, negotiators, and advisers. Johnson is remembered within church historical records as someone who sought peace and stability in a period when war could last for years and political authority was being renegotiated across towns and regions.
Johnson became a deacon in 1880 and was posted to Oyo as a pastor from 1881. He was later ordained as a minister in 1888. In Oyo, his proximity to royal traditions, court memory, and the politics of legitimacy brought him into a deeper engagement with the historical questions that shaped Yoruba identity, questions about origins, kingship, succession, the rise and fall of imperial Oyo, and the creation of new centres of power like Ibadan and Abeokuta.
Writing The History of the Yorubas, turning voices into a book
Johnson’s most enduring achievement, The History of the Yorubas, grew out of years of listening, travel, and collection. He drew on oral testimonies, palace traditions, praise poetry, and accounts from elders, chiefs, and participants in the wars that transformed nineteenth century Yorubaland. Like most historians working with oral tradition, he faced competing narratives and local variations. His achievement was not that he produced a perfect and final account, but that he created a wide and carefully assembled record at a moment when many feared those traditions were slipping away.
The book covers Yoruba beginnings as understood through tradition, the evolution of political structures, the strength and decline of the Oyo Empire, and the violent reshaping of the region through nineteenth century conflict. It also records social customs, institutions, and patterns of authority, offering a view of Yoruba life that is both political and cultural. This is one reason the work remains so widely used. Even when modern scholarship revises details, the book preserves a large body of testimony that would otherwise be inaccessible.
Johnson finished the manuscript in 1897. He sent it to the Church Missionary Society headquarters in London, where it was lost. He died on 29 April 1901, without seeing his work in print.
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How the manuscript survived, and why 1921 mattered
After Johnson’s death, his brother, Dr Obadiah Johnson, worked from Samuel Johnson’s notes to recompile the history. The reconstructed manuscript eventually reached publication in London in 1921, under the longer title that begins, The History of the Yorubas from the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the British Protectorate. This publication date is crucial, because it meant Johnson’s historical record entered the world at a time when colonial narratives still commonly treated African societies as lacking credible history. The appearance of a detailed Yoruba authored historical work challenged that assumption through sheer scale, specificity, and internal knowledge.
Over time, historians have noted that Johnson’s work, like any large historical synthesis, contains areas that require careful reading, especially where oral tradition merges with political memory. Yet the book remains a standard reference because it gathers so much material from Yoruba perspectives, from within the cultural world it describes.
Author’s Note
Samuel Johnson’s story is a reminder that history is not only what happened, it is what a people manage to carry forward. He lived through disruption, served communities under pressure, listened to voices that might have been lost, and left behind a written memory strong enough to outlive him. When we read him today, we are not only learning about rulers and wars, we are witnessing a culture refusing to forget itself.
References
Samuel Johnson, The History of the Yorubas from the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the British Protectorate, first published 1921.
Toyin Falola, Yoruba Gurus, Indigenous Production of Knowledge in Africa, 1999.
J F Ade Ajayi, Christian Missions in Nigeria 1841 to 1891, The Making of a New Elite, 1965.
Dictionary of African Christian Biography, “Johnson, Samuel (B), 1846 to 1901.”
