Yoruba tradition holds that Ile-Ife, in what is now Osun State, Nigeria, is the site where the orisha Oduduwa founded the first Yoruba kingdom and from which the ruling houses of the other Yoruba city-states trace their descent, a founding account rather than a single verified date. From Ife, Yoruba settlement organized into a network of walled city-states, each with its own oba (king) and council rather than one central throne: Oyo, Ijebu, Egba, Ijesa, Ekiti and many others, sharing language and religion while remaining politically independent and often at war with one another.
The Oyo Empire, built on cavalry drawn from the northern savanna, became the dominant Yoruba power from roughly the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, extending tribute across much of what is now southwestern Nigeria and into the Republic of Benin. Oyo collapsed in the early 1800s under succession disputes and Fulani jihadist expansion from the north, triggering decades of Yoruba civil wars that also fed captives into the final, most intensive decades of the Atlantic slave trade, the direct route by which large Yoruba populations, and Yoruba orisha worship, arrived in Cuba, Brazil, Trinidad and Haiti.
British colonial rule from the late nineteenth century folded the Yoruba city-states into Southern Nigeria and later independent Nigeria, where the Yoruba remain one of the country's largest peoples alongside the Hausa-Fulani and Igbo, concentrated in the southwest but present nationwide and, through a large modern diaspora, in the United Kingdom, the United States and elsewhere. The old obaships persist as traditional, largely ceremonial authorities, most prominently the Ooni of Ife and the Alaafin of Oyo, alongside Nigeria's elected federal government.