Odù was published by the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University) beginning in the mid-1960s and stands as one of the earliest and most significant journals of African studies produced on the African continent itself. Its name — drawn from the corpus of Ifá divination — announced a project of intellectual reclamation: African scholarship about Africa, rooted in African institutions and drawing on African intellectual traditions.
The journal published history, anthropology, linguistics, and literary criticism at a moment when the African university was itself a new and contested institution, struggling to define its relationship to colonial intellectual legacies and to the newly independent states it served. Contributors included some of the foremost scholars of Yoruba culture, history, and language, as well as writers and intellectuals from across West Africa.
Our seven issues of Odù are among the rarest items in the 2026 acquisition. They are primary documents of a foundational moment in African intellectual history and will be held at the University of Ìbàdàn under archival conditions.