{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02154882154882155, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 5.040650406504065, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Poverty and Transvaluation in Nineteenth–Century Yorubaland

FOR a historian concerned with the poor, the most interesting point in John Peel's recent article is his acceptance that 'poverty on a substantial scale' existed in later nineteenth-century Yorubaland. His book, Ijeshas and Nigerians, did not mention the pre-colonial poor, perhaps because he relied chiefly on oral sources which had no reason to remember them. His silence was one reason why I suggested in my book on the African poor that only study of documentary sources would reveal the history of poverty in Africa. That such study in the Church Missionary Society Archives has convinced Peel of the existence of the pre-colonial poor is gratifying, although he sees them only as recipients of favours from their social betters, not as historical actors. As a critique of my work on poverty in Yorubaland, however, Peel's article is largely beside the point, because he is not interested in the history of the poor but in the history of Yoruba religion, especially the question whether pre-colonial Yoruba had experienced the process he calls 'transvaluation', which I understand to centre on a shift of concern from prosperity in this world to salvation in the next, leading to a positive valuation of poverty and suffering. Although he has himself drawn attention to the elaborate notions of the after-life which existed in late nineteenthcentury Yorubaland, Peel insists on 'the this-worldliness of Yoruba religious