Karin Barber - I Could Speak Until Tomorrow - Oriki, Women & The Past in A Yoruba Town-Edinburgh University Press (2020)

International African Library 7
General editors: J. D. Y. Peel and David Parkin
. JTCOULD SPEAK UNTIL TOMORROW
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I COULD SPEAK
UNTIL TOMORROW
Oriki, Women, and the Past

in a Yoruba Town
Karin Barber
| EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS

for the INTERNATIONAL AFRICAN INSTITUTE, London
© Karin Barber 1991
Edinburgh University Press
22 George Square, Edinburgh
Set in Linotron Plantin
by Koinonia, Bury, and
printed in Great Britain by
The Alden Press Limited
Oxford
British Library Cataloguing
Barber, Karin
in Publication Data
I could speak until tomorrow: Oriki, women >

and the past in a Yoruba town. —(International
African Library. 7)
1. Nigeria. Yoruba. Cultural processes
I. Title II. Series
305.89633
ISBN 0 7486 0210 0
CONTENTS
Maps, Diagrams and Tables Vil

Acknowledgements Vill
Note on orthography x
1. Anthropology, text and town 1
2. The interpretation of ortki 10
1. The place of ok: among oral genres in Okuku 10
2. Onki, definition, and the transcendence of time 12
3. Encounter with ortki 16
4. Ortki as literary text 21
5. Ortki as a relationship with the past 25
6. Paths to interpretation 34
3.1.Oritki
Okuku in Okuku
today 39
39
2. Okuku history
3. What oriki do 67 50
4. Contexts of performance 87
1. The variety of styles 87
2. The mastery of ortki performance 96
3. The bride’s enjoyment 105
4. Death and other worlds 117
5.1.The orki of origin
Introduction 135 135
2. The idea of origin 138
3. Identification through town membership 146
4. Ile in Okuku 153
5. The demarcation of ile by ortki ortle 165
6. Ontki orile of the mother 168
7. Emblematic language 172
6.1.The ortki of big men 183
Big men, reputation and ortki 183
2. Hierarchy and the dynamics of self-aggrandisement 187
3. Big men in the early nineteenth century 195
4. Wartime big men up to 1893 203
5. The basis of big men’s competition 212
6. Big men 1893-1934 220
7. Farming, trade and big women , 230
8. Big men 1934-1984 | 236
7. Disjunction and transition 248
1. Introduction 248
2. Crossing boundaries and merging identities in oriki 249
3. Disjunction and juxtaposition . 261
4. The ortki of women 270
5. Profusion and difference , 277
Appendix :
Notes | 304292
Bibliography
Glossary 336 329
Index 341
MAPS, DIAGRAMS AND TABLES
MAPS, DIAGRAMS AND TABLES

Map 1: Nigeria: showing position of Okuku xii
compounds 40
Map 2: Okuku c. 1975: showing public buildings and principal
Map 3: Okuku and neighbouring towns 42

Map 4: ‘Towns of origin’ 53
Fig. 1: Genealogies of the Olokuku 56
Fig. 2: Descendants of Awotutu and Aworoka 169
Fig. 3: Asapawo’s ancestry 251
Table 1: Reigns of the Olokuku 54
Table 2: Chiefs in Okuku (1975) 188
Appendix: Ile in Okuku
Plate 1. His Highness James Olosebikan between pages 134-135
Oyclousi II
Plate 2. Sangowemi
Plate 3. Sangowemi
Plate 4. A bride
Plate 6. A royal bride
Plate 6. Faderera
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It would be impossible to thank individually all the people who did me

kindnesses in Okuku. Many of them are named in the following pages, as
performers of oriki or as interpreters, explainers and tellers of history. However,
there are some to whom I owe special gratitude. During the three years that
I lived in Okuku, I stayed with the family of Mr G. A. Akindele. To all of the
Akindeles I extend my heartfelt thanks for their generosity, hospitality and
tolerance. I had the privilege of being made an honorary daughter of the late
Olokuku, His Highness James Olaosebikan Oyewusi II. From the moment of
my first arrival, in July 1974, to his untimely death in March 1980, the
Olokuku showed me every kindness. Always entertaining, unfailingly gracious,
he was also in his way a man of genius. It was an honour to be admitted into
his confidence.
In 1977 I left Okuku to take up an appointment at the University of Ife, but
our connection did not come to an end, rather it expanded as our spheres of
operation diverged. My parents, Charles and Barbara Barber, and my brother
John visited Okuku at different times. The Olokuku also visited my parents
in Leeds, where he liked to say he had been offered ‘seventeen different kinds
of meat, including zebra’. He made my Ph.D. graduation day at the
University of Ife memorable by attending it with an entourage of eight of the
town chiefs, even though he was by then very ill. His successor, the present
Olokuku, His Highness Samuel Oyebode Oyeleye Oluronke IT, has continued
the gracious tradition and made me feel as much at home in Okuku as ever.
Our connection was symbolised and cemented through his kind action,
supported by the chiefs and the Okuku Welfare Association, in conferring on
me the chieftaincy title Iyamoye in 1984. As the Olokuku said, “We want you
to know by this that you can never leave us, except physically’.
I also owe special gratitude to Joseph Faramade Ajeiigbe, who helped me
enormously with my research during my second and third years in Okuku.
Not only did he transcribe almost all my recorded texts, he also went through
them with me, word by word, commenting in Yoruba on local allusions,
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix
obscure meanings and poetic idioms. His guidance and contacts were also
very helpful in the rest of my field work.
At Ife, I was fortunate enough to be supervised in my Ph.D. research by
Professor Richard Taylor and Professor ’Wande Abimbola. I am also grateful
to Professor ’Sope Oyelaran and Professor A. Akiwowo for many illuminating
discussions over the years, first as a student and later as a colleague. Professor
Olabiyi Yai has long been a formative influence in my thoughts about Yoruba
literature. When I began the long drawn-out process of rewriting my thesis for
publication, Jane Bryce and Ruth Finnegan gave me the benefit of detailed
readings and comments on the first draft. John Peel has been a patient,
constructive and encouraging critic throughout the production of the present
version, and Chris Wickham also made many helpful suggestions. Iowe most
of all to Paulo Farias, who read all my numerous drafts with unfailing
perceptiveness, and provided constant support and encouragement.
NOTE ON ORTHOGRAPHY
Yoruba is a tonal language, with three underlying pitch levels for vowels and
syllabic nasals: low tone (indicated with a grave accent: ko, ‘n), mid tone (not
marked: le, n) and high tone (indicated with an acute accent: wi, ‘n). Speech
is characterised by continual glides between these levels.
The orthography adopted in this book is the modern standard style
recommended by the Yoruba Orthography Committee. The following symbols
are employed:
e roughly as in English ‘get’ (cf. e as in French ‘chez’)
9 roughly as in English ‘pot’ (cf. o as in French ‘eau’)
s the sound written in English as sh |
p the voiceless labio-velar sound Kp where k and p are simultaneously
pronounced.
Poetic texts in Yoruba are written with full tone markings. Lineation is
partly subjective, but is based on a combination of the performer’s breath-
pauses and the linguistic structure of the text. Where the texts reveal features
of the Osun area dialect, these have been preserved, e.g. Enikoyi [for standard
Yoruba Onikoyi], ségi [for standard Yoruba ségi], mid-tone third person
possessive re (for standard Yoruba low-tone ré].
When Yoruba sentences or phrases are quoted in passing, they are
italicised and tone-marked. However, isolated Yoruba words are not tone-
marked, because the frequency of their occurrence would cause problems for
the typesetters. For reference, all such words are listed with full tone marks
in the glossary. The word ‘oba’ (king) is not italicised because it is used in
English constructions such as oba’s, obas, obaship.
@®Sokoto —_
Maiduguri
e
e/aria
e Kaduna
Rip
oR N/o
ellorin <?
,e Okuku
Ogbomosa eta »
|
Oyoe ®Osogbo Vee 3e™
ibadane Ife @Akure
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— eBenin eEnugu
0 50 100 150 Miles
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MAP 1: NIGERIA Showing Position of Okuku

BLANK PAGE
I
ANTHROPOLOGY, TEXT AND TOWN
Literary texts tell us things about society and culture that we could learn in
no other way. In this book I investigate what ortk: tell us about Okuku and
what Okuku told me about ortkz. _
Okuku is a town in the Oyo State of Nigeria, small by Yoruba standards,
but an important political and cultural centre in its own area, the Odo-Otin
district. Orki are a genre of Yoruba oral poetry that could be described as
attributions or appellations: collections of epithets, pithy or elaborated, which
are addressed to a subject. In Okuku they are performed mainly by women.
Onki are a master discourse. In the enormous wealth and ferment of
Yoruba oral literature, they are probably the best-known of all forms. They
are composed for innumerable subjects of all types, human, animal and
spiritual; and they are performed in numerous modes or genres. They are
compact and evocative, enigmatic and arresting formulations, utterances
which are believed to capture the essential qualities of their subjects, and by
being uttered, to evoke them. They establish unique identities and at the same
time make relationships between beings. They are a central component of
almost every significant ceremonial in the life of the compound and town; and
are also constantly in the air as greetings, congratulations and jokes. They are
deeply cherished by their owners.
The most conspicuous of the genres based on orth? are those performed by
specialists, like the hunters who perform yala chants, or professional
entertainers like the travelling egungun masqueraders. Both men and women ,
can make a name for themselves as public performers, by going wherever
great celebrations are being held — and, nowadays, by appearing on television
and making records. There is also, however, a less conspicuous but much
more pervasive tradition of or:ki performance carried on by ordinary women,
the wives and daughters of the town’s compounds, who learn and perform the
oriki relevant to the individuals and groups with which they are associated.
This less showy, more anonymous, but often more profound tradition of ortki
chants performed by women is the central subject of this book.
2 ANTHROPOLOGY, TEXT AND TOWN
Because ortki are crucial in making the relationships, human and spiritual,
that constitute the Yoruba world, they reveal connections and hidden faces
in society that would not otherwise be accessible. By attending to what people
say themselves, through the concentrated and oblique refractions of oriki —
and through what they say about oriki— we learn how people constitute their
society. Texts like this can lead into the heart of a community’s own con-
ception of itself: without which, any description of social structure or process
will remain purely external. In extended texts, better than in brief citations of
lexical items, descriptions of physical artefacts, or artificially-constructed
interview schedules, we find the possibility of entering into people’s own
discourse about their social world.
Malinowski knew the value of ‘texts’. He collected them with avidity and
spent a lot of his time in the field poring over them. But despite the modern
dominance of interpretative approaches in anthropology, it is rather unusual
for literature to assume its proper place at the centre of anthropological
enquiry. Work like that of Fernandez (1982, 1986), Jackson (1982), Abu-
Lughod (1986) and Beidelman (1986), where literary texts are used as a key
diagnostic device, a thread leading into the inner aspects of a society’s
imaginative life, are still rather rare. Anthropology has on the whole been
content to leave literature to the folklorists and oral historiographers, whose
aims have been somewhat different.
| Anthropology, in fact, has tended to adopt interpretative techniques from
literary criticism and apply them to almost anything but literary texts. Ritual
symbolism,’ spatial relations,’ and culture itself* have been treated as texts
whose metaphorical meanings can be ‘read’ like those of a work of literature.
Semiotics and structuralism have attempted, with partial success, to show
that the symbolic and classificatory systems of signification that anthropology
has traditionally concentrated on are homologous to language. What is much
more evidently true, however, is that they are implicated in language and
dependent on it. Sooner or later, they are interpreted, amplified, or evaluated
by a verbal commentary, and without this speech context they could not
continue to operate. As Volosinov (or Bakhtin),° the great Russian literary
theorist put it sixty years ago, speech is ‘an essential ingredient in all
ideological production’; ritual, music, visual art, not to mention day-to-day
behaviour, are all ‘bathed by, suspended in, and cannot be entirely segregated
or divorced from the element of speech’ (VoloSinov 1973a, p. 15). And in
Okuku — as in other places — literary texts function like nodal points in the flow
of speech. They are salient and enduring landmarks in the field of discourse,
reference points to which speakers orient themselves or from which they take
their departure. It is often through literary texts that exegetical commentary
is directed towards these other systems of signification.
The literary utterance is at once action in society and reflection upon
society. That is, it talks about social process from within because it is part of
ANTHROPOLOGY, TEXT AND TOWN 3
it. Speech act theory has enabled us to ask what a speaker is doing in uttering
certain words;° and what the performer of oriki is doing is a vital part of the
social process. Onki performance is involved in struggles for power as well as
in the legitimation of the status quo. Ortki are used to swell the reputation of
the person they are addressed to and to lay claim to membership of certain
social groups. But orki not only are a form of social action, they also represent
social action: not of course as in a mirror image, but in a mediated and
refracted discourse. Whether implicitly or explicitly, they offer a commentary
on it: a commentary which is made up of heterogeneous and sometimes
competing views.
Literary texts, whether written or oral, offer an especially valuable represen-
tation of ideology because of their concentrated, ‘worked-on’ character.
Literary texts are often described as having involved greater thought or effort
than other kinds of utterance, as being more premeditated, or as undertaking
to exhibit a greater degree of skill.’ They may articulate and give form to
otherwise amorphous notions circulating in society. Because a literary text is
more detached from the immediate context than other utterances, having the
quality of repeatability and the capacity to be recreated in a variety of
situations, it is compelled to put things into words which normally are left
unsaid. Less of its content can be assumed from the immediate context of
utterance. In this way, the text becomes, as VoloSinov put it, ‘a powerful
condenser of unarticulated social evaluations — each word is saturated with
them’ (Vologinov 1973b:107). The text, furthermore, does not just represent
an already-constituted ideological viewpoint; it is in the text that a viewpoint
is constructed, in the process revealing more about the ideology implicit in
daily discourse than could otherwise be discovered. The text itself says more
than it knows; it generates ‘surplus’: meanings that go beyond, and may
subvert, the purported intentions of the work. It has the capacity to pick up
subterranean ideological impulses that are brought to realisation in no other
discursive arena.®
Above all, literary texts are revealing because they are inherently discursive.
Verbal forms lend themselves to verbal exegesis. There is a continuity
between the object of discussion and the discussion itself which is conducive
to detailed, active, conscious commentary by the people involved in its
production and transmission. In Okuku, as in many other places, language,
linguistic formulations, and especially literary texts, are intended and expected
to be talked about, to be explained, expounded, and opened up so that the
multiple meanings enclosed and compressed within them are revealed.
Quoting an ortki often leads automatically to a historical narrative. It may also
open out into a discussion of family taboos, the characters of the gods, or the
composition and relations of social groups. The ork: are not just the trigger
which sets off a separate discourse; they are the kernel of the discourse itself,
which will not take place except with reference to the ortki. They are thus, in
many cases, the only route into the subject. It is in literary texts that
commentary on all spheres of experience is inscribed and from the starting
point of literary texts that second-order discussion 1s instigated.
Not only are literary texts made to be interpreted; they are also accompanied
by well-developed indigenous methods and techniques by which their
interpretation is carried out. The decoding of ortki — as of other Yoruba oral
texts’ — relies on etymology, etiology, personal memory, and something like
riddling. These techniques provide the outsider with a guiding thread, a
certain limited access to the inner aspects of the discourse. The outsider
contemplating ritual, art or cooking is seldom so fortunate.
Some literary texts are more central to social discourse than others. In the
history of European literature, there have been periods when the role of the
literary text has extended far beyond the boundaries we recognise today,
organising fields of knowledge which now are assigned to discourses not
defined as ‘literature’.!° In oral cultures, Ong suggests, the literary text always
plays this kind of mnemonic and organising role (Ong 1982)."! Ifliterary form
is what makes knowledge memorable and therefore transmittable, then all of
inherited knowledge in oral cultures is ‘literature’. It is in poetry-and narrative
that history, philosophy and natural science are encoded and through their
forms that this knowledge is organised. It is certainly true that in Yoruba
towns, oral literature is still an organising discourse. Even those who are
functionally literate base a large part of their self-conception — their ideas
about society and their place in it — on itan (narratives) and oriki.
Oriki commemorate personalities, events and actions that people consider
important. They provide a way of thinking about social relationships within
and between families, and a way of promoting and expressing the rivalry of
ambitious individuals. They are the living link through which relationships
with the orsa, the ‘gods’, are conducted. And it is in ortkz that the past is
encapsulated and brought into the present, where it exercises a continual pull.
Orik1, then, are one of the principal discursive mediums through which people
apprehend history, society, and the spiritual world.
This study traces the ways in which oni enter into the construction of
personal power and communal solidarity in Okuku, and how they implicate
the past in the process. The guiding thread of oriki leads to some discoveries
about the constitution of this Yoruba town. The way notions of kinship and
town membership are articulated in orik1, and the way the ork: are actually
used in daily life, reveal a complexity and negotiability in the composition of
fundamental social units that existing accounts of Yoruba social structure do
not prepare one for. The oriki of individuals also bring to view the central
importance of the self-aggrandisement of ‘big men’, who within the chiefly
hierarchy and between its interstices operate much in the manner of their
New Guinean counterparts, building up a following and thereby creating a
place for themselves in society. Though the phenomenon of patron—client
relationships has been well described in the context of modern Yoruba city
life,’* the ‘traditional political system’ of Yoruba towns has always been
presented much more in terms of the checks and balances between
governmental institutions, or the ‘representative’ character of chiefship and
the importance of competition between lineages rather than between individual
big men. Personal ork: are the means by which a big man’s reputation is
established. Through them, we are afforded access to the dynamic process of
self-aggrandisement and the values it generates. Ortki show that big men are
a central and long-established feature of Yoruba social processes.
Oriki, however, do not represent the only way of apprehending social or
spiritual realities. The other ‘literary’ discourses that coexist with oriki— notably
Ifa divination poetry and ztan or narratives — offer other ways, which converge
with ortkz along some dimensions and diverge along others. In some respects,
they offer a different view of the world and are the means through which
different social and spiritual relationships are established. These differences
and convergences need to be mapped in future work. There is a particularly
close, symbiotic relationship between ork: and itan which makes its presence
felt throughout this study. But my focus is always on oriki and the models they
provide for interpreting and intervening in social experience — without
suggesting that these are the only models or that they are used in all contexts
or equally by all members of the community. Indeed, it is precisely the
element of ‘bias’, their aptness to express values from a particular angle, with
particular ends in view, which makes them valuable as clues to social
experience and social process.’? Ortki are nothing if not partisan. Struggle is
evident in these texts: rivalry, aspiration, self-promotion, an intensity of
projection and volition that is almost beyond words.
If the reasons for studying a Yoruba town through ortk: are self-evident,
something more probably needs to be said about the reasons for studying ortki
through the particular town of Okuku. Apart from the fact that I took an
immediate liking to Okuku, and was treated from the moment I arrived as
someone who belonged, there were some broad general reasons for staying
there rather than in one of the numerous other places I visited during my first
year in Nigeria. Okuku is culturally and politically an Oyo town — though with
strong Ijesa influences and some features of dialect peculiar to the Osun area
— and oriki are believed to be more highly developed in the Oyo area than in
other parts of Yorubaland.’* Okuku is also an old town, with an unusually
important oba (‘king’) for its size, and exceptionally strong ceremonial life.
However, all Yoruba towns have their own traditions of performing arts and
their own cultural specialities and peculiarities, and a study based in any one
of them would have yielded equally interesting results. It would be impossible
to select one place as being outstanding. On the other hand, it would be
equally impossible to select a ‘typical’ place representative of the Yoruba
small town, though there is a gap in the existing literature for this category.’
Scholars of Yoruba culture and society have always had to deal with the fact
that there is no such thing as a ‘representative’ social unit. The concept seems
inapplicable, in a place where there is, first, such regional diversity, and
second, so many levels of organisation. It is not just that Yoruba are divided
into recognised ‘sub-groups’ such as Tjebu, Tjesa, Oyo or Ekiti, each of which
has distinctive social and cultural features while possessing a common
language and sharing fundamental social and cultural principles; but that
even within any such Yoruba ‘sub-group’, different towns have different
cultural traditions; different gods are prominent and different art forms are
emphasised from one place to the next. At the same time, however, a town
is not a discrete unit that can be treated in isolation. It is subordinate to a
bigger town, overlord over smaller ones; it has economic and historical links
with neighbouring towns. Members of every town also have their farm
settlements, where they often spend more time than in the town proper.
| People have business connections, jobs and sometimes even property in other
towns — and, for long periods, even in other countries. It is artificial to talk of
any Yoruba town as ifits people’s interests and activities were confined within
its boundaries. Culturally, too, no town is self-contained. While there are
differences, there is also a great deal of overlap. The same cultural elements
are found over wide areas, though they may appear in different configurations
and with different meanings. What we are presented with could be described
by Wittgenstein’s famous notion of ‘family resemblances’, where a group of
items share ‘a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-
crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail’, so
that all somehow seem to go together, though there is no single diacritical
feature which they all share (Wittgenstein, 1978, p. 32). Resonances and
recognition combined with a feeling of strangeness, of displacement, are the
experience of anyone who has lived in more than one place in Yoruba country.
Studies of Yoruba social structure have responded to this situation with
local and comparative accounts of the varying forms found in different towns.
P.C, Lloyd, in particular, has laid the groundwork for a systematic comparative
overview of political and social organisation (Lloyd, 1954, 1958, 1960, 1962,
1965, 1968, 1971) and J.D.Y. Peel has provided an exceptionally full and
penetrating social history of one town (Peel 1983). The study of culture,
however, and especially of literature, has tended either to generalise
prematurely, or to anthologise, synthesising elements taken from different
places. The result has been a representation of ‘culture’ as a synthetic
construct, occupying some ideal realm well above the concrete forms of real
: life. There are good reasons for generalising and synthesising. Much of the
ortki I quote in this book will be recognised by people from other towns, and
sometimes the interpretation given in one place will complement or enhance
the one recognised in another. A broader view is ultimately inescapable. But
this view can only be constructed on the basis of detailed, localised studies.
With ortki, the case for a locally-situated study becomes overwhelming. It
is only in this way that all the various realisations of ortkiz can be seen together,
as different points on a single spectrum of expressive acts, rather than as
disembodied ‘genres’, treated as ifthey were unrelated. The truly extraordinary
polymorphous adaptability of or:ki and their fundamental importance in the
culture only then become clearly apparent. Only a study that stays close to the
ground is able to do justice to the anonymous, domestic, unnamed
performances by ‘household women’, which are defined by the nature of the
occasion on which they are performed. Even more importantly, only a
localised study really permits detailed interpretation of these texts, for, as will
become clear in the next chapter, they are rarely self-explanatory. Their
exegesis 1s encoded in parallel oral traditions which are also localised. Some
ortki are widely known, but even then, the exegesis offered in one town is likely
to differ from that offered in another. And many ortki are composed in response
to local events or to celebrate local personalities. In these cases, the ork:
simply cannot be understood without detailed information drawn from the
milieu in which the ork: are created and performed.
Above all, for an oriki-text to be apprehended as a text, it must be heard
and seen in action. In a sense, as ‘performance theory’ has demonstrated,'®
all oral texts should be thought of as action rather than object, as process
rather than pattern. They are fully realised only in the moment of performance.
Onki chants demand this approach more insistently than most forms of oral
literature, however. There is a sense in which they are simply not accessible
at all viewed as words ona page. They are not texts that ‘speak for themselves’.
Their obscurity goes beyond the opacity of particular verbal formulations or
references. They are ‘obscure’ because it is what they are domg that animates
them and gives them their form and significance. Detached from the scene of
social action, laid out on the page they may appear to the untutored eye as
little more than a jumble of fragments.
Rather than being representative, a study based in a particular town must
be regarded as a starting point; a necessary basis for future comparative work
that will draw on many more, similarly localised, case studies. I believe,
however, from the evidence of existing work and from the experience of
teaching and supervising students from all parts of the Yoruba-speaking area,
that the underlying dynamics of social life in Okuku, and the part played in
them by ortki, are widely shared. The implications of this analysis do go
beyond the single small town in which it is located ~ though how far beyond,
and with what qualifications, can only be discovered by future research.
In the course of learning what ork can tell us about Okuku, then, Okuku
will tell us how to interpret orkz. Texts are a ‘way in’ to understanding aspects
of the life of a society. But at the same time, they are forms of art, with their
own specific gravity and their own manner of existing as texts. What they can
tell us about a society they can only tell us through their particular textuality.
They are not a source of ‘data’ that can be read straight; nor can their poetic
properties be identified and set aside, so that the residue can be treated as
data. They must be apprehended as art forms to be understood at all. And in
the case of ortki, especially for an outsider, this is not easy. They are protean
forms, elusive shape-changers, opaque, fragmented, and deliberately cryptic.
They could hardly be more remote from the literary forms that conventional
European criticism has grown up on. European literary theory has tended to
generalise only from the literature that is least alien to its own culture and
historical period, producing an ethnocentric and impoverished definition of
literary form and value, which nonetheless usually pretends to be universal.
To someone brought up in this mainstream, ‘common sense’ tradition of
written literature, ortki are at first almost impossible to apprehend as texts. Yet
what they tell us, they tell us by means of their textual properties. To begin
to grasp how they work, the only way is to see them as they exist, in society.
The society that produces them is not ‘social background’ but the very
condition of their capacity to have meaning. It is only through Okuku (or
another Yoruba town) that we can ‘read’ ortki at all.
The examination of ork: in Okuku, then, involves a perpetual going and
return. If orzkz illuminate aspects of social reality, they can do so only if we
recognise, at a fundamental level, the textuality of ortk:; their textuality — their
properties as a verbal art — only reveals itself in its real social context. This
book moves gradually outwards from the moment of performance itself, but
always returns to look again at the textuality of the text in the light of widening
rings of social context. Chapter 2 establishes the centrality of oriki among oral
discourses in Okuku, and then presents the conundrum of ortki, the reasons
for their perplexing opacity and the ways this affects our ability to apprehend
them as ‘literature’ and as ‘history’. Chapter 3 introduces the town as it is
today, and then recreates its past as itis remembered in ortki and itan, showing
how the textual mode of or:ki conditions memories. After this rather lengthy
scene-setting, we are in a position to return to the question of the baffling
elusiveness of ortki, and to propose a first step towards making sense of it, by
establishing the nature of the activity of uttering ork:. Butifall orzki are animated
by a common basic intent, their specific textual mode is determined by their
context. After describing how women master the art of oriki, Chapter 4 goes
on to describe in detail some characteristic contexts of performance, showing
how the ‘same’ ortki take on new forms and significances according to the
situation. Chapter 5 deals with ortki orile, the oriki of people claiming the same
place of origin, and shows how group identities are negotiated and affirmed
through this medium. Chapter 6 is about big men and their personal oriki, in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is a long chapter because Okuku’s
past offers such an array of diverse and compelling personalities. Finally, in
the last chapter, I return to the textual properties of oriki, the way these properties
enable the performance to do what it does, and the role of women in the
constitution of the social world of Okuku. By this time, I hope, the fragmented
shifting and elusive character of oriki texts will have begun to reveal its
significance and make felt its eloquence.
THE INTERPRETATION OF ORIKI
2|
1. THE PLACE OF ORIKI AMONG ORAL GENRES IN OKUKU
The position of ortki as a ‘master discourse’ can be seen immediately in the
ubiquitous and manifold realisations of this genre in daily life. Continual
performances bind together members of the community, those alive today
and those receding into the past.
Okuku is a quiet town with an eventful history. In the eighteenth century
it was sacked by the Ijesa and rebuilt. In the nineteenth century, after the fall
of Old Oyo, it was in the middle ofa battle zone. Several times, the town was
overrun and evacuated to neighbouring towns. At the end of the nineteenth
century it was resettled and began to expand again. In the early twentieth
century colonial interventions altered the structure of government and
transformed the local economy. There were great changes in the town’s way
of life as people took up cash-crop farming, first yams and then cocoa.
Through all these dislocations of its history, however, Okuku has retained a
sense of its own enduring continuity. The identity of the town is:‘enshrined in
the person of the ruler, the oba, whose majesty is reaffirmed and recreated
even today in cherished and highly charged ceremonial. But the sense of
continuity is also remade by every household in the town in ceremonies
connected with marriage, burial, and the propitiation of spiritual beings. In
these ceremonies, the performance of oral poetry is virtually indispensable.
Oral performance ofall kinds flourishes in Okuku. Old men know tan, stories
about family and town history, and tell them when the occasion arises.’ Until
recently, every compound would have evenings telling alo—folktales and riddles
—in which both adults and children would join.” The babalawo, divination priests
of the god Ifa, still master the great corpus of sacred, semi-secret Ifa verses,
and perform them during consultations and cult meetings.? The annual Ifa
festival opens with a night of vigil, during which all the babalawo gather at the
palace to perform iyere Ifa, a chant based on Ifa verses, in the presence of the
oba and a large audience of townspeople. Processional and dancing songs are
sung at every funeral, festival and marriage. Prayers and incantations, as well
THE PLACE OF ORIKI AMONG ORAL GENRES IN OKUKU 11
as songs, are a vital part of the festivals of the ortsa, the ‘gods’, which succeed
each other round the calendar.
But it is performances of onki that are most continually present to the
consciousness and most highly valued by most of the population. While Ifa
verses are esoteric and popular songs are ephemeral, oriki are both widely
known and deeply cherished. People grow up hearing orki every day. Mothers
recite them to their babies to soothe them. Grandmothers greet the household
with long recitations every morning. Friends call each others’ ortkz in the street
in jocular salutation. Devotees invoke their ortsa at the shrine every week with
impassioned ortki chants. Some festivals include great set pieces of ortki
chanting which townspeople will flock to hear whether or not they are
involved in the cult of the orsa concerned. At funerals, each stage of the week-
long ceremony requires oki chanting, in a variety of styles, and for a variety
of purposes. Every February, the season of marriage, girls are to be heard
everywhere chanting rara tyawo, the bride’s lament, in ceremonial progress
around the town.
People remember that forty years ago, before the social and economic
changes associated with colonial rule had weakened so many traditional
cultural practices, there were many professional and specialist performers in
Okuku. There was a band of eleegun gje,* the ancestral masqueraders who
travelled as entertainers from town to town and made money from it, boasting
in their zzz—the distinctive egungun chant-— that they had no time orinclination
for farming. There was the powerful hunters’ guild, some of whose members
were expert in chanting yala, in honour of their orisa Ogun and to entertain
an audience. Both zw and gala are specialised styles of chanting belonging to
distinctive occupational and religious groups. Like so many other poetic
‘genres’ throughout the Yoruba-speaking area, however, they are made up
mainly of oriki.° There also used to be a trumpeter who was part of the oba’s
household. His duty was to wake the oba before dawn every morning by
saluting him on the trumpet, making it say:
Dide, dide, o bo sékoto, enikan ii fi is¢ igbOnsé ran omo eni.
Get up, get up, put on your trousers, no-one can send someone else to
shit for him.
After this rude awakening — so to speak — the oba would be serenaded with
the trumpeter’s performance of ofo (incantations), iwure (blessings) and the
royal or:ki. Also in attendance were the drummers, who came every morning
to sit at the palace doorway playing phrases from the oba’s ork: on their talking
drums, and saluting the town chiefs when they arrived on their customary
morning visit. There were ‘praise-singers’, specialists in the performance of
oriki who would go to every social event in the neighbourhood and perform
for money and gifts.
12 THE INTERPRETATION OF ORIKTI
The egungun entertainers have now disbanded. The hunters’ guild meets
every month, but though the ala chanters still entertain their fellow hunters
during the meetings, ala has become a genre that receives little general
exposure in Okuku. There are no longer any trumpeters at the palace; the
drummers come only on special occasions, and there 1s only one professional
‘praise-singer’ left in Okuku. But despite the decline in professional and
specialist performance, ortki still flourish. The domestic tradition which
underpins and informs the professional one is still vigorous and resilient. All
women learn at least a few orki, and in most compounds there are gifted
women whose knowledge, though usually narrower than the specialist
performers’, is also deeper and more detailed. Some women know a great
deal, not only of their own parents’ ortki but also of their husbands’ and
husbands’ mothers’ and even grandmothers’. These women become known
within the compound as experts and are called upon to lead the performance
on ritual and festive occasions. But the other women participate too,
repeating some chants line for line, singing a chorus to others.
Women are thus constantly involved in oral performance. This domestic
tradition — which it is safe to assume exists in most other northern Yoruba
towns too — has had very little attention in the considerable body of academic
work on Yoruba oral literature. It does not lend itself easily to discrimination
as a ‘genre’; the women do not call it by any name or classify the great variety
of their production according to style, subject matter or musical mode. It is
difficult to detach, as an object of study, from the context of its performance.
‘These women are not discovered by television presenters or asked to come
and give public performances — as performers of yala and izw2 often are. They
do not see themselves as entertainers or artists, but as the providers of the
would be impossible. ,
appropriate act of communication without which any ceremonial undertaking
2. ORIKI, DEFINITION AND THE TRANSCENDENCE OF TIME

The ubiquity of these performances arises from the fundamental ontological
and vocative role of oriki. It is said that everything in existence has its own
oriki. Subjects range from orisa and ancestors to living men and women, from
elephants to palm trees, from the railway to Or, the notion of:destiny. Ab-
stract ideas as well as concrete objects, the dead as well as the living, the absent
as well as the present, can be addressed with their own oriki. The word ortki
is used in Yoruba academic writing to translate the English word ‘definition’,
for oriki are felt to encapsulate the essential qualities of entities. But oki do
more than define. They evoke a subject’s qualities, go to the heart of it and
elicit its inner potency. They are a highly charged form of utterance. Com-
posed to single out and arrest in concentrated language whatever is remarkable
in current experience, their utterance energises and enlivens the hearer. They
are ‘heavy’ words, fused together into formulations that have an exceptional
ORIKI, DEFINITION AND THE TRANSCENDENCE OF TIME 13
density and sensuous weight. An ortki can be a brief inscrutable phrase or an

extended passage. Some oriki encapsulate in a laconic formula enormous
public dramas, others commemorate little private incidents. All, however, are
felt to evoke the essence of their subjects.
The oritki most commonly heard, and most extensive and elaborated,
belong to three categories of subjects. First, there are the ortki of orisa, the gods,
which will be dealt with in a separate study. Secondly, there are personal ortkz,
the ortki of individuals,° given in recognition of their outstanding or estimable
characteristics. The most prominent citizens acquire the largest collections of
epithets. These epithets allude, often in condensed, witty and oblique style,
to the subject’s achievements, sayings or qualities. And thirdly, there are oriki
oriue, the ortkt by which large groups of people are identified through reference
to common origin in an ancient, named town. Within any one present-day
town, they tend to function as one of the distinguishing features of the ile —
the ‘houses’ which are the primary political and social units in the town. They
are the best known and the most highly esteemed of oriki. Many of the ancient
towns of origin are now defunct, but the or1k: which speak of them live on in
vigorous profusion. Ortki orile usually circle around a few selected themes felt
to be characteristic of the place concerned: the natural features of the area,
the customs of the inhabitants, the orisa worshipped there, or memorable
events in the town’s ancient history.
These different categories of ortki, addressed to different kinds of subject,
are not usually kept separate in performance. In most chants, the performer
combines personal oriki with ortki orile, and in chants addressed to orisa she
may combine all three types. Different chanting styles put emphasis on
different kinds of ortki, but few chants are constructed entirely out of one type.
In this way, different kinds of identity are brought together.
Though ortki are often called ‘praise poetry’, neither personal ortki nor oriki
ortle are wholly flattering to their subjects. Their point is rather to go to the
heart of a subject’s identity by evoking whatever is distinctive in it. If what
makes a big man formidable is his violence, greed, or intemperance, these
qualities will figure prominently in his personal ortki. In ortki orile, whole
populations may be hailed — like the people of Ikoyi — for their skill at theft,
or — like the women of Oko — for their rabid jealousy of their co-wives. Trivial
incidents may be made much of. Precisely because they are peculiar,
idiosyncratic or funny, these incidents are memorable: they imprint distinctive
features on the smooth public face of the successful man. There exists, in fact,
a kind of anti-ortki called akya (‘provocative epithets’) which deal exclusively
with the shameful, painful, ridiculous and embarrassing incidents in a
family’s past. These epithets are worked artfully into daily conversation by old
men, who are always looking for opportunities to tease each other. When one
is successfully planted, the victim responds with mock outrage, and retaliates
in kind. But even these insulting epithets can eventually become a mark of
14 THE INTERPRETATION OF ORIKI
distinction, a source of pride, and can be incorporated into performances of
ortki proper.’
But while ork: affirm the distinctiveness of their subjects, they are also
agents of transcendence. As we shall show in the next chapter, it is in ortkz that
boundaries between entities are opened, even in the act of asserting the
irreducible uniqueness of each. Through them, relationships are made and
remade. In ork: of individuals and of social groups, this transcendence
includes a transcendence of time. The past is reactivated in the present. The
moment of a group’s ‘origin’ is made present to consciousness as a
contemporary sign of identity; prominent men of the past, predecessors of the
living, are evoked in the midst of the activity of the present generation.
At the time of composition, each ortki refers to the here and now. They
} encapsulate whatever is noteworthy in contemporary experience. Epithets
are composed as things happen, or as qualities in people emerge. But because
they are valued, they are preserved, and transmitted for decades — sometimes
even for centuries. They are then valued all the more for coming from the past,
and bringing with them something of its accumulated capabilities, the
attributes of earlier powers. In performance they are recycled and recomposed,
but they also retain an essential core which is preserved even when its meaning
has been forgotten. Onki can thus be a thread that leads back into an
otherwise irrecoverable social history.
Sometimes, listening to these texts in your mind’s ear, you may have the
sensation of a door opening onto a lost but still adjacent world: a world that
may seem more substantial and more satisfying than the present. Through the
condensed eloquence of ortki it is evoked and brought once more into view:
Dar6-palé babaa mi, a-ji-félu-pata
O fijokin pagi awon aja
Abodédé-gbomo-sanleé-lai-réni
Abigbangba-ilé-kunmo-l6orun
Pupayemi abéyinbo-dur6é
Bo ti nf dan ilée ré n dan
Babaa mi wu Tapa lEnpe
Ire lonii orii mi afire.
Gengele ti, ti n je ayé 0-ji-lu-peke
O-ji-mi-titi léyin ilékin
Eniyan ii mi ird é lasan
Eni gboge té e rin niimiirué
Bi 4 tin dan nilé ré n dan
Babaa mi wu Tapa lEnpe.®
One who makes indigo dye to decorate his house, my father, one
who rises to paint his premises in dark blue
ORIKI, DEFINITION AND THE TRANSCENDENCE OF TIME 15
He uses dark green dye to paint the rafters

One whose passageways invite you to lie down without asking for
a mat
One whose courtyards make you sleepy
*‘Fair-skin-suits-me’, one who stands beside the European
As he glistens, so his house glistens
My father delights everyone as far as the Tapa at Enpe
May good luck attend me today.
A magnificent man, who revels in life, who rises to merriment
One who rises to shudder with splendour within his quarters
No-one quivers like that for nothing
It’s only he, the handsome one, who quivers like that
As he glistens, so his house glistens
My father delights everyone as far as the Tapa at Enpe.
The sensuous conjunction of wealth, leisure, and wellbeing is almost palpable
in this evocation of the well-decorated house and its personable owner, a man
who lived in the early years of this century. The spacious, immaculate
courtyards, the inviting corridors, the air of satisfying ease all create an
extension of the personality being praised. The man himself is com-pacted of
a magnificence so intense it makes him quiver. Domestic sufficiency and
public fame are combined in imagery which is both condensed and
accommodating, both laconic and gracious. Through its own qualities the
verse brings to realisation the vanished glory of the town’s olola, those who are
highly esteemed. Ortkz like these evoke in concrete particularity the world that
lies behind the visible surface of daily life, and that informs and animates it.
Onki, then, can open windows simultaneously onto the past and the
present. They are the principal means by which a living relationship with the
past is daily apprehended and reconstituted in the present. They are not
‘history’ in the sense of an overview or attempt to make sense of a sequence
of events, but a way of experiencing the past by bringing it back to life. They
represent the ‘past in the present’ (cf. Peel, 1984), a past which they have
brought with them and which can be reopened and reactivated by their
agency. But they also represent the ‘present in the past’, for through all the
stages of their transmission they do not lose their relationship of
contemporaneity to the events they refer to. They are not retrospective, nor
are they subordinated to an overview of ‘the past’ as such. They are not
thought to be about the past: they are fragments of the past, living encapsulated
in the present. They still speak of the scandals of years ago with the same
immediacy of reference as if it were today. In this way they do more than
preserve a sense of continuity through the violent reversals of Okuku’s history:
they also keep ‘the past’ close at hand, at the heart of present concerns.
This relationship with the past cannot be properly apprehended by treating
oriki as a rather problematic and incomplete historical ‘account’. How the
past is experienced can only be grasped through seeing how relations in the
present are constituted: by placing this evocation of ‘the past’ within the wider
context of the mode of all ortki, which is simultaneously to define states of
being and to transcend them. |
3. ENCOUNTER WITH ORIKI
Through ortki, then, the essential attributes of all entities are affirmed, and
people’s connections with each other, with the spiritual universe, and with
their past are kept alive and remade. In this fundamental sense, oki are a
master discourse. But they are also one that is extremely hard for outsiders to
read. Hans Wolffin a seminal article (Wolff, 1962) has called oriki ‘disjointed
discourse’. They appear to be composed of fragments. They are labile,
elliptical, allusive, and often deliberately obscure or incomplete. An oriki
chant is a form that aims at high impact, high intensity, which it achieves
through juxtaposing apparent opposites. Although they are so highly valued
and so tenaciously preserved, oriki are also almost impossible to pin down. A
corpus of ortki is said to be ‘the same’ whatever context the epithets appear
in; but in fact they take on new shapes and even new meanings with every
appearance.
When I first went to Okuku, I happened to arrive in the middle of the great
annual Olooku festival. The oba had just returned from an outing round the
town. The chiefs, the elders of the royal family, and swarms of other
townspeople were coming into the palace to congratulate him. Among them
was a battered looking woman, elderly and shabby, who seemed to be going
from person to person and screaming at them. ‘What is she doing?’ I asked.
An obliging bystander explained: “That is ork’. |
To me it was nothing but a meaningless jumble of sound. There was
nothing in it that I could distinguish at all, despite my three years of studying
Yoruba. It seemed to have no form: to be an unvarying and endless stream
of utterances. The woman, I soon learned, was called Sangowemi, and was
the town’s only professional performer, to be seen at every festival and
funeral. What was so striking was the intensity with which she focused on the
person she was addressing, and the real avidity with which the person listened.
Even when, later on, I had transcriptions to look at, things were no better.
Translation was very difficult. The schoolboy who first offered to help turned
out to be baffled by much of it. What we did manage to translate seemed like
the inside of an old knitting bag, a bundle of many-coloured scraps, a diversity
of bits and pieces, with a lot of loose ends. I had begun with the text of a
performance by Sangowemi. Later I found there were other styles of
performance, more patterned and more coherent; but this was a matter of
degree rather than of kind. They all had similar formal properties: or what
seemed to me at the time to be an absence of properties. They seemed to have
ENCOUNTER WITH ORIKI 17
no shape, no centre and no inner cohesion.
I stayed three years in Okuku. During this time I experienced the intense
pleasure of learning Yoruba, not only from books but from people who loved
their language and never missed an opportunity to demonstrate its capabilities.
People would produce choice phrases — proverbs, idioms or current slang —
and then take endless pleasure in expounding their inner meaning. Daily life
threatened to become a perpetual exchange of catchphrases. Fragments of
orikt were treated the same way, like treasures brought out on view, though
the explanations were not always so readily forthcoming. The hermeneutic
habit was well established. I was given ortki myself: the ork: of the royal family,
because I was ‘adopted’ by the oba. Every day I would hear the same phrases
ten or twenty times, recited by old women who never seemed to get tired of
it: ‘Ajiké Okin, omo olddéré! Omo aibile! Omo awayéja! Omo épépé Oladilé, omo
akéré-foba-sura!’ (Ajike Okin, child of the owner of the morning! Child of one
who finds a place to be tough! One who seeks a space to fight! Child of the
long-lived Oladile, child of The-small-one-protected-by the-oba!). Sometimes
they would detain me for half an hour at a time while they recited long
passages of oriki, The recitation was always an expression of affection, even
when it was teasing. Like other people, I began to feel a pleasure in onki
independent of their meaning; and at the same time I began to discover the
meanings upon meanings, the layers of allusion, so supple, laconic and
ironical that I felt — rightly — I would never get to the bottom of them.
Here is a bit of one of the first texts I recorded, from a very long
performance by Sangowemi:
E é ni i fodun éyi sasemo
Eésade, omo Owélabi émi Abéni n peo
Omo Mofomiké omo Moydsi omo a-rilé-gbofé-kunrin
Omo aboodéeé ku: bi 60
Mofoémiké ow6 la fi soge 6 ba 0 gbélé origun
Ara Aran omo asoféla
Ja a relée wa, Aran-Orin, omo tité lewé ata
Omo Omiyodé omo Alari a-da-idi-oro-lému-mu
Bo o ba ji lénii o juba babaa re Oltigbede Otabilapé
Ogun Ajagbé té ri kowéé joogun
Ko rin fin alejo 6 fi Fomiké toro
Ara Aran omo asoféla, Ajagbé to waa ri kowéé joogun
Sa maa juba babaa re, o 6 fowo iyOku womo...
This will not be the last festival you celebrate
Eesade, son of Owolabi, it is I Abeni calling you
Child of Mofomike, child of Moyosi, child of one who had a fine
house in which to receive slaves as gifts
Child of one whose corridors reverberated like rain
18 THE INTERPRETATION OF ORIKI |
Mofomike, magnificence is acquired with money, money has
made your house its headquarters |
Native of Aran, child of one who gets rich on gifts |
Letus goto our house, Aran-Orin, child of “The pepper leaf spreads’
Child of Omiyode, child of Alari, one who taps the base of the wild
mango tree and gets wine ,
When you rise today pay homage to your father, Olugbede
Otabilapo 7
Ogun Ajagbe who got a kowee bird to make medicine _-
He had nothing to give the visitor so he made a present of Fomike
Native of Aran, child of One who gets rich on gifts, Ajagbe who
found a kowee bird to make medicine |
Just make sure you pay homage to your father, you’ll spend the rest
of your money rearing children...
What was I to make of this? When I asked for explanations, the first thing
that struck me was that the performance was composed out of phrases or
passages that were apparently unconnected to each other. The words were
being addressed to Eesade, a title-holder in the guild of hunters. Some of the
lines evoked the great wealth of one of Eesade’s forebears: ‘child of one who
had a fine house in which to receive slaves as gifts’, ‘magnificence is acquired
with money, money has made your house its headquarters’. Others were
about knowledge of medicine: ‘Ogun Ajagbe who got a kowee bird to make
medicine’ (a Rowee bird, I was told, is a harbinger of death, and medicine made
from it is very powerful). There was an allusion to an incident within the
family: ‘He had nothing to give the visitor so he made a present of Fomike’.
Some of the lines were personal ortki, belonging to particular individuals
connected with Eesade. But others were fragments of ortki orile. Eesade’s family,
I was told, is of Aran-Orin origin, and ortki orile referring to the characteristics
and distinguishing features of this town are briefly quoted: ‘Native of Aran,
child of one who gets rich on gifts/Let us go to your house, Aran-Orin, child
of “The pepper leaf spreads”’. Aran people, I learnt, ‘get rich on gifts’ because
they are a masquerading people whose performances are rewarded with
money, food and cloth. The pepper leaf is one of their emblems. All these
allusions and references were simply juxtaposed without explanation or
connection. There seemed to be no continuity between one reference and the
next; all seemed to have different origins as well as different contents.
Then, there was the obscurity of many of the allusions. This often seemed
not to be accidental, but the result of deliberate compression and truncation.
No reference seemed to be completed. The fragment of Aran oriki orile makes
little sense unless the hearer already knows the context from which it has been
taken, where the themes of masquerading and the taboos and observances of
the Aran people are elaborated. The allusion to the man who ‘had nothing to
give the visitor so he made a present of Fomike’ turns out to need the addition
ofa second line before it can be understood: I was told that it goes on ‘Fomike
pulled a face and said he wouldn’t go.’ Then a story is needed to explain it.
An elder of the compound, Michael Adeosun, the chief Sobaloju, obliged:
Olugbede was a great man, a hunter, in the time of Oyewusi [the
oba who reigned c. 1888-1916]. Mofomike was his younger brother
by the same mother. Once they held a great hunters’ meeting at
his place. All the hunters came and saluted him, saluted him,
saluted him [with yala chanting]. He said he’d like to give them
money, but money wasn’t enough [to reward them for their
chanting]; he’d like to give them cloth, but that wasn’t enough
either. He said he would give them Mofomike, to go with them
and become an entertainer like them. But Mofomike refused point
blank, he said he wouldn’t go. It was all a joke.
Without this little ztan, the words of the orzki can tell us nothing. As S. A.
Babalola says of ortki orile, “These ortkt ... are full of “half-words”; words that
you say to a sensible or knowledgeable person, and when they get inside him
or her, they become whole’.’ The ortki supply half the message, but only a
knowledgeable hearer will know how to supply the other half.
Then, there was the impression given by this passage of an almost indistin-
guishable mix of references: to ortki orile and to several different individuals
belonging to one family. There is a plethora of names, and attributions seem
to slide about within the text from one to another. Although Eesade is the
recipient of the performance, he is addressed with the personal ortki of various
men — Mofomike, Omiyode, Alari, Olugbede Otabilapo, Ogun Ajagbe — and
these are sometimes uttered in the same breath with ortki orile: ‘Native of Aran,
one who gets rich on gifts, Ajagbe who found a kowee bird to make medicine’.
One personal ortkz also slides into another, and there are so many names that
it is hard to know who is being saluted at any moment.
Finally, the passage seems to be neither narrative nor descriptive. It is in
the vocative case throughout, and the utterance is clearly felt to be in some
way effectual. The act of addressing the subject is foregrounded by the singer,
who draws attention to her own role in the situation (“Eesade child of Owolabi,
itis IT Abeni calling you’). The passage opens with a wish stated as an assertion
in the future tense (“This will not be the last festival you do’), a form of ‘prayer’
felt to have the potential to affect the course of events. It ends with an
exhortation (‘Just make sure you keep honouring your father so that you too
will have children to spend the rest of your money on’), which the hearer is
intended to heed. What the singer is in fact doing is saluting the man she is
addressing, Eesade, by paying honour to his father (Mofomike) and his father’s
senior brother or — according to another account — his father’s father
(Olugbede). In doing so, she suggests, she is helping to ensure that Eesade in
turn has children to honour him. Orki are thus a principle of continuity
between the generations. By keeping alive the memory of your predecessors
you ensure that your successors will keep alive the memory of you. The
performance of oriki is an action which maintains connections and which can
realign as well as reaffirm relationships within the social and spiritual
economy.
To understand how ortkt work we must first understand what it 1s that
makes them seem initially so baffling. The root of the matter is their apparent
internal disconnectedness. The nature of this disconnectedness must be
grasped before we can understand the ways in which ork: chants do in fact
attain their own kind of coherence — a theme to which I return in Chapter 7.
The performer has at her disposal a corpus of textual elements. These
elements may all have had separate origins. They may have been composed
by different people, at different times and with reference to different incidents
or situations. The corpus of ortki attributed to a given subject is made up of
items which are largely genetically separate. They therefore have no fixed or
necessary relation to each other within the performance.
In the case of living subjects, the process by which independent epithets are
accumulated can be seen to happen: more ortki are added to a person’s repertoire
as more of his or her qualities and actions become apparent during his or her
life-time. Different people make them up: the drummers, members of the
family, the town wits. Each one may allude to a separate incident or quality.
With ortki orile, the ‘oriki of origin’, there are occasional clues in the texts
themselves showing that something similar has happened over a much longer
time-span. The compound of Elemoso Awo, for instance, has ortki orile which
begin by identifying this group with ljesaland, but then add references to Oyo:
Tjésa ni mi, ilé obi
Omo atEfon waa soogun
T6 lOyo6 dan
Oun 6 tun relé mo
Aremo ni babaa wa waa se féba
Efon 16 bi mi, Oyé wo miE...
I am an Jjesa, land of kola
Child of one who came from Efon to make medicine
Who said Oyo was so pleasant
He wouldn’t go home again
So our ancestor became the maker of child-birth medicines for the
oba
I was born of Efon stock, brought up by Oyo people...
‘Iam an Jjesa, of the land of kola’ is the core theme of the orth: orile of all people
claiming origin in Tjesaland. But — as this text itself explains — the orik1 above
belong to a particular group of Ijesa people who went to Oyo and settled there.
The lines about Oyo were clearly composed by this group and added to their
Ijesa ortki orile some time after the latter had become established.
New ortki, then, are composed when something remarkable becomes
evident, and are added to the existing corpus. Each corpus of ortki therefore
contains a multiplicity of items from different historical moments, often
accumulated over long periods. Each item is autonomous, referring to its own
field of meaning and therefore capable of standing on its own. Each may point
ina different direction. Each item is an internally coherent verbal formulation,
but beyond that, different items may take very different shapes. They can be
condensed or extensive, obscure or perspicuous, flattering or otherwise. Oriki
orile tend to be made up of long patterned passages, each of which is an
internally coherent unit, while personal oriki tend more often to be composed
of short items of one, two or three lines. A corpus, then, is a collection of items
which are both autonomous and heterogeneous. In performance, the singer
draws items from the corpus and assembles them rapidly, bringing them
together into temporary conjunction.
To grasp a text like this involves not merely a problem of information
(though to unravel a passage like Sangowemi’s performance quoted above
does require a great deal of circumstantial information), but a problem of
comprehension. European academic disciplines prepare us for texts to work
in certain ways. Ortki, it seems, work in quite other ways. Texts like this do
not fit our mainstream conceptions, bred from European post-renaissance
written texts, of what a literary text zs: and though they are so much concerned
with the past, they do not represent it in a way that is recognisable to us as
‘history’.
4.ORIKI AS LITERARY TEXT
In Africa there are numerous genres of ‘praise-poetry’ that resemble ortkz in
their fluidity and internal indeterminacy. All of these forms are radically
unlike the kind of ‘literary text’ which critics educated in the mainstream
Euro-American literary tradition are used to dealing with — and this includes,
at least in certain respects, most African literary scholars.!° Perhaps this is why
there really has been no adequate poetics of such forms. Instead, genre after
genre has been documented, described, and placed against a social
‘background’. Interesting and informative as these presentations are, they do
not allow us to get to grips with the textuality of these poetic forms: how they
work as texts and hence how they constitute meaning. It is striking that while
there have been brilliant advances in the field of African narrative, analysis of
oriki-type texts has remained almost unbroached. Oral narrative, as Scheub
(1975), Cosentino (1982), Jackson (1982) and others have shown, is, like
ortki, fluid and emergent, recreated in different ways in each performance.
But each narrative has a discernible internal logic, a sequence of stages, a
beginning and end, which can be grasped and described by the researcher.
This inner formal coherence provides the firm ground from which the
innovative studies mentioned above have been able to set out. Orki-type texts,
on the other hand, offer much more slippery and shifting ground; and
European literary assumptions have tended much more to block the
development of a suitable critical approach. | ,
The disjunctiveness of an ork: chant is both the key to its textuality, and
what makes it so difficult for outsiders to apprehend. Like the otter, you know
not where to have it. The mainstream, ‘common sense’ view of literature in
European culture—most clearly articulated in New Criticism which dominated
English literary studies for more than half this century — has as its central
postulate the notion that a work of literature is or should be a unity, in several
senses. Ithas, or should have, boundanes and closure, which are achieved through
the internal structure of the piece. Barbara Herrnstein Smith has written
perceptively about ‘poetic closure’, Frank Kermode about ‘the sense of an
ending’ (Smith, 1968; Kermode, 1967). As literary works unfold they
perpetually defer closure and at the same time raise expectations of closure,
so that the ending is produced from within the structure of the text. When the
reader gets to the end, he or she experiences gratification, for the discourse
has concluded rather than merely coming to a stop, and it can now be
reviewed and experienced as a totality. According to mainstream criticism, a
text also is, or should be, a unity in the sense of being a whole. It is supposed
to be greater than the sum ofits parts. ‘The parts are nothing’, Coleridge said.
The Romantic formulation of organic wholeness in which all the parts
“‘interanimate’ was succeeded by other metaphors: of a delicate mechanism
held together by its inner tensions, as in British New Criticism; or a sentence
which is more than the sum ofits constituent words, as in linguistic criticism."
This view of the text takes it as axiomatic that each element has a determinate
role to play which depends on its precise position within the text and its
precise relations to the other parts. Move or remove a part.and you have
altered the whole. Apparent gaps and disconnections are significant in the
same way as the perceptible links and ligatures in a text, for they signal that
there is a hidden connection to be sought.’ Finally, a literary: text is seen as
a unity in the sense of being the construct of single shaping consciousness,
which draws on a literary tradition but recasts its materials to express an
original and unique vision.
With these expectations, the outsider’s inclination would be to look.at an
ortki text as a discrete object and seek significance in the precise arrangement
of its constituent parts — to try to find a pattern even ifa hidden one. But oriki
chants are striking for the absence in them of boundaries, closure or an overall
_ design. Since the units out of which an ortki chant is constructed are essentially
autonomous, one unit does not arise out ofits predecessor in the performance
or give rise to its successor, Some studies have observed (not very surprisingly)
that an ork: performance has a beginning, a middle and an end; but it does
not have a ‘sense of an ending’. It is true that many chants begin with an
_ ORIKI AS LITERARY TEXT 23
invocation of spiritual powers to assist the performer, or some other
introductory device, and end with a song or other formula. There are also
formulas to indicate that the performer is about to change her theme in the
course of the chant. These formulas are like signposts in an essentially
homogeneous and endless terrain. Any other element — including songs and
the invocations appealing for spiritual support — can appear in any position
in the text. The formulas are brought into play in response to external factors
rather than produced out of internal structural ones. If the performer is
addressing an important figure at a festive gathering, and an even more
important person comes in, she may change to the newcomer’s ortki." As
Olabiyi Yai has pointed out, this kind of shift cannot be regarded as ‘deviation’
within the text for there is no established centre from which the performer can
deviate (Yai, 1972). The chant, in fact, has no centre in this sense of the word.
The ‘whole’ is like a string of beads, a long chain of interchangeable parts,
which can be extended or broken off at will without significantly altering its
form. Eventually, the performer will stop — because she is tired, because the
occasion does not require further performance, because she has exhausted
her repertoire several times over, or because another performer wants to take
over. She will signal her intention to stop by deploying a formula that says so,
or by shifting from a chanting mode into a song, in which the audience will
join. This marks the end of her performance but it does not produce closure,
for the end does not arise out of what went before.
Similarly, the relations between the parts do not determine the significance
of the text, nor can an oriki text be seen as a whole which is greater than the.
sum of its parts. The genetic autonomy of its constituent units means that
unlike the organism, the mechanism or the sentence which provide
metaphorical models for the ‘whole’ in mainstream criticism, the meaning of
an ortki chant is not significantly affected by the removal of one part or the
rearrangement of others. The internal relationships of a chant are
indeterminate. There is no overall formal pattern to which units are
subordinated and which assigns them a particular place in relation to the
others. The performer enjoys considerable freedom — limited by habit rather
than by rules of the genre — to string them together in whatever order and
combination she wishes. Every performance ofa particular subject’s oriki will
be similar, but the units will be to a greater or lesser degree differently selected
and ordered, and sometimes differently worded. People will say it is the
‘same’ text each time. Many variations will not be noticed at all, precisely
because they are not significant. Ostentatious variations may be appreciated
—a performer who is clever at manipulating her material and producing novel
effects from it will be admired! — but these variations are still not felt to affect
_ the real significance of the text.
Studies of African oral narrative have looked closely at the relation between
‘tradition’ and the individual artist, and have shown how large a role the
24 THE INTERPRETATION OF ORIKI ,
individual creative consciousness has to play in reshaping themes and motifs
drawn from a common repertoire. The performer of ortki, likewise, has scope
to recast her materials, recombine them and add new elements by borrowing,
adapting and sometimes by fresh composition. However, unlike the tellers of
oral tales discussed by Scheub (1975) and Cosentino (1982), the performer
of oki does not impose a unique vision or voice of her own upon her materials
in such a way as to make them express her own distinctive personality. Or
rather, she does so only partially. Each unit retains its own voice while being
uttered in hers. And, as we shall see, there may be many different voices within
a corpus of ortk1, each speaking from a different position.
The European common sense view of the unity of the literary text derives
in obvious ways from the formal properties made possible or necessary by
writing — fixity, visible form, a material existence detached from both author
and reader. There are other ‘literary critical’ views of the text that seem at first
sight much more appropriate to oriki and to oral literature in:general. Post-
structuralist and deconstructive criticism, as I have argued elsewhere (Barber,
1984a), looked extremely radical when applied to written texts but would
_ have seemed almost to be stating the obvious if they had been applied (though
they never were) to oral ones. Intertextuality, the decentring of the text, the
displacement of the author as the ‘father’ or creator of the text, the replacement
of discrete autonomous literary works, as the object of analysis, with the
interplay of literary codes: all these notions effectively struck at common
sense criticism just at the points where it was most deeply indebted to the
assumption of writtenness. But at a deeper level post-structuralist criticism
is inimical to oral texts. It immobilises the human agent at the same time that
it empowers the text itself: texts interact, fructify, produce meaning; the
human beings participate merely as Joci or functions within a vast network of
codes. Oral texts do not permit this evasion of the question of agency
| (ultimately a question of power) — of who is saying these things, to whom, in
whose interests — for the speaker and the hearers are always visibly and
concretely present, and text clearly has no existence apart from them.
And, more specifically, post-structuralist criticism does not apply to ortki
and other oral texts like them because it was developed to deal with texts that
are intended to be formal unities — though, according to post-structuralism,
they can never actually achieve this. Gaps and flaws are significant because
they are unintended, thrown up against the grain of the literary form, and they
therefore reveal something which the text’s conventions could not say. While
conventional criticism presumes unity and therefore tries to find readings that
will fill the gaps with significance, deconstructive criticism goes a step further
and says that some gaps cannot be filled because, rather than being zero-signs
within a code, they represent the limits of the code itself. But they are
significant only because there is a presumption that they would have been
avoided if this had been possible. Modernist texts that deliberately flout
ORIKI AS A RELATIONSHIP WITH THE PAST 25
canons of formal unity depend, similarly, on the audience’s expectation that

they will be unified. In oriki, however, we have a text that seems to be made
of gaps: a dazzling juxtaposition of fragments. There is no presumption of
wholeness in the mainstream critical sense, no formal means of imposing such
wholeness. The gaps are real gaps resulting from the separate genesis of the
individual elements that make up the chant. As a technique for interpreting,
the method that splits open the text from within seems redundant when the
text is already so thoroughly, so fundamentally split in all directions.
Brilliant as performance theory and folklore studies have been at
rehabilitating the orality of oral texts, reinstating the centrality of the express-
ive resources and context of performance, and exploring the implications of
Parry and Lord’s crucial conception of ‘composition in performance’,!®
nonetheless, for texts like onki, the shadow of the ‘common sense’ written-
literature presumption of unity still seems to get in the way, to block off a full
apprehension of how these texts work. Some scholars have emphasised their
textuality altogether.!’ , |
unity and down-played their disjunctiveness, while others have ignored their
However, as I shall indicate in the final section of this chapter, there has
long existed the promise of a unified approach to literary texts, both oral and
written, in the Marxist philosophy of language proposed by VoloSinov/Bakhtin.
New Criticism sees the literary text as an autonomous artefact. Structuralism
and post-structuralism see it as the outcome of the operation of codes — that
is, of virtually autonomous systems of signs, whose meaning is assigned by
their relationships with each other within the system. VoloSinov takes neither
of these views. He foreshadows — and goes beyond — performance theory and
speech act theory in seeing literary text as utterance, and utterance as
attaining meaning only in and through the concrete contexts of real social
existence. By asking precisely what kind of utterance oriki is, and in what
social contexts its meanings are achieved, it becomes possible for us to see
how the fluidity and fragmentation of the ortki text actually work. What makes
Volosinov/Bakhtin even more interesting is that he sometimes writes exactly
as if he had ortki in mind.
5. ORIKI AS A RELATIONSHIP WITH THE PAST
Ortk1 are essentially historical in the sense that they are one of the ways in which
the relationship of the present with the past is constituted. But though it has
often been suggested that they could provide a valuable source of historical
data (see Biobaku, 1973, pp. 6-7; Law, 1977, pp. 19-20), oriki have in fact
rarely been used in this way. Bolanle Awe’s historical analysis of Ibadan oriki
(Awe, 1974, 1975) is the exception rather than the rule.'!* The genres on which
leading oral historiographers understandably enough have focused their
attention have been ‘accounts’ of the past which they assume to be very
roughly comparable with the history produced by literate European historians
26 _ "THE INTERPRETATION OF ORIKI
(Vansina, 1965, 1985; Miller, 1980): that is, narratives whose purpose is
usually to explain by what chain of events things came to be as they are. The
procedure adopted by most oral historians is directed towards the problem of
separating the wheat of historical fact from the chaff of distortions introduced
by political interests, literary conventions, mnemonic strategies, personal
creativity and simple forgetfulness. In this way, it is hoped that nuggets of
more or less factual information may be extracted. Orzki, however, seem to
ask for an approach to ‘oral history’ that, like the fine discussions by Cunnison
(1951), Bonte and Echard (1976), Peel (1984) and Sahlins (1987), concerns
itself with the way the past is represented, and not only how this relates to what
‘actually happened’ but also how it conditions the way things happen next.
- An ortki text, as we have seen, is not an ‘account’. It is not narrative like a
chronicle or consecutively ordered like a king-list. There is no necessary or
permanent relationship between one item in an orki chant and the next: each
may refer to a different topic. There is therefore no narrative continuity
between them. The discontinuity arises from the fact that each unit has its
own historical moment in which it was composed and to which it alludes.
The span of time on which their separate originary points are located may
- be very wide indeed. Some oriki appear to date back many centuries; others
: came into existence within living memory. The oriki of ancient Ife, recorded
byS. A. Babalola, contain lines referring to events presumed to have occurred
in the twelfth or thirteenth century. Assuming that oriki then, like the ones
| composed within living memory, were contemporaneous with the events and
, personalities they refer to, we have examples of oriki that may have originated
more than five hundred years ago.’ Other oriki date themselves by references
to specific historical personalities, for instance the Alaafin Abiodun or ‘Afonja
in Ilorin’, both late eighteenth century figures. Some ortki in Okuku refer to
experiences or objects whose impact has been relatively recent: the presence
of the European, or the use of iron sheets instead of thatching for roofs,
introduced in the 1920s. The great majority of the ortki now being performed
in Okuku appear, for reasons that will be discussed later, to have been
composed between the second half.of the eighteenth century and the middle
of the twentieth. Few of them can be located very precisely in the past, but it
is reasonable to suppose that a single performance often contains items
composed as much as two hundred years apart.
Each corpus of or:ki therefore contains a multiplicity ofitems from different
historical moments, accumulated over long periods. This historical variegation
in ortki usually remains invisible and uncommented on. The items from
different historical moments are not usually arranged in chronological order,
nor are the most ancient units separated from the newest ones; they may be
performed in virtually any order and combination. This is not because a
chronological ordering is beyond the scope of oriki performers — in certain
circumstances, the ortki of all the successive obas of Okuku and those of the
successive holders of the most senior chiefly title are performed in order” —
but because oriki performances usually aim at something else. The past is
recalled for a different purpose.
An ortki text taken as a whole is historically unlocatable in a double sense.
Like all orally transmitted texts, it is historically mixed in the sense that it has
passed through many stages of transmission, each of which has altered,
however slightly, the ‘original’ material. In fact, in ortki, though there is an
irreducible core in each unit which is supposed to be retained, there is a good
deal of scope for the performer to recast them in her own way, and thus for
the factors producing ‘distortion’ (in Vansina’s terms) to enter them. So as
it moves through time it accumulates layers of reinterpretation. But the text
has the added complication of being, at any given moment in history,
internally mixed, composed, like a patchwork, by juxtaposing pieces of diverse
origin. Since the ortki are independent of each other, and, as we shall see, can
be borrowed and migrate from one corpus to another, each in a sense has its
own separate history of transmission and its own experiences of ‘distortion’.
At the same time, however, ortki taken as a genre clearly has a history itself.
Not only did certain historical periods apparently produce an efflorescence,
an intensification of oriki production, but also, internal changes of form and
style in ortki can be discerned. Despite the fluidity and malleability of each
corpus and each unit within a corpus, definite expressive shifts corresponding
to large-scale historical changes are sometimes evident. I have argued
elsewhere (Barber, 198 1a) that the new ‘big men’ of Ibadan in the second half
of the nineteenth century called forth a new style in personal ortki; and that
on the decline of these men’s extraordinary capacity for expansion — that is,
with the imposition of British rule — the new style lapsed and a version of the
earlier type of oriki returned. No shifts as dramatic as this occurred in the
history of Okuku, but the same ambiguity presents itself: on the one hand,
ortki are fluid and malleable; on the other hand, they exhibit a kind of tenacity,
a continued closeness to their moment of origin, which makes it possible for
us to perceive through them the outlines of ideological change. |
Since the units that make up an ortki text are genetically separate, each
refers to its own field of meaning, which may be quite unrelated to the
meaning of the unit which succeeds it in the performance. Furthermore, as
we have seen, each of these meanings may be hidden, its interpretation found
not within the text, but only in a tradition of explanation which exists outside
the orikithemselves. As Babalola puts it, “The ork: just hint fleetingly at histories;
a full explanation can only be obtained by research and investigation’
(Babalola, 1966b, p. 12).2! Each formulation therefore gestures away from
the text to its own, separate explanatory background. The explanation may
turn out to be a full-blown narrative. It may consist of circumstantial
information about the person for whom the ortki was composed, or it may just
be an amplification or restatement of what the oriki says. And sometimes, not
unnaturally, it turns out to be no explanation at all: “What does this mean?
Well, it’s ortki’. The principle is the same in all cases, however: to know what
the oriki means, the hearer has to look for information which lies outside the
oriki tradition itself. |
The exegesis of oriki reaches its fullest and most institutionalised form in
the genre called itan, ‘narrative’. Oriki and itan are separate but symbiotic
traditions. They are institutionally separated, for while women are the
principal carriers of ortki, it is mainly old men who tell ztzan. And while ortki
are continually in the air, performed publicly and privately in innumerable
different contexts, itan are rarely told except when occasioned by a family
dispute, a chieftaincy contest or a direct request for information from a son
of the compound (or, of course, a researcher). If women are asked to explain
oriki, they may do so, especially when the explanation is anecdotal or of recent
provenance. They may even tell short ztan, especially if male elders of the
compound are not within earshot. But they do not often sit down and relate
an extended past-oriented story. They tend rather to direct the enquirer to a
male elder of the compound. Despite the fact, however, that ztan are
concentrated in the hands of the more powerful and prestigious members of
the house—the male elders—it does not seem to be the case that ztan are regarded
as amore privileged, more ‘historical’ or truer evocation of the past than ortkz.
The scholarly C. L. Adeoye seems to be articulating a commonly held view
when he states that on the contrary, it is orikz that bear the main responsibility
for recalling the past, and quotes Aristotle to the effect that ““Izi kiké tabi rara
sisun tona ju itan lo” (“Poetry is truer than history”)’ (Adeoye, 1972, p. 58).
The relationship between ork: and the explanatory hinterland of tan to
which they point is complex. When people tell ztan of a family or a town, they
often use the oriki as mnemonic staging posts. Each section of the narrative
may conclude ‘And that is why the people of So-and-so are called Such-and-
such’, The telling of ztan in these cases depends on the orkz. But not all tellers
of itan rely on oriki— some only touch on them here and there — and, conver-
sely, not all ortki are to be explained by itan. Oriki and itan, then, are partly
complementary and symbiotic, but partly independent, traditions. One
cannot be reduced to the other, but nor can either function without the other.
Not only do the two traditions exist in a complex relationship, but the path
from the textual formulation to the explanatory background varies from one
unit of an ortki text to the next. In some the reference is direct, in some
oblique, metonymic, metaphorical or riddle-like. The ‘sensible person’ not
only has to recognise the oriki for a ‘half word’, he or she also has to know what
kind of completion it requires in each case. Babalola is one of the few scholars
to have carried out in detail the investigation necessary to interpret extended
passages of oriki. His textual annotations in Awon Oriki Orile are a model of
minute and painstaking enquiry. Almost every syllable is unpicked to yield an
explanation, and the links between the words and their explanations are of
many kinds. There is the use of key words, which may appear completely
isolated in the orikz, with no explanatory support; but each of which, to those
who know, represents a central concept in an itan. Hearing the word is enough
to trigger off memories of the whole story. Even more commonly, there are
etymological links between ork: and explanatory hinterland. Obscure phrases
are either restated to make a meaningful sentence which is then expounded,
or they are placed in a narrative context where each of their syllables can be
interpreted to fit somehow into the story. These cryptic phrases are not just
traces or residues of a former, fuller expression. They are deliberately
composed to be laconic, compressed and packed with hidden meaning.
People take pride in their opacity. Although everyone can recognise an oriki
as belonging to a particular person or group, only a few will know what story
lies behind it; and there may even be layers of explanation, some of which are
so private that their existence could not even be guessed from the text itself.
Supplementary meanings may be added on to a well-known formulation from
outside, so that only those in on the secret could decipher it.
The following passage can be taken as an illustration. It shows, first, that
each successive unit in a performance of oriki may not only require narrative
supplementation before it conveys any meaning, but that each one may
require a different kind of supplementation, thus heightening the
disjunctiveness of the text, and the disparateness of its constituent units.
Secondly, it becomes clear that although the whole of the text is in a sense
past-oriented, little of it-actually yields historical narrative. What it yields is
past-derived observations: emblematisation of a lineage’s characteristics,
gossip about contemporary figures, odd incidents within the family. And
thirdly, it becomes evident that the function of any one of these references
may be multiple, ambiguous or indeterminate. It is an excerpt from the text
ofa performance in honour ofanother Babalola, of Elemoso Awo’s compound
in Okuku, a group who call themselves Enigboon. The performance, like many
others of its type, mixes ortki orile with personal ortki of past big men of the
family:
Emi naa lomo arukt ti i tori baso
Igba n mo yégo nigbalé
Oka yanhinyan 6 di gbéngan
Idi n mo dirt kalé LAguré
Ewt omo Alaé omo sisé 6 wiya 5
Babalola omo sipa omo wu baba
Irin esé ni babaa mi ni fi wu Iyaléde
Enigbodéri omo baba Banlébu
Béniyan 0 ba mi ni tokun
Y6o ba mi ni tajigéelu 10
Enigboori, ni won n ki baba Banlébu.
I am also the child of one who dons the masqueraders’ costume
When I befit the costume in the sacred grove
mother 5
A disruptive corpse was put a stop to
I tied my bundle up at Agure
Ewu, child of Alao, the first steps of the child delight its
Babalola, the child opens its arms, the child delights its father,
The way my father walks delights the Iyalode.
Enigboori, child of the father named Banlebu [‘meet me at the
dye-pits’]
If people don’t find me tn the place where they boil zokun dye
They’ll meet me where we go early to pound indigo, 10
Enigboori, that’s how they salute the father called ‘Banlebu’.
The performer, an elderly sister of the Babalola being saluted, interpreted
these lines for me. I went through my written version of her text line by line,
asking her what each one referred to. Some lines she would accept as units,
but with others she would continue the quotation with the line or lines which
followed it before explaining them as a group. When I quoted ‘I too am the
child of one who puts on the masquerading costume’, for instance, she
immediately added ‘When I befit the costume in the sacred grove’ before she
told me what these lines referred to. In other cases, she completed my
quotation with lines that had not actually appeared in her performance. Thus
she not only demarcated for me the units which in her view constituted the
components of her chant, she also showed how fragments of text can stand
for larger textual units not actually uttered but only implied. Throughout her
whole exposition, which was of a much longer text than this excerpt, she never
made any kind of links between two distinct units. Her method ofinterpretation
thus did definitely suggest a conception of the performance as a collocation
of separate units, each with its own hinterland of meaning, not necessarily,
primarily or permanently related to the meanings of other units in the same
performance. This is the gist of her interpretation:
(1) Unit 1 (lines 1-2): ,
I too am the child of one who puts on the masquerading costume
When I befit the costume in the sacred grove ...
This unit seems incomplete, but she didn’t finish it. She said 1t was a reference
to the fact that the lineage occupation was masquerading: the sacred grove
was where the egungun priests went for three nights at the beginning of the
biennial Egungun festival. The reference was thus a generalised one, alluding
to a permanent characteristic of the lineage, not to a specific event.
(2) Unit 2 (line 3):

A disruptive corpse was put a stop to.
In her hands, this briefand obscure formulation unravelled into a complicated
story about a real incident in the history of the family. The word yanhunyan
is apparently empty, and takes on a definite meaning only when one knows
the story — and the only people likely to know it are the members of the small
compound to which Babalola belongs. One of the sons of the family was taken
ill in the middle of a masquerading show. They thought he was dead — and
to avoid disrupting the show they carried him into the house and hid him. But
after the show was over he revived: thus a ‘disruptive corpse’ (6ku yanhunyan)
was ‘put a stop to’ (6 di gbongan). The reference is deliberately riddle-like, for
not only does it use a word that has no ascertainable meaning until ‘solved’
by a specific application, it also seizes on the most puzzling moment of the
whole affair — when the apparent corpse suddenly ceased to be a nuisance by
coming alive — and alludes to that alone, without any explanation.
(3) Unit 3 (line 4):
I tied up my bundle at Agure
This might sound like a reference to another specific incident, but it turns out
not to be. It is a fragment of a longer ork, and will mean nothing to a listener
who is not familiar with the rest of it. In full, it runs:
Idi n mo dirt kalé [Aguré
Nigba tin 6 réni ti yoo gbéru mi
E ba n wa kékeré eégun ko gbé 1é mi.
I tied up my load at Agure
Since I can’t get anyone to lift my load for me
Find me a little egungun to lift it onto my head.
In the full version, it becomes clear that the ‘load’ is a bundle of masquerading
gear, and that the point of the ortki is to emphasise the secret and exclusive
status of the masqueraders’ association. No-one is allowed to touch the gear
except members, so a ‘little egungun’ has to be found, if there are no adult
members about, to help to carry it. Like the first unit, this one turns out to be
a generalised reference to the lineage occupation rather than an allusion to an ,
actual event.
(4) Umit 4 (lines 5-7):
women]. }
Ewu, child of Alao, the first steps of the child delight its mother
Babalola, the child opens its arms, the child delights its father
The way my father walks delights the Iyalode [chief of the
The first two lines are a well-known formulation in praise of parenthood
which can be used to salute any father or mother. But the third line turns it
into a sly topical reference at Babalola’s expense: it alludes to a clandestine
love affair he was supposed to have been having with the Iyalode, the chief of
the women.
(5) Unit 5 (lines 8-11):
Enigboori, child of the father named ‘Banlebu’
If people don’t find me in the place where they boil okun dye
They’ll meet me where we go early to pound indigo
Enigboori, that’s how they salute the father known as Banlebu.
This unit grows out of the subject’s nickname ‘Banlebu’, which means ‘meet
me at the dye-pits’. This could suggest either that Babalola is himself the
owner of the dye-pits and famous for his dye-making, or that he is the owner
of rich-coloured robes and a marvellously decorated house (zjokun is a dark
greenish dye used to paint the floors and walls inside the house, and e/u is the
indigo used to dye cloth). This is a formulation which could be applied to
anyone rich enough to have their clothes and house frequently and lavishly re-
dyed. But Babalola’s sister explained that to members of the family these lines
have an additional, private meaning. They are made to refer to a family
scandal caused by a daughter of the compound, married to Oba Oyekunle
(1916~—34), when she ran off with a handsome travelling musician, only to be
fetched back in disgrace by the oba’s messenger. The lines are interpreted by
people in the family to mean ‘If you don’t find her in one place you’ll surely
find her in another’ — in other words, in the house of some man or other! Here,
then, is a meaning attached to the words by the ‘owners’ of the ortki for their
own private amusement: it could not even be suspected by someone not in the
know.
Each of these units, then, has to be supplemented by the hearer in a
different way. To interpret the first unit, you have to know that it is a
generalised reference to the lineage occupation, not a historical incident. In
the second unit you have to know the whole story of a particular historical
incident in order to be able to assign any meaning at all to the deliberately
cryptic and obscure words. In the third unit you have to be able to complete
the quotation to make sense of it. The fourth unit appears transparent, part
ofthe common repertory of personal oriki, but the reference to the Iyalode can
be understood at two levels — as a harmless conventional praise of someone’s
demeanour and gait, and as a scandalous topical allusion. To interpret the
unit as the family do, you have to know that such a scandal was in the air at
one time. And in the fifth unit, an extra meaning has been attached to a
conventional formulation which would not even be suspected by people who
had not heard of the escapade of Oyekunle’s wife. Interpretation requires a
different operation in each case. Each unit is to be understood — at least in the
first instance — not in relation to the units adjacent to it in the performance,

but in the light of its own domain of meaning: which, in each case, is reached
by a different route.
Even if all these paths could be traced and all the explanatory stories
surrounding a body of oriki could be recovered, they clearly would not add up
to a narrative history, for each story has its own frame of reference and is self-
sufficient; there is no attempt to place them within the borders of a single
picture. When ztan depend heavily on ortki as mnemonics, they too tend to
take on an achronic, episodic quality, as will be seen in the next chapter.
Furthermore, as we have seen, orkz are often not about significant historical
events in the life of the town. They deal with qualities as much as with action,
and with trivial and private episodes as much as with great public ones. In fact,
many of the great events of Okuku’s turbulent past are not recorded in the
oriki, or are only occasionally and as it were inadvertently alluded to.” Rather
than being organised into an ‘account’ of the past, the qualities, actions and
events that oriki refer to are to be interpreted as symptoms of a state of being.
Onki encapsulate and embalm moments of experience, states of affairs, and
remarkable incidents, not because they chronicle an earlier age but because
they capture and in some way sum up the essential nature of the person or the
lineage to whom they are attributed. Even when they seem trivial, they
represent a larger condition. In the excerpt from the Sangowemi performance
quoted in Section 3 above, the great hunter and medicine man Olugbede was
saluted as someone ‘who had nothing to give the visitor so he made a present
of Fomike’, and the explanatory story showed that this referred to a small
family incident; but it was preserved because it captured in a humorous
idiosyncratic act Olugbede’s essential quality as a jovial, generous, hospitable
man. If the incident was a symptom of Olugbede’s ola (‘honour’ or ‘high
esteem’), Olugbede in turn has himself become a symptom of his descendants’
glory. He has become symbolic property, for he represents the accumulated
power and fame of the lineage.
Butifortki are not narrative history, neither is it easy to treat them as a series
of portraits of historical personalities. Though they do yield a great deal of
circumstantial information, particularly about nineteenth and early twentieth
century figures, they are not always to be taken literally. Orzki do not describe
people, they address them in a manner intended to enhance their standing.
In the passage just referred to, there occur the lines ‘child of one who had a
fine house in which to receive slaves as gifts/Child of one whose corridors
reverberated like rain/Mofomike, magnificence is acquired with money, money
has made your house its headquarters’. In this chunk of ortki text, the three
lines, which go together, circle round a central idea: that Mofomike has a wealthy
and substantial household. It is full of slaves, presented to Mofomike by his
grateful friends and clients; it is so full of people that their footsteps make the
house rumble; wealth itself has taken up residence there. These are vivid but _
conventional ways of attributing to a subject the desired state of social well-
being, ola. It is an ideal state that is being evoked. There is no way of knowing
from the evidence of the ortkz alone how far, in reality, the historical Mofomike
attained the ideal. Furthermore, orki that evoke a state of being, a status, or
qualities of character are often transferred from one subject to another. What
may begin as an allusion to a real, perceived situation may through such
transference become a stylised or metaphorical attribution: An outsider
neither can an insider. :

cannot tell which is which, and after a certain amount of time has passed,
A social history that attempted to use ork to recover patterns of personal

relations would meet with the same difficulties. Onk: do not record the
genealogical relationships of the subjects commemorated in the ortki. In the
Sangowemi passage, which is addressed initially to Eesade, it is obvious that
the relationships between Eesade, Mofomike, Olugbede, Owolabi, Moyosi,
Omiyode and Alari cannot be reconstructed from the information given in the
text alone. Like other references, they depend for clarification on information
transmitted outside the oriki tradition. Genealogical relationships, as we shall
see, seem actually to be obscured, rather than clarified and preserved, by the
orikt.
This does not mean, however, that orzki performed today should be regarded
as fulfilling a purely synchronic function. Ulli Beier, in his study of the crowns
of Okuku, observes that ‘History, to Yoruba kings, praise singers and story
tellers, is a means of explaining and justifying the present, rather than of
enlightening the past’ (Beier, 1982, p. 46), and it is true that the fluid and
eclectic character of ork: makes them easy to modify in accordance with
present-day interests. But at the same time, their disjunctive mode lends itself
to the preservation of elements which do not ‘fit in’ with any immediate
project. The inconvenient and the contradictory are retained and easily
accommodated in the great, formless repertoire of the singers, and may be
produced to serve a number of different purposes. This is a product of the
most fundamental tendency in orikt, which is to maintain difference and insist
on incompatibility even while keeping all the elements of experience in
juxtaposition with each other. The past is not the present, but it must be kept
alive in the present, contiguous and accessible to it. The occasional
awkwardness of the past is perhaps valued as a sign of life in it. To explain oriki
performances purely in terms of their function as charters to legitimate the
present-day status quo, or as reflections of present-day interests, would-be to
miss what is to their practitioners their most profound significance — their
capacity to transcend time.
6. PATHS TO INTERPRETATION |
| The disjunctiveness and lability of ortki, then, make them difficult for outsiders
to apprehend either as literary texts or as historical documents. Nonetheless,
PATHS TO INTERPRETATION 35
orikt performances are brilliant, beautiful, evocative and moving verbal art;
and ortki are steeped in the past. The important thing to acknowledge is that
these qualities are attained not in spite of the chant’s disjunctiveness but
because of it, by means of it. The qualities of an oriki text that make it most
baffling to outsiders are precisely what enable it to do the things it does. They
are the foundations of its existence, the key to its ‘literariness’, the way it
establishes itself as a text.
To understand the way ortki speak of human experience, constituting
notions of social group, social origin, individual pre-eminence and relations
with the spiritual world, we need to experience them from the inside. That is,
we need to apprehend their meaning as it is constituted, by means of their
disjunctive, labile form. To do this involves going beyond text. Not only does
each orki formulation lead outwards, as has just been demonstrated, to its
own field of meaning carried in parallel traditions of anecdote and itan; but
also, the way a text does constitute a ‘performance’ and does generate poetic
excitement can only be understood by looking at the situation that occasions
it. The ortki units performed in a funeral dirge will have a different significance
from the ‘same’ units incorporated into a bride’s lament or into festivities
celebrating the opening of a new house.
Volosinov/Bakhtin suggested that the ways in which ‘context’ enters into
text’s meaning are both intimate and far-reaching: intimate in the sense that
all words have only a highly plastic potential for signification until given a
specific meaning by use in a concrete situation; far-reaching in the sense that
the situation in question — that is, the common ‘purview’ shared by speaker
and listener — includes not only their physical surroundings but the horizon
of their shared knowledge, interests and assumptions. ‘Context’ therefore not
only enters into utterance in an inescapable and constitutive way, but may
also be as wide as society itself, or wider. According to this view, speech is the
basis of social being. Literature rises out of a sea of innumerable ‘little speech
genres of internal and external kinds’ which ‘engulf and wash over all
persistent forms and kinds of ideological creativity’ [VoloSinov (Bakhtin),
1973a, p. 19], and which register most sensitively the social changes which
can be traced through many layers down to the economic base.
The apparently fragmented and shapeless or1ki text assumes form, life and
animation only when understood in its context, in both the narrowest and the
widest sense. The deep contextualisation required to interpret this genre may
make this study appear over-specialised, pursuing ‘meaning’ further and
further down a literary cul-de-sac. I do not believe that this is the case,
however. The literary properties of orzkz constitute a challenge to conventional
critical assumptions. They also, however, have extraordinary resonances with
some of the propositions of recent critical theory. ‘These resonances not only
throw doubt on the notion of the wholly unprecedented and innovative
character of certain European literary developments, but also show that
African oral texts go further, in some respects, than they do.” This suggests,
at the very least, that one of the projects of future critical theory should be to
widen the domain of ‘literature’ so as explicitly to include texts such as ortkz.
A comparative view, straddling the conventionally divided domains of
‘literature’ and ‘oral literature’, would, I believe, be productive of new critical
thinking. Studies like the present one are a necesssary preliminary to such a
comparative project.
For the purposes of the present analysis, there is one set of such resonances
in the work of Volo’inov/Bakhtin which is peculiarly illuminating to the study
of oriki. Central to Volosinov/Bakhtin’s philosophy oflanguage was the notion
of the dialogic. Utterance, he said, is dialogic in the sense that it is always
oriented towards its reception. Utterance is not the creation or property of the
utterer; on the contrary, it only has meaning because it inhabits the space
between a speaker and a hearer. Language is ‘a two-sided act. It is determined
equally by whose word it is and for whom it is meant’ [VoloSinov (Bakhtin),
1973a, p. 86]. It is ‘a border zone’ between the speaker and the person spoken
to, and it is in this border zone that human, that is social, consciousness is
constituted. Thought, according to this view, is a stream of inner speech, and
speech is learnt in dialogue. Thus consciousness and self-consciousness
themselves are constituted dialogically. The ‘self? cannot fix itself except by
putting itself, through an act of the imagination, in the place of the other. ‘This
exchange is more than the interpersonal gaze proposed by Hegel and Sartre;
for it is conducted above all through language. The words I utter are never
fully my words, but I nevertheless to a certain extent manage to appropriate
‘self’.
them. The process of interpersonal appropriation reaches its most developed
form in literature, and Volosinov/Bakhtin thought that one way of investigating
it would be through the phenomenon of ‘reported speech’ in literary texts.
The ways that speech is reported in the literature of different eras offer clues
to the way the utterance of the ‘other’ is received and appropriated by the
Oriki could be seen as the living embodiment of the dialogic. They are
addressed by one person to another and often involve explicit or tacit refer-
ences to the context of the utterance, the joint ‘purview’ of speaker and hearer.
Oriki however are dialogic not just in the sense that all utterance 1s dialogic,
but in a dramatised and heightened form. One could almost say that they are
a representation of the dialogic. In ortki performances, the role of utterance in
constituting social being is held up to view. The performer constructs her own
persona as a performer in the act of establishing her subject’s reputation, that
is his, her or its claim to full social existence, to a recognised place in the
human world. The mutuality of the process is made vividly evident in the
intense dyadic interchange between performer and hearer. |
Theimportant role given to ‘reported speech’ by VoloSinov/Bakhtin is highly
relevant to ortki, for one of most striking things about any oriki text is its evasion
PATHS TO INTERPRETATION 37
ofa fixed authorial point of view. It is polyvocal in the greatest possible degree.
Not only does each unit of a text have the possibility of different origins, a
different composer — so that the ‘corpus’ of ortkz is literally an assemblage of
diverse voices — but also, the prevailing style of orzk: performance seems
deliberately to heighten and emphasise this polyvocality. The ‘T’ of the chant
is in a relationship with the listener that continually varies. It is not just that
authorial distance is continually shifting, from moment to moment, but that
the conception of authorial voice itselfis called into question. At one moment
the ‘I is the singer in propria persona; the next moment, it could speak from
within the orik1, in the voice of a member of the group whose praises the
performer is singing. It could shift from one representative of that group to
another, from male to female, young to old, wife to daughter. The chant
modulates continually, as if by reflex, from one voice to another, so that the
effect is like an endlessly shifting tissue of quotations without any centre or
starting point upon which to anchor them. It is as if the chant were all
‘reported speech’, with no fixed voice to report it. As we shall see, and as a
reading of Bakhtin/Volosinov would lead us to expect, these characteristics
are related at a deep level with the capacity of ortki, more than any other
Yoruba genre, to open channels and transcend barriers between beings. That
is, their function is to concentrate and enhance the dialogic capacity of all
discourse to bring the other into relationship with the self, and in so doing,
to constitute social being.
Even when writing of a genre so self-evidently Western and written as the
novel, Bakhtin uses language that seems to be made for ortkz. The novel exhibits
‘indeterminacy, a certain semantic open-endedness, a living contact with
unfinished, still-evolving contemporary reality’ (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 7). It is
‘uncompleted’, so that ‘we cannot foresee all its plastic possibilities’ (Bakhtin,
1981, p. 3). Writing of Dostoevsky, whom he judges to be the instigator of a
totally new type of novel, Bakhtin says his work is made up of ‘a plurality of
independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony
of fully valid voices’ (Bakhtin, 1984a, p. 6), is ‘multt-accented and contradictory
in its values’ (Bakhtin, 1984a, p. 15), composed of ‘highly heterogeneous
materials’ which ‘are presented not within a single field of vision but within
several fields of vision...’(Bakhtin, 1984a, p. 16), with the result that ‘each
opinion really does become a living thing and is inseparable from an
embodied human voice’.
This unexpected congruence raises many questions that will not be
addressed here. Among other things, it indicates places where Bakhtin’s
picture of the historical evolution of European literature develops its own
loopholes, places where European literary history could turn round and re-
examine itself and recognise its own specificity. But it also suggests that orzkz
are perhaps less foreign to European sensibilities than my account so far has
implied. Ifthe student of Dostoevsky and the student of African praise-poetry
are recognised as sharing some common ground, a new dialogue becomes
possible.
Understanding oriki, however, begins not by the application of European
theory but from within the ortk: tradition itself. Careful attention to the texts
reveals that ortki themselves offer clues on how to ‘read’ them. The performer
not only dramatises and heightens what she is doing in the performance, she
also comments on it from within. Her utterance is punctuated with specific
observations upon her own performance, general reflections upon the function
and importance of ortki, comments on protocol, appreciation for the art ofher
predecessors or self-praise for her own, and explicit commentary on what she
has done or is going to do in performing oriki. The self-reflexivity of ortkz is
thus a kind of embedded oral critical practice: a practice which, as Olabiyi Yai
has argued, is unlike European literary criticism in being productive, intimately
related to its object and expressed often in the same poetic form as it (Yai,
1989, p. 65). Unlike the Zuni text discussed in Tedlock’s seminal paper
(Tedlock, 1983, pp. 233-46), there is no sense in oni of an ‘original’ text in
which are embedded later, supplementary, commentaries.”* In the case of
oriki, commentary is installed at the heart of every text and is indeed its mode
of being. Oriki themselves, being inherently self-reflexive, tell us how they
could be interpreted.
ORIKI IN OKUKU
3,
1. OKRUKU TODAY
Okuku is a small northern Yoruba town. It straggles briefly along the main
road from Osogbo to Ofa, just before the point where the rich soil of the forest
belt gives way to the sandy soil of the semi-savanna. To a traveller on this road,
Okuku will appear as the usual blur of brown earth houses with their rusty iron
roofs, mixed with imposing two-storey plastered housefronts with ‘Brazilian’
verandahs, balconies and window-shutters. On the right as you travel
northwards (see Map 2) is the market, with its modern concrete stalls laid out
in rows under ancient shady trees. Then you pass the great square concrete
tower of the Roman Catholic church and the more ornate twin towers of the
mosque. On the left the housefronts open out into a wide sandy bumpy
irregularly-shaped arena; at the back of it is the Anglican church, and its left
margin is the palace wall. The houses continue for another half mile or so up
the road, petering out before they reach the Grammar School. The population
was put at over 26,000 in the much-derided 1963 census. My rough and ready
calculations based on the 1977 electoral register got a figure nearer 18,000.
Neither of these numbers is really very informative.
The main road bisects the town. When I first arrived in 1974, it was the
only tarred road in Okuku, and in a very bad state of repair. The other big
road, Oke Agadangbo, ran at right angles from it through the upper half of the
town. It was long, straight, broad and golden from the sandy soil, punctuated
by occasional massive leafy trees. Away from these two roads, Okuku was a
maze of paths and alleyways opening unpredictably into patches of open
ground between buildings. The appearance of the street was deceptive.
Housefronts stood shoulder to shoulder in a row, plain concrete blocks or
pink and yellow plaster (often it was the plaster that held the mud walls up),
with shuttered or louvred windows, and ornate stone railings around their
front verandahs, looking very square, self-contained and European. Often, as
I made my way up Oke Agadangbo to the house where I stayed on the far edge
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MAP 2: OKUKU c. 1975

showing public buildings and principal compounds
OKUKU TODAY 41
of the town, I would be called over by an elder taking the breeze in his front
porch. I would be ushered ceremoniously into the ‘parlour’ at the front of the
house. Here there would be armchairs and foam-cushioned sofas, coffee
tables and picture-rails crowded with posed photographs of members of the
family, living and dead. But when the formal part of the visit was over, one
of the wives would draw me into the back regions of the house. We would
enter a dark corridor with earth walls, huge waterpots in the cool angles of the
passages, chickens underfoot, three-stoned hearths smoking near the openings.
Through one of these openings we would emerge into the sunshine of a great
courtyard, where there would be women plaiting each others’ hair, cracking
palm nuts, sifting and sorting through heaps of drying melon seeds, or
washing clothes in big battered tin basins. I would be led through another
doorway into another passageway and walk a long way in the dim light, past
the low gated doors of the inner rooms on one side, the archways or openings
onto the courtyard on the other, stepping past the stretched-out legs of aged,
immobile, lizard-like old ladies, till eventually we would emerge, apparently
into quite a different part of town.
It was only when one of the oba’s sisters took me onto the roof of a half-
completed building on a little hill to one side of the town that I saw the pattern.
From above, the sharp ridges of the russet iron roofs described clearly visible
designs of rectangles, squares, L-shapes, T-shapes and straight lines. Their
long eaves seemed to jostle and overlap. I saw the outlines of great old
compounds with their inner courtyards; but their lines were broken again and
again by new, square, two-storeyed houses that rose above them like ships.
Here and there parts of the old compound walls had simply been pulled down
to make room for the new houses, and the raw ends of the broken structure
were left sticking out. The rain of years had reduced other ruins to rounded
heaps. Much demolition was going on; many new concrete buildings going
up on the old sites. Further out towards the edges of town, all the buildings
were new. There were many ‘foundations’ marking the layout of a future
house, waiting for the owner to raise money for the next stage. Some were
fresh, but others had become overgrown and looked like ruins before they had
been built.
Out here where the town met the bush the evening air was distinctly cooler.
Okuku has a definite centre, along the axis of the main road between the
palace and the market. At night this part of town generates heat, crowds of
strolling people with their lanterns, a perpetual hubbub faintly audible even
from the other end of town. As you walk out to the fringes of settlement, the
darkness and silence creep up: everyone seems to have shut themselves up
inside their houses. Early in the morning men pass that way with their hoes
to the local farms; women with baskets on their heads to the markets of
neighbouring towns. From dawn, the misty silence is broken by their
greetings.
, :)
oO 1 2 3. 4 5 Miles
lra
“ig a
wvny :;
Gipy
Wr <\X ;
Y \jagbo
tH: ZOF
\n0¢
A ,,
“5 on : . 0 d em Asi
4
pm Oyeku GY
Opete Yponda pia Odo Asaba
Igbaye imulekes , OYAN
Faji YY Kokoe. “a—
¢ Okuku/ ,
Okua "EkuSa
M4Ekosin LY, |
2 Agbeye
ay . %
| |
G Inisa
Eko-Ende
fee x | :.
Lip ati,
Va \kirun : .
is Agbaa
tip wr aabiit
To Osogbo . . AR, Ada
MAP 3: OKUKU AND NEIGHBOURING TOWNS

OKUKRU TODAY 43
People build in the bush because they cannot get sufficient land in the
centre of town. They do it, often, with a pioneering spirit, and talk proudly
of the trees they had to cut down and the undergrowth they had to clear before
they could lay their foundations. Their hope and expectation is that in due
course more people will follow their example until the outlying areas become
part of the town proper. Meanwhile they claim to be suffering, living as they
do ‘in the forest’. This sense of the encompassing vegetation always being
contested at the margins of civilisation underlies the very conception of what
a town is.
The creation of a town is a triumph over the bush. The oba, as the symbolic
founder of the town, is responsible for keeping the bush at bay. A successful
oba who maintains and expands his settlement can be commended with this
orikt:
Sogb6 dilé sogbé digboro

Oba asaatan doja.
Turns forest to settlement, turns bush to town
Oba who turns a rubbish heap into a market.
But the ruins of abandoned houses overgrown with bush, the traces of
whole ruined settlements, remain as a warning that at any time the conquest
of the bush can be reversed. A town is the prime social unit, the fundamental
and enduring source of identity, through which alone full social being can be
claimed; yet we are reminded too that a town is a frail construction that can
be disbanded, destroyed and overgrown in a matter of years. The history of
Okuku, as we shall see, is eloquent testimony to this.
When I first arrived in Okuku in 1974 there was no electricity. A year and
a half later electricity was brought. Its effects were gradual. For a long time
very few people had the money or the influence actually to get the cables
connected up to their houses. Then the habits of a lifetime — rising at dawn,
going to bed soon after the evening meal, never leaving the house at night
without a lantern, avoiding walking at night altogether if possible, for night
is associated with maleficence — all these habits and dispositions meant that
the electricity, when acquired, had only a limited role to play. But it did have
effects. The last time I visited Okuku I went to see the Elemoso Awo, the most
senior of the surviving Ifa priests, an old man venerated by his colleagues for
his quietness and modesty as well as for his great knowledge. He was sitting
as usual on the floor in the corner of his parlour, surrounded by his divination
instruments and an array of bottles and calabashes used in the preparation of
medicines. But on the table at the other side of the room stood a brand-new
television.
Another gradual shift was effected by the rebuilding of the main road. It
is now a narrow but fast expressway carrying heavy traffic north. It was
44 ORIKI TIN OKUKU
designed to bypass all the small towns between Osogbo and Ofa. The Olokuku
(oba of Okuku) alone among obas had the influence needed to reverse this
decision and ensure that the road continued to run right through the centre
of his town. Now big towns like Ikirun and Inisa are by-passed but all the
traffic comes to Okuku.! In the last ten years the number of trucks and taxis
owned by Okuku people has increased tenfold. The petrol station, owned by
another Ifa priest, has done well. At first it was a single yellow tank installed
above ground right outside the palace wall. Now it has been moved out to the
junction at Konta and forms the centre of a new motorpark, stop-off place and
provisions market for travellers. A bank has also come to Okuku and the bar
and eating place next to it, on the main road, always have customers.
Other projects for local improvement appear more sluggish. As long as I
was in Okuku, one of the popular places for the youth of Oke Agadangbo to
gather was on the waterpipes outside Mrs Akindele’s food shop. This great
heap of unused pipes became so familiar as a place to sit that people forgot
their original purpose. Till today, the only piped water in Okuku comes from
a handful of standpipes dotted about the town. In the dry season the water
flows intermittently, usually in the evenings, and each standpipe is signalled
by the long row of buckets, basins and jerry cans marking their owners’ places
in the queue for water. Most water is collected from the river; during the
construction of the road it could also be bought from the Alhaji who drove the
tanker, at 50 kobo a drum. There are still no shops in Okuku, apart from one
or two tiny apothecary’s stores where you can buy aspirin and knitting
needles. Buying and selling is done in the big four-day market and in the
smaller market held every evening in front of the palace. A few artisans’
workshops can be seen. The traditional forge is still operating, and the head
of the blacksmith’s lineage, Chief Arogun, still salutes passers-by with his
anvil from inside the smithy. There is a small printing press; some
photographers’ studios; a carpenter who displays his marble-topped tables
and gilt-ornamented coffins around his front porch; a radio repair man; a
cobbler with a dark workshop hung with strips of leather and rubber, shoes
in every stage of manufacture and repair; and many women petty traders with
small wooden stalls outside their houses, selling soap powder, Kerosene,
chewing sticks, pepper and onions, and Trebor mints.
People believe in ‘progress’, but the slow changes that take place are often,
it seems, undertaken in the same spirit that animated the past. The trees on
the main road were cut down in the name of progress - Okuku must not
appear as a bush, backward town — but the underlying relation of town to
forest, of inhabited to uninhabited areas, appears from oral literature to be an
ancient one. In the same way, the profile of the palace was drastically altered
on the accession of the present oba, in conformity with a long-standing
expectation. When I first came to Okuku, the gateway in the high golden
palace wall was surmounted by a pointed gable roofed in corrugated iron. On
OKUKU TODAY 45
either side were raised concrete platforms, six feet deep, also with gabled
roofs, supported by pillars. On these shady platforms old women sold
condiments, the butcher sold meat, and goats dozed in the heat of the day.
It was in this accommodating archway that the oba would sit enthroned on
his beaded chair every other year when the town’s egungun masquerades came
to the oba’s market to dance their respects. But anew obais expected to proclaim
his intention to uphold the traditional glory of kingship by making expensive
improvements to the palace. Oyekunle (1916-34) built the first parlour with
glass windows. Oyinlola (1934-60) built the great stone two-storeyed building
in the middle of the palace complex. Oyewusi (1961-80) opened the hall
behind the inner courtyard where state occasions are now held. When
Oyeleye ascended the throne in 1981, he improved the front view. The
archways, gables and tin roof were pulled down, the platforms removed, and
in their place the wall was given a high two-dimensional cement arch,
plastered and inscribed with Aafin Olokuku (Olokuku’s Palace). The depth,
the shade, and the angular promise of induction into a mysterious region
within were erased; any passer-by could now see straight into the great open
front courtyard of the palace. Intimations of the past were destroyed, but it
was done in the spirit of the past.
Okuku is felt by its inhabitants to be ofa political and historical importance
out of proportion to its size. It is the queen of the Odo-Otin district, claiming
rights to tribute from seventeen neighbouring villages: rights which were
apparently acknowledged by most of these villages, and which were upheld
by the colonial authorities when they made Okuku the district capital,
responsible for the taxation and chieftaincy affairs of all the towns under it.
Some of these towns have now outgrown Okuku, and local politics has
revolved for some time around their attempts to shake off their traditional
subordination. Most Okuku people take it for granted that their town is more
ancient and more royal than the other towns around them. But except at the
level of local government committees, inter-town rivalry is of less importance
than the many links of trade and kinship that bind the towns of the area
together. Many women traders operate full-time in the Odo-Otin area, going
from one market to another through their interlocking four-day cycles. Many
Okuku men marry women from neighbouring towns, and therefore become
involved in family and ceremonial obligations there.” And conversely, many
Okuku women marry men from neighbouring towns and go there to live,
bringing back whole teams of co-wives to attend their families’ funerals.
The superiority of Okuku is symbolised for the townspeople in the person
of the oba. The Olokuku 1s classed as a Grade II oba, of the same rank as many
obas of much bigger towns. He is the centre of an exceptionally rich and
elaborate royal ceremonial complex, and is the inheritor and custodian of the
famous collection of ancient beaded crowns (see Beier 1982). The late
Olokuku, Oyewusi IT, certainly lived up to Okuku’s reputation for royal
46 ORIKI IN OKUKU
grandeur. He was a charismatic figure, famous for his hospitality and his
capacity to impress and attract big people from outside Odo-Otin. At the annual
royal and civic festival — the Olooku festival — the great front courtyard of the
palace would be solid with Volvos and Mercedes. Within the town, despite
the steady erosion of the oba’s actual powers, obaship still commands respect
bordering on awe. The oba is the head of the huge royal lineage, whose four
branches rotate the title among them. He presides over the three grades of
ranked chiefs which constitute the indigenous structure of :government.
Chieftaincy titles are still the focus of intense interest among those who hold
or aspire to hold them, the centre of endlessly ramificating intrigues that have
dominated town politics as far back as people can remember. ‘These affairs
revolve entirely around the central figure of the oba. It is he who validates
appointments to titles. He can reject candidates or push the interests of those
he favours; he can upgrade low-ranking titles, downgrade important ones or
even rediscover and reinstate long-abandoned ones. The reigns of some recent
obas have been characterised by interminable chiefly feuds. Everything turns
on who comes to the palace and who does not; who is in the oba’s favour, who
boycotts his ceremonies. The loyal chiefs used to come every evening without
fail to sit in the oba’s inner courtyard and talk over the events of the day: the
rebellious ones’ entire existence was coloured by their determination to keep
away. The gba also presides over low-level disputes which the parties concerned
do not wish to take to court. His representative sits in the local court itself.and
reports, every Monday when the sessions are held, on the cases being heard.
Those who are summoned by the oba for some real or fabricated grievance
comply instantly and with a fair degree of anxiety. It is dangerous to fall foul
of an oba; the prayer Oké oba ko niisd o lésé, ‘the oba’s hoe will not fall on your
foot’, still means something to the present-day commoner. |
The Olokuku is the nominal head of every religious group in the town. The
present Olokuku and his two immediate predecessors have all been Anglicans,
but they also preside over all the traditional cults. Every cult must obtain the
blessing ofthe oba when it fixes the day for its annual festival,’ and the celebrants
must pay an Official visit to the palace at the opening and close of the cere-
monies. Some festivals give the oba a much bigger role than this. The Olooku
festival, in honour of the town’s guardian spirit, is also a cult of royalty. The
ancient beaded crowns are brought out for display and ritual attentions, the
oba’s head is propitiated and the royal ancestors evoked. The central event
of the festival is the ceremonial wrestling match between the oba and the priest
of Olooku.* The Ifa festival, the next big event in the ritual calendar, involves
the all-night performance of zyere chants mentioned earlier. This impressive
performance is staged at the oba’s doorway where he meets his chiefs on
formal occasions and where the shrines to his forefathers and :to Osanyin, a
deity particularly associated with the royal family,° are located. The oba himself
is present throughout the vigil, lying in state on his beaded cushion across the
OKUKU TODAY 47
doorway, blessing the participants and the town and presiding over the feast
that precedes the performance. In the Otin festival in honour of the deity of
the principal local river, the central ceremony is a ritual confrontation
between the oba and a young girl representing the ‘town’, that is, the senior
chiefs. ‘The Gbedegbede festival requires the oba to go in procession to the Ifa
meeting house to authorise a ceremonial divination on behalf of the whole
town. Finally, the last festival of the ritual year 1s the Egungun festival, which
starts and finishes with a great ceremony at the palace. The oba is therefore
a crucial actor in the principal festivals of the year, the kingpin around which
ritual activity revolves. Okuku people are almost all either Christian or
Muslim, in proportions of about two to one, and it would be false to claim that
there is an unbroken harmony and continuity between ‘traditional’ and world
religions. Many Christians and Muslims are openly hostile to and
contemptuous ofthe remaining ‘pagans’ and deplore their cult activities. But
they are intensely proud of Okuku’s greatness, and this greatness is conceived
of in traditional and mystical terms and based on a conception of royalty
which is indivisible from ‘paganism’. Large numbers of people participate
fervently in the major festivals whatever their professed faith.
The men of Okuku are almost all farmers, though some combine farming
with other occupations including carpentry, barbering, shoe-making, radio
repairs, printing, trading in livestock, and produce-buying for the government.
Women have traditionally undertaken certain agricultural tasks on their
husbands’ or fathers’ farms, and nowadays those who live full-time on the
cocoa farms often do a great deal of work on them, particularly during the
harvest in November, when they collect cocoa pods, transport them back to
the settlement, and attend to the drying and fermentation processes. Women’s
principal occupation, however, and the source of their independent income,
is still trade and food-processing. On marriage, the husband is obliged to set
the woman up with a small amount of trading capital. Some women remain
petty traders, selling condiments and small articles from a stall outside their
houses by day, and in the oba’s market in the evenings. Others specialise in
preparing and selling cooked food such as akara (bean-cakes), moin-moin
(steamed bean puddings), or ekg (loaves of corn-starch, a cheap staple food).
Many women succeed in expanding the sphere of their operations and
become full-time traders in larger and more valuable goods — such as cloth,
staple grains and flours, dried fish, and yams. Their main outlet for these
goods is the big four-day market in Okuku, and on the other days they may
go to the four-day markets of neighbouring towns. Many women raise extra
money by shelling palm kernels, preparing palm oil in great vats in the farms,
and preparing kola for export to the north. Some have succeeded so well that
during the busy season they are able to run a business employing many other
women. Others specialise in trading in kola, organising its collection and
transport to the north.
48 ORIKI IN OKUKU
People’s identity within the town derives from their membership of an ile,
a compound or residential unit based on acore agnatic lineage but usually also
including a variety of other groupings. There are between twenty-nine and
fifty zle in Okuku, depending on how you define them; this indeterminacy is
a crucial aspect of the town organisation and one which will be discussed in
detail in Chapter 5. Membership of an ie assigns an individual to a group
which is variably defined in different contexts but which nonetheless exhibits
great solidarity. It is the ze which holds land in and around Okuku from the
oba and allocates it to individuals or families. The z/e defines a block of people
the individual cannot marry and on whom she or he can call for-assistance and
support. It provides the individual with an address. It groups people under a
baale (household head) who organises them for taxation, for communal
labour, and for all kinds of ceremonial activities at funerals, marriages and
festivals. Membership of an ze is the fundamental prerequisite of citizenship.
But perhaps the most important thing to know about Okuku today is that
for nine months of each year most of the population is not there. In the 1930s
and 1940s Okuku farmland was completely overplanted with cocoa and kola
trees. By the late 1940s the soil was becoming exhausted and the cocoa trees
were in any case past their best. Starting from 1949, farmers began to go in
search of land to rent or buy in the more fertile, thickly forested Ondo and
Ijesa areas to the south and east. The early days of the oko 1waju, frontier farms
or ‘far farms’ as the expression Is locally translated, are now recounted as tales
of heroism. People talk of the young pioneers’ discovery of igbo dudu (virgin
forest), their approaches to the local owners, the arduous labour of felling the
huge trees and uprooting the bush, and the first planting, followed by a seven-
year wait for the trees to bear fruit — years during which many of them were
too poor to visit home. In one far farm the first group of settlers lived under
a rock for two years before they could afford to build the tiny two-roomed
mud houses typical of the farm settlements. The first far farm founded by
Okuku people was Sunmibare, twelve miles south of Ife. Others are even further
afield: Odigbo is three miles north of Ore, a hundred miles from Okuku.
Because of these distances, the farmers took up a more or less permanent
existence in the far farms. Other groups from other towns came and joined
them, and a formal local organisation was established on the basis of
‘quarters’ for each town of origin. Now almost the entire able-bodied male
population of Okuku has land on one of the fifteen or so far farms colonised
by Okuku people; many of the older men have acquired plots in more than
one location, and put their younger brothers, sons or wives in charge of some
of them while they attend in person to others. Most of these men and their
wives — the junior wives if they have more than one — live on the far farms full
time. From March till November, Okuku is a town of old men, senior wives,
chiefs, ritual specialists and young children.°®
In November after the main cocoa harvest, the farmers come flocking back
OKUKU TODAY 49
with money to spend. In December, January and February houses are built
and house-opening festivities are held. Weddings are performed — even now,
overwhelmingly in the ‘traditional’ manner rather than in the church. Every
Wednesday (unanimously accepted as the propitious day for the ‘bride’s
outing’) parties of richly dressed girls and their retinues of sisters and friends
can be seen parading around the town chanting, most affectingly, the ‘bride’s
laments’. Sometimes forty or fifty weddings take place in a single day. This
is also the time for funerals, for those who can afford to keep their dead
relatives on ice till the high season; or for memorial celebrations and ‘turning
the dead over’ for those who have already done the burial itself. Christmas and
the New Year are lavishly celebrated. Families, church groups, and social
clubs all bring out their new ankoo (‘and co.’) — the uniform outfit that demon-
strates their wealth and solidarity. Then as the rains begin again in March or
April, people begin to go back to the far farms for a new agricultural year. They
will come back as often as they can afford or are required to: to attend family
festivals, funerals and important meetings, and to participate in the Olooku
festival and perhaps also in the Ifa, Otin or Egungun festivals. Many people
also make a point of coming home at Easter and for the August bank holiday,
because these are the times when the salaried, educated members of the
family who work in Lagos, Ibadan and Kaduna have their holidays. They
come for Okuku Welfare Association meetings and other arrangements at
these times, and progressive-minded townspeople like to be around when
they come.
Except on these occasions, Okuku 1s a quiet town. Old men sit on their
verandahs nodding to passers-by; the oba sits in his silent palace. Little of the
explosive activity that carries trucks and taxis at top speed along the new road
penetrates into the life of the town. Women crack palm nuts in a desultory
fashion and the olorisa (traditional devotees) attend privately to their household
shrines. If changes have taken place, they have done so in a sluggish and
almost reluctant fashion. The mood in the far farms is quite different. There,
people are galvanised by a strenuous work ethic; they are ambitious, enterprising
and impatient of anything that impedes ‘progress’. In Okuku, by contrast, the
prevailing mood is one of something very like nostalgia: a mood informed with
memories, animated by an always-present past. Just as the new storey houses
rise from among the only partly-demolished old compounds, so the new has
not displaced the old in any aspect of life. Traces of the past lie thickly
scattered everywhere — in the architecture, in rituals, in jokes, in forms of
address, in modes of identification, and 1n the continual performance of oral
texts. The outlines of the past, still showing through the slow accumulations
and displacements of modernity, are continually and affectionately retraced.
This past inhabits this present above all through the medium of ortkz.
50 ORIKI IN OKUKU
2. OKUKU HISTORY
There is no written evidence of Okuku’s history before the twentieth century.
The earliest colonial document directly concerning Okuku is probably the
1911 report on a visit to the area by the Ibadan chiefs and the resident,
Captain Elgee, in connection with a boundary dispute between Okuku and
the neighbouring town ofIba-—a dispute which dragged on into the late 1930s
and occasioned much colonial paperwork. From 1933 onwards the A.D.O.
for Osun North frequently mentioned Okuku and its neighbours in his
reports, which dealt mainly with taxation, chieftaincy affairs and land
disputes. In 1935 I. F. W. Schofield submitted the first Intelligence Report
on Okuku. He estimated the population at 1606 and commented on the
‘energetic and adventurous disposition’ of the people.’ For any period before
this, however, there is no independent written evidence. But the past is all
around the people of Okuku and is preserved and recreated in a variety of
ways.
All elders, both men and women, talk about the past, recounting events
remembered from their own youth or told them by their parents. Most of
these reminiscences revolve around prominent people in the town; but they
may also trace the path by which an orisa or an institution was inherited by a
present-day individual, or recall a cult official’s predecessors in office. Often
they just contrast ‘the old days’ (aye atyo) with ‘the present’ (aye ode ont). ‘In
the old days, when people held feasts they would serve pounded yam in
troughs, there was so much food’; ‘in the old days, there was no money in the
town: only three men in Okuku had gowns of off cloth, and anyone else who
wanted to wear one had to borrow it from them’.
These stories can evoke a world that it takes an effort of the imagination
to reconstruct. Before the first motorable road was built to Okuku in the late
1930s,° the town was enclosed by bush, linked only by narrow footpaths to
neighbouring settlements. In the nineteenth century it was protected by a
town wall enclosing a stretch of igbo ile, domestic forest, where people could
collect firewood and throw their waste when conditions were too dangerous
for them to venture further. Visitors were rare in the town. But parties of
traders did arrive with their goods, and were charged a levy at the town gates
before they were admitted. There was always a consciousness of a greater
power beyond Okuku: first Oyo, which exercised overlordship in the semi-
mythical era before the fall of Old Oyo; then Ilorin, till the ‘Jalumi War’ of
1878; and then Ibadan, after its victory in this battle at [kirun, ten miles from
Okuku. [Ilorin and Ibadan made their power felt by posting representatives,
ajele, to Okuku, but few Okuku people had been to Ilorin or Ibadan.’ To reach
Ibadan was a three-day walk, and not many people knew the paths until the
first decades of this century when long marches in search of wage labour
became common.
OKUKU HISTORY 51
‘Everything took time in those days’: long periods of initiation into cults;
for men, long periods of service as apprentice or bondsman, the long wait for
a wife and the longer period of service to their fathers. Women recall that they
grew up knowing they had been betrothed from the womb and fearing the
power of their future co-wives. The past is remembered as a world where
extraordinary spiritual powers were at large, controlled and channelled to
their own advantage by those who were strong and lucky. ‘We do not have
medicine like that any more: the knowledge of it has been lost’. Powerful big
men, and a few powerful women — whether well- or ill-disposed — dominated
the community in these accounts, attracting and organising all memories of
what the past was like.
But ttan, formal narrative history, is the preserve of old men alone. Both
the town itself and the z/e (“compounds’/‘lineages’) that make up the town
have itan. Each ile has its own story, concerning its origins, the sequence of
events which led to its arrival in Okuku, and the reason for various family
customs and taboos. Each ze will deny knowledge of the history of other ie;
histories are part of the repertoire of emblems by which each group demarcates
itself from the others.'° Each tells a partial story which links a particular group
to the great events of Okuku’s past, but it does not actually tell the story of
those events. The only people who tell the story of Okuku as a whole, from
the beginning, are the royal elders and the oral performers who serve the gba.
The town’s identity is subsumed into that of the oba, and the town’s history
is the history of one figure: the ‘I’ who represents the office successively filled
by all the present oba’s predecessors. Even Ajiboye, the son of Oba Oyekunle
(1916-34), though he did not himself become oba, began his history of Okuku
with the words:
The title devolved on us in Ara. I was the elder brother. The kingmakers
said that it was our turn. But Ifa didn’t choose the elder brother that our
family offered, it chose the younger brother...
All past obas'! are ‘I’ to their successors. The continuity of the royal line,
whose importance is thus stressed, is synonymous with the continuity of the
life of the town itself. '?
The greater weight of history behind the royal lineage can be seen in the
way they construct their genealogies. The royal family boasts a king list of up
to seventeen names (see Table 1), and the genealogical relations posited
between them, though highly variable, particularly in the earlier phases of the
story, yield a genealogy with a depth of at least seven generations (see Fig. 1).
Commoner lineages, by contrast, trace themselves back to an apical ancestor
only three, four or five generations back, even when they claim that he
founded the lineage in the remote past (a characteristic of lineages in many
if not all Yoruba towns). This foreshortening is accompanied by a tendency
to conflate the big watersheds in the town’s past: all wars are thought of as the
‘Kiriji? war — which actually took place in the years 1879-1886 — and the
52 ORIKI IN OKUKU
apical ancestor is conflated with distinctly nineteenth-century figures, some
of whom can actually be remembered by the oldest living men today.
Representations of the past of the town as an enduring, unified entity, then,
lie in the ztan as told by elders of the royal family. There are many versions,
reflecting the position of the elder in one of the four branches of the royal
lineage as well as his personal narrative tastes. All the stories, however, have
the same narrative and symbolic structure. They move through the same
three phases, and in all of them the same relations between itan and ortki are
established. Every version begins with a primordial, semi-mythical era from
the origins of the town to the early nineteenth century; there follows a more
circumstantially detailed nineteenth-century period, covering the [lorin—
Ibadan wars which threw the Odo-Otin area into turmoil; and then a modern
period, from the beginning of this century to the present day. The mythical .
era is the one where there is most variation in the stories, and where ortki play
the role ofa key mnemonic. From the reign of Adeoba onwards -—1i.e. probably
from around 18301* — there is almost complete agreement about the names
and order of the obas and about what events happened in which reign (a
pattern which was also noted by Ulli Beier in his discussion of Okuku
history’). Oriki are more profuse and elaborated, but play a less prominent
mnemonic role. From about 1900 onwards, history enters the realm of
personal memory, and the story of the town usually tails off into a bald
summary of successive obas up to the present incumbent. In reminiscences -
about the period after about 1940, orki are rarely quoted at all.
Whatever the variations, all the versions share the same basic scheme of
events in representing Okuku’s past. The outline is as follows. The story
begins with a chieftaincy dispute in the Ekiti town of Aramoko in which a
senior brother (Oladile or Oladitan) was passed over in favour of a younger
brother and therefore left the town — a standard narrative device found in
many Yoruba town histories.!* The senior brother then journeyed into an area
of thick forest (with or without an intermediate stop in Imesi-Ipole) and founded |
anew town, Kookin. The isolation of this area 1s stressed in several versions =
ofthe story: it is said that the name Kookin derives from tho zkin— thick clumps
of palm trees — and that Ifa told the founding prince to settle where the palm-
tree forest was thickest. Other story-tellers emphasised that:at this period
| there were no other towns in the area: ‘the nearest neighbour to the new
settlement was Ekosin, as Osogbo, Ikirun and Iragbiji did not yet exist’:
suggesting a périod prior to the late sixteenth century, when Osogbo was
probably founded.” It is agreed by all that the cult of Olooku was brought by
the founding prince from Aramoko and celebrated in Kookin, and that the |
royal title Alara was retained by the obas at Kookin. A special relationship was :
said to have been established with the river Otin, though the account of how |
this came about varies. Ajiboye says that Otin displayed her beneficence by
sparing all the domestic animals when the river flooded its banks; another
OKUKU HISTORY 53
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58 ORIKI IN OKUKU
royal elder, Oyeleye, says that it was Otin who appeared to them in the thick
forest and pointed out the spot where they should settle. Oyeleye also said that
Otin ordered or predicted that the founding prince’s first son should be called
Otinkanre (Otin touches something good) as a sign or acknowledgement of
her beneficence.
Everybody agrees that Kookin was a great town. It was swelled by an influx
of settlers whose places of origin are often recounted in detail. These settlers
are said to have come mainly from further north and west (see Map 4). ‘They
are said to have settled not only in Kookin itself, constituting the ile of which
the town was made up, but also in separate settlements all around the area as
tributary towns under Kookin.'* As in other Yoruba towns, the order in which
the constituent z/e of Kookin arrived was said to determine the rank of the title
they held: the first to arrive held the highest title. But this was not the only
reason for recording the town’s constituent z/e and their places of origin so
painstakingly. In the story of their arrival is embedded a picture of the funda-
mental nature of the town. Individuals and small groups come from far afield,
bringing with them their own customs and emblems associated with their
place of origin, and their own chieftaincy titles which would be given a place
in the hierarchy of the new town. Their difference is stressed. But each in turn
makes a commitment to join in the common project of creating a new place:
Ladile’s eldest son that he brought with him from Ara was Oluronke
Otinkanre. Oluronke was the father ofus all. After Oluronke, Ladile had
a girl, Lalubi. Lalubi married into a family of carvers who came from Oje
and said they would stay with us in Kookin. ...The first person to come
and settle with us in Kookin was Eesa from Ajase Ipo. Otebolaje the
Odofin [the carver from Oje] came next. After that came i/e Aworo from
Apa; tle Baale from Aran Orin; zle Oloko from Oya; le Oluode from Ofa.
The latter were the people who actually initiated the foundation of
Kookin. They were hunters so they were brave enough to go alone
through the uninhabited forest. They first left Ofa because of a quarrel |
abouta title—just like us—the younger brother was made gba of Ofa while :
the elder was by-passed, so he left and went to Imesi where he met Ladile. |
When they decided to leave, he went ahead to look for a good place. He
found a spot in the bush, cleared it and went back and called Ladile to
come. His name was WinyomiAraoye, son of Olugbensere of Ofa-Esun.
His people sent to him to come back home. He said he wouldn’t, he
would found a town of his own. (Ajiboye, zle Oba)
Ajiboye goes on to list fifteen more z/e, giving the place of origin for each. By
recounting, he was recreating the town in narrative and reaffirming both its
inner diversity and its coherence. , :
Kookin was noted for its iron-work. Several accounts said: that there had ,
been 140 blacksmiths at work there; one added that the iron ore was obtained
from the mines at Isundunrin near Ejigbo, and that the finished products were
OKUKU HISTORY 59
sold as far afield as Ila, Oyo, Ilesa, Iresa and Iregba. It was said to have been
‘a huge town with three rivers’:
Going right through the town were the rivers Anle and Godogbo. Going
along the edge of the town was Pankere. Springing from the house where
they did the dyeing was Agbamudoyin. They lived there a long time.
(Ajiboye, tle Oba)
Little else is said about Kookin, and since few historical events are
remembered that can be attributed to the obas who ruled there, some of the
narrators telescoped the rise and fall of the great town into only two reigns —
that of the founder who came from Aramoko, and that of his son who was said
to be on the throne when Kookin was sacked. In some versions, this was Alao
Oluronke, in others Oluronke Otinkanre or Jala Okin [and in the version given
by Beier’s informants (Beier 1982), Olugbegbe].
The sack of Kookin is always attributed to the Ijesa Arara war. Schofield,
reporting on oral history he collected in 1935, states unequivocally that this
war took place in 1760, but he does not explain how he arrived at this date.
The official history — produced by the oba’s advisers for such purposes as the
publication of a coronation brochure — cites the same date, based on reign
lengths counted back from 1916, a firm date for the death of Oyewusi I: but
as there is no agreement about which oba was on the throne when Kookin was
sacked, this precision seemed questionable (and at that stage, quite possibly
a product of Schofield’s report itself, since the oba had a copy of it and often
referred to it as an authority).!? What all the historians of Okuku agreed on
was that the Ijesa were jealous of Kookin’s greatness and, some said, particularly
its monopoly of iron manufacture; that Kookin was totally unprepared (one
elder added that it was given over to peaceful pursuits, manufactured only
tools and not weapons, and ignored warnings from Ifa that it should arm
itself); and that the destruction was almost total — only the oba and a handful
of citizens survived (nine adults and a child, it is said). To avoid being found
by the Ijesa again, they moved a few miles north of Kookin and settled on what
had been the outskirts of its zgbo ile, or ring of domestic forest. The new town
was called Okuku. Oyeleye stressed that the oba who presided over the
resettlement — Alao Oluronke — preserved the continuity of the town by
bringing with him a branch of the fig-tree that stood at the Kookin market,
and having it planted in Okuku ‘to show where the new market was to be and
to remind people of where they had come from. It was a sign, and it grows
there to this day’.
Around this period there were obas whose reigns are remembered in magical
terms. Alao Oluronke himself had magical powers. According to Oyeleye, he
moved the river closer to the new settlement by creating a supernatural boa
with water spouting from its mouth (cf. Beier 1982:39):
He said the river was now [i.e. after the move from Kookin] too far from
the town. He bought a boa’s head, and told the people to bring him three
60 ORIKI IN ORKUKU
loads of ebolo vegetable and a bag of salt, and he also bought some
potash. With all these he made a medicine and took it outside the town.
He dug a hole and put the medicine in, and covered it with a big pot.
The medicine changed into a boa, and water spouted from the place.
The boa climbed a palm tree and watched the women: coming to the
river. This frightened them, but Alao told them the snake would do
them no harm. The river became Obuku [one of Okuku’s principal
rivers]. During the Egungun festival the women would put it in their
chants, saying ‘In the year that Alao founded the second Okuku, the
palm tree became a boa, and crawled away’.
The quoted words are an ortki, felt by Oyeleye to encapsulate the story he had
just told. Ajiboye’s narrative surrounding the same ortki, however, was different.
According to him, the Oba Olugbegbe had a younger brother called Ope, who
turned himself into a python that terrified the town. The chiefs drove him out
into the bush ‘at zle Odofin’s farm at Oke Apara’ where he became a small
river, which is called Opedere (Ope becomes a python) to this day.
But the most famous of the obas with supernatural powers was Olugbegbe
himself, who was said in some accounts to have reigned before the fall of
Kookin, in others after it. In Ajiboye’s version, he used his magical powers to
turn himself into a leopard and wrought havoc in the town every year during
the Olooku festival. The chiefs asked the Alaafin of Oyo to help, but though
the Alaafin summoned Olugbegbe to Oyo he failed to trap him. Eventually
the chiefs found out the secret of Olugbegbe’s power from his wife — it was a
lamp he always kept burning, hidden in the forest. They found the lamp and
extinguished it, and Olugbegbe knew then that they would kill him, so he took
chains, called on the earth to open, entered it and was never. seen again.
With the reign of Adeoba, the narratives reach the threshold of the
remembered past. At this point the nature of the stories changes as personal
reminiscences only two or three generations old begin to enter the picture. All
Adeoba’s successors are confidently named, and reign lengths are sometimes
ascribed to them (see Table 1, which shows the obas named by Ajiboye, Oyeleye
and by one version of ‘official’ history), The turning point in all these stories
was the ‘Fulani war’, also referred to as the ‘Ofa war’ and the ‘Ilorin war’. Not
only royal elders, but elders of every i/e have something to say about what went
on in Okuku during this period of protracted disturbance.
The wars that convulsed Yoruba country from the 1820s almost up to the
end of the nineteenth century had a devastating impact on this area. Afonja’s
revolt against Oyo and alliance with the ruling Fulani at Ilorin unleashed a
long series of attacks by the Ilorin forces in a southerly direction. By c.1825
the Ilorins reached Ofa, ten miles north of Okuku, and made it their camp.
From here they launched a succession of raids to the south, overrunning the
whole Odo-Otin area as far as Osogbo, until decisively checked by the Ibadans
in the battle of Osogbo in c.1838 (Law 1970, p. 217). Meanwhile Old Oyo
OKUKU HISTORY 61
had been sacked and then abandoned, and refugees were pouring southwards
from the whole area around it.”° Through the 1840s the Ibadans were able to
push northwards, finally establishing their own camp at Ikirun, a well-
fortified town ten miles south of Okuku. The twenty miles between Ikirun and
Ofa remained a contested area, and Okuku was right in the middle of it. Raids
and skirmishes between the Ilorins and the Ibadans continued inconclusively
back and forth between the two camps until 1878, when the Ilorins joined
forces with the newly formed Ekitiparapo (alliance of Ekiti towns) and prepared
to attack [kirun. It was then that the Okuku people and the populations of all
the small neighbouring towns ran for refuge to Ikirun and took up permanent
residence ‘for seventeen years’, as Okuku elders remember, i.e. until the
British-engineered peace of 1893. Though the Ibadans won a resounding
victory in the ‘Jalumi War’ of 1878, the Ilorins continued to raid and harass
the area. The Ibadans went to help Ofa and became involved in a siege that
lasted until 1887, when the Ilorins finally drove them out, sacked the town
and massacred the chiefs. Okuku people remember the escape of the oba of
Ofa, Adegboye, shortly before this, for he was said to have spent several days
in Okuku before fleeing further south.
Even after the British-negotiated peace of 1893, the Ilorins continued to
attack the area. Captain Bower and a mainly Hausa garrison were established
at the Otin River, and the people were encouraged to return to their ruined
towns. Many, however, did not feel it was safe to go back until the main Ilorin
army, near Otan, had been destroyed by Captain Bower’s rockets in 1896.
Old men remember the sound of the rockets to this day, and describe with glee
what they heard about the fall of Ilorin the following year. Okuku, in short,
lay in a battleground through most of the nineteenth century, from 1825 to
1893. If the earlier period was relatively mild — though involving raids and
abandonment of the town on more than one occasion — from 1877-8 onwards
the long-term evacuation to Ikirun and the attacks that occurred during the
latter phases of the wars are vividly remembered and are described as having
been extremely disruptive.?!
The people of Okuku had no formal military organisation, but bands of
fighters were informally set up both to protect the town and to launch raiding
parties themselves. During the period of their enforced stay in Ikirun, they
farmed on plots lent to them around Ikirun, or went back to their old farms
at Okuku by day, returning to Ikirun at night — but this was very dangerous,
and they could be captured at any moment by slave-raiding Ilorins. The
buildings in Okuku fell down and were completely overgrown before the
people moved back to the town in the 1890s. The dislocations produced by
seventy years of warfare were immense. Many lineages were reduced to
rumps, many were fragmented and scattered between two or more
neighbouring towns, and many parties of refugees hitherto unconnected with
Okuku turned up. There is a lot of evidence about the dispersal and
62 ORIKI IN OKUKU
regrouping of the population in lineage histories; there is less direct evidence
about changes in the power structures of the town, but the stories suggest that
the nineteenth century saw the rise of the big man on a scale not seen before.
Several chiefs attained towering powers in the town, probably through their
successes in slave-raiding and slave-trading. They succeeded not only in
deposing two obas around the middle of the century — first Oyekanbi and then
Edun — but also in reinstating one of them, Oyekanbi, something which in
normal times would have been unthinkable.*? Ambitious individuals seem to
have been able to take advantage of the turbulent conditions to exploit the
flexibility inherent in the town’s political structure to an unprecedented
extent.
Pre-twentieth century representations of the past thus seem to fall into two
distinct phases: the period up to Adeoba/Oyekanbi, the fall of Ofa and the
battle of Osogbo; and the period after that up to the resettlement of Okuku
in 1893. The earlier history is recounted only by elders of the royal family; it
has a heroic and mythic character, and is extremely variable in sequence and
in the correlations between names, reigns and events. There is disagreement
even about the names of the founders of Kookin (Oladile or Oladitan) and of
Okuku (Alao Oluronke, Oluronke Otinkanre or Jala Okin). No two accounts
agree on the names or order of the early obas, the genealogical connections
between them, or about which events should be attributed to which reigns.
The stories are consistent, however, in the broad picture they give of the
foundation and powers of a great pre-Okuku city state and its destruction by
the Ijesa. The later period is one in which there is almost complete agreement
about the names and order of the obas and about what-events should be
attributed to each reign; but the description of successive obas’ deeds is no
longer all there is to be said. It is an era about which every lineage has a say.
The dislocations in the commoner lineages’ narratives — visible in the double
form, already noted, where there is a founding ancestor of remote provenance
who is also a recognisable nineteenth century figure — may be the result of the
social dislocations of the war period. More will be said about this later. The
point to be made here 1s that the nineteenth century wars are part ofa common
historical experience, and any elder of any lineage feels entitled to talk about
what happened then. ‘Past time’, in ordinary discourse, is seen by these men
as nineteenth century time: the ‘old days’ were the days of evacuations, slave
raids, turbulent chiefs, and big men enriching themselves. Each narrator has
a different set ofreferences but all are located against this common background.
To many commoner elders, Kookin is just another name for Okuku, now }
fallen into disuse, and the past really begins with the fall of Ofa.
The way the past is recalled in these narratives is better understood by
looking at the role ork: play in them. In accounts of the quasi-mythical era,
what needs to be understood is the nature of their variability, which makes
itself felt as a kind of unanchoredness.
OKUKU HISTORY 63
Variations between ‘testimonies’ is of course one of the central concerns
of scholars of oral history. The Okuku narratives contain many of the features
identified by Vansina (1985). Differences in personal narrative style, for
instance, can give rise to two very different accounts. Another obvious factor
is the political interests of the narrators and the section of the royal family to
which they belong. In some cases, it was clear that variations in the upper
reaches of the genealogical tree were brought about when different narrators
tried to promote the claims to the throne of their own branch, or to eliminate
those of other branches. The tendentiousness of the narrators is sometimes
very subtle, and the interests at work are not always immediate or short-term
ones. In their accounts of the order in which the founding fathers of the other
lineages came to join the first oba at Kookin, both Ajiboye and Oyeleye refrain
from making over the story to conform to the present-day rank-order of the
chiefs. They preserve discrepancies — a different one in each case — rather than
provide a ‘charter’ for the way things are today. In this way, they remind their
listeners that the chieftaincy order was not always as it is now: the oba has the ,
power to raise and demote, and actually did so in several well-remembered
episodes of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history. They thus keep
open the possibility of further adjustments in future.”
But creative variation and motivated ‘bias’ do not fully account for the way
episodes, genealogy, and chronology seem to shift and re-form in these
stories. Achronicity and inconsistency pervade even a single testimony.
Ajiboye for instance insisted that Oluronke Otinkanre, according to him the
second or perhaps third oba, and son of the first one, founded the ‘three
branches of the royal family from which we all came’; but in his narrative he
told along story about Olugbegbe, who could not be fitted anywhere into the
three branches as he presented them. Furthermore, Ajiboye’s story would
loop backin time. His narrative begins predictably enough with the chieftaincy
dispute at Aramoko, the departure of the elder brother, the foundation of
Kookin, and the arrival, in order, of all the founders of the z/e which constitute
present-day Okuku. It goes on to tell the stories of how the highest chief in
Kookin, the Eesa, offended the oba and was expelled, whereupon he went and
founded his own town, Inisa (now Okuku’s neighbour and its greatest rival);
and of how a prince of Kookin came-to be the ruler of another neigbouring
town, Eko-Ende. Ajiboye then describes the greatness of Kookin, its sack by
the Ijesa Arara, and the establishment of the new settlement, Okuku. He tells
the story of the leopard-king Olugbegbe. He returns to the Ijesa Arara war to
add further explanation of the Ijesas’ motives and additional description of
the size of Kookin before it was sacked. He goes on to tell the story of the
foundation of Iba, another neighbouring town. He reverts to the theme of
Kookin and its rivers, and the flood which spared the livestock. He then goes
right back to the pre-Kookin era in Aramoko, and explains the origins of the
Olooku cult and festival which the people brought with them from Aramoko
64 ORIKI IN OKUKU
to Kookin and from Kookin to Okuku. He jumps forward from there to the
reign of Oyekanbi, and then finishes the rest of the story in a few sentences,
listing the obas that succeeded Oyekanbi (Edun, Oyekanbi again, Oyewusi I,
Oyekunle, Oyinlola, Oyewusi II) up to the present day.
In other words, he tells the story of the foundation and establishment of
Kookin in a straightforward manner, but having done so, he begins to weave
back and forth in time, apparently at random. What underlies this is a non-
linear, non-sequential mnemonic practice. Almost every episode (including
some of those in the ‘straightforward’ part) is built around or attached to one
of four things: the interpretation of a name; location in a still-existing, marked
place; explanation of a ritual; or the interpretation of an oriki.
An etymological motive sets off several of the episodes. in Ayjiboye’s
narrative. The story of the Eesa who was driven from Kookin for offending
the oba is built around the name of the town, Inisa, which is said to mean Ini-
Eésd, the property of the Eesa. The story of how he left Kookin and went to
found his own town is told to ‘explain’ the name. In some versions, this small
keyword opens out into a narrative of great imaginative detail.’* The whole
story is felt to be condensed into the name Inisa, and the name is the point
of the story as well as its trigger. Similarly, the story of the foundation of
Okuku itself ‘explains’ the name Okuku, which is said to mean Awon okt: t6
ku ku, ‘those who are left of the dead’. By thinking of the name, the story is
called forth. The story of the foundation of Iba is explained as follows:
The village of Iba was founded when people came from Apa to Kookin
and asked the oba of Kookin to give them some land. The oba did so,
and told them to build themselves a farm-hut [abd] there to live in. After
a while the place became known as Iba because of this. -
itself, , ]
In the case of the Inisa and Iba stories, the motive is obvious: it is to assert the
overlordship of Okuku and the tributary status of the other towns, which are
presented as either an offshoot of Kookin or as late-coming beneficiaries. But
the point being made here is the manner in which the story is encapsulated
in a durable, permanently accessible mnemonic locus, the name of the town
Other episodes are inscribed in permanent features of the landscape.

*Kookin was so big that the Igbo-ita forest outside Okuku was at that time the
egungun’s sacred grove on the outskirts of Kookin’: that is, although the centre
of Kookin was several miles away from the site of Okuku, its outskirts reached
to the edge of the present town. The Igbo-ita forest thus becomes a permanent
reminder of the size and former glory of Kookin. There is also a part of the
forest called zgbo Olugbegbe, where I was told I could see the chain that marks
the place where Olugbegbe eventually entered the earth and disappeared after
terrorising the town with his magical feats for so long (‘but only if you’re not
purposely looking for it”). Other stories are encapsulated within rituals. The
wrestling match which is the high point of the Olooku festival is a reminder
OKUKU HISTORY 65
of a story about the original struggle between the spirit Olooku and the oba
of Aramoko, or, in Ajiboye’s version, a commoner who became the champion
of the the town. The annual enactment of a wrestling match between the
priest of Olooku and the oba is said to have been instituted precisely in order
to commemorate the original event; each year, its performance reminds
people of the story. Finally, stories about the past are encapsulated in ortkz,
brief and well-known phrases that nonetheless open out into lengthy narratives
in the hands of a knowledgeable elder. Ajiboye remembered what he wanted
to say about the relation of Kookin to the river Otin because of the epithet
ayabuéro, ‘place where strangers stop and drink’:
One of Kookin’s ortkiis ayabuéro. This is because ofa famous flood. The
river Otin flowed near the town. One year it rained and rained and the
river flooded everybody’s backyard and all the hen-houses, goat-pens
and dove-cotes were carried away. But after about twelve days, when
the flood subsided, all the animals were still alive. The river was
recognised as a beneficent one and was honoured with the name @ ya
bi érd, i.e. ‘strangers stop to drink its waters’. And that was why Ladile
named his first son Otinkanre, ‘River Otin touches something good’.
Oyeleye likewise concluded his story of the magical boa by quoting an orskz:
‘And afterwards the women put it into a chant, saying, “In the year that Alao
founded the second Okuku, a palm-tree became a boa and crawled away”’.
The whole of Ajiboye’s narrative up to Adeoba 1s based on emblems: the
ritual, the geographical location, the name, the ortk1. Each encapsulates within
it or suggests by its associations a story, and the narrative is a collection of such
stories. But all these emblems are simultaneously present and available to the
narrator. They are inscribed in a landscape seen every day (even if it is a
mythical landscape containing Olugbegbe’s chains); in names heard in every
conversation; in rituals performed annually; or in all-pervasive oriki. They are
all there and available, spread out side by side, as it were, without intimations
of chronological succession. The weaving, recapitulating movement in
Ajiboye’s narrative is the effect of a narrated past which inheres in objects,
names and practices contemporaneously surrounding the narrator. Oriki not
only participate in this mode of recall, they also, characteristically, redouble
it. They introduce a kind of second-order emblematisation: for they not only
speak of events from the past, they also speak of the other emblems by which
these events are remembered. There are ortki about the ritual, the landscape,
and other durable and visible signs of the past. All these signs are absorbed
by ortki and given a textual embodiment which makes possible a much greater
elaboration. How this is done is discussed in Chapter 5.
In the stories of the post-Adeoba period, ortki play a somewhat different
role. It is likely that big men became more prominent in the political life of
the town in this period, and that the far greater volume and elaboration of
personal oriki probably testifies to this fact, rather than being merely the result
66 ORIKI IN OKUOUKU
of erosion in oral transmission of earlier personal orik:. What is certain is that
the big men of the post-Adeoba period are always recalled by their descendants
either through extensive personal orzki —- much fuller and more detailed than
the emblematic references of the earlier period — or for the kind of actions and
qualities which that style of or:ki dwells on. But while the personal ork: of great
men of this age are so much more profuse, their mnemonic role is reduced:
they are used to amplify a story whose outlines are known independently. The
stories told about this period do not depend as heavily on visible or verbal
‘survivals’ as those told about the earlier period. And when they quote orikz,
it is usually to evoke the qualities of a personality rather than to recall events
in the history of the town. But even when these stories of the nineteenth
century do not mention orkzat all, they talk about the kind of thing that personal
oriki were developed to celebrate, and clearly inhabit a specific universe of
thought to which ortki offer a key.
The twentieth century, for which there is a variety of documentary
evidence as well as a wealth of personal memories, is also the period during
which the composition of new orth lost its impetus. From the resettlement of
Okuku in 1893 till some time in the 1930s prominent individuals were still
celebrated and commemorated with lavish personal ortk1. Oba Oyekunle (1916-
34) acquired a substantial corpus of oriki of his own, as did a number of
powerful chiefs and medicine men, like Fawande of z/e Baale, Bankole of ile
Aro-Isale, and Toyinbo of zle Aworo. Their stories are told in Chapter 6. Oba
Oyinlola (1934-60) also attracted extensive personal ortk: celebrating his
formidable qualities, but most of his contemporaries did not. After that, the
composition of new oriki suffered a decline in Okuku. The performance of
oriki continued unabated and flourishes vigorously even now in a multiplicity
of forms. But performers tend to draw on the existing stock of epithets rather
than composing new ones specifically attributable to one subject.
The great changes brought by colonialism are spoken of endlessly in
personal reminiscence but are directly referred to hardly anywhere in ortk1. The
first Christian convert was made in 1905; Islam was introduced in 1910; the
railway from Lagos to Kano reached Okuku in 1904, and transformed the
local economy by providing an outlet for surplus production of foodstuffs,
especially yams. Farmers and businessmen went in for commercial yam
farming in a big way. Substantial amounts of cocoa and kola had also been
planted by the early 1930s. As the need for cash grew, to finance the
establishment of cocoa and kola farms and for other purposes, a large
proportion of the male population took up migrant labour. Most of the older
men in Okuku spent several years in Ghana, Lagos or Abeokuta in the 1920s
and 1930s, trading or more often working for the Public Works Department
on the railways, roads, plantations, and gold mines. ,
The reign of Oyinlola (1934—60) is thought of as the age of stability and
growing prosperity deriving from really substantial cash-crop production.
WHAT ORIKI DO 67
Oyinlola pioneered the cultivation of a new type of kola (known in the area
as ob1 Olokuku) which was extremely popular and made his fortune. Oyinlola
was the first Christian oba in the town and the first to support education.
Having decided that Oyinlola’s predecessor was too weak, the colonial
administration proceeded to back up Oyinlola with police and local court.
This was the golden age of the oba, which his successors have found it hard
to live up to. He was able to marry seventeen wives and educate all his fifty-
odd children, founding a dynasty which up till today is unquestionably the
power behind every civic or communal enterprise.
In the 1950s, the great exodus to the ‘far farms’ got under way. This shift
of focus not only put an end to a number of traditional practices, but also
accelerated changes in family structure, notably allowing young men to free
themselves of their fathers’ control and cultivate their own farms independently
or with a full brother at an earlier age. Education also had a transforming
effect, though this was partly concealed by the fact that the better-educated
sons and daughters of Okuku almost invariably went away to work in bigger
towns, only returning at Christmas and Easter. Their presence is made
visible, however, by the large and elegant houses that the more prosperous of
these people have built around the edges of town, as a monument to their
patriotism rather than as a place actually to live.
Little of this, however, is commemorated in the continual performances of
ortki that take place in Okuku. I will argue in Chapter 6 that the reasons for
this arrest in the growth of the tradition of personal oriki, following its nine-
teenth- and early twentieth-century flowering, are associated with changes in
the basis of personal power, and with them, changes in the role of oriki
themselves. What is recreated in oriki performances now is an older idiom.
But it 1s an idiom which is not in any sense irrelevant to the present. Indeed,
it animates the present and enables people to put a value on it.
3. WHAT ORIKI DO
Within this context of Okuku, past and present, we can now return to the
question of how ortki are constituted as texts. We saw that it is the apparent
autonomy of its constituent parts that makes an oriki text appear centreless,
boundariless, formless and resistant to conventional criticism and conventional
historical analysis. To know how the oriki text works, I have suggested, we
have to know what the performer is doing. At the most fundamental level, what
she is doing 1s naming. From this starting point flow all the characteristic
features of the chant.
It is said that:
A ii dagba ojé
Ka ma ma lalajé
Nij6 ta a ba gbo
Ta a ba t6 ni omo eni i ni fi kin.
68 ORIKI IN OKUKU
We never live to a ripe old age
Without acquiring some nicknames
On the day we grow old
In righteous age, our children will use them to
praise us.
The process of ‘acquiring nicknames’ — that is, or1ki — begins with the
naming of a baby seven or eight days after birth. As well as a multiplicity of
other names, the child is given a single or:ki-name. Oriki-names stand out
among the rest, for most of them have the same distinctive structure,”’ and
all of them are used to convey special affection and intimacy by a senior person
to a junior. Like other names, oriki-names have meanings. A girl might be
called Abéni [one whom we supplicate before owning], Ajiké [one whom we
rise to caress], Adiini [one whom people compete to possess]. A boy might
be called Ajani [he whom we fight to possess], Akanbi [the one conceived
without delay] or Adigun [one that is tied straight, i.e. proper and decent].
To this name will automatically be attached another one which 1s associated
with the father’s orile, i.e. the ancient place of origin by which his extended
patrilineal kin group is defined. The orile name is emblematic, and is often
taken from nature (e.g. Okin, king crane; Owa, palm leaf stem; Amo, mud),
and less often from human artefacts (e.g. Aran, velvet). P. C. Lloyd calls these
‘totemic names’ (Lloyd, 1955, p. 237), but, as he makes clear, the things they
refer to are not totems in the sense that there is a special relationship between
them and the people named after them: they are strictly emblems by which
large scattered sets of people recognise a relationship amongst themselves.
Thus the week-old baby will already be equipped with an appellation
beginning, for instance, Ajike Okin, Ajala Owa, or Akanbi Amo. When people
pronounce these names, the ork: orile of the father’s lineage follow almost
automatically. These ortkz orile will be used to salute the child all through its
life. Everybody, therefore, is equipped from the start with ok2; women as well
as men, children as well as adults can be saluted whenever the occasion arises.
The ortki orile, which are the subject of Chapter 5, remain the most highly
prized social symbols throughout the person’s life and the source of their most
profound satisfaction. But as a child grows up and begins to show individual
characteristics, those around it will begin to select, from a common repertoire,
personal oriki which are felt to be especially appropriate to it.2° A child of very
dark complexion could be addressed:
Igbo fi dudu sola
Okéé fi ribiti sayo.
The forest makes its darkness a thing of high
esteem
The hill makes its roundness a thing of joy.
WHAT ORIKI DO 69
And a tall, good-looking boy could be called:
A-gun-tasoo-lo.
One who is tall and worthy to wear [good] clothes.
As the child grows to adulthood and acquires specific skills and capacities,
more specialised ortzki may be added to his or her corpus. The more outstanding
the person, the greater the number of ortki that will be added. For this reason,
men acquire more than women, and important men acquire more than
ordinary men.
An exceptionally knowledgeable babalawo might be given this oriki, which
claims that he has such a deep knowledge of divination that even from outside
the house he can tell which of the 256 odu (divination figures) another diviner’s
throw has turned up:
O gbo sésé Ifa 6 yalé
O gbéyinkulé mo tye odu to hu
‘Aigbofa la a 1: woke, Ifa kan 6 si 4 para’
L6 t6 babaa Faronké se.
He hears the clink of the diviner’s chain 1n someone’s
house and he pauses
From out in the yard, he already knows what odu has come
up
‘Not knowing Ifa, we gaze up in consternation, but
there’s no Ifa in the rafters’
This is what father of Faronke is worthy to be called.
A very successful farmer can be saluted with the following ortkz: it says that
he has such a big farm that he actually has separate plots of maize for each kind
of dish made from the crop:
Ayindé alagbado-égbo-léko
Babaa mi agbingbado éwa 16to
Ayindé alagbado isaaju
Baba Ojutémori, ni i gbani low6 ebi
Ayinde, one who has maize for pottage in his farm
My father, who plants maize for pudding separately!’
Ayinde, ‘maize that ripens before other people’s’
Father of Ojutomori, ‘is what saves us from hunger’.
These are ortki for exceptional men: I found them applied to only two or three
people in the whole collection of texts I recorded. They were probably
originally composed for a single person, and later borrowed for attribution to
other people who achieved similar greatness. Some ork? celebrate qualities or
70 ORIKI IN OKUKU
attainments that are more universally aspired to — wealth, a large household,
many wives, the capacity to resist the attacks of rivals. Other personal ortki,
on the other hand, commemorate something so particular to one person’s life
that they remain exclusively his.
The original oriki name given to a baby is therefore like a peg onto which
a growing string of other attributions is hung — first just the corporately-owned
ortki orile, later personal ortki that refer to specific qualities or attainments
belonging to the individual. But as well as being attached to a name in this
manner, oriki are also ike names. Yoruba names all have meanings.” Some,
called oruko amutorunwa, are ‘brought by the child from heaven’: they signify
particular circumstances surrounding the birth — a child born feet first is Ige,
a child born with the caul is called Oke, and so on. Other names, called oruke
abiso, are ‘names given after the child is born’, and may reflect the parents’
situation or desires or their hopes for the child’s future. At its naming
ceremony, a child may be given almost as many abiso names as it has well-
wishers. Only a few will be kept on for regular use, but many will be
remembered for their honorific significance. Abiso names are compressed
statements, often in the form of a complete sentence: Ajetigbe means ‘Wealth
never dries up’; Moromoeke means ‘T have got a child to cherish’. Some even
contain subordinate clauses: one name for an abiku, the child who is born only
to die and be reincarnated over and over again, causing a succession of infant
deaths in the family, is Molome, which is short for Omo-ié-mo-ohun-ti-yd0-se,
‘It is the child who knows what it’s going to do’ (i.e. whether to go on dying
or to consent this time to stay with its parents). Each name is self-contained,
for it has its own meaning which is not continuous or connected with the
meaning of the other names belonging to the same person. When addressing
someone, there 1s no reason to say these names in any particular order. Since
they are unconnected, there is no necessary sequence. Noris there any reason,
apart from familiarity and habit, to pick one selection rather than another out
of the total range the person possesses. A person could be. addressed as
‘Ogungbile’ or ‘Babatunde’; as ‘Babatunde Ajeiigbe Aderibigbe’ or as
‘Aderibigbe Babatunde Ayodele Ogungbile’. The only difference would be
that the more names the speaker brings out, the more intimacy he or she
would be demonstrating with the family, and the more affection and esteem
for the owner of the names. It would be unusual to try to say all of a person’s
names, but equally unusual to use always and only the same one.
But if the names are in one sense autonomous, each constituting a
complete statement with its own field of reference, they are also all connected
in the sense that they all belong to, and signify, the same person. They thus
become equivalent, and are alternatives to each other. ,
Names can be used to address people as well as to refer to them, and it is
the vocative aspect of naming that oriki take up and elaborate. The whole of
an ortki chant is in the vocative case. The units of ortki are also constructed
WHAT ORIKI DO 71
in aname-like way. All the features that have been identified as characteristic
of ortki are in fact products of the construction of oriki as names. Perhaps the
most important of these features, noted by Olatunde Olatunji (1973, 1984),
is the high incidence of nominalisation in oki, Phrases and even whole
sentences are turned into nouns through the use of prefixes such as a- and o-
(‘one who...”), d- “one who...’ in the passive) and o/- with its variant realisations
al-/ol-/el- “owner of...”). These nominalising prefixes occur very commonly in
ordinary language, in nouns like apeja (a-pa-ga, one who kills fish, i.e. a
fisherman), obi (o-bi, one who gives birth, i.e. a parent), djeku (a-je-ku,
something which is eaten and remains, i.e. left-overs), and alaga (oni-dga, owner
of the chair, i.e. the chairperson at a meeting). But in ork: they are used much
more frequently and are attached to much longer and more complex phrases
in inventive ways. This passage from the ortki of the orisa Loogun-Ede, for
instance, is constructed almost entirely out of complex sentences nominalised
with a-, d- and d-:
Panpa-bi-asa, asode-bi-oldgbo
O-gbija-onija-fesé-ha-1i-para
O-takiti-lori-irék6-fenu-gbégb4-ebo
Abikéhin-yéyé-tii-yo-gbogbo-omo-omi-lénu...
Swift as a hawk, one who hunts like a cat
One who takes on other people’s quarrels and ends up
getting his foot stuck in the rafters
One who comes somersaulting down from the top of the
mahogany tree and seizes the calabash of offerings
in his mouth
Last-born of the Mother [River Osun] who annoys all the
children of the water.
Each of these nominalised epithets has been derived from a longer noun-
phrase. Oxgbija-entja-fesé-ha-n-pard, for instance, is a contraction of the phrase
‘Ent t6 maa n gba ta entja, t6 si maa n fesé ha ni para’. The nominalising
construction allows the conjunctions, relative pronouns and aspect-markers
to be dropped, making possible a condensed, compact noun-like formulation
which is nonetheless internally complex. In some cases oriki go beyond the
rules of ordinary grammar, and attach nominalising prefixes to whole
sentences without converting them first into noun-phrases. This happens in
the ortki of the great farmer already quoted:
Ayindé alagbado-égbo-léko
Babaa-mi-agbingbado-éwa-loto
Ayindé alagbado-isaaju
Baba Ojutomori, ni i gbani low6 ebi.
72 ORIKI IN OKUKU
Ayinde, one who has maize for pottage in his farm
My father, one who plants maize for pudding separately
Ayinde, owner of ‘maize that ripens before other people’s’
Father of Ojutomori, ‘is what saves one from hunger’.
In the third and fourth lines of this excerpt, a/- meaning ‘owner of’ is attached
to the whole sentence dagbddo isaddju ni i gbant low eb1, ‘it is early maize that
saves one from hunger’. The effect is to attribute the whole idea to Ayinde,
as if it were a favourite saying of his, or a saying particularly associated with
him, and therefore already half-way to becoming an ortki. Thus nominalisation
in ortki is more flexible and more accommodating than in ordinary speech.
Long complex phrases and even whole sentences can be brought in under
cover of a nominal epithet and made to behave like anoun.
Another structural device in oriki for rendering statements into names is
the frequent use of omo..., ‘child of, which can be put at the head of a line or
even a whole passage of text and has the effect of making everything that
follows into an attribution. In the orki of Ojomu’s compound, for instance,
we hear:
Omo odo nigi
koko lam
Omo iyi la yido
Kéni ma yii’ koko |
Beni ba yikoko
Inu: alamo 4 bajé.
Child of ‘The mortar is made of wood
The pot is made of clay’
Child of “The mortar can be rolled
Let no-one roll the pot
If anyone rolls the pot
The potter will be distressed’.
‘Child of? here means ‘descendant of people who own the following
attributions’, or ‘one of the people who can be called by the following names’.
Omo presents what follows it as an expression which can be applied attributively
to a subject. Even when it introduces a long connected passage, the whole
passage 1s as it were in quotation marks: it is not a simple statement but a
statement which belongs to someone, or some group, as a name does.
The compression and laconic terseness so characteristic of the style of ortki
makes each unit manageable as a name-like formulation. Obscurity and
allusiveness are the result of a deliberate process of packing extensive
meanings into a brief phrase. This gives ortki their quality of ‘heaviness’: they
are dense with an implicit significance which is known to be there even when
people do not know what it is. To work as names, they must be compact and ;
WHAT ORIKI DO 73
condensed, encapsulating meanings rather than displaying them, and
indicating that there are narratives to be told rather than narrating them. Just
as given names can be abbreviated or expanded, so can ortkz: they are quotable
and attributable items. But they go beyond mere names, and become
signatures: names imprinted with the distinctive personality of their bearers,
from which much more can be read than is at first put on view. It is orzkz that
the drummers play to announce a visitor’s arrival at the palace, for the ortki
is heavier, more memorable, more identifiable from its form alone, and more
significant than the visitor’s ordinary names.
The performer of or1ki continually reminds the hearers that what she is
doing is naming her subject. She can do this by interjecting the subject’s given
names — his abisg — again and again into the ork: text. ‘This is a way of calling
the subject’s attention to what is being said to him, of insisting that he give
his total and undivided attention to the performance, and of underlining the
fact that the whole performance is in the vocative case. The incessant
interjection of personal names is one of the most recognisable features of orikz
style. The personal names are an interruption into the ork text; but they are
also clearly in apposition to the ortki, reminding us that the ork: too are being
used attributively in relation to a given subject. We have already seen a
number of examples of this; let me quote again the ortki of Ayinde, the great
farmer:
Ayinde, one who has maize for pottage on his farm
My father, one who plants maize for pudding separately
Ayinde, owner of ‘maize that ripens before other people’s’
Father of Ojutomori, ‘is what saves one from hunger’.
When the singer interrupts herself to call ‘My father!’ she seems to be
addressing the subject directly. ‘Father of Ojutomori’ is even more of an
interruption, breaking as it does right through a nominalised sentence (‘maize
that ripens before other people’s is what saves one from hunger’), and seems
obviously to be addressed to the listening subject. ‘Ayinde’, interjected twice,
occupies a position that could be both vocative and nominative: ‘Ayinde is a
person who has maize...’, or ‘Ayinde, listen to me, you are a person who has
maize...’ In either case, the name ‘Ayinde’ is parallel to the ork: that follows
it. The performer may also quite explicitly inform us, after a long passage of
oriki, “That is what they call so-and-so’, or ‘... is worthy to be attributed to so-
and-so’. At the end of the passage honouring the great babalawo, quoted above,
the performer tells us “This is what father of Faronke is worthy to be called’.
In the Enigboori excerpt quoted and analysed in detail in the second
chapter, the performer uses both these ways of making attribution explicit. In
the space of only seven lines, she addresses Babalola directly four times and
ends up ‘...2t won n ki baba Banlébu’, ‘...is how they salute the father known
as Banlebu’:
74 ORIKI IN OKUKU
Ewu child of Alao, the first steps of the child delight its mother
Babalola, the child opens its arms, the child delights its father
The way my father walks delights the Iyalode
Eniigbori, child of the father named Banlebu
If people don’t find me in the place where they boil yokun dye
They’ll meet me where we go early to pound indigo
Enugbori, that’s how they salute the father known as Banlebu.
Thus we are never allowed to forget that when the performer utters ortkz,
what she is doing is bestowing on the subject a plethora of elaborations of, and
alternatives and equivalents to, his own names. Even quite long passages of
oriki orile, often patterned and with a certain amount ofnarrative development,
can be rounded up and presented to the subject as an attribution by the use
of devices such as these.
The autonomy of ortki, then, is like the autonomy of names; and ortki are
therefore equivalent to each other and interchangeable in the manner of
names. At one level, each unit of ortki is quite separate, inhabiting its own
universe of reference; but at another level, it is equivalent to all the other units
belonging to the same subject. They are interchangeable in the sense that they
are all alternative ways of addressing the same subject. A unit can be
substituted for, or added to, others without altering the nature of what is being
done. Like names, the units can be performed in any order, and any selection
from the total can be made. It is this that makes the text radically unlike the
texts that common sense European criticism defines as ‘poems’. The name-
like quality of ork: units makes it possible for a performer to vary the order
from one performance to the next; to perform a different selection from the
corpus each time; and to repeat units at will, returning to them again and
again if she wishes. This means that the ‘text’ can be highly unstable. Each
performance of a given subject’s orkz will be different from all others. Habit
and a kind of thematic drift does lead, in some performers’ productions, to
a ‘silting-up’ effect, where certain units tend to appear in the same order each
time. This is particularly true of ortki orile, the most widely-known and often-
recited of ortkz. But in principle there is nothing to prevent the performer from
breaking up these clusters. Indeed, there is an aesthetic preference for
variation and surprise in performance, the most skilled performers producing
the most fluid and variable texts, as we shall see in the next chapter.
It is because the constituent units of a chant are not only autonomous but
also equivalent to each other that the form of a chant is not produced out of
its determinate internal relationships, and there is no ‘sense of an ending’.
Since any unit could equally well occupy any position in the performance, and
any unit that has been left out could equally well replace any one that has been
included, there can be no boundaries to the chant that could be said to have
been determined by its inner structure. More units could be added indefinitely
WHAT ORIKI DO 75
without altering the ‘form’ of the chant. To close it, the performer needs
signposts, clear formulas that will signal to the audience that she intends to
stop.
The ‘naming’ that ortk: do is of a specific effectuality. When a performer
utters ortki, she addresses herself intensely and exclusively to the subject,
whether he or she is living or dead, human or spiritual being. In a festive
gathering she will address many subjects, often interrupting her chant to turn
to an important newcomer or moving from person to person in a circle of
auditors. But as long as she is addressing one person, she concentrates entirely
on him. If the subject is a living human, present at the performance, she can
be seen leaning towards him, bestowing her words on him, almost visibly
creating and maintaining a powerful dyadic bond. And the subject is visibly
affected. He appears locked into the relationship, galvanised by what he is
hearing; he seems to expand, to take on afflatus, and to be profoundly moved.
Much of what the performer does can be seen in terms of strategies of
insistence. She asks the recipient again and again ‘Are you listening to me?’,
‘Are you attending to what I am doing?’, “These are your ortk7’. By calling him,
interjecting his names into the chant and by continually reminding him that
oniki are equivalents and alternatives to these names, she engages him in an
intense dialogue in which, though silent, he is constitutive of her discourse.
The vocative is also evocative. Ortki call a subject’s qualities to life, and allow
them to expand.
Uttering a subject’s ortkz is thus a process of empowerment. The subject’s
latent qualities are activated and enhanced. This is true ofall subjects. A living
human being addressed by ortki will experience an intense gratification. He
or she has associated ortkz since earliest childhood with affection, approval
and a sense of belonging to a group. At the same time that your ortki offer you
the security of group membership, they confer on you alone — as long as the
performance goes on being addressed to you — the marks of distinction. The
recipient of an ortki performance is deeply moved and elated. Many recipients
respond by giving the performer more money than they can afford. To
describe the experience, people say Ori mi wu, ‘My head swelled’—an expression
used to describe the thrill and shock of an encounter with the supernatural,
for instance if you meet a spirit on a lonely forest path. Onki arouse the dormant
qualities in people and bring them to their fullest realisation. The oba is most
fully an oba, most securely located in his glory, when he is enhanced by the
royal ortki. Warriors in the nineteenth century would be raised to the pitch of
courage needed to go to battle by the stirring utterance of onki. Oriki
performers often seem to be screaming, so urgent and intense is the process
of empowerment.
The dead, addressed by their orzk1, can be recalled to the world of the living.
Itis in and through an ortki chant that the performer empowers and encourages
the ancestor to return to the living household of his descendants. Offerings
76 ORIKI IN OKUKU
are made at the oju oor, the grave shrine inside the house, and kola is thrown
in a simple form of divination to ascertain that the ancestor has accepted
them. Now all that remains is for him actually to get up and come. But to do
this, he needs to be empowered with the surge of energy that makes possible
such transitions. This can only be provided by ‘making his head swell’
through the galvanising and enhancing properties of omki. The ancestor’s
journey is pictured as an arduous one. The orki singer may exhort him to
spring up and make his way quickly over the great distance that:separates the
world of the living from that of the dead, but to stop and rest if it is too tiring:
Babaa mi ro wayé o ,
Babaa mi gbobi, yoo womo
Parord wa, 0 waa jeewo |

Babaa mi ro wayé 0 waa jiyO waa jepo ,
Babaa mi ri muti adaagbe e se baba lofe
Babaa mi ofere gégé o
Babaa mi oféré gégé ,
Ofere faafaa letuu fo
Porogodo
Baba, oké ii lawéré laya
1ak6k6 sogi |
Baba, b6 ba mo lé o laya o ya sinmi.”° }
My father has accepted the kola, he will watch over our children
Father, transmigrate back to earth ,
Transmigrate, come back and eat ééw0d*°
Father, transmigrate back to earth, come and eat salt, come and
eat palm-oil
My father drinks from a never-drying fount of wine, tell father to
be sprightly
My father, spring to your feet
My father, spring to your feet |
The guinea fowl flies up as free as the air |
The woodpecker taps the tree with a rattling sound .
Father, heights never make the monkey lose his breath -
But father, if it’s tiring you, stop and rest.
Thus ortki make possible the crossing from the world of the dead to the world
of the living, making the past present again. |
Orisa and other spiritual beings are treated in the same way: ortki uttered
to them both empower them, and localise them in the human community
whether through possession or more simply by securing their presence at a
shrine. Every fourth day, an orisa’s devotees perform an early-morning
ceremony at its household shrine. Food or just kola is offered; the orisa’s
acceptance is solicited; prayers and incantations are uttered; and one of the
WHAT ORIKI DO 77
women chants the ork: of the orisa. Without the ortki, the presence of the orisa
could not be secured. On bigger occasions the performance is of course more
spectacular. At the Sango festival, the most important ceremony is the public
possession of the head priest in the oba’s market place. The devotees and the
public gather; the devotees form a circle and begin to dance round in single
file, singing cult songs. Then three women, each with a few supporters,
separate themselves from the circle and take up positions outside it. These
women begin to call on Sango with his orikz. The bata drummers back them.
The women start their chant in an orderly fashion, taking it in turns to chant
the ortk: and allowing their supporters time to repeat the chorus after each
line. But they steadily become more impassioned. They step up the pace,
interrupting each other more and more until they are all shrieking at the tops
of their voices. As the sound reaches its greatest intensity, the priest, who has
been waiting at the side of the arena, suddenly leaps up and with a great
answering cry of ‘Hooo!’ rushes into the centre, rapidly stripping off his outer
garments, leaving only a pair of purple velvet shorts. Bare-chested and
staring-eyed, he rushes into the centre of the circle, scattering the dancers.
The oriki chanters follow him, singing his praises ecstatically, while the crowd
flees. He then begins a series of stunts and feats that convince the onlookers
he is indeed possessed: Sango has been called down from his place ‘lagbede
mépi ayé oun orun’ (‘half-way between heaven and earth’) by the frenzied
chanting of his ortki, and has entered and transfigured the human devotee.
Equally dramatic effects are achieved when egungun— ancestral masquerades
— are saluted with their ortki. Each family takes great competitive pride in its
own egungun’s ferocity, especially the families that possess eegun alagbo, the
masquerades that carry medicines and parade round the town, overturning
market stalls and terrifying innocent by-standers.*! But the power of egungun
depends on human action to maintain and restore it. After being Kept in store
for two years (the festival is biennial) the egungun has become limp and feeble;
its powers have to be deliberately restored by human action. This takes the
form of making a sacrifice to its head — dripping the blood of a decapitated
chicken over the mask — and at the same time, chanting its ortki. Human
attention can also have longer term effects on the egungun. The royal egungun
Paje used to be much more savage ‘in the old days’ than it is now. Its priest
told me: “This egungun was more ferocious in the old days, we tamed him. If
we want him to become ferocious again we’ll make sacrifice to his head and ,
we'll salute him with his ortki over and over again. If we keep on like that
saluting and saluting him, he’ll get up, he’ll begin to rush around, he’ll
threaten people. Everyone will run away!’. When an egungun’s powers have
been diminished over a long period they can only be restored by intensive and
prolonged utterance of ortki. It is not the orzkz: by themselves but the process
of attributing them, the action of uttering them and directing them at the
subject, that is effectual. The longer you go on, the more effectual it will be:
78 ORIKI IN OKUKU
A a kit, kit, kid — ‘we'll salute and salute and salute him’.
Oniki performance then 1s not just a matter of piling up prestigious and
reputation-enhancing encomia. It actually effects changes of state. The
subject is translated. The living human is translated into his own fullest
existence: ortki awake his potential powers and expand the social space he
occupies. The spiritual world is translated into the human world, brought in
and localised; but this implies not domestication so much as an intensification
of the powers of the spiritual beings. It is by being invoked, called upon, that
the orisa or egungun attains its most concentrated being. The past is translated
into the present: great men and women of the past are called on to be present
in the affairs of their descendants and to lend them some transmitted glory.
Oriki can do this because they are felt to encapsulate, in compressed and
concentrated form, the very essence of their subjects’ natures. They hold the
‘secret’ of the subject — the principles ofits being— and their utterance releases
its true powers. Oniki must be addressed to the subject, whether present or
absent, living or dead; and it is the intense one-to-one bond between utterer
and recipient that allows the utterance to be effectual. Oriki, that is, open
channels between beings through which powers can pass and potentials
emerge.
The centre of the chant, then, is the subject himself or herself. He or she
is the living instance and occasion for it: not just the ‘hearer’ or the ‘audience’,
but the heart of the performance and the very principle of its. constitution.
Each unit of the text 1s directed to him or her. Whatever their origins, separate
and often untraceable as they are, all of the units of a corpus in performance
converge at this point. Seen as a finished artefact, the ‘text’ may seem to 7
disintegrate into a jumble of fragments; heard in action, the principle of its |
coherence becomes apparent. As so often, this principle is continually
referred to by the performer herself, in the act of performance. She frequently
reminds both the subject and other listeners that in uttering oriki she is
bestowing on him the greatest of gifts, a heightened state of being.
The effectuality of ork: lies in the intensity and length of the process of ,
salutation. The more epithets a performer bestows on her subject’s head, the more
effectual the process. If a chant seems to have no sense of an ending, no:clo-
sure, this is precisely the impression the performer wants to create: she wants |
you to think that she could go on forever. In rara tyawo the bride can boast: .
Maa wi maa wi ni i sod6 iyan
Maa ro maa ro ni i sorégun oka
Bé e nin wi mo le wi dola
Isé mi ni, Owo mi ni
Eé { su mi
Eé j ré mi...”
‘Speak on, speak on’, that’s the way of the pestle
WHAT ORIKIT DO 79
‘Keep talking, keep talking’, that’s the way of the stirring-stick
If you want me to speak, I could speak until tomorrow
It’s my work, it’s my trade
I never weary of it
I don’t get bored with it...
Profusion is highly valued. Cleanth Brooks, doyen of American New
Critics, urged that criticism ‘reject the obese poem, the overstuffed poem’
(Brooks, 1947, p. 221). But the fatter and more fully-furnished an oriki chant,
the more gratifying to the recipient.
The impulse to profusion is what underlies the incorporativeness of ortki
— an incorporativeness so far-reaching that it has created doubts about
whether to define oriki as a genre or as a material. Oriki chants seem to be a
category which swallows everything and leaks into everything, exhibiting a
boundarilessness which goes well beyond the constitution of individual
performances. The performer, in addressing a subject, will seize on materials
from whatever source is available: not only from other ortki corpuses, but from
other literary genres too. With a skilled sleight of hand she will convert these
diverse materials to attributions for her subject.
Borrowing personal onki from other individuals 1s so common that there
is a permanently-available stock of unanchored attributions, applicable to
whoever qualifies — the skilled babalawo, the great hunter or medicine man,
the successful farmer. The great majority of epithets thought of as ‘belonging’
to a particular person in Okuku turn out, on further investigation, to have
entered the corpus of at least one other person. People often take over orikz
from a particular person of their acquaintance, sometimes on quite tenuous
grounds. Enquiring about an obscure epithet I heard in a performance in
honour of the Oluode (the Head of the Hunters) of Okuku, I was told that it
was a personal ortki acquired by the Oluode of Igbaye, a neighbouring town.
Since they were both Heads of Hunters, the Oluode of Okuku felt he was
entitled to share the ork, even though this particular epithet made no reference
to hunting. Specialist performers frequently bestow on their subjects ortki that
they have learnt elsewhere. The ork: of ortsa— contrary to the assumptions of
many scholars of Yoruba religion — also float and are borrowed by devotees
seeking material with which to enhance the reputation of their own divinity
(see Barber, 1981b and 1990b). Even ork: orile, which are often described as
the most stable and clearly demarcated of or1ki— defining, as they do, large and
enduring social units — seem to tolerate a considerable degree of overlap.’ It.
is therefore impossible to conceive of ortki as belonging to clearly defined
corpuses each of which belongs exclusively to one subject. Despite the fact
that ork: are felt to encapsulate the essential character of each subject — its
difference and distinctiveness — it is in practice impossible to draw a definitive
line around any subject’s corpus, even at the abstract level of the total
80 ORIKI IN OKUKU
potential units any performer could know.
Oriki are like a material rather than a genre in the sense that they can be
performed in numerous different modes. Certain performances are referred
to simply as ‘ortki’: for example, the recitation, in a speaking voice, of ortkz
orile, as a morning greeting or to congratulate or honour someone. But, as we
have seen, there are other performances which have their own names: like
wala, the hunters’ chant, zw, the chant of the egungun performers, rara the royal
bards’ chant, rara tyawo (in standard Yoruba, ekun tyawo) the bride’s lament,
and countless localised performance modes such as olele (in Ijesa), alamo (in
Ekiti) and so on. These chants are distinguishable by their vocal qualities and
their musical contours (see Vidal, 1977, Olukoju, 1978), but all of them are
constructed from the same basic material: or1ki of various kinds. Each chant
concentrates on the oriki appropriate to the context for which. it is being
performed: in yala, the oriki of animals and those of Ogun, the hunters’ god,
are prominent; in iw: the ortki of Ologbojo, the legendary founder of the
egungun cult, are usually included. Some chants also include a good deal of
supplementary material relating to their function. The performer of 177 1s an
entertainer, and will include jokes, advice and topical comments with the
oriki. The performer of rara tyawo is a bride, leaving her family 1n solemn
circumstances, and she has a large repertory of laments, expressions of
gratitude and farewell to her people, and reflections upon her impending
change of status. But in their core content, and in their form, all these chants
are the same; their features derive from the possibilities inherent in the form
of ortki. This dual existence, as a genre (‘orikz’) and as a building block of other
genres (such as ‘ijala’, ‘iwi’, ‘rara’ and ‘ekun tyawo’) has led Olatunde Olatunji
to devise a two-pronged classificatory system which distinguishes “feature
types’, recognisable by internal formal features (e.g. ortki, ese Ifa, proverbs,
incantations) and ‘chanting modes’, recognisable by the manner of vocal |
realisation (e.g. wala, 1wi, ekun tyawo). He explains that not only are chanting |
modes built up out of materials provided by the feature types, but also one
feature type may incorporate another — ortki may use a proverb, ese [fa may
contain orik1, and so on (Olatunji, 1973, 1984).
This is a helpful approach which avoids many of the problems encountered
by any attempt to impose a single system of classification of genres on Yoruba
oral literature. But its very success as a scheme means that it does not
correspond to local practice. In Okuku at least, there is no exhaustive and
systematic classification of genres of oral literature. Oriki as a basic and
irreducible source from which many performances are derived is always
acknowledged; any question about the meaning of an item abstracted from
an oriki-based chant is likely to draw the response, ‘Oriki 11’, ‘It’s ortkz’, as if
this were all that needed to be said. But not all performances — 1n fact, very
few of the total range — have a name that corresponds to Olatunji’s idea of the
‘chanting mode’. In Okuku, the only named chanting modes based on ortkz
WHAT ORIKI DO 81
are tala, iwi and rara tyawo. Each of these is specialised in some way. [ala
belong exclusively to the guild of hunters, zw: to the association of egungun
entertainers, while rara tyawo, though learnt by all girls, are performed only
once, in very special circumstances, in each girl’s life. These modes are
therefore marked out from the broad many-stranded stream of daily household
performance, which is not named. If you ask ‘What kind of performance is
that? Whatis it called?’, people are likely to reply ‘Oni kiéniyann?’ (She’s saluting
people) or, 1f the subject is a water divinity, ‘O n pagbo ni’ (She’s saluting the
medicinal infusion [made from the sacred water]), and if the occasion is a
funeral and the subject is the deceased person, ‘On poku mi’, (She’s calling the
dead). In other words, the performance is conceived not as a classifiable
object — a genre — but as an activity defined in terms of the circumstances
which occasion it.
But the indefiniteness that surrounds the concept ‘ork: chant’ is not only
the result of local lack of interest in genre classification. It arises, more
fundamentally, from the porous and disjunctive form of ortki, which permits
performances to be extremely incorporative. An oriki chant makes use of all
kinds of materials. Proverbs, for instance, are always ready to hand, and a
skilled performer may use strings of them. Often they are used not as a straight
commentary on life from the persona of the performer, but attributively, as
a piece of wisdom associated in some way with the subject:
Omo Abégunrin, omo Adis eléte 6 pa 16ju eni
Baba mi, é¢hin eni la a gbimoran ika
Adié bé 9 gbd bd 0 16 6 gbd
Abdégunrin baba mi 0 lémi ni ni se funni?
Omo isé léko-ajomu to bi mi
Baba mi, iya ni sokoto akitibo
Bi 0 fan won lésé 4 mu won dookun
Akintayo baba mi 6 ni ohun eni ni i moni lara.
Child of Abogunrin, child of Adio, ‘the plotter doesn’t plot before
your eyes’
My father, ‘It’s behind your back they make their evil schemes’
Adio, ‘If you hear about it and say you didn’t hear’,
Abogunrin my father said, ‘what harm can it do you?’
Child of ‘Sharing the hot gruel’s an inconvenience’ who bore me
My father, ‘Sharing a pair of trousers is a pain’
‘If they’re not too tight in the legs, they’ll be cramped at the knees’
Akintayo my father, he said, ‘Having one’s own things is really
more convenient’.
All these sayings are well-known reflections on human society, identifiable as
owe (proverbs) and with an independent existence outside the context of the
82 ORIKI IN OKUKU
orikt performance. At the same time, they are chosen because they express
views which fit very well with the philosophical ambiance of personal oriki,
belonging as they do to the ruthless struggle between competing big men. The
world is deceptive; people who appear well disposed may be scheming against
you behind your back; it is undesirable to be dependent on other people —
having to share one’s breakfast or one’s trousers with someone else leads to
problems, and, by implication, so does any other over-close association with
another person. It is good to be detached, independent, indifferent to the
machinations of one’s fellows. All these sayings are quoted as the characteristic
utterances of the subject, Abogunrin: ‘Abogunrin my father said...’, ‘Akintayo
my father, he said...’, suggesting perhaps that he was in the habit of making
philosophical remarks of this kind. But the association of the subject with the
proverbs goes further than this. The implication is that Abogunrin’s behaviour
exemplified the lesson taught by the proverbs: he himself was a living proverb,
remaining aloof and undeceived by his fellow-citizens. Whether he actually
said these things or not is irrelevant; he deserves to have the proverbs
associated with his name for a better reason. Thus the proverb itself becomes
an oriki, an alternative to a name, and the subject can be addressed as ‘Child
of “Sharing the hot gruel’s an inconvenience” who bore me’. ‘Sharing-the-
hot-gruel’s-an-inconvenience’ here clearly stands in the place of a name,
turned into one by the familiar and simple technique of prefacing the
expression with omo..., child of, like so many other orthz.
But much more substantial texts than proverbs or series of proverbs can be
equally easily incorporated into an ortki chant. In a salutation of members of
tle Aro-Isale, Sangowemi at one point launched into the following excursion:
Akandé omo ‘Sofé séléri’, omo ‘ord nisan’
Igba éékini ti mo mégbaa jo
Igba éekéji ti mo tin mégbaa lu
Igba 6 waa déeketa atata ,
Akandé, mo waa kaki mégbaaa mi walé
Mo waa deélé ,
Mo wai ko kéré 6 dint oko o
Iwo lomo ‘Béngbé 6 gbé

Emi longbin 6 gbin?
Bongbin 6 gbin,
Emi lonht 6 hue
Bonhu o hu
Emi londagba 6 dagba? |
Bondagba 6 dagba
Emi loritanna 6 tanna?
Bontanna 6 tanna
Emi lonso 6 so?
WHAT ORIKT DO 83
Bonso 6 so, Ayodelé,
Emi lonla 6 1a?
Bonla 6 la
Akandé, emi lonyo 6 yo?
Boényo 6 yo
Emi lonja 6 jaa, Bankolé Ayodélé Gbotifayo?
Bonja 6 ja, omo Abégun-légbere,
Emi lonta 6 ta?
Bonta 6 ta
Emi londa 6 daa?
Bonda 6 da nlée won
Emi l6nka 6 kaa?
Bonka o ka,
Emi lonta 6 ta?
Gba ofita waa ta tan, Sofé-seléri,
Em’onpAsandé 6 pAsandé?
Bi Alaran-an 6 ran, emi leégtn fi sé
Omo Abégun-légbere, 6g0g6 mo 1 pajaa Moje.
Akande child of ‘Get gifts and promises’, child of ‘Wealth at Isan’
The first time that I took sixpence to the dance
The second time that I gave sixpence to the drummers
When it came round to the third time
Akande, I just brought my sixpence home
I used it to buy cotton seed, I took it into the farm
I came home
You are the child of ‘If the winnowers don’t winnow
What will the planter plant?
If the planter doesn’t plant
How will the sprouter sprout?
If the sprouter doesn’t sprout
How will the grower grow?
If the grower doesn’t grow
How will the bloomer bloom?
If the bloomer doesn’t bloom,
How will the fruiter fruit? |
If the fruiter doesn’t fruit, Ayodele,
- How will the splitter split?
If the splitter doesn’t split,
Akande, how will the comer-out come out?
If the comer-out doesn’t come out,
How will the picker pick, Bankole Ayodele Gbotifayo?
If the picker doesn’t pick, child of Abegun-legbere
84 ORIKI IN OKUKU
What will the spinner spin?
If the spinner doesn’t spin,
What will the buyer buy?
If the buyer doesn’t buy in their lineage,
What will the folder fold?
If the folder doesn’t fold
What will the seller sell?’
When the seller has finished selling, ‘Get gifts and promises’,
With what will the praiser of Asande praise Asande?
dress to come out?

If the people of Aran don’t sew clothes, how will the masquerade
What we have here, starting from ‘Bongbin 6 gbin’ (‘Tf the planter doesn’t
plant’) and going right up to ‘Bonta ti ta tan’ (“When the seller has finished
selling’), is an extended sequential poem, known as aro, which used to be
recited by children in the old days as part of moonlight story-telling sessions.*
It traces the stages of cotton cultivation — the planting, growth, harvest,
processing — culminating in the production and sale of cloth. Mastery ofa long
poem of this type would have been an exercise of memory for the child, getting
it right a tour de force, and the riddle-like formulations (ongbin, onhu, ondagba
and so on — the planter, sprouter, grower — are, as in English, odd-sounding
nonce-words made up to intrigue) a source of great amusement. Sangowemi
too includes the passage as a tour de force, but in her performance there is an
extra skill involved — the skill of attaching this long, independent and
apparently irrelevant text to the ortkz of her subject. She does so with ease,
casually and almost inconsequentially. The opportunity to introduce it arises 7
as she repeats some of the ortki orile of tle Aro-Isale, her subject’s compound,
related to ze Baale and sharing with them the distinction of being associated
traditionally with the egungun entertainment masquerade. The orki ore
revolve around the theme of professional entertainment, the lineage members’
skills as performers, and the rewards they get from the public (‘Get gifts and
promises’, ‘Child of Wealth at Isan’). The young people of the lineage are
supposed to be irresistibly drawn to drumming and dancing, and to attending
the performances of strolling players. A young man who has sixpence will
spend it on drummers rather than serious things. But if the drummers do not .
play, he will bring the sixpence home and spend it on seed for his farm instead.
The seed sprouts, grows, flowers, bears fruit, splits its pod, and produces
cotton which is spun, woven and sold. At the end, Sangowemi turns the whole
lengthy jeu d’esprit, by a kind of sleight of hand, into an elaborate salute to her
subject:
When the seller has finished selling, ‘Get gifts and promises’
With what will the praiser of Asande praise Asande?__
WHAT ORIKI DO 85
The entire sequence is thus made to lookas if it led up to this conclusion: every
stage of the cotton cycle is seen, after the event, as a metaphor for the process
of praising. If the farmer does not plant the seeds, cotton will not grow; if the
praise-singer does not have materials, she will not be able to praise her
subjects. As so often, the performer is doing her job and reflecting upon it at
the same time. Her conclusion to this passage reveals the importance, to the
performer, of laying her hands on textual materials with which to fill out her
chant. She has just demonstrated, in the use of the aro, what good use she can
make of these borrowed texts. Finally, for good measure, she ties in the
passage not just with Asande as an individual (‘With what will the praiser of
Asande praise Asande?’), but also with the ortki orile of his lineage, with which
she began. The cotton cycle results in cloth; cloth is the principal prop and
symbol of the masqueraders:
If the people of Aran don’t sew clothes, how will the masquerade
dress to come out?
Thus we are brought back to where we began. And all of this display, the
performer makes clear, is done in Asande’s honour and attributed to him.
If other genres provide ready-made materials which can effortlessly be
incorporated into oriki chants, then the stock of materials on which the
chanter can draw to produce any given realisation of her competence
becomes incalculably wide. ‘Oral tradition’ appears less like a hierarchy of
classified and boundaried genres and more like a vast pool of textual resources
into which the performer can dip at will.®* An oriki chant, then, is essentially
incorporative; its centreless and boundariless form makes it endlessly :
accommodating. Its mode is to subsist by swallowing other texts.
Clearly, the appropriate starting point in approaching such a performance
is not a concept of a definable, demarcated genre, but an apprehension of
process. The way ortki are constructed, out of a multiplicity of quasi-
autonomous, equivalent and interchangeable fragments, in a fluid,
incorporative and agglomerative mode, suits their purpose perfectly. If ortkz
simultaneously bring to realisation the potential of unique individuals, and
remove categorial barriers that hinder the flow of power from one being to
another, it is their apparent formlessness that enables them to do so.
The performer exploits the possibilities inherent in this form to achieve
remarkable effects. What has been discussed so far is the fundamental
character of ortki in general. All ortki performances are a process of naming,
all are composed of textual items that are name-like in structure and function,
and all involve a transcendence or transformation of state, whether mild or
dramatically powerful. But, like the word itself in VoloSinov’s account
[Volosinov (Bakhtin) 1973a] this protean and polysemic form is always only
potentially meaningful until it enters into a specific context whose parameters
define and pin down the utterance. Oriki are performed in a multiplicity of
86 ORIKI IN OKUKU
contexts and with a multiplicity of intents. These factors enter into the chant
and are perceptible in both their form and their content. Some performances
are more fluid than others, some are more patterned, connected and stable.
Some contain a great variety of different kinds of materials, others are
relatively homogeneous. Some are private utterances, some are public set-
pieces. Only by looking at concrete performances in particular circumstances
can the potentialities of the form be apprehended.
4
CONTEXTS OF PERFORMANCE
1. THE VARIETY OF STYLES

The same orki can be performed in strikingly different styles — not usually
identifiable as discrete genres, but occupying a continuum from the relatively
fixed to the relatively fluid, the relatively coherent to the relatively fragmented,
the relatively homogenous to the relatively heterogeneous. I begin this
chapter by comparing two passages which both contain the same ortki orile,
those of the Ale-Oyun people, represented in Okuku by ze Oloko. The first
is from a performance of rara tyawo (bride’s lament) by a young girl practising
with her friends before her wedding day. The second is from a performance
by Sangowemi on the occasion of the Ogun festival; it is addressed primarily
to the Oluode, the Head of the Hunters, who was a prominent elder in tle Oloko.
The two passages are at opposite ends of the stylistic continuum.
Rara tyawo is the first performance style a girl learns, in her childhood and
adolescence. The style is simple and easily mastered. It is also the least
characteristic of oriki chants, in the sense that the features discussed in the last
chapter — the intense vocative mode, the interjections, the insertion of
personal names, and so on — are at their least developed. Sangowemi’s chant,
by contrast, displays these features in their most full-blown form, taking them
almost to extremes.
This difference is partly to be understood in terms of the stages of the
learning-process. Women master chanting styles gradually, starting with rara
tyawo and moving on, as they gain maturity and experience, to more complex
and fluid styles. This shows that the fragmentedness and apparent shapeless-
ness of the mature woman’s chant is not an accident, nor the mere outcome
of ‘orality’: it is a hard-won, gradually attained skill, the product of long
habituation and experience. The more experienced and artful the performer,
the more fluid her performance. This chapter goes on, after the initial
comparison of styles, to trace the development of women’s mastery of them.
But variations in style also arise from the different purposes to which
performances are put. The utterance of oriki always creates and maintains
88 CONTEXTS OF PERFORMANCE
relationships: but the intensity, proximity, intimacy and indeed the point of
these relationships depends on whom the performer is addressing and in what
circumstances. The ‘context’ of performance can be seen as the whole web
of social and spiritual links which, in any orik: chant, the performer draws on
and recreates. Context in this sense is implicated in the innermost constitution
of the chant. The focus and intent of a rara tyawo chant are unique in the
whole repertoire of orientations available to a performer, and this is the main
reason for the unusual stylistic features of the chant which enable it to be
recognised as a distinct genre with its own name. After her marriage, the
maturing woman is called upon to participate not just in one but in a whole
range of expressive acts using omki. Each performance shares the same
fundamental properties, but each is also shaped by a specific intent and
orientation. The occasions range from diurnal domestic greetings to formal,
massed chants at a compound ceremony. In the last two:sections of the
chapter, I examine first the marriage ceremony and then a funeral to
demonstrate the significance of ‘context’ in the formation of the specific
textual properties of the chant. The example of the funeral demonstrates the
range of styles that a complex social drama can call up, and the flexibility of
the ortki chant as it is turned from one purpose to another.
(a) Rara tyawo: |
Nigba ti mo ni bo wayé
Mamaa mi, mo k6obi egbéje
Nigba ti mo 1 bo wayé :
Mamaa mi, mo kobi egbéfa |
Nitori iku kd, nitori arun k6é
Nitori orogun ayé
Eyi ti i se elénini orun ,
Orogun ti mo ba wi 6 ni
Omo ara Okin, n ni yoo séyaa mi
Ire lonii orii mi afire. ,
Tléé mi ni mo j6ko6o si |
Odédé mi ni mo tié wa
Eléyin ni i jogun érin
, Oun naa 16 ni n waa sikéji oun
Ire lonii orii mi afire. |
Mamaa mi se yayi t6 wemi
Ko jé n toro aso low6 abutni
Ko jé n toro ew l6w6 awon séganségan
Aso éyi to wu mi ni mo r6
Ko jé ki n r6 kijipa lagboro ,
Ire 16nii orii mi afire. ,
THE VARIETY OF STYLES 89
L6j6 oni mo fé kilu awa
Agba 16 jé mo ara Oyd
Omo ara Oyo mo fé kil awa 0
Nibo 16 jolé?
Nibo 16 si waa jolé babaa mi?
Oy6 16 jolé
Oyé 16 mo waa jolé babaa mi.
Apard méloé péré
N naa 16 4 be ni Oyd awa?
Aparo méta péré
N naa ni nh be ni Oyé awa.
Okan 1 se ka ba ka ba
Okan ni se ka fd ka fo
Okan 1 se ka fo piri ka relé Alé-Oyun.
Nigba to di léékiini
Mo dako suru
Suurd suurd suurd si Anlé-Oyun
Esu se bi eré
Esu mu mi 16Ko je
Nigba to diléékeji ewe
Mo tun dako suru
Suura sturt siurd sAnlé-Oyun
Est se bi eré
Esu mu mi loko je
Mo kéj6o mi 6 dilé Alé-Oyun
Alé-Oyun ti ni témi ébi ni.
Mo ni tori ki ni?
O ni igba ti esti 6 16ko ti 6 1éd6 nké,
Emi loo ni késu 6 moo je?
Ow6 omo ni mo ni 6 ba mi ka lo
Ani bibé un 6 jona, bibé un 6 jolé
Maa yaa tété bokoobo’miin lo
Mo gbagbé mo rOyo-ilé
Omo Oldyod’lé ti gbagbé lorii mi
Mo ni baba, ki 0 pé, tori ki ni?
O ni tori Ogégeré ni mi
Emi té rérun ké ségi
Ire lonii orii mi afire.!
When I was coming to the world
My mother, I brought 1400 cowries’ worth of kola
When I was coming to the world
My mother, I brought 1200 cowries’ worth of kola
Not because of death, not because of disease :
Because of the co-wives of this world,
The ones that bring their enmity from heaven.
Whatever co-wife I may chance to have,
Child of the Okin people, may she be a mother to me,
I was sitting quietly at home
I was staying quietly in my house
“The owner of good teeth inherits laughter’
It was he who said I should come and be his partner.
May good luck attend me today. |
My mother did me proud, to my great satisfaction
She didn’t let me go begging for cloth from abusive people
She didn’t let me go begging for gowns from the scurrilous
I’m wearing this cloth that I like very much ,
She didn’t let me go through the town dressed in kiipa [coarse
cotton cloth]
May good luck attend me today. |
Today I want to salute our town
He is a senior man, offspring of Oyo
Offspring of Oyo people, I want to salute our town.
Where might our home be?
Oyo is our home |

And where might the home of my father be? |
Oyo is the home of my father.
How many bushfowl
Are there in our Oyo?
There are only three bushfowl
In our Oyo.
One said ‘Let’s sit, let’s sit’ |
One said ‘Let’s fly, let’s fly’,
One said, ‘Let’s whirr off and go to Ale-Oyun’.
I made a little farm

The first time round
A little tiny farm at Ale-Oyun

Locusts came as if in jest
Locusts ate my farm up.
The second time around
I made another little farm
A little tiny farm at Ale-Oyun
Locusts came as if in jest
Locusts ate my farm up.
I took my case to the palace of Ale-Oyun.
Ale-Oyun said I was in the wrong.
I said why?
He said, ‘When the locusts have no farm and no river,
What do you expect the locusts to eat?’
Money and children, I say they should go with me

I say if that is not the way, if that is not the house
Pll quickly turn and go another way.
I took my calabash and went to Oyo town
The prince of Oyo took the calabash from off my head.
I said, Sir, excuse me, why did you do that?
He said it’s because I am a slender beauty
I have a neck worthy to wear blue segi beads
This excerpt is made up of five distinct sections, each of which is internally
coherent. The end of each section is marked by an unvarying closing formula,
‘Ire lonii orit mi afire’ (May good luck attend me today) which could be said
to be the hallmark of rara tyawo in Okuku: every performance uses it. Each
section has a different theme. The first is a reflection on the prevalence of
hostile co-wives and a prayer that in her new home she will meet only kindly
ones. The second says that she, the bride, was quite happy at home until the
bridegroom sought her out and persuaded her to become his wife. The third
praises her mother for looking after her, providing her with suitable finery and
thereby saving her from humiliation at the hands of malevolent gossips. The
fourth and longest section is part of the ortki orile of tle Oloko. The last section
— which occurs after other sequences of ortkz orile, omitted in this quotation
for reasons of space — also sounds like a quotation from the ortki orile of ile
Oloko, this time connecting them with Oyo rather than Ale-Oyun. But it is
deftly turned into a comment on the bride herself, suggesting that her beauty
makes her worthy of the bridal finery in which the performer would actually
be dressed when she performs the chant in public on her wedding day.
The bride’s chant therefore incorporates a variety of material in addition
to ortki orile. These sequences, reflecting on her impending change of state,
expressing her gratitude to her parents, her grief at having to leave or—as here
— her pride in her husband-to-be, make up a large part of most performances
of rara tyawo. They are not linked to each other nor performed in any set
order: each sequence is self-contained, its closure clearly signalled by ‘Ire lonii
orii mi afire’, and can be regarded as a single unit. Different brides will know
a different range of units, and each will perform them in her own order,
probably repeating several times those she knows or likes best. To this extent,
a performance of rara tyawo is flexible.
But each sequence is invariably repeated almost word for word the same way.
Each sequence is always completed before the bride moves on to another. And
each owes its inner coherence to a high degree of patterning, based on struc-
tural parallelism and repetition. The performer moves through these sequences
steadily and methodically, omitting nothing. In the section of oriki orile, for
instance, the forward movement is initially slowed down by a pattern of question
and answer, involving almost exact repetition: ‘Where is home?/Where is the
home of my father?/ Oyo is home/ Oyo is the home of my father’. The ortki
per-taining to Oyo are then introduced through an elaborate figure of the
three bushfowl, again presented through a repetitive question-and-answer
sequence: ‘How many bushfowl/Are there in our Oyo?/There are only three
bushfowl/In our Oyo’. Each bushfowl in turn does an action which leads
towards the key name, Ale-Oyun, where the story of the locusts is set. This
story — the heart of this particular ortki— is again set out step by step: “The first
time round.... The second time around...’ with full repetition at each stage.
The result is a style that sounds stately and quaintly formal. Even though the
bride is often nervous and tearful, and utters the lines at high speed, the
measured, leisurely and methodical unfolding of each theme still makes itself
felt. Lines are of even length, well marked with breath pauses and almost
always end-stopped. There is almost no deviation from the theme, interpolation
of other matters, or even interjection of vocatives apart from the standardised
‘My mother...’ (and, in other texts, ‘My father’, ‘My brother’, or ‘My com-
panions...”). There is heavy use of a few standard formulas, most notably
‘May good luck attend me today’, always used to close a section; but also
“Today I want to salute our town’, a stock opening, and ‘If that is not the way/
If that is not the house...’, a way of announcing either closure of a section of
oriki orile or the intention to embark on another one. Rara tyawo, then, are more
predictable than other modes of oriki chanting: easy to remember and easy to
follow. The style is transparent; though the inner meaning of the orki orile is
not at all self-evident, they are set out with an appearance of conscious lucidity.
(b) Sangowemi’s chant:
Akotipopo o ku odun o
Odun odun ni odun ayo ni yoo se
Akotipépé omo Ogunténléwd
N 6 roko Oguntdnlow6 no yena
Ogongogongo laran oko Sadyé
Ajilongbégbé 16 waa t6 okoo Jéjé se, Ayindé waa soja oldbd
bé sokoto
Gba ti oldbo 6 gba mo baba gbé kagbaa re botan, omo eké re
ni Moja
Iwanu omo Orandin
Péé ni won 60 re jégbe la muku wa 4 mt erin, olori ode
ajolu Eyo
Aje-féhinti ni mo jogbodo niwalé oga
To o ba lé sunmu lasunutnjt ida elesuku eja ni won n fi
lani lénu
N 60 yaa bésu relé Alé-Oyun, *mo bebe aso, [want omo
Oranditn
Iwanu ni iya Op6 jé, 6 digba éékiini mo dako lAléé-Oyun
nlé oldri-ode
Esti waa je mi l6ko
Mo waa kéjo ohuin rOy6, Oldéyd6 ti wi, 6 1éj60 mi, abi ni
Emi Abéni ni pé 6, oldri ode, ajélu Eyo
O waa digba kéji éwé, mo k6 ej6d mi rOyé, mo ni est ni jen
léko
O ni ngba ti est 6 loko ti 6 16d6
O lémi ni e ni kés 6 moo je, 6 ni omi i be [Anlé-Oyun, 6
ni e mu foso
Ogédé ti ni be 1Anlé-Oyun, 6 lomodé 6 gbodo sa 4 je...
Akotipopo greetings for the festival

This year’s festival will be a festival of joy
Akotipopo son of Oguntonlowo
I don’t hoe the farm, Oguntonlowo, I don’t clear the path
‘Jutting velvet’, husband of Saoye
Ajilongbegbe is worthy to be the husband of Jeje, Ayinde
went and took his trousers off in front of a female
When the female refused him, the father just stuck his
legs back in his breeches again! — son of ‘A good
forked stick at Moya’
Iwanu child of Orandun
Suddenly, they'll go and eat yam pottage, ‘Bring death and
Pll bring an elephant’, Head of the Hunters, one who
dances to the sound of the Eyo drum
I ate ogbodo yam till I couldn’t stand up at Iwale Oga
If you wrinkle your nose too much they’ll slit your mouth
with a blade made of fish-fins
[ shall go with the locust to the home of Ale-Oyun, child
of voluminous cloth, Iwanu child of Orandun
Iwanu is the mother of the Opo people, the first time
round
I made a farm at Ale-Oyun at the house of the head of the
hunters
The locusts came and ate my farm
So I took my case to Oyo, the lord of Oyo said I was in
the wrong
It is I, Abeni, calling you, Head of the Hunters, one .
who dances to the sound of the Eyo drum |
Then the second time around, I took my case to Oyo, I said
the locusts are eating my farm up
clothes 7
He said when the locusts have no farm and no river
He said what do you expect the locusts to eat, he said
there’s water at Ale-Oyun, he said use it to wash
The bananas that are at Ale-Oyun, he said the children |

must not cut and eat them, it’s dirty children
that immerse their clothes in water, Iwanu child :
of Orandun....
This is Sangowemi at her most turbulent. Her delivery was like a rapid,
jumbled cry, with sudden infrequent pauses of uneven length and a continual
tumbling forward movement — so that whenever an utterance seemed to have
reached its grammatical end she would tack something else on. Her breath-
units were far longer than in rara tyawo: indeed it seemed to be part of her
virtuoso technique to prolong them to the utmost. |
Like the performers of rara tyawo, Sangowemi incorporates a variety of
materials into her chant. But here it is not nearly as easy to see where one type
of material ends and another begins. The chant does not fall into clearly
marked segments, each treating a particular theme, as in the excerpt from rara
tyawo. Instead it is an eclectic mixture of fragments hurled promiscuously on
top of each other. It opens with greetings and good wishes appropriate to the
occasion, the feast being held by Ogungbile the Head of the Hunters.
Throughout the performance Sangowemi calls upon Ogungbile with a variety
of names and appellations, insisting on his attention: ‘Akotipopo’, ‘child of
Oguntonlowo’, ‘Ajilongbegbe’, ‘Ayinde’, ‘Iwanu child of Orandun’, ‘Head of
the Hunters’; some of these belong to Ogungbile in person, others to his father
Oguntonlowo, or to more remote ancestors. All enhance his presence at the
feast and all are bestowed on him by Sangowemi with this intent.
The oriki which she addresses to him before she reaches the theme of the
locusts are fragmentary in the extreme, and often almost impenetrably
obscure. ‘ “Jutting velvet”, husband of Saoye’ comes from the personal oriki
of the 19th century oba Adeoba, and was included because Jeje, the mother
of Ogungbile and the wife of Oguntonlowo, was a direct descendant of this
oba. ‘Ayinde took off his trousers in front of a female...’ is a personal ortki
belonging to Oguntonlowo, who was renowned for his exploits as a hunter
and as a womaniser. This passage is a fragment of a longer and more explicit
oriki, which according to Sangowemi was composed by Oguntonlowo’s fellow-
hunters to tease him. An elder of a neighbouring compound? explained that
during the nineteenth century wars Oguntonlowo was carried as far as the
Ijesa town of Imesi, where he began laying siege to the local girls. Sometimes
he was successful and sometimes not: if not, he would just tie up his trousers
and move on to the next:
Ogunténléw6é n 6 roko
Oguntonléwé n 6 yena
O déjJésa 6 ba won dé ‘Yin-mi-nw’
Oguntdénléw6 babaa mi 6 do era Owa kunkun bi eni 1 lagi
Ayindé wa soji ol6bd b6é sokotd
Gba olébo 6 gba md, baba gbé kagbaa re botan
Oguntonlowo I don’t hoe the farm
Oguntonlowo I don’t clear the path
He fucked the Ijesa, he fucked ‘Leave-me-alone’ [in Ijesa
dialect]
Oguntonlowo my father he fucked the subjects of the Owa
[oba of Ilesa] like someone splitting logs
Ayinde went and took off his trousers in front of a
female
When the female refused him, the father just stuck his
legs back in his breeches again!
Other phrases are fragments of oriki orile whose meaning and provenance I
was unable to establish.
Sangowemi’s exposition of the well-known locust story is similarly elliptical
and broken up. No sooner has she announced the theme (‘I will go with the
locusts to Ale-Oyun’) than she takes off at a tangent with the interpolation
‘Child of voluminous cloth, Iwanu child of Orandun’, even adding ‘Iwanu is
the mother of the Opo people’ before getting back to the story. The
interjections continue: after the first phrase she adds ‘in the house of the head
of the hunters’, after the second ‘It is I Abeni calling you, head of the hunters,
one who dances to the sound of the Eyo drum’. The story itself, instead of
being methodically unfolded step by step as in the rara tyawo, proceeds
apparently erratically in fits and starts. The narrator goes to Oyo to complain
about the locusts straight away (not after the second occasion as in the rara
tyawo) and 1s found guilty; but the reason for this is not given until the second
visit, when the Lord of Oyo tells him/her ‘What do you expect the locusts to
eat?’ This is the climax of the story, but Sangowemi proceeds instantly and
without any indication of closure to another theme (the water, bananas and
dirty cloth) which she links on with the greatest of ease. On paper her
performance looks fragmented, but in performance, the dominant impression
is of a sinuous and confident — some would say over-confident — fluidity,
demonstrated by an almost reckless disposal of themes.
Two chants based on the same orth: orile, therefore, can be realised in such
different styles that the relationship between them is hardly recognisable.
Here we have two texts each at an extreme pole of the fluidity-fixity
continuum. The rara zyawo is made up of relatively long internally-coherent
passages, each clearly demarcated and ostentatiously patterned. These
passages are repeated with little variation in wording. Little attempt is made
to introduce embellishments or to link one to the next except by a few well
established formulas. Two kinds of materials are used in the chant — ork orile
and special passages specific to the bride’s status and condition. (Occasionally
well-developed passages of personal ortki may also be included, but this is not
common.) The two are kept distinct in the performance; after performing her
laments and thanks to her parents, the bride may announce her intention to
start on the ortki orile by some such formula as “Today I want to greet our
town’. She may perform as many as four different ortki orile (one for each of
her grandparental lineages); but each is likely to be represented by only one
or perhaps two themes (of which the locust story is an example) which will be
given a full and extended treatment, expanded by repetition and patterned
introductory structures. Sangowemi’s performance on the other hand was
characterised by great fluidity: no two performances in this style would ever
be the same. Rather than elaborate a single theme at length, her procedure
was to leap rapidly from theme to theme, breaking off abruptly, often saying
only a brief phrase of an oriki before switching to something else, and
interrupting any semblance of narrative continuity with persistent vocative
interjections. These two performances differ therefore in regard to the degree
of fragmentation or coherence; the degree of fluidity or fixity; and the degree
of variety or homogeneity in the materials used. Other performances fall
somewhere between these two extremes.
These differences are not determined by any recognised conventions or
rules of genre. There are infinite degrees of variation along each of the axes
described. Two broad factors, as I have suggested, shape the configuration of
any performance: the experience and status of the performer; and the nature
of the occasion and of the relationships being established in the performance.
2. THE MASTERY OF ORIKI PERFORMANCE
Although everybody who lives in Okuku acquires at least a latent knowledge
of some of their own lineage’s ortki orile while still very young, it is only little
girls who are expected to take part in performances of oriki-based chants. The
few young boys who master oral poetic performance are those born into a
family where there is a male specialist of some kind: a babalawo, who teaches
his apprentices to chant the verses of the great Ifa corpus of divination poetry;
a hunter expert in ijala; or, before its disbandment, the group of entertainment
THE MASTERY OF ORIKI PERFORMANCE 97
masqueraders in z/e Baale. Other boys are not expected to perform chants; at
most, they will learn to join in the processional songs which accompany
numerous ‘outings’ around the town — such as funeral parades or the biennial
forays of the family egungun into the market, palace and public streets.
Young girls, however, begin to play a role in the public performance of all
kinds of songs and chants from quite an early age. All through their childhood
they accompany their mothers and older sisters on festival and funeral
parades; they participate in the oral performance that underpins family rituals
within the house; and they have their own songs that go with the games they
play amongst themselves. By the time they are adolescent they are able to hold
their own in the performance of the genre that is the special preserve of young
women, rara tyawo. On the ‘bride’s day’, the day before she goes to her
husband’s house, each bride is escorted by a party of younger girls from her
compound. As the bride chants her laments and farewells, they provide a
sympathetic chorus. Their role can be quite substantial; sometimes the
performance develops into a dialogue where the chorus has almost as much
to say as the bride:
Lilé: Dudtyemi abojo-su o
L6jO Oni mo ri MOmoo6 mi
Egbée: L&6jé oni elégbé gbohun re o
Elégbe gbohun re roké o
Elégbé 16 16j6 oni o
Oj6 Oni elégbé gbohun re o
L6jo Oni e ma gbagbé awa o
Ekeji mi olufé
Ekeji mi o ma gbagbé awa o
Lile: Kinin 60 gbagbé eéyin se o?
Emi éyin 6 sord
Soro ninu onigbagbé o
Ekéji mi ki ni n 66 gbagbé éyin se o?
Egbe: A pe egungun ori 6 ya egungun
A porisa se ori 0 yorisa
Nigba ti awa ni pé 60
Ekeji mi ori 0 ya iwo o
Ire lonii orii mi afire.°
Solo: Duduyemi [Blackness-Suits-Me], dark as the
threatening rain
On this day I see my mother —
Chorus: On this day the chorus supports you resoundingly
The chorus raises up your song on high
It’s the chorus that holds sway today
This day the chorus supports you resoundingly
On this day, do not forget us
My dear playmate
My dear playmate, don’t forget us
Solo: How could I forget you?
What you and I said to each other
Was not said to be forgotten
My companion, how could I forget you?
Chorus: We call the egungun, the egungun doesn’t listen
We call the orisa, the orisa pays no attention,
When we are calling you
My playmate, you don’t respond.
These lovely verses are chanted by the chorus of young girls in unison. In
language, structure, style and manner of delivery they are indistinguishable
from the solo part. The girls are therefore familiarised with the performance
of bridal laments long before their own wedding days. They also pick up the
ortkt ore that make up a large part of these chants, by listening to other brides
performing and by repeating the verses amongst themselves in play. Quite
young girls — about nine or ten years old — often volunteered to ‘sun rara’ for
me, and would usually produce a short and standardised version of their
lineage ortki orile with one or two verses of gratitude, lamentation and self-
contemplation thrown in. But two or three months before the date of their
wedding, young women would go into intensive training. They would go to
an older woman in the compound — often there was an acknowledged expert
all the girls in that house would consult — and ask to be taught the ‘real thing’:
oriki orie of greater length and complexity than they had formerly known, and
those of other lineages, for instance their maternal grandparents’; and
elaborate and copious laments, reflections on marriage, thanks to their
relatives and so on. They would do this learning privately, with a view to
surprising everybody on the day. Because of the shortage of time, they tended
to learn by word-for-word repetition, a process made easier by the highly
patterned and repetitive style of rara tyawo.
Some girls showed greater aptitude and interest in the chant than others.
During the festive period every year when dozens of brides would be
celebrating their ‘outing’? on the same day, the differences were quite
noticeable. Some girls would repeat the same handful of verses over and over
again to each group of listeners; others would attract a crowd as they held
forth, elaborately and at length, their repertoire of material seemingly
inexhaustible. But this one day is the only opportunity for even the most gifted
of girls to give a public performance of rara tyawo. After marriage, it would
not be proper to chant this genre publicly. A woman who liked the poetry
could sing to herself when alone, but she would never again have an audience
and a chorus.
This early mastery of a genre was not lost, however. In learning to perform
rara tyawo, young women mastered extensive passages of oriki orile and
sometimes also of personal or:ki. These materials would be recycled in other
performances in her married life. Not only the oriki themselves, but the verbal
materials out of which the rara text is constructed — stock formulas, standard
pairs and triads of lexical items, poetic idioms to be discussed in later chapters
— would form the basis of other styles of performance, styles depending less
on set patterns and long coherent sequences than rara, but sharing some of
the basic ingredients of this chant nonetheless. The young wife would attend
funerals and family rituals both in her parents’ house and in her husband’s.
All of these involved chants, made up chiefly of oriki orile and the personal oriki
of famous ancestors. Often, in a solemn ceremony, an experienced older
woman of the household would take the lead, as soloist, and the rest of the
women would repeat each line after her in chorus. The younger women would
thus gradually get used to the style and language of this type of chant through
participation in communal performances. Eventually, if the need arose, she
would be able to lead the performance herself. Other occasions offered
opportunities to those who were especially gifted. Funeral ceremonies
provided a forum for impassioned solo performances by the bereaved: but
these performances were not compulsory. A woman with special talent would
begin to find herself called upon whenever one of her relatives (more or less
distant) was involved in a public ceremony. )
Some women became expert at chanting through their dedication to a
particular orisa. Oriki is the central channel of communication between
devotee and god, and a woman who found herself among the dwindling band
of devotees would be given endless opportunity and incentive to become
expert at orisa pipe (oriki chants to the orisa): opportunities at every four-day
devotional session, at the monthly cult meeting, and at every feast during the
long drawn out ceremonies of the annual festival; incentive in the form of a
supportive and encouraging audience of fellow cult members, who would
exert considerable pressure to get a young devotee to play her part. When the
cults were still well attended, it was the duty of the younger women to perform
orisa pipe, while the elderly women presided over the performance without
actually taking part. Nowadays, there are not many young women still
learning the oriki of the orisa, and their elders often have to shoulder the
responsibility themselves. But one can still get glimpses of the extraordinary,
electric ambiance evoked by their performance, in which performers would
be visibly galvanised into surpassing themselves and each other in fluency and
intensity of expression. |
There were thus a number of spheres in which women could excel in ortkz
performance. Some women became recognised experts within their
compounds; they would be called on to take the lead at every family
ceremony, and approached by younger women to impart to them their skills.
After the more or less obligatory performance of rara tyawo on her wedding
day, however, a woman was never constrained by custom to do more than join
the chorus in group performances. The extent of her mastery of the art
depended on her own interest and talent. There was a quiet reward in the
esteem her mastery brought her. To outsiders these women’s gifts would
generally remain hidden. Obinrin ile, the wives of the household, did not
regard themselves as entertainers or as specialists, however gifted they were.
When Iasked to record their performances, they showed a dignified awareness
of their own powers, but they never asked for acknowledgement in the form
of money, as professionals did. But they and their own people: were proud of
their knowledge and talent.
Their sense of self-worth sometimes took the form of a protective shyness
which differentiated them markedly from specialist performers like Sangowemi.
Sometimes this attitude seemed connected with a religious prejudice. One
elderly woman performed a marvellous dirge during the funeral of her co-
wife; she was gratified that I recorded it and asked me to come back on another
day, when she would have time and peace of mind to give me:an even better
performance. But on the appointed day she told me that she could not do it;
excessive chanting was associated with paganism, and her Aladura church
would not like it. There seemed to be nothing in the words of her first
performance that a Christian would particularly object to, and other women
in the household laughed and tried to persuade her to perform for me again;
but she never did. Reluctance to put on a performance for an audience,
however, is not always associated with Christian conviction; it seems to be an
intrinsic aspect of the women’s definition of their own role as performers.
Specialists who perform for a living have to overcome this kind of modesty:
egungun entertainers boast that they prepare their children for their future
profession by washing their faces with a special soap that takes away all shame.
(And it is characteristic of the culture that those who are different should
make this into a matter of pride.) Ordinary townswomen, however, only
perform for a public larger than their own compound on rare occasions: at the
high point of a festival or at certain points during a funeral. These occasions
are always ones of high intensity and seriousness, in which the communication
the chant establishes with the dead or with the orisa is paramount and the
function of the performance as entertainment has receded to the background.

A specialist like Sangowemi, who derives most of her income from
performance, is by contrast an entertainer. She thrives on large mixed crowds
and her great experience enables her to adapt her style to almost any situation.
Her performances were always more breathlessly varied, eclectic and fluid
than those of ordinary obinrin ile. They also contained a large dash of
showmanship and self-display. The obinrin ile established their own role in the
interchange effected by the utterance of oriki, and commented on its significance
in the act of performing. But Sangowemi went further; she always presented
herself as performer, at the same time that she addressed her subject. She
more often included her own ortki; boasted of the artistic feats she had
accomplished or was going to accomplish; and drew attention not only to her
own skill but to the gratification that this produced in the hearer. Unlike the
obinrin tle, whose performance was bound up with their own compound and
domestic life, Sangowemi was to be seen at every social gathering, amongst
crowds ofrowdy men, at big meetings at the palace, and at all the public events
in neighbouring towns.
This difference was reflected in the quality and texture of their chants.
Obinrin ile, despite their modesty, were well aware that their capabilities in
some respects exceeded those of a professional. Sangowemi knew a bit of
every oriki in Okuku and beyond. Indeed, her knowledge of lineages and
attached lineages, of genealogical relations and individual nicknames in every
family, was astonishing; and she also knew ortki of all the ortsa and all the
egungun. She was present at every public event, and had something to say to
everybody present. During the early days of my research I found my
recordings monopolised by Sangowemi: she was always there, always twice
as vociferous as everyone else. But then a kind advisor, a babalawo, told me
“There’s too much Sangowemi in your recordings. She is fluent but she is
superficial. She doesn’t know as much about any compound as the people of
the compound itself.’ I began to notice that there were domestic ceremonies,
private family functions, where Sangowemi did not come, and where the floor
was taken by quiet elderly women of the compound: women who once they
got going produced chants of unparalleled beauty, more subtle and less
ostentatious than Sangowemi’s sometimes tediously dazzling displays. The
difference was always explained in terms of depth: obimrin ile knew, perhaps,
only a few lineages’ ortk: orile and a few people’s personal ork. But those that
they knew were acknowledged by their owners to be qinle ore, deep words.
They were fuller than Sangowem1’s renderings of the same ortki, and contained
idiosyncrasies and details that hers did not. ‘They contained less showmanship
but more substance.*
The sister of the babalawo who warned me of this difference was called
Faderera. She was an obinrin ile, but had become more attached to the ze of
her father and brother than that ofher husband after her second husband from
this lineage died. She was one of the most movingly expressive performers I
ever heard. She seemed to have total command of the idiom of ortki. She used
it to utter seemingly private thoughts as well as conventionally appropriate
public ideas. During the Egungun festival she would lead the chant in honour
of the ancestors ofher lineage. The other daughters of the family would repeat
each line after her. But on one occasion, after this formal public performance
was over and the participants had dispersed, Faderera came back alone. She
knelt down again at the grave-shrine, and addressed the ancestor again, this
time on a note of private anguish. She was seeking relief for a painful problem
in her life, and her words were both personal and poignant: -
Baba, 0 0 riko bo ti mohun mi pé yaya
Ipéayéda o!
Babaa mi so mi niye
Babaa mi fin mi 16kan balé nilé ayé o
Mo mo jé n roju ki n rayé gbo tie
Edindin oran kan fi mo ni din mi, Mobomiléjé
Babaa mi, ba n gbohun ti i dun mi 16kan mi... |
Father, don’t you hear the cough that has shattered my voice?
Ipeayeda! [father’s name]
Father, restore my memory
Father, give me peace of mind in this world
Give me the means and opportunity to attend to your call
One thing is causing me great pain, Mobomilejo
Father, help me to deal with what is causing such pain to my heart...
No other woman that I heard ever used precisely these formulations, with
their eloquent suggestions of urgency and intimacy. Faderera was one of the
Okuku women who was a master of the art of ortki, but who used her great
talent only within the compound.
In one performance she paraphrased just what her brother the babalawo
had told me: she claims the insider’s unchallengeably superior knowledge of
her own lineage orth.
Ta ni 6 molé ju mio
Ani n 66 kilaad mi ,
Omo Awoyemi, ta ni i molé eni juni i lo?
Oyagbénjo Fadérera
Mo kini kini
Mo kinyan kinyan
N 6 réni ti yoo ki mi mo
Folawé Wuradla omo 60 ki mi gbésan.
Who knows my house more than I do?
Child of Awoyemi, who knows anyone’s house more than the

person herself?
I say [ll salute my town
Oyagbenjo Faderera
I saluted and saluted people
I saluted everybody
There was no-one to salute me in return any more
Folawe Wuraola, my children will repay me in salutations.
However, what is also revealed in this passage is the permeability of the
border between the professional and the obinrin tle. There is no absolute
distinction. Faderera’s range may be more limited than Sangowemi’s, but her
skill is as great, and she knows it. The fact that she boasts of her skill in the
very act of exercising it testifies to this, for as we have seen, self-comment and
self-advertisement are the hallmarks of the entertainer.
The development of a performer and the degree to which she gravitates to
Sangowemi’s end of the scale depends partly on her background. Both
Sangowemi and Faderera had exceptional parents which help to account for
their outstanding skills as performers. Faderera was the daughter of the great
babalawo Awoyemi, Oba Oyinlola’s personal diviner and senior title-holder
in the cult of Ifa. Her mother was a devotee of Oya. Faderera said:
When my father celebrated his egungun feast, after he’d cast the kola and
it had come out propitiously, he would begin to call on his father with
all kinds of appellations. He would call his father, his father’s father. We
would gaze at his mouth as he spoke, we would gaze and pick up the
words ourselves. We’d repeat it after him, all of us children, and support
him with a chorus. That’s howI came to have the gift for it. [would learn
it all. Of course, while a person’s father is still alive we don’t take
something over before his eyes. But when he died, I took over and began
to chant as he used to do—I replaced him. My mother also used to salute
herself, and salute her father. She would perform during the Egungun
festival and she might do it on ordinary days just for pleasure, or
whenever her parents came into her mind. I would retain it all.
But if Faderera’s father was unusual in excelling in the domestic ortki
performances that are normally the province of women (Faderera stressed
that they were quite separate from his professional expertise in chanting Ifa
verses), Sangowemi’s mother was even more extraordinary, for she was a
fully-qualified practising babalawo, the only female one Okuku remembers.
This woman, about whom more will be said in Chapter 7, took part in all the
meetings and activities of the otherwise male Ifa cult association, and also
travelled for long periods performing divination for clients and adding to her
knowledge of Ifa. Sangowemi travelled with her, and acquired the habit of
performance. However, it was not Ifa that she learnt, but Sango pipe, for her
mother was also a notable Sango priestess. Sangowemi’s career was then
boosted by a colonial intervention: ,
During the egungun festival I would take part in the vigil, singing the ortkz
of the egungun priests, and one time Oba Oyinlola picked me out as the
best performer. The European arrived — Adunni [Susanne Wenger]
from Osogbo — and called us all to the ‘Barracks’ [the D.O.’s Residence
on the outskirts of Okuku] where she asked us to come forward one by
one — there was Adekunbi, the mother of Michael Oyekola, Erewenu,
Kolaade, Omironke of zJe Ojomu, Ere-Osun of ile Elemoso. She wanted
to select the best vocalist. She selected me, and told the oba that I was
the one chosen. Then I was taken to Gbongan for the competition for
the best vocalist in Osun Division. Then in the time of politics - 1952
— we began to perform the ork: of all the politicians, Akintola, Awolowo,
all the Action Group leaders. I went to many towns, and many of them
were known to me because I had accompanied my mother there on her
travels.
What these accounts show is that Sangowemi was one among many brilliant
performers, and in the early stages of her life did not necessarily see herself
as different in status from her peers. But her exceptional youthful experience
made her stand out among them; she won the competition, and from then on
became more and more of a professional, travelling far afield to attend big
events, and making her appearance at every social occasion in Okuku where
money was being spent. Her former companions stayed at home and
remained within the domestic tradition. But some of them — like Faderera —
had unusual backgrounds and exceptional gifts too, and knew themselves to
be extraordinary performers. Sangowemi, therefore, remains as one end of a
continuum, not as a discrete and isolated category of performer.
Learning methods also occupy a continuum, with something like rote-
learning at one end and something like Parry and Lord’s notion of ‘composition
in performance’ at the other. The young girl getting ready for her wedding day
memorises long sequences of rara tyawo and then repeats them with little
variation. At the other pole, a young apprentice —like Sangowemi in her youth
— would learn by following her mistress to public performances and trying to
join in wherever she could. She would learn by doing: continual exposure to
the sounds and techniques of performance and repeated attempts to imitate
them would gradually lead to mastery. As she became more experienced and
more confident, she would begin to use her materials more freely. The more
expert a performer, the more she would introduce variations, surprises,
interruptions and idiosyncratic passages of her own. Throughout her
professional life she would go on picking up new materials and new ways of
presenting old ones. The fragmentedness, eclecticism and fluidity of
Sangowemi’s chant represented an extreme of professional competence and
confidence, the outcome of a lifetime of experience. Again, however, the
THE BRIDE’S ENJOYMENT 105
difference in learning methods, though clearly a real one which correlates with
different degrees of fixity and coherence in the performances, is a difference
in degree rather than in kind. As we have seen, the young bride is not in fact
merely memorising ready-made chunks of material: she has become
accustomed to the style, form and content of rara zyawo through many years
of participation in other girls’ ceremonies before she settles down to prepare
intensively for her own wedding day. Professional performers learn by doing:
but they also fix passages of onki and other materials in their memories —
passages of varying length, some of them many lines long — and produce them
in more or less unvarying form each time they use them. Mature obinrin ile,
who fall somewhere in the middle of the continuum, learn new material by
formal repetition in public or domestic ceremonies. They may also go to a
senior woman and ask to be taught especially important ork: word for word.
The distinction, in fact, between memorisation and improvisation, though
it has been much relied upon by theorists of oral literature, is not a very useful
one. While Lord was clearly wrong to suggest that ail oral performance is
produced by precisely the same process of ‘composition in performance’, the
whole continuum as I have described it is actually occupied by varying
versions of this, some leaning more towards repetition of fixed passages,
others more towards free creative variation within the parameters of the given
performance style. What is central to all variants is habituation: that is, that
performance is picked up through practice rather than produced through the
Operation of consciously mastered rules. This notion, elaborated by Pierre
Bourdieu (1977), is important to the understanding of what an ortki performer
is doing in and by performing ortki, and I will return to it in the last chapter.
3. THE BRIDE’S ENJOYMENT
The distinctive style of rara tyawo 1s, as I have shown, well adapted to the
youth and inexperience of the performer. The exceptionally coherent, highly
patterned, and formulaic character of this genre, with its simple repetitive
structures, makes it easy for a beginner to master. Unlike the mature woman,
the bride has no chance to improve her public performance by gradual and
repeated exposure, because she performs rara zyawo publicly only on a single
occasion: an occasion, moreover, when she has many other things on her
mind besides poetry. Rara tyawo therefore has to be in a style which can be
quickly grasped and produced more or less mechanically.
However, the unusual style of this chant — with its absence of the
interpolations, ejaculations, rapid allusions and unfinished quotations
characteristic of other ork: chants — is also produced by the structure of the
occasion on which it is performed. Rara zyawo thus make a revealing test case.
By comparing the occasion of their performance with other occasions on
which more common styles of omk: are performed, the essential and
fundamental fit between the form of a chant and its intent, purpose, or point
will become clearer. The way that the chant’s organisation and texture are
apparent. | |
shaped by what the performer is doing in her performance will become
The day on which the bride performs rara is known as faajt tyawo, ‘the bride’s
enjoyment’. It is the day before she actually goes for the first time to take up
residence in her husband’s house. Since Thursday, in Okuku, is the auspicious
day for marriage, faaji iyawo is always on a Wednesday. From January to
March every year, Wednesdays are the days when brides are to be seen on
parade. On the morning of her faaji day, the bride stays at home receiving
visitors. Her hair is elaborately plaited and she is adorned with gold earrings,
bangles and necklaces. She changes from one sumptuous outfit to another
every fifteen minutes or so, in order to show off the extent of her trousseau.
Her family stay with her and her younger sisters and companions gather. In
the afternoon she begins her outing. Accompanied by her escort of young
girls, she goes first to her own parents within the compound and kneels
ceremoniously in front of them. She chants verses expressing her gratitude to
them for all they have done; her regret at leaving; her respect and affection for
them. Tears sometimes stream down the bride’s face as she does this. She will
add the oriki of her father’s and mother’s lineages. Her parents give her their
blessing and she moves on to other senior members of the compound,
repeating the performance for each in turn. There are verses to address to
each of her principal relatives. She then sets off on a tour of the town, escorted
by her chorus. She goes to each compound where she has relatives, performs
for them and receives blessings and small gifts of money from each. Her
outing lasts all afternoon and into the early evening. Before dawn the
following morning she is escorted by the women of her compound to the
husband’s house and her married life begins.
The day of the bride’s enjoyment is exactly at the turning point of the
protracted process by which a woman born into one lineage is incorporated
as wife into another. The process involves a double movement: first the man
is introduced to the girl’s lineage and must ingratiate himself:with them; then
living among them.° |

the girl is introduced into the husband’s lineage and must adapt herself to
Even today, marriage is a matter between two lineages, not just two
individuals; and in the past, it could be conducted without reference to the
wishes of the girl and man concerned. A girl could be promised to a friend of
her father’s before she was born. When they were young, men who are still
only in their fifties now expected their fathers to ‘marry a wife for them’; and
this meant that they left not only the financial negotiations but even the
selection of a suitable bride to the father and his advisors. Arrangements
between the two parties were carried out mainly through formal visits by
delegations representing each lineage. The use of go-betweens to conduct
courtship meant that sometimes the girl did not even know who her husband
was to be until her wedding day. An old man, particularly ifhe was of repellent
appearance, could send his handsome younger brother to do the courting,
and stories are told of desperate last-minute struggles on the sleeping mat
when the unfortunate girl discovered who her husband really was.
The first movement, then, was the introduction of the man’s people to the
woman’s. The man had to establish himself in her family’s esteem. Once the
question of a marriage had been mooted and its prospects investigated by an
Ifa priest, the elders of the man’s family would pay the woman’s family a
formal visit to thank them and show their respect. The visiting party would
be ceremoniously shown round the compound and all its outlying buildings,
so that they would recognise the full extent of the lineage to which they were
planning to ally themselves. They would also be shown which houses the
other daughters of the family had married into, so that they would be able to
recognise a female affine wherever they met one. After that, the man or his
senior relatives were expected to offer a series of tokens of respect to the
woman’s family. Once a year the man would perform owe, voluntary labour,
for his prospective father-in-law. This would involve bringing a large party of
young men from his own z/e to work for a full day on the father-in-law’s farm.
He would also be expected to present him with a load of yams and a chicken
every year on the day the father-in-law celebrated the festival of his orisa.
If the girl was betrothed while still a child, these annual dues would be paid
for years. When the girl was old enough to be married, the isthun ceremony
for ‘opening discussions’ and the parapo ceremony for ‘uniting people’ would
be performed. On both these occasions the man’s people sent gifts of kola,
strong drinks and money to the woman’s people. The woman’s family divided
them meticulously so that every member of the compound received a share
and was thus symbolically implicated in the new relationship. After this the
bride price would be paid. The money was raised by the man’s father, but sent
formally by the baale (head man) of one compound to the baaie of the other.
Then the date of the wedding could be fixed, after consultation with a
babalawo. The man’s father would then indicate his gratitude by sending the |
woman’s father a cock, known as adie idajo, ‘the fowl of the date-fixing’.
Up to this point, therefore, every stage of the proceedings represented
respectful approaches by the man’s family to the woman’s. The man and his
people had to show that they were serious about the marriage; that they
recognised the importance of the family they wanted to ally with; that they
knew every member of this family, however extensive; and that they were
grateful for being allowed to marry one of its daughters. The girl, ensconced
in the heart of her people, was the prize for which the man’s family had come
to beg.
This attitude of extreme respect lasts throughout the husband’s life. To
belittle or mistreat one’s in-laws is the worst possible breach of manners. The
man must remain forever grateful for being given the woman. Immediately
before the wedding day, however, the woman herself begins the second
movement of the process, a complementary inversion of the first movement.
The night before her faajt tyawo, the girl and her egbe, an informal group
prosper. ,
of age-mates, perform a ceremony symbolically marking her severance from
her former status and her natal lineage. A calabash is ceremoniously broken;
seven songs are sung; and kola divination is done to see if her marriage will
The faaji iyawo itself is thus a moment when the girl has been detached
from her former status but not yet inducted into her new one. Early in the
morning after her day of enjoyment, the bride is escorted to her husband’s
house. At the threshold, she 1s stripped and washed by the husband’s female
relatives, wrapped in a new cloth and taken to the compound shrine before
being conducted to her room.® She stays there for three days, hardly speaking,
her head covered in a cloth; and when she needs to go out to the bathroom
she is escorted by one or two little girls ofher own compound, who have stayed
with her. The clothes she came in are taken backto her own compound. There
then begins a series of symbolic acts demonstrating her willingness to
contribute her labour and her property to her husband’s people. On the sixth
day after her arrival they show her where all the married daughters of the
compound live — the counterpart to the groom’s earlier introduction to the
married daughters of the bride’s family — and she ceremoniously sweeps their
yards for them. After that she has to draw water and grind pepper for each of
the women of her husband’s compound in turn. On the ninth or the fifteenth
day, her people bring her dowry of household equipment — plates, cooking
pots and utensils — that she has been collecting for years. It is put on display,
and then divided amongst all the members of the husband’s family. Even
small children receive something: for every person already there before she
arrived is considered to be senior to her, and every one of them is implicated
in the process of acquiring her services. She is required to: treat even the
smallest boys with respect, calling them by avoidance names, for they are all
her husbands.’ This division of her property is a sign that the transfer of the
bride to her new home is complete. After about three months she will take up
all the duties of a compound wife. |
The ‘bride’s enjoyment’, then, falls at the point at which the contractual
process inverts itself: the man, as suppliant, has been introduced to the
woman’s family; now the woman, as subordinate, is introduced into the
man’s family. It also falls between two ceremonies which mark the bride’s
transition from belonging to her father’s lineage to belonging to her husband’s.
The girls’ evening game symbolises, with the breaking of the calabash, her
break with her own lineage. The early morning ceremony at the husband’s
doorway, when she is stripped of her former clothes, washed, and wrapped
in a new cloth, symbolises her incorporation as a new person into the
husband’s lineage.
For aman, getting married for the first time is an unqualified improvement
in status. As a young unmarried man he was no more than a subordinate in
his father’s household, working for his father on the farm but having no
control over the household income. A wife made him the nucleus of a new
household. She was the foundation stone of his future existence as an
independent social being. Even though he might remain technically under his
father’s control until the old man’s death, he would be recognised by other
people as a social being in his own right. For the man, then, the bride was a
prize of unparalleled value. The long process of paying respect, giving gifts
and working for his future in-laws expressed, in ceremonial form, the
importance of the man’s own achievement in getting a wife. And after that,
each succeeding wife he married would be another improvement in status, a
new indication of the man’s importance and success.
But for the woman, the situation was much more ambiguous. On the one
hand, marriage or rather the motherhood that was expected to follow it meant
attainment of full adult status. A woman without children would be a more
unhappy being even than a man without a wife; she would have no voice, no
influence and no respect. Moreover, it was the husband who was responsible
for setting a woman up in business. Without marriage, she would have less
chance of becoming well established as a trader or food-seller. On the other
hand, marriage for a woman meant leaving her natal compound and the
people she could count on for support and affection, to go and live among
strangers. These strangers were thought of as essentially hostile, and co-wives
especially were assumed to be implacably opposed to each other. It would be
only after many years and many children that she would attain a position of
security and authority within her husband’s household. Despite the symbolic
separation from her own people, a woman would remain closer to them, in
some ways, than to her husband’s home. If her husband lived in the same
town as her parents, she would attend the monthly family meeting, the farajo,
of her compound. She would take part in any ceremony involving the omo-
osu, the daughters of the family. Eventually, 1f she disagreed too seriously with
her husband, or if he died and she refused to be inherited by one of his
relatives, she could return to her father’s household. Some women even
maintained a working arrangement with their husbands, where they continued
to have children for him but lived at home with their parents. But in spite of
this continued background support from her family, the woman was still in
a less happy position than her brothers, who stayed with their own people all
their lives and suffered no division of interests and loyalties. The woman’s
situation as mediator between two lineages could sometimes be manipulated
to her advantage; but it also contained inherent disabilities. She could play
husband off against parents only up to a certain point, as this ironical
comment, from a woman’s chant in honour of the ortsa Erinle makes clear:
‘Nlobinrin
N 60 lo,fi indéra
60 bokunrin
19’ }
‘B6 o ba lé lo o méo yaa lo’
N ni babaa mi fi kolé éru sara iyaa mi.®
‘I’m going, I’m going’
That’s how women frighten men
‘If you want to go, then hurry up and be gone’
That was how my father built mansions of fear in my
mother’s heart.
If the ceremonies of the marriage process seem to undergo a double
movement, turning on the pivotal point of the ‘bride’s enjoyment’, this
reflects the ambiguity of the woman’s actual change of status. Marriage is
indeed a glorious attainment for her; but it is also a revelation of the
fundamental weakness of her position compared with a man’s, and the
beginning ofa long subordination to another family’s interests. This ambiguity
is reflected subtly but with great clarity in the content of rara zyawo. Indeed,
it could be said to be their principal subject matter.’ ,
The transformation of the woman’s status is celebrated in verses that make
it clear what she hopes for in marriage:
Emi mo ni reléé mi nv-un
Emi ni reléé mi réé low6d
Emi mo 4
Emi ri reléé mi réé bimo
reléé mi nt-un
Bé e ba lorii yin 6 sin mi
A sin mi 4 ba mi dé yaraa mi
Ire l6nii orii mi afire.'°
I’m going to my new home now
I’m going to my home to have money _
I’m going to my new home now
I’m going to my home to bear children
If you say your good luck will escort me
It will escort me right to my room
Her change of status brings with it increased dignity:
Emi ti kurd ni ‘Bo ba di 1alé 9 wa’
Mo kuro ni ‘Bo ba di labo 9 moméd ya’
Emi momo waa degbé alaardébo
Alaarobo ti won 4 pe l6kunrin
Ire l6nii orii mi afire."!
THE BRIDE’S ENJOYMENT | 111
I’ve left the stage of ‘Come in the evening’
I’ve left the stage of ‘Drop in on your way back’
I’ve joined the club of mothers of new-born babies
Mother of a new-born baby that 1s a boy
She is no longer a young girl who can be teased and flirted with; she will now
have the greater responsibility and greater prestige of being the mother of a
new baby — preferably, of course, a baby boy.
But this enhancement of status also involves a loss. The bride must give up
her playmates and her carefree life, a life of dressing up, going out and showing
off:
Aré eléwe won 0 su mii se

Gélé ert: kan 6 t6 miirut reja
Opa aso poun kan ko té mi i wéri
Emi momo waa ti kurd niwoyi
Eyin-érin mo jola babaa mi
Ire lonii orii mi afire.!4
I am not yet tired of young girls’ games
A towering head-tie is not big enough for me to wear to market
Cloth of a pound a yard is not enough to wind round my head
But now I’ve left that time behind
‘Laughing teeth’, thanks to my father’s standing
More poignant than this is the sense of her loss of the security she enjoyed in
the midst of her family. If she had been a man, she could have stayed with
them forever:
Ode nt wt mi mo nin 6 lapo
Agbéde i wi mi mo ni émi 6 léwiri
Nigba ti ilé baba n wu mii gbé
Emi Abiké Omotanbajé
Omo ara Okin mo ni n 6 ya okunrin
Ire l6nii orii mi afire.’
I would have liked to be a hunter, but I have no quiver
I would have liked to be a blacksmith, but I have no bellows
When I would have liked to go on living in my father’s house
I, Abike Omotanbaje
Child of the Okin people, I did not turn into a man
As a woman, she is helpless. The contract which transfers her to another
man’s house is made without consulting her: she has as much say in it as a
sheep being put up for sale: :
A ti péte agbd
Agbo 1 je léhinkulé
Nigba ti émi 0 si nilé ae
Eyin-érin ni won ni péteé mi |
Ni won fi péte pero
Péte péro ni won gbow6 idajo
Gbow6 idajo, 6 dow6 émi nikan o
Ire l6nii orii mi afire.'*
They’re making arrangements about the ram
The ram is grazing in the yard
When I was not in the house
‘Laughing-teeth’, they made arrangements about me
They plotted and planned |
Plotted and planned till they got the date-fixing fee
Got the date-fixing fee, but the rest is left to me alone |
They make the decisions, she says, but it is she alone who has to live with the
consequences. And the consequences she envisages can be dire: hostile in-
laws, jealous co-wives, petty meanness and unfairness of all kinds. The
following verse complains that while her brother is swelling the ranks of her
own lineage, she is serving the interests of another lineage: and one that does
not even treat her well:
Se bi ba-n-kunlé lokunrin | .
Se bi ba-n-tulé lobinrin
Se bi ilé onilé lomo réé kun
Ta ni 60 ba n toyée babaa mi se?
Nbi onilé gbé buni t4 6 gbodo bu
Toélodédé gbé buni ta a gbodo fési
Bo o gunyan won a 16 ni koko ,
Bo o roka to mo ri lebelebe
Alaké, won 4 leeta da si
Kaka won 6 pé 6 koro ki won ba o wi |
Won a peyaa kaa, won a péya ni popo
Won a pe baalé 1lé abenu-gbooro
Won 66 tun peni ti 6 ni i woran mi...’
For a man is someone who swells the household
While a woman is someone who depletes it
For a daughter goes to swell someone else’s household.
Who then will improve my father’s status?
Where the householder abuses you and you mustn’t answer back
Where the owner of the premises abuses you and you mustn’t reply
If you pound yam they’ll say it’s lumpy
If you prepare yam pudding that is fine and light
Alake, they’ll say it’s not well mixed
Instead of calling you to one side to tell you off
They’ll call the most senior woman of the compound,
they'll call in a senior woman from outside
They'll call the head of the house with his big mouth
And they’ll call in the people who have no sympathy for me.
The bride’s position on the day of her ‘enjoyment’ is a double one in a
further sense. The ‘bride’s enjoyment’ is the only day when the bride herself
is incontestably the sole actor, the centre of attention. Her family, relations
and age-mates become a sympathetic chorus and audience; it is she who, as
conspicuous in her finery as an egungun, leads the way and conducts the
performance. This day provides her with the only forum for the expression —
through the deflecting medium of rara tyawo — of her feelings about the long-
drawn out process by which she is transferred to her new status. But while it
is her day of action and expression, it is also the day when she is most an object
on display. The bride is the prize the man has long striven for. She is shown
to the world to demonstrate just what her parents are bestowing on him. The
performance of rara tyawo is part of the display. Her competence as a per-
former is an accomplishment that demonstrates her intelligence, her diligence,
her maturity and presence of mind. But more than this, her expressed
sentiments are themselves part of the display: a proper filial gratitude, a
becoming reluctance to enter the married state, combined with a modest
pride in her impending fulfilment as a woman, are all attitudes which
embellish her and enhance her value in the public eye.
This duality of the bride, as both actor and object, is imprinted on both the
form and the content of rara ryawo, and is the fundamental source of this
genre’s unusual features. Everything the bride says in rara tyawo is intended
to direct attention back to herself. The genre, in fact, is a long reflection on,
and dramatisation of, the bride’s change of status. It asks the audience to look
at her, observe her glory, recognise the transition she is undertaking. The
verses, that is, are not detached philosophical reflections on marriage in
general but invitations to the onlooker to acknowledge that this particular girl
is atthis moment embarking on married life. Her very act of goingis dramatised
(in Yoruba, the verb ‘to marry’, for a woman, is ‘to go to the husband’s
house’). She asks the public to recognise that her departure is permanent and
involves a profound change for her:
Momoo min 6 0 si moo lo nt-un
N 6 lolo eja to lo ti 6 mo débu
N 0 lolo ikoro té lo ti 6 dédo we
Emi 6 lolo légbénlégbé |
Légbénlégbé to lo ti 6 delé omi.'®
Mother, I’m ready to go now
I’m not going in the way of a fish, that goes without
reaching the deep pools
I’m not going in the way of an zkoro fish, that goes
without reaching the river to swim in
I’m not going in the way of a tadpole
A tadpole that goes without getting to the bottom of the
water.
In other verses she calls attention to her own beauty, not as an individual’s
boast but as the essential attribute of a phase in her life, when she is poised
on the very threshold of adulthood. She celebrates the perfections of unspoilt
youth at the very moment of departing from it. The verse asks the audience
to acknowledge this moment:
Odo kan odo kan
Ti n be laarin igbé |
Ara iwaju 6 gbodo débe
Eré éhin 6 gbodd débe
Emi débe mo ba béju
Ojyuu mi waa doju oge
Idii mi waa didi iléké
lleké ta a ba ka ti 6 ba pé
Anji e méo tisod mi lo.?” |
A certain river, a certain river
In the middle of the forest
People at the front must not go there
People at the rear must not go there |
But I went there and splashed my face
My face became the face of lovely youth
My waist became a waist adorned with beads
Beads which if you count them and they’re not complete
I say you should strip me and take my clothes away.
These lines suggest a magical quality to a young girl’s perfection. Her
beads are complete — she 1s a virgin, and therefore deserves her beauty and the
finery that adorns it. The implication seems to be that as soon as she marries,
the moment of perfect radiance is past. The audience should bear witness to
this moment that will soon be forever lost.
Her performance is thus self-reflexive, a dramatisation of the actual
moment at which she 1s the centre of attention. It is true that her utterances
are apparently directed outwards, addressed to an audience, and often to
specific, named listeners: her mother, father, brothers and sisters. It is also
true that to do honour to her parents and grandparents, she repeats the ortki
oride of their lineages. In any other oriki chant, this would at once open a
channel for intense communication, and most of the communicative energy
would flow away from the performer towards the recipient of the ork. It is
the recipient’s head that would ‘swell’. But in rara tyawo, it is as if this process
_ wereimmobilised. The ork: circles back to the bride and becomes a reflection
on her state. When she goes out on her parade, she carries in her hand an
emblem of her z/e: a miniature gun if she belongs to i/e Oloko, the compound
associated with hunters; a miniature drumstick for ie Alubata, the bata
drummers’ compound, and so on. The orth orile that she performs, although
ostensibly addressed to members of her family, assert her own membership
of the group.
Sometimes this is made explicit in the words of the ortki themselves. In the
long excerpt from a rara ryawo version of the ortki of ile Oloko quoted at the
beginning of this chapter, the performer gave the narrative a final twist which
turned it, retroactively, into a comment on her own beauty. The story tells of
an ‘I’ who went twice to Oyo to complain of the locusts who ate his crops; but
itis finished by an account ofa third visit, by an ‘Il’ who is now the bride herself,
in which the lord of Oyo tells her she is worthy of rich adornments. A similar
thing happens in the following rendering of the well-known ortki orile of the
Olojonwon people (here, z/e Odofin):
-Njé ti Lagbai ri toko onaa bd
Gbogbo igi n sa gilogilo
Ir6k won 4 mi léngbé
Emi 6 mobi Lagbai 60 solé si, omo Kujénra
E ni 6 soléé’léé mi ki n low6 n bimo
Ki n sow6 ki n mo tié jéré
Eré ti 6 ba si nii pé
K6 si waa pari da léhin mi.'8
On the day that Lagbai was coming from the wood where he did
his carving
All the trees were running hither and thither
The mahogany trees were shuddering
I don’t know which one Lagbai will land on, child of Kujenra
Tell him to land on my house, so that I get rich and have children
So that I trade and make a profit
And trade which is not profitable
Let it turn back and depart from me.
The usual treatment of this theme, in ortki chants other than rara zyawo,
builds it up into a celebration of the lineage occupation of wood-carving. The
line ‘I don’t know which [tree] Lagbai will land on’ would be followed by a
passage developing the idea that the trees are all afraid of Lagbai, the founding
ancestor of the Olojonwon, because of his incredible prowess as a carver. He
can bring a dead piece of wood to life by giving it human features unparalleled
by any other carver for detail and completeness. Only true Olojonwon people
can do this: their slaves and servants cannot copy their inborn skills, which
mark them out as a lineage...!° But in the rara iyawo version, the theme veers
from a lineage occupation to the bride’s own future. ‘Landing on’ a tree to
carve it is converted to ‘landing on’ a household to bless it, and by what
amounts to a verbal sleight of hand the performer launches herself into a
prayer for her own prosperity in marriage.
Even when she does not do this kind of explicit conversion, the performer
of rara tyawo still seems to be directing the ortki orile to herself rather than to
another subject. This is brought about partly by the textual framework of
comments on marriage in which the ortki appear, which has already set the
direction of attention towards the bride, and partly by the absence of vocative
interjections. The bride, unlike other performers of ortki, does not insert the
names of her addressee in apposition to the ork1; she does not call on him to
pay attention or insist that ‘that is how So-and-so is to be saluted’. The few
interjections that appear are almost always to herself, part of the process of
directing the listener’s attention back to the speaker. The features most
characteristic of other ork: chants are absent here. The chant proceeds
steadily and methodically through its well-marked repetitive sequences as if
the presence of the listener did not affect it.
The structural role of rara tyawo in the marriage process therefore gives
rara 1yawo its distinctive characteristics as a chant. On the oné hand, it is a set
piece, performed on the day when the bride is shown off to the world as the
prize her future husband has won. Its function is to display her, not to make
other people’s heads swell. It continually circles back on itself, producing an
effect curiously formal and static in comparison with the forward thrust of
most ork: chants. But on the other hand, it is the bride’s one moment of action
and expression. In its simplicity of diction, its clarity of structure, and its
luminous, lucid imagery, it achieves a poignancy that no other chant does.
In all her subsequent performances of oriki, the woman directs her attention
not to herself as she steps out onto the stage of adult activity, but to- other
actors on this stage: above all, to the important male centres of social and
political power in her compound and town; to the influential:dead and other
spiritual beings; and to the collectivities that constitute her father’s and her
husband’s z/e, past and present.
DEATH AND OTHER WORLDS 117
4. DEATH AND OTHER WORLDS
The events leading up to and following a wedding are a long and elaborate
series, but the context of the performance of rara tyawo 1s straightforward.
There is one clearly defined key performer in each ceremony, and a co-
ordinated and equally well demarcated group of supporting performers; the
performance takes place on a single occasion at a specified time; and the texts
themselves, despite the internal ambivalence of their themes, are structurally
exceptionally coherent and transparent.
But after her wedding, all the occasions where a woman will subsequently
participate in the performance of ortki will offer a much broader and more
variegated canvas of expression. The most important ceremonial complexes
are funerals and festivals. In both, there is a wide range of participants who
perform different kinds of chant. There is not just one focus and one drama,
but a variety of them, involving different but overlapping sets of participants,
and sometimes overlapping in time too.
The example I examine here is a funeral. Of all ceremonials, funerals are
the most frequently held and the most inescapable: everyone will sooner or
later have to be one of the central performers in his or her parents’ funerals,
but before and after that all women will be continually required to participate
in a lesser capacity in other funerals. If the deceased was an old person, a very
large number of women are mobilised to contribute to the celebrations. First
there are the omo olooku, the children of the deceased, who organise the whole
event and are at the centre of all the principal scenes. Then, if the deceased
belonged to a traditional cult, there are the fellow cult members, who may
have strong claims on the deceased and who perform — sometimes in
opposition to the wishes of the emo olooku — special ceremonies over the body.
Then there are sets of women, related to each other either as omo-osu
(daughters of the same lineage) or as orogun (wives of the same lineage). If the
deceased was elderly and had many children, the sets of orogun may run into
dozens, for each daughter and granddaughter may be married into a different
compound and will have her own set of ‘co-wives’. These sets are mobilised
at different moments and to perform different roles throughout the proceedings.
Certain family ceremonies designed to affirm the solidarity of the deceased’s
lineage, for instance, involve all the daughters of that lineage. Other ceremonies
involve all the wives of the deceased’s lineage. And from the second day of the
funeral onwards, young women related to the deceased by birth — usually
granddaughters, through the daughters as well as the sons of the deceased —
will come to the funeral ceremony bringing with them a party of their ‘co-
wives’, all dressed alike, to go in procession round the town singing funeral
songs and collecting money. Finally, both men and women, but especially
women, who are related in any way to the deceased may attend the funeral
as individuals and contribute performances or join in the songs and chants of
others if they wish.
Not only this, but a funeral ceremony moves rather rapidly, in seven days,
through a number of dramatic stages signifying first the shock of loss, and the
sense of the absence of the deceased; then the progressive separation and
departure of the deceased’s spirit; and then the reconciliation of the survivors
to their loss through affirmations of continuity. These dramatic moments are
enacted principally through oriki chants. The ortki therefore express a range
of contrasting moods, suggested by different styles of chanting. Some are slow
and solemn, involving a large collectivity of women, led by a soloist and
backed up by a massed chorus. Others are highly individual and personal, the
wild lament of a bereaved daughter or wife. They also express different
philosophies, offering, at different moments, different views of what the dead
are and where they go. But these moments are not clearly ordered as a series;
there are eddies of feeling, an ebb and flow and an overlapping of phases
within the general progression described. Furthermore, there is a shifting and
indeterminacy in the subject to whom the oriki are addressed. There are in fact
several overlapping subjects, and the principal subject, the deceased, takes on
several shapes and relationships to the performers. It is only the powerful
channel of orski that can establish a link with the rapidly receding person who
has died. But at some moments the deceased is addressed as a person who has
just gone out — a living absence; at other times, he or she is.addressed as a
corpse, an object of fear and mystical danger; other utterances are addressed
not to the deceased as an individual but to him or her as part of a collectivity
of ancestors. Furthermore, the dead bring with them a web of connections.
Some of the ortki are addressed to the oma olooku they have left behind; some
to the relatives who have preceded them to the other world and who are
pictured as waiting there to receive them; others again to an abstract entity,
as much place as person, which represents the past and its inhabitants in a
generalised way. A funeral, therefore, is a highly complex event inviting a
much wider and more subtle range of expressive acts than a marriage. What
hardly take place. |

is the same is the centrality of oriki performances. Without ortki, a funeral could
Funerals vary according to the customs of the lineage and the cult group
of the deceased. What follows is a composite and schematised description
taking examples from a number of different funerals I actually observed. The
aim is to suggest the way in which the ‘same’ material — oriki— takes manifold
forms and accomplishes a variety of expressive purposes depending on the
performer, her relationship to the deceased, and the moment in the complex
event that she is celebrating.
From the moment that a death is known, the closest women relatives may
raise a lament announcing it. Once, in the dead of night, I heard this cry from
a neighbouring house, rising with tragic and unearthly effect into black empty
air:
Ara Okuki e w44 wo wahala mi
Okoo wa domoole 6 ti lo
Okoo wa domooleé 6 dara orun
Aré Okuku e wa4 wo wahala mi.
People of Okuku, come and see my plight
Our husband has become a child of the Earth, he has gone
Our husband has become a child of the Earth, he has become
a denizen of heaven
People of Okuku, come and see my plight.
If the person who died was old enough to have grown-up children and
grandchildren, the death is made public by ztu/o: that is, a formal announcement
to the oba, together with the gift of ‘five shillings’ (originally, 20,000 cowries;
nowadays, fifty kebo). After this, the chanting of ortkz as lamentation begins
in real earnest, and continues for seven days more or less continuously.
As soon as the death has been announced, the wives and daughters of the
immediate family send for the rest of the omo-osu, the married and unmarried
daughters of the lineage. When they have assembled, they set off in a
procession round the town, collecting more omo-osu on the way. As they go,
one or two women noted for their ability will chant the ortki ore and personal
ortkt of the deceased. This chanting is a way of announcing the death to the .
world at large. On their return the women will keep up the chanting by the
side of the corpse where it lies in state. The following is a description of the
first morning of the funeral ceremony of one Efuntohun Arinke, an elderly
woman married into ile Baale, but belonging by birth to an Ikoyi lineage from
Ikirun. She was a Sango priestess and she died on the last evening of the
Olooku festival. The announcement of the death had to be delayed, for
otherwise the bereaved would have been fined by the oba for ‘spoiling’ the
festival, the opening one in the yearly cycle. But the Sango cult as well as the
immediate family knew about it and began their preparations in secret. The
next morning the death was announced to the oba and around the town. On
their return to the house where Efuntohun had been laid out, the chant was
raised by the elderly omo-osu of tle Baale — that is, the daughters of the lineage
of the deceased’s husband, who had himself died some years previously. They
gathered on the front porch and kept up a flow of ortki and lamentations, at
first as individual solo performances, then after some time as a collective
performance, one very old woman singing the lead and the rest repeating each
line after her. (The younger women were somewhere else in the house,
singing group songs with clapping and dancing, without any co-ordination
with the elders’ performance; and this was typical: later, in the funeral
procession itself, the same overlapping and clashing of performances could
be seen, as some groups sang songs and others simultaneously, and immediately
adjacent to them in the street, chanted ortkz.) The elderly omo-osu of dle Baale,
on this occasion, kept up their chant until the Sango cult members arrived to
do their ritual on the corpse. The first performer, Iwe, a daughter of Efuntohun,
began by speaking of a sense of loss, and of the discomforting absence of
someone they had been living with till then:
N 6 ri iyaa mi m6 0
Béwuré ba je yun je wa o
Arinké, yoo maa fégbé nugiri
O 9 raguntan kan boldjo
Bo ba je yun je wa
lyaa mi Arinké, yoo maa fégbé nugiri
N 6 réni mégbeéeé nu
N 0 réni mégbéé nu mo o.
I cannot see my mother any more
If a goat goes grazing and comes home
Arinke, it will rub its sides on the wall
And look at the big black sheep
If it goes grazing and comes home
My mother Arinke, it will rub its sides on the wall
I have no-one to rub sides with
I have no-one to rub sides with any more.
She then went on to the orki orile of Efuntohun’s own people from Ikirun, who
were Onikoyi, celebrated for their prowess in war:”°
Es6 Ikoyi o
Es6 Ikoyi n 16 ti muKoyi rdde
Ka a waa ji hjoojumo ka a dira ogun...
War captains of Ikoyi
The war captains of Ikoyi have summoned the child of Ikoyi
“Let’s rise every morning and arm ourselves for battle...’
The Ikoyi warriors, that is, have called Efuntohun up; she is to rise and go
when they summon her. But Iwe soon abandoned the Ikoyi ork, probably
because she did not knowit well. Ikirun, Efuntohun’s town, is not an immediate
neighbour of Okuku; and in Okuku, the only compound with the same ortki
orile was a small one with which she may not have had much contact. After
five more lines, she turned to a much more familiar theme: the personal ortki
of Efuntohun’s late husband, who was Iwe’s father. This was introduced by
a device very common in the funeral chants in honour of women whose
husbands have predeceased them:
Omo Jéselola 6 gbaya é¢ l6w66 mi, omo Adigin eléwaa bujé
Ojdselola a-mu-dudu-wumoo-se...
Son of Joselola has taken back his wife from me, son of
Adigun, one with the beauty of blue-black dye
Ojoselola, one who makes his blackness the envy of others...
She develops this theme, adding the ortki orile of the husband’s lineage, which
is also the performer’s own lineage, at some length, occasionally directing it
to the deceased by repeating and varying the introductory device, for
example:
O gbaya é lénii 0, oj da o. :
He took his wife back today, it has left us desolate.
But she also includes comments on the woman herself, commending her |
fastidious manners and her kindness to her children:
N 6 ri iyaa mi md o
Iy4a mi ku, iyeé mi bOléun lo, bddkiini iya og
Abiyamo ti i jemoo re lénu bi isu
Afinju, bi won reja won 6 moo rin gerere, tyeé mj,
Obun reja pa siasia
Obun rairai ni yoo reru afinju wolé o.
I don’t see my mother any more
My mother is dead, my mother has gone to God, wealthy,
dainty mother
Mother of children, who talks constantly about them with
anxiety and affection
Fastidious people, if they go to market they walk there
smartly, mother,
A slob going to market shuffles along
The filthy sloven will carry the dainty one’s burden home.
At this point Omotunwa, another elderly daughter of i/e Baale took over
from Iwe, with a salute addressed to the assembled mourners:
ly4a mi ki, iyeé mi bOléun lo
O kuudelé eni to rorun
Apéké o kaudeélé eni ti 6 sayé
O kuudélé eni 6 bédde
O waa fa té bi eni ti 0 si
Efuntdohun se bi eni 6 bdédde.
My mother’s dead, my mother’s gone to God
Condolences on being left behind in the house of one who went
to heaven
Apeke, condolences on being left behind in the house of one who
is NO more |
Condolences on being left behind in the house of one who just
slipped out
She went to sit aloof like someone who is no more
Efuntohun went as if she were just slipping out for a while.
Then another senior omo-osu took up the chant from Omotunwa, and this
time the rather haphazard interplay between different performers gave way to
a pattern of leader and chorus. They lamented the shocking fact of death
itself: Efuntohun was a corpse, unable to get up. But this horror was
immediately offset by the reflection that death which comes in old age and is
properly celebrated is a fitting one. They then went on to associate her with
all the male elders of the compound, for since she was ‘wife’ to all of them,
her death was a collective loss:
Arinké 6 leé nde, éé leé nde |
K4 a kt lomodé, Efantéhun
Ka a fesin sérélé eni
Adagba ailadie irana
E é mo péku t6é bani lémos6 6 sini pa
Arinké 6 leé nde, aya Omitundé o
Arinké 6 leé nde, ayaa Babayeju o
Arinké 6 leé nde, éé leé nde
Aya Ikubolajé 6 leé nde
Aya Okusindé ki 16 se td 6 leé nde?
) Aya ‘Igbo fi dudu sola’ 6 leé nde
Babaa mi ‘Oké fi ribiti sayo’....
Arinke cannot get up, she can’t get up |
It’s better to die in one’s youth, Efuntohun |
And have a horse killed in one’s honour
Than to grow old without even a chicken for the burial rite
But don’t you know that death when it strikes down an aged
person has done no wrong
Arinke cannot get up, the wife of Omitunde ,
Arinke cannot get up, wife of Babayeju
Arinke cannot get up, she cannot get up
Wife of Ikubolaje cannot get up
Wife of Okusinde why can’t you get up? ,
Wife of “The forest’s darkness is its pride’ cannot get up
My father, “The hill’s roundness is its joy’....
From this point, the leading singer elaborates the personal oriki of the man
known as Igbo-fi-dudu-sola, “The forest’s darkness is its pride’, a big man of
ile Baale, and this goes on until the Sango cult members arrive.
The omo-osu of ile Baale, then, have dwelt much on the deceased’s role
within the compound, as a ‘wife’ to all the lineage’s senior men and as mother
to the younger members. They acknowledge, as fully as they can, the lineage
from which she came, even though they do not know much of that lineage’s
oriki. They are preoccupied with the immediate impact of her death:
lifelessness (“Why can’t you get up?’) and the sudden absence of a familiar
figure, which still seems unreal (‘She’s gone to sit aloof like someone who is
no more/Efuntohun is like someone who just slipped out for a while’). They
are addressing the corpse as if it were still a person, from whom the life had
only temporarily absented itself. In so far as the other world is mentioned at
all, it is simply ‘heaven’ or the unspecified place to which her dead husband
is summoning her. Most of the performance, in fact, is made up of the ortki
of her husband, his fellow elders and his lineage in general. Even in death the
ambivalence of a woman’s position, born into one lineage and married into
another, is not resolved. At the beginning of the chant Efuntohun has been
‘summoned’ by the Enikoyi, her own lineage ancestors, to rejoin them; but
throughout the rest of the chant she is pictured as being reclaimed by her dead
husband, and as belonging still to the collective male elders of his lineage.
The Sango cult members expressed a different range of interests and a
different mood in their chant, which began the moment they arrived on the
scene. Efuntohun was an adosu, a cult initiate of the inner circle. Before she
could be buried, a secret ritual had to be performed to remove the osu, the
power-giving ritual substance that had been implanted in her scalp on her
initiation half a century before. This was what the Sango cult had come to do.
When they first arrived with the bata drummers, a wave of excitement went
through the compound. The omo-osu fell silent and their laments were replaced
by the characteristic sounds of the Onisango’s own chant. Only the other
adosu, led by the male head of the cult, the Baale Sango, could go into the
room where the corpse lay. The ritual, which was protracted, was performed
behind closed doors.2! Meanwhile, the rest of the cult members, all women,
stayed outside and kept up the chant throughout the ceremony. The chant
was led by a soloist, who would deliver a number of lines of oriki and other
matter. Then the chorus would respond with a refrain which was different
from the soloist’s lines and which varied slightly from one repetition to the
next, but always unanimously, an effect characteristic of Sango pipe in other
~ contexts too.?? While the soloist’s delivery was rapid and stirring, the chorus
half-sang their lines, slowly and with a solemn, indeed menacing, effect. In
this chant, Efuntohun’s husband’s personal and lineage ortk: are not uttered,
and neither are her own lineage oriki. What is stressed is her personal character;
her role in the cult; her relationship with other cult members already dead,
whose ortki are added; and above all the terrifying nature of a cult death and
the rituals associated with it. The singers warn the by-standers:
| Solo: Efantéhun 0j6 oni soro
Egbéri i i woja oku, Eftintéhun o ,
Sangotola, ’éni 6 mo boddro lo
Arinké ’éni 6 md bd6r6 lo ,
Chorus: Aiiwo6
Aii word ] |
A-wé-bi-abéré Arinké
Aiiwo Oisa Mogba

Bo o wo 6 firi o kui firi
Bo o wo 6 bara o ku bara
Aiiwo Oisa Mogba
Aiiwod6 ,
Solo: Mo 16 waa doju ok6ko, babaa T6d6woju
Aiiworo ,
Chorus: Eépa, eépa, eépa
Solo: Arinké waa daiiwo6, a-wé-bi-abéré

Eni ba woju oro i bord lo ni
Chorus: Aiiwo Oisa Mogba.
Solo: Efuntohun, today is dangerous
The uninitiated must never look a corpse in the face,
Efuntohun
Sangotola, lest they go away with the rite [to heaven]
Arinke, lest they go away with the rite
Slender-as-a-needle Arinke |
Chorus: We never look at Orisa Mogba [a version of Sango]
If you look swiftly, you'll die swiftly
If you look long, you'll die long ,
We never look at the Orisa Mogba
Solo: I say the height of the hot season has arrived, father of
Toowoju
Chorus: Eepa, eepa, eepa [indicates presence of supernatural]
We never look
We never look at the sacred
at it
Solo: Arinke has become a forbidden sight, slender-as-a-
needle
Anyone who looks at the forbidden will go with the
forbidden
Chorus: We never look at the Orisa Mogba. |
This frightening warning dramatises the actual moment of the performance,
the moment when the ritual is being carried out on the other side of the closed
door. As the soloist says at one point, “The height of the hot season has
arrived’, meaning that the ceremony has reached the moment of its most
intense danger. The earlier performance by the omo-osu seemed like a kind of
holding operation: to keep each other company in the presence of death and
in the absence of the dead woman — almost, in fact, to keep that absence itself
company — while awaiting the next stage of events that mark the severance of
the dead from the living. But the Onisango performance, in marked contrast,
was to push events forward. Not only the performance of the ritual itself,
which effected another stage of the procedure, but the way the dead woman
was addressed showed this. The gmo-osu were lamenting ‘Arinke cannot get
up, she cannot get up’, when the Onisango burst in; and their first words were
Arinke nde ade ndeeee
Nde nde la a solu, Eftintéhtin nde
Sango6t6la oldérisa Arinpé
Nde nde 1a 4 saw6
Nde nde 1a 4 séyaw6 oj6 00j6 ti 6 gbodd poko é 166ko ...
Arinke get up get up get up
We say ‘Get up get up’ to the lord, get up Efuntohun
Sangotola the orisa-worshipper, Arinpe,
We say ‘Get up get up’ to the awd [meaning obscure]
We say “Get up get up’ to the bride married today who is not
allowed to call her husband by name...
The Onisango are there to activate the dead, to move her on to the next
stage of her journey away from the world of the living. She is compared with
a new bride who, like a corpse, would be covered from head to foot with a new
cloth and who would Keep apart and silent, huddled motionless in a private
room for the first days of her married life. The dead woman, like the bride,
it is implied, is undergoing a transition; like the bride, she must be urged to
take the step forward that moves her into a new state of being. Her ork: are
being used to inspire her, to give her the courage and the will to go on.
Throughout this chant, Efuntohun’s death is referred to as a journey, always
an arduous one, but pictured in different ways. At one point she is said to have
gone into the ground, bearing a heavy burden:
Arinké waa woléélé lo, o ki ert ta 6 ranni
A-wé-bi-abéré 0 ku ert ta 6 ranni
Bori ba ri tani a modo gbéri o
Arinké bérun ba 1 woni a4 sd
Onjisangé Arinké o ku ert ta 6 ranni.
Arinke has gone into the Earth, greetings for your load that no-one
can help you to carry
Slender-as-a-needle, greetings for your load that no-one can help
you to carry
If your head hurts you lift up the load to relieve it
Arinke, if it’s breaking your neck you’ll lift your load down onto
the ground
Onisango Arinke greetings for the load which no-one can help you
to carry.
At another moment, the journey is to ‘heaven’; this time the burden is
specified as the ritual calabash of Sango, and again the idea is that no living
human can help the dead to carry this burden to the next world:
Awo 0 wo 6, ogbéri 6 wo 6, ta ni 60 rugba Sango dorun?
The initiated don’t look at it, the uninitiated don’t look at it, who
will carry Sango’s calabash to heaven for her?
Finally she is pictured as being carried away in a river, in an image that 1s
characteristically polysemous:
Basé ba mumi 4 tan ninuu re, igéré t6 ba mumi 4 joolé
Onisango Arinké, md6o bémi lo émi 66 moo sofe.
If the sieve drinks water, the water will soon drain out, if a fish-
trap drinks water it will all leak away
Onisango Arinke, go with the water, I will stay behind and cheer
you on.
This image begins with the notion of life as water in a sieve or wicker basket-
trap, draining away and being lost. But the dead woman is then imagined as
being carried away by that water as by a great river; the living cannot
accompany her on this journey, but can only encourage her from their vantage
point in this world.” She is also pictured as arriving at the other end, to be met
by a large reception committee. All her fellow cult members, now dead, are
listed:
Ki i se kékeré Enisango
O ba Okéyébi se
O ba Kudomi je
O bOyéniran se
AtOkeéyiola Eftinjoké
Atlyalasé Sangé
Atomo Oyagelt omo ol6ké ide
AtOgtndapo babaa mi
O jalapata low6d, omo agelugelumbi
AtOgunwolé Ogunfonné Makanjuola
Gbogbo won ni 60 mésin wa koyaa mi, omo aldéti-lému
She was not an untried member of the Sango cult

She was there at the time of Okeyebi
She was there together with Kudomi
She was there with Oyeniran
And Okeyiola Efunjoke
And the Iyalase Sango [a senior female title in the cult]
And the child of Oyagelu, child of the one who has a hoe of brass
And Ogundapo my father :
He owed the butcher money, son of one who pounded indigo in
huge quantities
And Ogunwole Ogunfonna Makanjuola
All of them will bring horses to meet our mother, child of one who
has both beer and palm-wine
Like the omo-osu, the Onisango group use naming and ortki to provide a
continued context in which the dead woman will be enmeshed even in the
other world. The other world itself is in both cases conceived of in the vaguest
possible terms; what is concrete is the networks of relationships with other
people which are projected into it. But the emo-osu seem to see Efuntohun
being claimed either by her husband’s lineage (which is also theirs) or by her
own; the Onisango, on the other hand, disregard both these groups (and their
ortk1), and propose to reunite Efuntohun with her former colleagues in the
cult. It is their ortk: that are extensively heard in this performance.
Once the ritual had been completed, the cult members of the outer circle
and all the members of the family were asked to come and look at the corpse
prepared for burial. Although most of the family were Christian and normally
rather contemptuous of Sango rituals, they seemed very proud of the totem-
like figure of the old lady, completely swathed in cloths and with patches of
blood marking her eyes. Photographs of her were taken and later distributed
to friends of the family. When the corpse had been sufficiently viewed, the cult
members went in procession to the banks of a local stream, Awere. Two of
the most senior male title-holders in the cult, the Baale Sango and Elemoso
Sango, went ahead to bury a calabash containing the dead woman’s osu, cut
from her scalp, together with other ritual substances.(Perhaps the image of
Efuntohun ‘going with the water’ was suggested by this riverbank ceremony.)
As the cult members returned in procession they sang cult songs interspersed
with snatches of the orik: of Efuntohun.
Other cults had similar rituals of separation for a cult member before
burial. The worshippers of Oya and Esu, like the Onisango, initiate and
empower inner circle members by applying osu, which is removed on death.
The ritual, as Peter Morton-Williams has persuasively argued (Morton-
Williams, 1960b), arises from the this-worldly orientation of the cults. The
powers held by the living are retained by them; the dead are stripped of all the
appurtenances of the cult before they can be buried. Other cults like Orisa Oko
and Ogboni, according to Morton-Williams, have complex and highly secret
pre-burial rituals, concerned not so much with the detachment of the dead
from their living associations as with a reaffirmation of the interdependence
and continuity of the living and the dead. Clearly, however, the difference
between the two kinds of cults is a matter of emphasis rather than an absolute
distinction. As the oriki chants show, the Onisango assert continuity of
association amongst their dead and living members even in the very act of
performing the ritual of separation.
If the death took place in the evening, the burial will be postponed until the
following day. In that case, a wake will be held throughout the night during
which the women of the household and other relatives keep up a continual
performance of songs and chanting, several groups often performing
independently and simultaneously.
Burial takes place about four in the afternoon, after a big procession in
which the empty coffin, often accompanied by a large photograph of the
deceased, is carried all around the town, followed by drummers and groups
of singing and chanting women. On their return, certain ceremonies are
catried out in the compound before the corpse is put into the coffin. The most
important of these is the formal interrogation of various groups that the
deceased was associated with. The compound elders, seated beside the coffin,
which is laid across two upturned mortars, ask each group in turn if the
deceased left his or her affairs in order, if there is any matter left unsettled, or
if there are any debts to be paid. Only when all have answered no can the
corpse be put in the coffin and buried inside the compound building.
The night after the burial there is a private family ceremony symbolising
the departure of the deceased’s spirit. Around eleven at night, the elders will
gather at the freshly heaped grave and the rest of the family will assemble
nearby. A calabash is placed on the grave mound. The most senior man takes
up a big stick and calls on the deceased by name in a loud voice. The third time
he calls, a distant voice will answer ‘Hooo!’ The lanterns are put out and a
white-garbed figure rushes out through the compound and into the street. At
the same moment the senior man smashes the calabash with the stick, seizes
the chicken someone is holding ready, and pulls off its head, dripping the
blood onto the broKen calabash. The egress of the white figure is the signal
for all the women to burst into lamentation and ortki chanting. The drummers
at the same moment begin to play very loudly.
The women stay inside chanting while the men follow the white figure at
a safe distance as it dances slowly down the street to the smithy. There it
washes its face in water from the blacksmith’s trough which is believed to have
magical properties. After that it goes to heaven.”*
The third day from the burial is reserved for oro ile — family ceremonies,
performed for the deceased, whether male or female, by the members of his
or her own (i.e. father’s) ze. Each lineage has a ceremony of its own, and its
function is largely emblematic, marking the unique identity of the lineage. As
we shall see in the next chapter, the signs of identity put on display in oro ile
are the same as those celebrated in the principal themes of ortki orile. Thus
Efuntohun, the first day of whose funeral has just been described, had an oro
ile performed for her that enacted the twin themes of warfare and thievery,
themes that also figure prominently in the ortki orile of Ikoyi.
But the enactment of oro ile is not just a dramatic or symbolic equivalent
to the performance of ortki orile; it may in some cases also contain a performance
of ortki orile. This was so in the oro ile of cle Oloko, who claimed origins in Iwata,
and whose emblem was opo, a housepost. There is a short post in the centre
of zle Oloko which is used only for this ritual. It is dressed up in fine cloths for
the seven days of the funeral. The cloth symbolises the traditional occupation )
of the Opo people, who were a lineage of weavers, but it also recalls the story
of an Alaafin, their ancestor, who is said to have had two hundred doorposts
carved with the face of his mother and dressed in velvet.” When the post has
been dressed up, the obimrin ile (compound wives) gather near it and say
prayers that the deceased may have a good end. Kola is thrown in a form of
divination at the foot of the post until a favourable outcome is obtained. Then
the women move outside to an open but shady space near the compound. All
the male elders of the compound assemble, the most senior being seated on
a row of chairs. The women kneel down facing them. One woman recognised
for her ability begins solemnly to chant the ortk: orile of the Opomulero line.
The rest of the women repeat it after her line by line. Their words express
profound respect for their ‘husband’, that is, for the collective membership,
female as well as male, of the lineage, into which these women have married:*°
Omo Eribami mo kunlé f6l6w60 mi...
... Mo mo m0 foribalé fol6w66 mi
Omo Eribami mo foribalé f6l6w60 mi
Omo Ertbami Alaafin Oyd
Mo mo m6 foribaleé féléri, omo Abimbéw6
Omo Eribami mo kunlé n 6 sasa.
Child of Erubami I kneel for my husband...
... | bow down indeed for my lord
Child of Erubami I bow down for my lord
Child of Erubami the Alaafin of Oyo
I bow down indeed for my lord, child of Abimbowo
Child of Erubami I kneel, I show no disrespect.
The ortki orile of the Opomulero people are the heart of this performance.
The singer concentrates on those parts of the ortki that elaborate the theme
of the post and the cloth. As we saw in the discussion of rara tyawo earlier, the
Opomulero ortki contain another substantial and extensively-developed theme
based on the story of the locusts, the farm in Ale-Oyun, and the Alaafin’s
verdict. But in this performance, that part of the ortki is ignored. The ceremony
revolves around the emblematic post whose physical presence is before them.
The first oriki orile the women quote, therefore, are these:
Ar4 ili Oyun, ara ri gb6 mi ldso
Kéké ta dundtn, aso ledidi éniyan .
N 60 bé o rélut re, omo kalukd 16 lasoo re
Egbinrin nko? Aso op6 éyin ni.
Egbinrin nko? Aso opo éyin ni.
Keélekulu laso aré-pékun opoé
Eninléyo ilée yin ni won 1 ti i régi laso
cloth’ }
Native of Oyun town, I’m wearing my clothes out
The spinning wheel spins merrily, cloth is the covering of people
Pll go with you to your town, child of ‘Everyone has their own
What about egbinrin cloth? It’s your post’s cloth.

What about egbinrin cloth? It’s your post’s cloth.
Kelekulu is the very best of all the post’s cloths.
Ileyo people, it’s in your family they dress up a post in cloth.
The identity of the group is conceived of in terms ofa place of origin. The
assembled members of #/e Oloko are identified, first and foremost, as ara iu
Oyun (natives of Oyun town), and to introduce the ortki orile the performer
: says ‘T’ll go with you to your town’. The utterance of the orikz is itself a kind
of ‘going’, for in performance she takes the owners of the ortki back to their
source, recalling them to a sense of their common origin in a named location.
This sense of place provides a metaphor for death:
lyaa wa relé Oy6, omo Akénjékiin Sabi ,
: Iyee wa relé, omo akankan eyin erin...
tusk |
... Asa gbé kowéé, 6 gbé omo Abimbéw6 o
Yooye relé Oyd reé somo-oba
Our mother has gone to Oyo, child of Akenjekun Sabi:
Our mother has gone home, child of one as tough as the elephant’s
Abimbowo ,
... [he hawk carried off the kowee bird, it carried off the child of
Yooye has gone to Oyo to be a princess.

Yooye, a daughter of the lineage, has gone back, in death, to her place of
origin. Her ‘wives’ — the women married into her natal compound — do her
honour by performing a ceremony that recognises her most essential identity.
They assert that her bonds with the Opomulero people can never be broken.
‘Oyo’ — not the present-day city but the ancient city of origin — becomes
another way of thinking of the afterlife.
And - as in the rara tyawo and the Sango chant already discussed — the
performers are conscious of their own role. The performance includes
commentary on itself and on the proceedings of which it is a part. The
performance is to do public and collective honour to Yooye. In the act of
doing this, the women congratulate those present for the part they are playing:
O 1é ¢ kit b4 n dard o, ¢ kit b4 n dard iyeé mi
Seyin doku, séyin doku
Kyin té e ba séyin doku, omo ni yoo téyin gbogboo yin se
Thank you for your sympathy and support over the death of my
mother
Performing a fitting funeral for the dead
You who are helping to perform a fitting funeral for the dead, you
will have children to give you a good burial too.
After the oro ile, there are three days in which all the daughters and
granddaughters of the deceased take it in turns to bring parties of their
compound co-wives (oregun) to go round the town in procession, singing
funeral songs. Sometimes those among them who are close relatives of the
deceased overlay this singing with solo chanting of laments and the deceased’s
oriki. On the night of the sixth day, a farewell vigil is held by the Sango or Ogboni
cult if the deceased was a member. The devotees go round the town in
procession all night singing cult songs. The Orisa Oko cult has secret rituals
that it performs during the sixth night.
On the seventh day is the zzawo, the spending of money, when the heirs
have to provide food, drink and drumming on as grand a scale as they can
manage. Lavish expenditure is considered a mark of respect to the dead, as
well, of course, as being a demonstration of the wealth and status of his or her
heirs. This is the kind of occasion that specialist and professional performers
would come to from neighbouring towns, and Sangowemi would be there
from start to finish. Her performance on these occasions demonstrated the
beginning of a process of domestication of the death. At the funeral of
Oyawale, an elderly Oya devotee and very senior man in ile Nla, the deceased
was lamented, and still addressed as a beloved companion only just embarking
on his lonely journey to an unknown world, as he had been in the earlier stages
of the funeral. Puzzlement and reproach were notes still to be heard in
Sangowemi’s chant. But at the same time much more of the chant was
concerned with putting the death into the context of the social experience of
the living. Much of it was addressed not to the deceased but to the survivors.
The death of one person seemed to open the doors of memory on the deaths
of many others, and her chant became a survey, that concluded with the sad
but philosophical comment:
Oldisa isén bayé waa lo gbaa
The orisa-worshippers of the old days have all gone beyond recall
Oyawale’s death was thus seen as part of a general process of decline. And
his solitary journey in unknown realms was now pictured in contrast to the
good time the celebrants were having on earth, at his funeral: they would have
liked to send him a part of the feast, but rather humorously doubt whether
human food would be acceptable to a denizen of the other world:
Ba a ba waa mohun ti okt je ni Waisa
Aba waa roti-oka fAyanda
If we knew what the dead eat in the Unknown Land
We’d buy guinea-corn beer for Ayanda
and she warns him to watch what he eats when he is underground:
Oya eat
Mo jokun ki o mo jekolo
Oyawalé ohun ti gbogbo egbé Oldoya ni ba ni je ni ki o moo je
Don’t eat millipedes, don’t eat worms
Oyawale you’d better eat what the rest of your fellow-devotees of
And those who spend money and effort on Oyawale’s funeral today will be
recompensed in future, when their own children do the same for them. His
death is now seen not only as part of a wider process, but as part of an endless
cycle of investment and profit, of moral and material expenditure and reward,
over the generations, and crossing between human and spiritual worlds:
Omo Oyawalé, gbogboo yin ni 60 réré omo je ,

Omo Oyawdlé baba Oléya, Okin omo Ayééjin
Omokéhindé 6 6 réré omo je 0
Omdséjiwayé, 6 6 réré omo je, omo Oyawalé baba Oldya
Ori 60 jé 0 to iya Ohun gbé...
Oya ni 60 fi pupo san
Omo Oyawalé, Olénda 1 wa ni dari 0kO6 bd
Owo0 igba ti e na fin Oyawalé
Oisa Oké ni 60 fi ppd san
Oya 60 dari agbon silé éyin...
Ba ani ban be layé, Oyawalé, ka a moo se rere
Ba a ba se rere silé ayé, omo a-béré-ji ara Isokun
Ba a ba si mo, omoO wa 60 moo jéré oore lo ni
Oyawalé ori 60 jé kOm00 re 6 jéré oore...
Children of Oyawale, all of you will reap the benefit of
your own children
Children of Oyawale the Oya-devotee, Okin people of Ayejin
Omokehinde, you will reap the benefit of your own children
Omosejiwaye, you will reap the benefit of your own
children, son of Oyawale the Oya-devotee
Your destiny will let you give your mother a grand burial...
Oya will repay you abundantly
Child of Oyawale, the Returner of Blessings is bringing his vehicle
this way
The money you brought out from your calabash to spend on
Oyawale
Orisa Oke?’ will repay abundantly
Oya will direct the basket [of wealth] to your house...
While we’re on earth, Oyawale, let us do good
If we do good to the world, child of One-who-rises-with-the-
python, native of Isokun
When we are no longer on earth, our children will carry on reaping
the benefits of our actions
Oyawale, your Destiny will allow your children to reap the benefits
of your good deeds...
In this passage Sangowemi addresses first Oyawale’s twin sons
(‘Omokehinde’ and ‘Omoseyjiwa’), who are among the principal celebrants at
the funeral feast, and then the deceased, Oyawale himself (‘While we’re on
earth, Oyawale, let us do good’), in a transition that involves no change of
register or tone. There is a perfect continuity suggested in this chant between
the living and the dead, between Oyawale and his children, and between them
and their own children of the future. None of these texts has shown any
interest in what the ‘other world’ is like. They stress, rather, the impossibility
of knowing. But in the very act of bidding farewell to the one crossing into that
world irretrievably, the chants re-establish a continuity and completeness of
communication which is almost sociable in tone, so assured and comfortable
1S if.
If the deceased was a man, there is a final ceremony to complete his
severance from the world of the living. On the morning of the seventh day a
masquerade representing his spirit (an egungun rere),”* will come out and take
his leave of the family. This is another occasion for the impassioned solo
chanting of ortki and laments. The widows, dressed in rags, will be escorted
by drummers, egungun priests and a crowd of family members and well-
wishers out of the town towards the path to the dead man’s farm. As they are
going, the widows will chant snatches of ortki, competing with the drums and
each other, while the rest of the women sing funeral songs. At the beginning
of the farm path the crowd will be told to stop. The egungun priests will lead
the widows forward up the path to a place, prepared by the egungun cult in
advance, where there is a yam heap dug for each widow and one extra one
representing ofo: emptiness. The egungun priest called Elemoso Agan calls the
name of the deceased. He calls again; and on the third call there is an
answering “Hooo!’ and the egungun emerges from the bush. Drumming begins.
Each widow then pulls up her own yam from beneath the egungun’s foot, which
he places on each heap in turn. Each widow then presents the egungun with
symbolic gifts: an egg, money, and a ball of thread representing the wick of
alamp and signifying that she will never light a lamp for him again.” The egungun
blesses them by placing his foot on their upturned palms. Then the crowd
escorts him back to the town. Once again the widows chant wild and tearful
laments on the way. At home, each widow cooks and pounds the yam she was
given, and the egungun emerges again that evening to come and eat the food.
Then, seated in the compound, he calls the widows, children:and younger
relatives to come and kneel by him. He prays for them, blesses them and
departs for ever.
After this, the dead man’s spirit, up till then still close to the human world,
has gone to its own realm. The departed can now only be present among the
living by returning at prescribed times as an egungun, or through ritual
invocations at his grave. But oriki remain as a vital link between the living and
the dead. Throughout the funeral, the deceased has been continually and
intensely addressed, with exhortations, farewells, regrets, reproaches and
warnings. After the funeral is over, communication becomes less concentrated,
but it continues, and the idiom hardly changes. He or she is still addressed in
oriki in the same tone, the same terms, as living subjects. The dead remain,
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5
THE ORIKI OF ORIGIN
1. INTRODUCTION
Ortki orile are the ortki of a place of origin, a homeland. What people say is that
their people originally came from an ancient town, whose name they
remember even when the town has long been defunct. They picture masses
of people scattering from these original towns to other places all over
Yorubaland. People from the same place of origin — the same orile — say ‘We
are one’. When they meet in the course of trade or other travel they recognise
an obligation to help each other, and observe a prohibition on intermarriage.
They have a number of things in common. They may share certain food
taboos, special funeral customs, a particular orisa or a specialised occupation
such as carving, blacksmithing or egungun entertainment masquerading, all
of which are traced back to the town of origin. But the most important thing
they have in common is the ortki orile themselves. These ork: are all about the
place of origin, and affirm the distinctive attributes of the place and its people.
Itis mainly through their shared ortk: orile that these scattered groups recognise
a relationship. They cannot trace the links between themselves, beyond
saying that, because they share the same ore, they know they are ‘one’.
When they left the town of origin, the stories say, these small groups settled
somewhere else: either they founded a new town, and waited for other groups
to join them, or they inserted themselves into an existing one. Within the town
where they settled, their orik: orile took on a new importance. Each incoming
group took up residence as a unit conceived as a kin group: a patrilineage. A
simplified version of local theory would say that each of these localised
patrilineages constituted a separate tle, a ‘house’, or compound, and that
these z/e were the fundamental social and political units in the town. Historical
narratives, already described in Chapter 3, represented the town as a collec-
tion of zle, each coming from a different place of origin and each having its own
traditions; and these separate units were pictured as being held together by
their common allegiance to the oba, who was descended from the founder of
the town. Each izle, in this picture, would stress its own inner unity and
136 THE ORIKI OF ORIGIN
separateness from other equivalent groups. It would know its own history and
deny knowledge of others’. It would identify itself, and could be recognised
by others, by its distinctive oriki orile. Sometimes it happened that two groups
from the same town of origin would arrive separately in a new town and each
would establish its own ile. In that case, they would recognise their relationship
through ceremonial actions and would be forbidden to intermarry, but
otherwise would behave as two separate political and social units. This did not
happen often enough, however, to undermine the function of ortk: orile as
symbols of the separate identity of de.
Townspeople often identify others by reference to the orle of the group
they belong to: ‘Awon Oldfa wonyen td wa nisalé Okukw’ — “Those people of Ofa
origin who live at the bottom end of Okuku’. They continually identify
themselves and their children as members of their own group by citing the
ortki of origin: so a mother might murmur to her newborn child ‘Omo Oldfa
nid, Moja-Alekan...’—‘You area child of the Ofa people, people who are called
“Moja-Alekan”...’ It is ortki orile that people most often recite as a form of
greeting, to congratulate someone or show them affection and approbation.
Oriki orile tell each individual where he or she belongs in the town: they
establish the person on the social map, and give him or her a background
without which he or she would scarcely exist as a social being. Ortki ore thus
have a dual claim on people’s emotional loyalties: they relate them to their
source and through that to large numbers of people all over Yoruba country,
in a shadowy but nonetheless deeply felt unity; and they place them in an
immediate, concrete social context within their own town, assigning them a
social place and a body of people to whom they belong, and who belong to
them.
Of all ortki, they evoke people’s deepest responses. They are not only
rooted in people’s earliest memories, bound up with their deepest sense of
their own place in the world, but they are also associated with the emotional
gratification of others’ affection and esteem. They hold pride of place in
almost all Yoruba chants. They form the basic building blocks in the eclectic
and flexible performances which draw also on personal oriki, prayers, blessings,
witticisms and topical comments. As we saw in the last chapter, they can
appear in extended sequences, formally elaborated, as in rara tyawo, or broken
up into allusive fragments, which those who know them will mentally
complete. They can be heard deeply entangled with the personal, individual
ortki of big men from the past, whose names and reputations are cherished by
their descendants. Ortki orile gradually absorb certain personal oriki in this
way, becoming, among other things, the collective memorial to great men of
the past. When the personal ork: of a great man are remembered as his own,
distinct from the orki orile of the whole group, they can still be intimately
mixed with ortki orile in performance. Origin is the foundation of identity; the
individual, whose personal oriki commemorate his or her personal
INTRODUCTION 137
achievements, distinctions and idiosyncrasies, cannot be conceived of except
as a member of the larger group that claims common origins. Just as the
group’s identity 1s fed and renewed by the fame of individual members, so the
individual members derive glory from the inherited, collective fame of the ore
to which they belong. The dialectical process by which individual and group
reputations feed, and feed on, each other, is thus visible in the very form of
oriki chants: in which personal ortki are absorbed into ortki orile and ortki orile
are addressed intensively to individuals.
Because of their deep roots in people’s self-conception, ortki orile are
cherished in transmission. They are more stable than other ortk1. In a perform-
ance of ortki orile, as in other ortki performances, there is fluidity, fragmentation
and variation in wording. But ork ori/e have a core set of images and references
which are considered to be unchanging. If a performer gets it wrong — if she
attributes the wrong ortki orile to her subject, or if she confuses two different
ones — the recipient of the performance will be alienated and even insulted.!
There is felt to be more at stake with ortkz orile than with personal oriki, where
borrowing and blending is the order of the day. With ortki orile it is important
to get it right. Ortki themselves comment on this:
Bi 6 si orilé a 6 mewe
Bi 6 si orilé a 0 moweée.
If there were no orle we should not know itching-beans
If there were no orle we should not know bean-sprouts.
That is, we should not know one thing from another, and the distinctions of
the social order would be blurred.
There is no doubt that ortk: orile are still, today, highly valued by Yoruba
people even when they no longer live in a traditional compound. Collections
of them are published by academic and popular presses alike; they appear
regularly in newspaper obituaries; they are quoted as slogans on the backs of
lorries. But their very pervasiveness has stood in the way of analysis.
A preliminary question that needs to be asked 1s what is the nature of
‘origin’, as represented in these or1ki, and what kind of bonds are envisaged
amongst the people who share them? A second question, which leads into the
very heart of the problem of how to describe Yoruba social structure, is what
groups actually do claim ‘common origin’ in any given town. When ork: orile
are mapped out over a whole community, showing all the groups that identify
themselves by a separate ‘origin’, and the relations between them, it becomes
clear that the simplified picture of social structure I have just described is not
adequate. Indeed, it is only used in certain contexts, notably in the formal and
as it were abstract recital of town and family histories. When the stories go into
greater detail, or are told for a specific purpose, a rather different picture
emerges: one which is corroborated by daily processes of interaction and by
living memories of relations between groups. Instead of the regular pattern of
residential patrilineages postulated by the simplified picture, it reveals
groupings constituted according to a variety of principles and joining forces
for a variety of purposes. Since the most influential descriptions of Yoruba
social structure available in anthropology have used the segmentary lineage
model, which is in a sense an edited, amplified and rigorously presented
version of the simplified indigenous picture, the investigation of ortki orie in
action may contribute much to our understanding of how social cohesiveness
and division, alliance and dissociation, actually work in one Yoruba town.
Oriki orile then can be used like a ‘trace element’, in the sense intended by
Terence Ranger’, to show up the constitution of social groups in the town. It
then becomes clear that in the rather mixed picture that emerges, ortki orile
play an active and constitutive role. If the town were indeed made up of
autonomous residential patrilineal kin groups, united for all purposes and
separate from all equivalent groups, ortki orile would be almost redundant; at
best, they could be seen as a reflection or endorsement of an established
system whose boundaries were already maintained by every social action and
relationship. But in a situation where ile are less clearly defined than this, and
where different groupings can be called forth by different situations, ortki orile
play a part in the actual definition and constitution of groups. They are a way
of laying claim to identity, rather than just a way of acknowledging membership
of an already fully constituted corporate group. Depending on how they use
them, people may loudly proclaim their membership of a group, or assert their
independence. They may also use them to negotiate the many ambivalent and
borderline relationships. It is only by locating ortki orile in this context of social
action that their true importance emerges; and at the same time, it is only then
that the true subtlety of Yoruba social structural principles is revealed.
2. THE IDEA OF ORIGIN
Origin, in oriki orile, is always construed in terms of place, whether a town
(Oyg-ile, Ola, Ikoyi) or, less commonly, a cultural area focused around a town
(Tjesa). Many ortki ortle fill out this ‘sense of place’ by dwelling on the
characteristic natural features and resources of the town of origin. The oriki
orile of Iresa have as their central theme the thick palm forests surrounding the
two towns, Iresaadu and Iresa pupa (‘black’ and ‘red’ Iresa). In Igbeti, further
north, itis shea trees that are celebrated. Many oriki ortle dwell on the abundance
of water sources, naming all the rivers that are said to flow past or through the
town. But landscape and geographical features are treated not as natural but
as culturalresources. The trees and rivers are part of civilisation, domesticated
and imbued with human significance, as both sources and signs of wealth to
a people. The palm trees of Iresa are given such prominence because they
provide the raw materials for the production of palm oil. Palm oil is the basis
THE IDEA OF ORIGIN 139
of trade, and is also, like salt, a fundamental ingredient of civilised life.
Abundance of salt and palm oil together indicate social wellbeing:
Epo ba n ka relé
Mo mébé mero
Mo modi epoo mi giri lata
Mo subt yégé mo fenu gungba epo
Mo fagbon isalé mo 1 boyo IAIO
Mo yiika bowagun
Mo dodobale bowamo.
Palm-oil come home with me
I know how to sell it and calculate the price
I sealed my palm-oil tightly into a big pot
I tumbled down, I hit my mouth on a calabash of palm-oil
I plunged my jaw into salt at Alo
I bent my shoulder to the ground to worship the young palm tree
I prostrated to worship the dried palm spines.
Rivers, similarly, provide the water which is the basis of the wellbeing of
a human community. They are often associated with the oba or the royal
family, who, as we have seen, are the custodians of the whole town’s identity,
so that abundant water indicates abundant blessings and honour for the town:
Ara odo Oro
Ara Kookin
Aya-bu-éro
Aasin re 0 gbe
Godogbo 6 dé n léran’sé
Obukd ni sé si mi lénu.
Native of the River Oro
Native of Kookin
Place where travellers stop to drink
The River Aasin doesn’t dry up
The River Godogbo doesn’t reach as high as the edge of my sole
The River Obuku flows into my mouth.’
Oriki orile, then, are about places in interaction with people: places that
have been made by people out of the available natural resources; places which
bless their inhabitants with prosperity and wellbeing.
Much of the oriki of these primordial towns is devoted to the people who
belong to them: their occupations, the orisa they worship, their customs and
taboos. And here the idiom of the ortki seems to hint at a preoccupation with
origin in a sense that goes deeper than that of a mere geographical starting
point. The oriki orile of Iremogun, for example, are built around the theme of
the Iremogun people’s distinctive occupation of blacksmith. They boast that
without blacksmiths, no tools would be made and no work done; there would
be no farming, no wealth, and no civilisation: |
Agbédeé mi ribiti niré
Aisi Eniré a 6 roko
Aisi Eniré a 6 yena ,
Ib4 ma sii Eniré a 6 ti gbédé ert saaju.
My smithy is round in Ire ,
Without the Ire people we wouldn’t be able to hoe our farms
Without the Ire people we wouldn’t be able to clear the paths
If there were no Ire people we wouldn’t be able to herd slaves
along in front of us [to work on the farm].
In a similar vein, the Opomulero people of Iwata claim that without the
cloth they weave, people would have to go naked, revealing the deformities
of nature:
Bi 0 si aso
Mo ni a ba sise
Bi 6 si aso
A ba siwa ha
Bii k6k6é
Bi o6wo
Bi iku
Bi agbaarin...
If there were no cloth
We would surely be at fault
Like lumps |
If there were no cloth
Our blemishes would be exposed
Like boils
Like swollen hips :
Like grape-sized swellings...
The origin celebrated by ortki orilehas overtones of the origin of civilisation.
Not only are all the arts by which nature is converted to culture put at the
centre of ortki orile, but also, that this contrast is made quite explicit. It is the
art of the blacksmith which enables the human community to transform itself
and remove itself from the animal existence of the forest: metal tools create
for the first time the possibility of clearing the bush, and of setting ‘farm’ and
‘town’ in opposition to ‘forest’ — an opposition which, as we have seen, is
fundamental to the Yoruba conception of civilisation.* Cloth and clothes refine
these distinctions further. Semi-nakedness 1s all very well on the farm, but no-
one in his or her right mind would go into the town like that. As the proverb
says, ‘Aifeni peni, aiféniyan péniyan, ni i mu ard oko san banté wol’: ‘Only the
“bush-man” [lit. farm person] who has no respect for public opinion would
come into town in his shorts’. Clothes set humans apart from animals; decent
clothes transform the sweating farmer, who struggles with nature at close
quarters, into a civilised man of means and leisure. In the ortki orile of Oje, the
idea of transformation is even more vividly represented. The Oje people are
carvers. Shapeless blocks of wood are turned, under their skilled hands, to
images of human life. The natural tree, transformed into a carved figure,
becomes part of human culture:°
Omo opagida sogi déniyan
Gbigbé léé gbé, omo Ajibégundé o
Njo ij6 kiini 4k6? Omo Ajibégundé
O wa gbé rigboro 6 1 lo sinuugbé o
Igi ri sa lu apa, irdko ni sa lura won
A a mobi ti Lagbai 6 sole si
O gbégi 1 koroboto ni koroboto
Igi 6 16ju igi 6 lénu
Igi 0 latanpako esé méjéeji
O tan wa delégketa éwéewé
Omo bibi Oldjéé 1k? O wa gbé rigboro n lo sinuugbo
O wé gbégi naa dént ayé
Igi lapa igi lénu 6 wa latanpako esé méjééji
O bu pélé sigi 1ééké Oran
O bubaja sigi léeké dsi
Omo ’Kujenra 6 wa gbégi naa dé Oyo-ilé.
Child of ‘One who transforms a piece of wood, turns it into a
person’
Carving is your metier, child of Ajibogunde
What happened on the very first day? The child of Ajibogunde
He lived in the town, he went into the forest
The mahogany bean trees knocked against each other, the
troko trees ran into each other in their fright®
Nobody knows which one Lagbai will pick on.
He carved a piece of wood and made it smooth and round
The wood had no eyes, the wood had no mouth
The wood had no big toe on either of its feet
But the third time round [sic]
What did the true-born son of Oje do? He lived in the town, he
went into the forest
He went and carved a piece of wood and brought it out on view
The wood had arms, the wood had a mouth, and it had a big toe
on each of its feet
He cut pele marks on the wood’s right cheek
He cut abaja marks on the wood’s left cheek’
Child of Ikujenra, his carving took him as far as Oyo-ile.
Lagbai, the carver, is part of the civilised world: he lives in the town, and
only goes into the forest to collect the raw materials of his craft. He converts
the raw material into a human artefact, and as a result of his skill he achieves
fame and success in the human community. ‘His carving took him as far as
Oyo-ile’ conveys the ultimate achievement: success in the eyes of the capital
of the Oyo Empire and, by implication, in the eyes ofits ruler the Alaafin. The
opening line, ‘On the very first day’, is a standard formula introducing a
tripartite narrative structure (note that the performer takes this structure so
much for granted that she skips the second day) but it also hints at the
primordial. Arts such as carving are the foundations of human culture.
But right at the origin of human culture is installed, in ortki orile, the idea
of social difference. The carver, like the weaver and the blacksmith, creates
culture for the whole community, not just for his own people. But note the
finishing touches to the carving. What makes the image really lifelike is the
incision of facial marks: ‘He cut pele marks on the wood’s right cheek/He cut
abaja marks on the wood’s left cheek’. Facial marks are emblems of social
difference: they belong to the repertoire of signs by which groups distinguish
themselves. To be fully part of human culture, it is necessary to be socially
differentiated. The carved image of course belongs to no social group, but it
is humanised by the generalised representation of social differentiation: the
marks of one group on the left cheek, and of another on the right. In the same
way, Carving itself is made into an emblem of difference: only certain groups
are Carvers, just as certain groups are weavers or blacksmiths. Difference is
what the oriki celebrate. ,
The kind of divisions that arise from occupational specialisation are
horizontal, between social groupings of comparable status and function.
Each group proclaims its own specialisation to distinguish itself from other
similar groups. But ortk: orile also assert that from the moment of origin,
society is characterised by vertical divisions. Citizens are not all equal; and the
status of the privileged is defined by its difference from that of the deprived.
These distinctions are built into the very structure of ortki ore. A fundamental
and continually recurrent figure is the triadic set ‘ert, iwofa, omo bibi ini’: slave,
bondsman, free member of a house. It is invariably used to emphasise the
superiority of the free member over the slave and bondsman. Slave and
bondsman are attached to the free person’s group, but can never really share
that group’s attributes. One version of the Oje ortki says that the slave carved
an image but it had neither eyes nor nose, nor toes on either of its feet; the
bondsman carved an image, with the same result; then the true-born son of
the house carved one, and “The wood had arms, the wood had a mouth, and
it had a big toe on each of its feet’. The superior skill of the “true-born son’
is reflected in the higher rewards he gets for his work. As a rara tyawo version
of the ortki says:
Owon pagida sogi déniyan
Erti Ojé ti gbéna pegbéje
Iwofa Ojé ti gbéna pegbefa
Omo bibi ind Ojé ti gbéna pegbééddgun.
Owon who transforms a piece of wood and turns it into a person
The slave of Oje made a carving that sold for 1400 cowries
The bondsman of Oje made a carving that sold for 1200 cowries®
The true-born son of Oje made a carving that sold for 7500
cowries.
The slave and bondsman are represented as being excluded from the
cherished ceremonials of the group that owns them. The royal descent group
‘owns’ the cult of the Otin, the principal local river. The Otin festival is
celebrated with the emergence of a stunning array of images, heavy carved
headpieces carried by the devotees, representing male and female figures.
Pride in this display can be expressed, in the oriki, as the yearning to take part
in it:
N ba 1a, ma dére
N ba 1a, ma dOtonpord
N ba 1a, ma ti gbédé erd saaju.
If I were rich, I would become an image
If I were rich, I would become Otonporo [the most important of
the images]
It I were rich, I would herd slaves along the farm path ahead of me.
But it can also be expressed as the specific exclusion of the royal family’s slaves
and bondsmen from the privilege; only ‘ibile Isesu’ (the ‘native’ Isesu people,
i.e. the ‘true-born sons’) are allowed to carry the images:
Eru ilée wa gbon
E é ii dére
Iwofaa wa 6 gbodd dOtonpord
Ibilé Isésu n 60 gbApa léri.
The slaves of our house are wise
They never become images
Our bondsmen are not allowed to become Otonporo
Native Isesu, I will carry Apa [another Otin image] on my head.
The presence of slaves and bondsmen heightens the standing of the ‘true-
born son’ not only by the sheer contrast of their positions — privilege against
deprivation, inclusion against exclusion, skill against lack of skill, true
belonging against attached status — but also because the slaves and bondsmen
are themselves part of the ‘true born son’s’ possessions. It is a sign of wealth
and wellbeing to be able to ‘herd slaves along the path’ to the farm, and to have
a household where slaves labour in the workshop or smithy for the benefit of
the master. In the ortki orile of Ola, an ancient city ‘on the road to Ogbomoso’,”
these two ideas are conjoined. The slaves and bondsmen, who trade in low-
value goods, are contrasted with the ‘true-born sons’ who deal in the most
valuable commodity of all, human beings. That is, the true-born sons use the
profits from their servants’ work to buy further servants:
Eru Oldla won a4 téégun ,
Iwofa Oléla won 4 togbungbun ,
Omo bibi Oldla won a rak6ko ert wale.
The Ola people’s slaves will sell silk-cotton shoots ,
The Ola people’s bondsmen will sell silk-cotton sprouts
bring them home. |

The true-born children of Ola will buy well-formed slaves and
Conceptions of social differentiation and specialisation are thus indivisible

from conceptions of social hierarchy. The celebration of difference in occu-
pation, religious practice, and customs is in the first instance a marker of
boundaries between equivalent, free social groupings from different towns of
origin but with equal social status. However, the characteristics attributed to
each of these groups are brought into focus by the contrast not only with each
other but also with the unfree categories that are attached to each group. The
| contrast is here between attributes possessed as of right, by virtue of member-
ship of the group, and the same attributes imperfectly possessed, or not poss-
essed at all, by a penumbra of people associated with the group but not belonging
to it. In this way the attributes in question are given the value of intrinsic,
authentic, quasi-natural characteristics, desired but never fully obtainable by
outsiders. The power of the attributes as identifiers is thus enhanced. In the
act of learning to distinguish themselves as members of a social unit within a
town, people also learn that the members of the town are not all equal.
Everything in ork: orile functions as a mark of identity, a means of social
differentiation. Often, ortki orile take as their theme the very symbols by which
groups demarcate themselves. Facial marks usually identify people as coming
from a particular area;'° they are cited with much elaboration in ortkz:
Okod mi réri abaja
Abaja poki n won n bt niraésé
Eni ko pele yale iya lo ni.
My Oko people cut broad abaya marks
At Irese they make thin abaja marks
Anyone who cuts pele marks has deviated
into his mother’s line.
Special taboos and observances which distinguish a group are treated in
the same way. The ortki of the people of Aran-Orin origin make much of the
fact that newly delivered mothers in their group are forbidden to eat palm oil,
salt or pepper in their food for seven days after the birth. The oriki of tle Oba
state that ‘My Ara people never eat ewe beans/ I will have nothing to do with
bean-shoots at Otin/ I must not trifle with the olodooye plant as long as I live’.
Onki orile can thus become a kind of meta-identifier. They not only repeat,
in the medium of words, signs of identity already existing in the form of visible
symbols and practices; they are also able to elaborate and comment upon the
value and meaning of these signs. They have a double capacity to emblematise
social difference.
It is only as elaborated emblems that orki orile can be understood; read as
narratives, or as the praises of past heroes, they remain opaque and yield little
of their meaning. Oriki orile revolve around a small number ofhighly distinctive
signs, revealing that their essential point or purpose is to distinguish groups
of people and assign them marks of identity. It will be shown later in this
chapter that their form, structure and use of language are all animated by the
intent to emblematise.
Place, horizontal social differentiation, and hierarchy are thus bound up
together in the notion of origin; and this origin is the beginning of civilisation.
This complex of ideas is concentrated into what is essentially a collection of
unitary itnages: emblematic representations that function like signs. The consti-
tution of living, evolving social identities is construed in terms of a remote
past. This ‘past’ is therefore inscribed in every social alignment formed in the
present. However, it is not essentially a historical past (though notions of
historical change do occasionally enter oriki orile). The core emblems are loca-
ted in a timeless, originary moment, the beginning of human society itself.
One of the key ambiguities at the centre of social identity will by now have
become fully visible. Oriki ortle are one of the principal means by which groups
of people who regard themselves as kin recognise each other and assert their
unity. But they do so in terms of a common town of origin, and not, in the first
instance, in terms of ancestry. The key emblems in ortki onle are always
associated with the names of places. Ortki orile do include allusions to illustrious
men and women among the ancestors of the group, but these allusions are
attached to the notion of the town of origin. Oriki orile do not trace genealogies,
nor do they revolve around the notion of a lineage founder. The members of
a group assert that they are ‘one’ because they all came from the same place
of origin, and distinguish themselves from people coming from other places.
Narrative accounts of town history do the same thing. When Ajiboye
described the formation of Okuku, for instance, he said that the people of ze
Oloko came from Oya, not that they were descended from Tela; and the elders
of ile Baale remembered that their people came from Aran-Orin but said they
did not know who brought them. This suggests that kinship cannot be seen
as the only principle by which people structure their social world. At the very
roots of identity, it seems, kinship and residence are intertwined and mutually
defining. Neither is prior to, nor determinant of, the other. To suggest how
this might have come about, some speculative history is required.
3. IDENTIFICATION THROUGH TOWN MEMBERSHIP
Why does the ancient town of origin have such a grip on the imagination of
people long since settled elsewhere? Why do the emblematic references of
oriki orile command such profound emotional allegiance and universal respect?
The answer to these questions must lie in the history of Yoruba town
formation and dissolution. Though our knowledge of this history is partial
and fragmented, there is enough evidence in oral narratives to suggest at least
an outline of a historical explanation.
In pre-colonial northern Yorubaland the town was the principal political
unit. Johnson and other sources show that it was towns — together with their
political hinterlands — that formed alliances, waged war and made peace with
each other. Subordinate towns, placed in that position either through conquest
or, as in the case of those that surrounded Kookin, by accepting land from an
already-established settlement, could expand and outgrow the overlord
town. They might then enter into a struggle for independence, recasting
history in the process. The unitary identity of a town was made visible in the
wall that enclosed it, marking it off from the surrounding bush and protecting
it from outsiders. A strong town would become the focal point for a wide area
in times of war, as neighbouring settlements looked to it for refuge.
In this context of inter-urban rivalry and warfare, each town or state would
assert its own identity, making much of any claim to fame it might possess.
Oriki orile must have come into existence when towns began to define
themselves in relation to their neighbours. Sometimes the ortki are explicitly
addressed to outsiders, defying them to belittle the town: |
Won lEnikotun 6 1l6d6
Bé e ba se tan e ba mi sébi dandan léri oluware
Ta ni ni da ya bi omi Ipakun?
Ta ni 1Afélélé omi ayaba ti i ji i pon 6n mu?
Ta ni léyi ti i winmo longbe tojo téérun?
Ta 4 léyi ti i winmo longbe toda k66k6?"!
They say the Ikotun people have no river

When you’re ready, come and curse that person heartily for me
IDENTIFICATION THROUGH TOWN MEMBERSHIP 147
Who has water that gushes like the river of Ipakun?

Who has Afelele the royal wives’ river, that they rise to drink from?
Who has the one that quenches people’s thirst wet season and dry?
Who has the one that quenches people’s thirst during absolute
drought?
Some ortki orile have passages that seem actually to have been inspired by
the outsider’s point of view.'* They point out characteristics or habits which
an outsider might be struck by, but which one would expect the townspeople
themselves to take for granted. Dialect, for example, is not usually something
that speakers are conscious of unless an outsider comments on it:
Won ii pé won 6 wé nikolé
Won 4 ni won 6 tami ’ara
Ki won 6 tami ’ara, Mési-Ojddr6.
They never say they’re going to wash in Ikole
Mosi-Ojooro.* |
They’ll say they’re going to ‘splash water on their bodies’
That they’re going to ‘splash water on their bodies’,
Preferences in food, similarly, would seem peculiar only to outsiders. The

oriki orilg of Omu make that very peculiarity one of their central themes:
Ewuuyan, w6n dOmu, won 4 dotun
Nibi won gbé bi mi l6mo
Otun 4 si (Omit, 44 dikasi
]ja ewauyan ni won 4 ja Omi
Tleé mi wa mi
Awon ti 6 gbén ti 6 da
Won ni won gunra won 16d6, won lora won Il6lo
Ij ewduyan ni won ri ja 1Omu
Tléé mi wu mi
Won faunra won l6wo won funra won lomo
W6n fanra won l6mo, Mési-Ojé66ré..."4
Yesterday’s pounded yam, when it reaches Omu, is like yam
freshly pounded
In the town where I was born
And freshly-pounded yam, when it reaches Omu, will be stale!
They were fighting over stale pounded yam at Omu.
I like my house.
Those who have no sense or reason
Say that they’re pounding one another with pestles, that they’re
grinding one another with grinding-stones
It was stale pounded yam they were fighting about at Omu.
I like my house
They give each other money, they give each other children
They give each other children, Mosi-QOjooro...
This passage presents the Omu people’s taste for ewuuyan (rewarmed
pounded yam) as an oddity, in contrast to the normal preference for fresh
pounded yam. It says that if you took fresh pounded yam to Omu, it would
be despised as much as ewuuyan is despised in other places. But the observation,
if it originated with outsiders, has clearly been taken on board by the insiders:
it is cited with pride, as one of the townspeople’s distinguishing features.
There is even a characteristic note of defiance — only ignorant fools will fail
to understand that in Omu the only thing worth fighting over is stale pounded
yam — and an equally characteristic linkage with the themes of prosperity and
fertility: as well as ‘pounding each other’ and ‘grinding each other’, they ‘give
each other money’ and ‘give each other children’.
In a more general sense, this play of perspectives between insider and
outsider is built into all ortki orile, because all of them seize on those features
which differentiate their town from others. It is with other towns in mind that
ortki ortle make their definitions.
One can speculate that in the hypothetical ‘primordial towns of origin’,
individual townspeople, when dealing with the outside world, would define
themselves by the identity which was known to outsiders: that is, the identity
of their town. Inside the town, going about their daily business, they probably
did not have much need of ortki orile which were common to everyone there.
If the early northern Yoruba towns contained, like modern ones, a collection
of notional patrilineal kin groups, one can picture each of these distinguishing
itself within the town by a body of lineage ortki, most likely the accumulated
personal oriki of lineage ancestors.!? But outsiders would only recognise the
oriki that defined the town as a whole to the outside world; These would
include not only the orki pertaining to the characteristics of the town and
townspeople at large, but also the ortki of the oba’s lineage. Since the oba
incorporated the identity of the whole town, and since it was through him that
dealings with other towns were conducted, the royal oriki were a recognisable
sign of identity to outsiders. Many oriki orile contain references to the royal
lineage of the town and to past obas and many, as we have seen, associate the
town’s natural features with the oba. These ortki would become paramount
when conditions were such that there was a strong need for townspeople to
identify themselves to outsiders. |
This speculation is supported by the fact that a similar process of
identification through town membership is going on today. The ‘far farms’
founded by Okuku men on rented cocoa land many miles to the east and south
of Okuku were gradually swelled by the arrival of other groups from other
towns. In Sunmibare, the first Okuku-founded far farm, dating from 1949,
there are groups from Ikirun, Ibadan, Ife, Ilobu, Aran-Orin, Otan and Osogbo.
Each set of townspeople occupies its own quarter in the new town. The
political organisation of Sunmibare is based on these divisions, each set of
townspeople having its own representative on the town council. The
representatives participate in policy decisions and transmit them to their own
group. Individuals are identified in terms of where they come from. Ifone asks
who lives in a certain house, one will get an answer like ‘Ard Otan ni’ (It’s an
Otan person) and people might even be saluted with a few phrases from the
royal orrki of their home town. These groups of fellow-townsmen are not
necessarily internally related by kinship. In their home towns, they may
belong to different compounds and regard themselves as quite distinct. But
in the farm town they have to define themselves to outsiders who know
nothing ofthese internal relationships. To outsiders the primary identification
is through membership of a common town of origin.
Conditions in pre-colonial Yorubaland were probably such that there was
a constant and widespread need for people to be able to identify themselves
to outsiders. Even before the outbreak of the nineteenth century wars, the
evidence suggests that there was a high incidence of population movement.
People who were dissatisfied with their town of origin for one reason or
another would leave. A section of a compound, or an individual with a few
kinsmen.and friends, would set off to join another town or found their own.
Every lineage in Okuku told a story beginning with some such departure from
their original home. Among the commonest reasons given were defeat in a
chieftaincy dispute, the recurrent deaths of children or persistent barrenness
in women, and the search for better farmland. The advantages of belonging
to an established town were often outweighed by the possibilities offered by
anew place. A group that founded a new town would become the ruling house
there, owning and distributing the land to newcomers. A group that joined an
established town could expect favourable treatment, for every town was
trying to expand by recruiting new people. In the era of Kookin, in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, movements of groups and individuals
seem to have added up to a local population drift south and west. The
histories of fifty ‘lineages’ and ‘attached lineages’!® in Okuku indicate that
people often travelled great distances after leaving their town of origin, and
that it was not uncommon fora group to uproot itself a second and even a third
and fourth time and move on if their earlier choices proved unsatisfactory. As
P. C. Lloyd observes, ‘these migrations seem to have been deliberately
undertaken by men bent on conquest or gain, or else fleeing from destruction,
not the slow drift of men seeking new farmland nor yet a small-scale
movement caused by incompatibility of temperament within groups of
kinsmen’ (Lloyd, 1955, p.240). Often part of a group would leave and part
would stay behind, so that lineages would become more and more widely
scattered throughout the towns of the area.
150 THE ORIKI OF ORIGIN .
As the quotation from Lloyd indicates, another cause of population
movement was warfare. Though the period before the nineteenth century
wars was relatively stable, localised warfare was nonetheless very common,
and in the course of these wars whole towns could be scattered. Several of the
towns of origin claimed by Okuku ze are said to have been founded in the
aftermath of the Tapa invasion of Oyo, perhaps in the sixteenth century."
One of them, Ikoyi, the Oyo military outpost, became a permanent military
settlement, and it appears that other towns did too. The oriki orile of Erin-ile
near Ofa, like those of Ikoyi, deal extensively with the town’s success and
expertise in warmaking. The Ijesa Arara war, as we have seen, is said to have
wiped Kookin out in 1760, leaving only ten survivors. Johnson (1921)
describes towns routinely declaring war on their neighbours for the sake of
prestige as well as for more substantial economic and political reasons.
Several Okuku groups claim to have left their towns of origin because of war.
The fear that a town would dwindle or disband completely seems to have
been taken seriously. In iwure (good-luck chants) addressed to obas, there are
prayers that this will not happen; and successful obas are often praised for
holding the town together. An Ifa verse, very probably dating from before the
nineteenth century, gives us a vivid image of a town’s sudden dissolution.
Obara was destitute, wandering in the bush and on the point of hanging
himself, when he looked up and saw thousands of people swarming towards
him. He asked them what they were doing in the bush, and they replied that
their town had disbanded and that they had been wandering about for days.
Now that they had found Obara, however, they would make themselves his
subjects and form a new town with him as oba.!®
In the nineteenth century, disturbances caused by war became chronic and
endemic. The rate of population movement increased enormously. War
scattered hitherto united lineages and sent them as refugees into different
towns. Some towns were obliterated; others expanded and were strengthened
when they took in large refugee populations. In the Odo-Otin area, the
disruptive effects of the wars have already been described. Many local:towns
were wiped out: Akunyun, for instance, once a town only a mile or two south-
east of Okuku, was destroyed completely and its population scattered, part of
it to Okuku. Okuku, after being abandoned for many years, was then
reconstructed out of the rumps ofits former z/e together with many new groups
who came as refugees. At least twenty-four of the fifty ‘lineages’ and ‘attached
lineages’ listed in the Appendix arrived as refugees from the wars, and most
of them when they arrived were composed of only a handful of people. By the
end ofthe nineteenth century, almost all the old lineages were fragmented and
mixed with segments of many stranger lineages. In the early twentieth century
the influx of strangers continued. The obas Oyewusi (d.1916) and Oyekunle
(1916-34) encouraged immigrants and gave them land in order to rebuild
Okuku’s population.
Warfare between towns simultaneously intensified a town’s identity as a

political unit, and scattered its population. Since ortki ore both affirm a town’s
identity and through it establish the identity of townspeople among strangers,
one could expect a period of intensified warfare to increase the use and
importance of oriki orile. Many of the longest and best-known oriki orile now
extant are those ofnorthern towns which were destroyed (Old Oyo, Ikoyi, Oje,
Ogbin, Iresa) or heavily attacked (Igbeti, Ola, Oko, Igbori, Erin-ile) in the
early nineteenth century’’. It is possible that the refugees, scattered all over
Yorubaland, kept their grip on their identity in the face of chaos by elaborating
the ortk: of their home town until it became an extended, full-blown expression
of their loss and yearning. Oriki orile, with their strong emotional charge, are
associated with lamentation. Chants based on oriki are ‘wept’ (sum), ‘cried’
(ke) or ‘called out’ (pe).
Still, ortki orile in some form clearly antedated this period (many of them
refer to much earlier events), and the evidence of pre-nineteenth century
inter-town relationships and population movement suggests that identification
through town membership would have been brought into play from an early
date. Whenever a group left its ‘town of origin’ and went to settle somewhere
else, it needed to have an identity which its new fellow-citizens would
recognise.
As the fragments of orile-groups scattered, their versions of the ortki orile
gradually altered. This seems to have happened in several ways.
People could incorporate into the ortki orile the oriki of their own lineage.
Two different lineages from the same town of origin would then have ortki orile
which shared some of the same basic themes but also included material that
was different. When the town of origin was fairly close by and the departure
from it fairly recent, memories of lineage difference within the town of origin
could remain strong.
After leaving the town of origin, different groups had different experiences,
stayed in different towns and sometimes took on new customs or began to
worship new orisa. There is the example of the Ijesa group from Efon who went
to Oyo and settled there as herbalists to the Alaafin, quoted in Chapter 2.
After recounting this episode, the ortki orile go on to declare that for this reason
the group now cuts Oyo facial marks rather than Ijesa ones. J/le Ojomu, one
of the lineages from Ofa, must have passed through a town where Ori Oke was
an important onsa at some point in their history. Their ortki orile begin with
the lines:
Omo a-roké-mu-gun
Omo a-roba-tun-yan
Omo a-row6-dunye-ti-0-je
Eni a ni ké jOlofa to ko...
Child of one who has a Hill to climb
Child of one that has an oba to swagger about
Child of one who had money to contest a title, but did not do so
Someone they wanted to make oba of Ofa and who refused...
The ‘Hill’ is Ori Oke. The first two lines are absent from the ork: of ile Osolo,
which is descended from the same branch of the same royal family of Ofa and
whose ortki orile are otherwise the same. J//e Oloyan, of Ikotun origin, however,
also adopted Ori Oke as their principal orisa. Their own oriki orile are quite
different from the Ofa ones, but they open with the same two lines as those
of ale Ojomu:
Omo a-roké-mt-gun
Omo a-roba-tun-yan
Ikotin ’mo a-réké omo Ena
Oké 1a 4 bobaa ré nikotin.
Child of one who has a Hill to climb
Child of one who has an oba to swagger about
Ikotun, child of one who has a Hill, child of Ena
We go with the oba to the Hill in Ikotun.
Even after settling in Kookin or Okuku, lineages would add new bits to
their ortki orile, reflecting their position in the town. J/e Balogun and ile Baale
both came from Aran-Orin in the Kookin era. Some elders said they actually
came as one lineage and only split into two after arrival. Others said that the
Baale people came separately and were already settled in their own village
near to Ijabe when Kookin was destroyed and Okuku founded. The new site
encroached on the z/e Baale people and they became absorbed into Okuku
(the name Baale fits with this story, for a Baale is a village head). Whichever
story is accepted, both agree that the two lineages were originally ‘the same’.
Their ortki orile are substantially the same, but a comparison of the standardised
opening lines of each shows that the people of zle Baale have incorporated
references to one of their chiefs and to the quarter of Okuku where their
compound is situated. The izle Balogun ortki begin:
Omo Alaran-an ,
Omo Asostin
Omo ad6oko-nibi-ow6-gbé-so
| Ila Aran ri sunkun pdéun 6 lépo
Osun Aran n sunkun péun 6 niyo
E jaa relé réé baté’la...
Child of the Aran line
Child of Asosun
Child of one who makes men-friends where the money is plenty
The okro of Aran is complaining that it has no palm oil
ILE IN OKUKU 153
The osun-plant of Aran is complaining that it has no salt
Let’s go home and eat unflavoured food...
Those of i/e Baale begin:
Omo Baaleé
Baalé a-dawonwon-sésin-lénu
Omo olddan méje Agddangbd
Omo a-doko-nibi-ow6-gbé-so
Ila Aran fi sunkun poun 6 lépo
QOstn Aran fi sunkin poun 6 niyo
E ba ja a relé réé baté’la.
Child of the Baale
Baale, one who fastens jingling harness to the horse’s mouth
Child of one who has seven fig trees in Agandangbo quarter
The okro of Aran is complaining that it has no palm-oil
The osun-plant of Aran is complaining that it has no salt
Let’s go home and eat unflavoured food...
The Baale is the principal title of ze Baale, and Agadangbo is the quarter
where z/e Baale is located (now a street). The second line of this passage is the
personal ortki of an earlier chief Baale, referring, typically, to his ownership
of a horse. Here we have an example of the incorporation into oriki orile of the
personal ortki of ancestors of the lineage, a gradual and continual process
which little by little differentiates the ortki orie of all lineages that nonetheless
continue to claim to be ‘one’.
So despite the high value placed on the supposed antiquity and
unchangingness of oriki orile, they do gradually diversify with the different
history of each group that claims them. In this way they make finer
discriminations than mere membership of the wide and shadowy set of people
claiming common origins in an ancient town.
4. ILEIN OKUKU
When a group of newcomers decided to settle in a town, it did not always
conform to the simplified model and establish a new ile of its own: sometimes,
instead, it would join an already-existing one. One way or another, however,
it had to belong to an ile, for this was the most important organisational unit
in the town. It was the social unit which gave people their claims to
membership of the town. Only outsiders temporarily resident in Okuku — like
schoolteachers and civil servants appointed to local government posts — live
in rented rooms and do not belong to any Okuku ze. Such outsiders, even
today, are very few in number. The first question that is asked when people
are trying to place a member of the community is ‘Omo 1lé wo mi?’ — What ile
does s/he belong to? — and it would be impossible to have even a slight
tle. |
acquaintance with someone in town without locating them by reference to an
The question ‘What le does s/he belong to?’ would receive an answer such
as ‘Omo ilé Ojomu ni’ or ‘Omo ilé Nid ni’— S/he is a member of Ojomu’s com-
pound, or a member of Great Compound. Ile are all named: but not, as
Schwab (1955) claims is the case in Osogbo, after a ‘founding ancestor’.
Many ze are named after a town title held by their members (e.g. iJe Ojomu,
ié Odofin, ile Baale) or, less commonly, a religious title (e.g. ile Aworo Otin,
the priest of Otin, and ile Oluawo, the head of the herbalists). Some have a
descriptive name: z/e Nla (large ile), ile Araromi (comfortable ie: so called
because it was built on the edge of town and enjoyed extra space and peace),
and ze Ago (temporary camp: because it was the most recent i/e to be established
in Okuku, its founders arriving around 1915). Some are known by the nick-
name of an illustrious forebear — but not the ‘founding ancestor’ — for instance
tle Oloko (ile of ‘Canoe-owner’, a nickname for the nineteenth century warrior
Gbangbade), and some by the traditional occupation of its members, for
instance z/e Alubata (tle of the bata drummers). Some ile have two alternative
names: zle Oloko can also be called ile Saiwo, after the town title held by this
tle; we Aworo Otin can likewise also be called i/e Balogun; and ile Oluawo, ile
Arogun. In some cases an i/e continues to be named after a title that it no
longer possesses. [Je Oluode was named after the great Winyomi, who was the
Oluode or Head of the Hunters, probably in the early nineteenth century (see
Chapter 6). After his death, the title passed to a member of tle Oloko, and has
remained there ever since, but z/e Oluode has not changed its name.
Ile are physical entities, places where people live together. Yorubas who
speak English always translate z/e as ‘compound’, and some i/é actually still are
single residential units: the large, four-sided buildings with a spacious open
yard in the middle, well described by Lloyd (1955) and Fadipe (1970). Others
have broken up into clusters of separate buildings, usually a mixture of new
petees: upstairs’, or two-storey houses), dleele Cbungalows’ or one-storey
houses) and portions of the old compound building that remain standing.
Large ile have also acquired scattered outposts on the edges of the town, where
more space is available for building, and z/e Oba, the royal de, has blocks of
land in several parts of the town. But the z/e that old men and women recall
from their youth were large, communal buildings; they faced inward rather
than out, and most of the life of the compound was conducted within their
walls, invisible to the outside world. Long corridors enclosed an open square
or rectangular space. Within this space, most domestic tasks and household
crafts were done: weaving, dyeing, basket-making, and shelling palm-nuts
and melon seeds. Domestic animals were penned here when the narrow
entrances to the compound were barred at night. Here, too, evening storytelling
took place. Family meetings were held within the courtyard, and the family
dead were buried there.
ILE TN OKUKU 155
But the word z/e means not just a building, but the people within it. Even
when a compound has spread into many buildings, it is still considered a
single ile, with one internal organisation and one head to represent it. Only if
a compound became very large indeed would it split into two separate
organisational blocks. This has only happened in one case within living
memory, during the period of the flight to Ikirun.
Internally, the compound was organised into four sections:.the young
men, led by a Balogun chosen by themselves; the younger and more active
wives, led by the Iya Ipeere who ‘is the Balogun for the married women in the
compound’; the elderly women, led by the Jyaalele, the most senior of all the
wives in terms of the order in which they arrived at the compound; and the
Baale, the leader of the senior men and the head of the whole compound,
chosen by the senior men from amongst themselves. When any activity
involving the compound members as a whole was called for, the Baale and the
Tyaalele would supervise it, but the actual work would be done by the younger
men and women led by their respective Baloguns. The Baale represents the
compound to the oba and council and transmits decisions back to the
compound members. He supervises the settlement of internal disputes, the
proper conduct of family festivals and ceremonies, the division ofinheritances
among the heirs, and the allocation of the corporately held compound land,
if any remains undistributed.
Iie are the social units through which individuals get access to land.
Membership of an ile gives you a body of people who can sometimes be called
on to supply free labour (for instance, when a man ‘serves’ his future in-laws
with annual ewe (voluntary labour), it is the members of his ze who come and
do the work). The ze, until recently, undertook—in theory at least—to provide
the bride price when one of its male members married. Up till today, the :le
makes sure its members are properly buried. Fellow members of one’s z/e are
duty bound to support with their presence any celebration or ceremony that
one holds: marriage, child-naming, housewarming or religious festival. They
are one’s ‘people’, and without a solid background of people one is socially
non-existent. The tle, as defined by the people of Okuku to the government,
is also the main administrative unit. Taxes are collected compound by
compound, and the individual’s relations with modern local government are
always mediated through representatives of his or her z/e. (“Wards’, though
they exist in local government records, are of little importance in actual
practice and people rarely mention them.)
Ile are associated with the ownership of corporate property, mainly titles
and land. This does not mean that everyone resident in the compound has a
right to this property, but it does mean that the property is definitely
associated with a named compound. All the land surrounding Okuku is
divided into blocks whose borders are well known and the major blocks are
readily identified with particular compounds. Most of the senior town titles
are likewise recognised as belonging to specific ile — and, as we have seen,
many i/e are known by the name of the title they hold. The distribution of titles
and the status associated with them is not a tidy one. Some compounds hold
more than one title (ile Balogun has four); some do not hold any; some share
a title with another compound. Some compounds have access:only to junior
aladaa (cutlass-carrying) titles, which can be moved much more freely from
one compound to another. As we have seen, the rank of the title claimed by
a compound is associated with the order of arrival of the founders of the
compounds — the compounds owning the highest titles claim to have arrived
first — but the compounds themselves are not ranked accordingly. Nor is the
Baale, the head of the compound, necessarily the holder of the compound’s
principal title or of any title. Nonetheless it is quite true that each ze holds on
to whatever property it possesses with great vigour. Ownership of titles is one
of the objects of intense and protracted struggle between the oba and leading
townspeople. In a number of cases it is remembered that the oba succeeded
in transferring a title from one compound to another. Struggles over title
reach far back into the nineteenth century; in the twentieth century land also
began to be a bone of contention, which the oba could sometimes take from
one compound and give to another, always in the teeth of furious resistance.
struggles.
Land and title, then, are talked of as the corporate property of compounds,
and though not inalienable, this property is the object of intensely proprietorial
At first sight, then, the zJe seems a strongly unified and easily recognisable
social unit. This impression is reinforced by the literature on northern Yoruba
social structure. Two views have been presented of the constitution of the z/e.
Lloyd (1954, 1955, 1960, 1965, 1968, 1971, 1974), Schwab (1955) and
others have represented the fundamental social unit as a localised agnatic
descent group, unified because it is in fact or in fiction a single body of
patrilineal kin. Fadipe (1970), Sudarkasa (1973) and Eades (1980), on the
other hand, offer an alternative model where the significant social unit is the
compound, defined primarily by the common residence rather than by the
kinship of its members. They point out that a single compound may contain
two or more separate descent groups, living together on an equal or unequal
footing. The functioning unit, in this picture, is the residential group — the
compound, whether containing one lineage or many — rather than the descent
group as such.
This second model accommodates the variability and adaptability of
Okuku social organisation much better than the segmentary lineage model.
It does imply, however, that whatever the internal composition of the
compound, its external boundaries are always clearly defined. In other words,
both models suggest, with different degrees of emphasis, that there is a clearly
recognisable social unit, with well-marked boundaries, which functions as the
principal building block of social structure in all contexts. The disagreement
ILE IN OKUKU 157
is about the criteria according to which this unit is defined.
The segmentary lineage model, of which Lloyd is the most lucid and
influential exponent, postulates a vast grid of kinship relationships as the basis
of Yoruba society. The scattered groups recognising unity through possession
of a common orile are described as ‘patrilineal clans’, descended from a
putative common ancestor, though unable to trace their genealogical
relationships. The compound is described as the residential manifestation of
a segment of one of these clans, that is, as a localised patrilineage. “Thus all
the inhabitants of a compound trace their descent from a common ancestor’
(Lloyd, 1955, p.237). These localised patrilineages are described as strongly
corporate, their membership uniting for all significant purposes — land-
holding, title-holding, political representation, communal labour, marriage —
and excluding members of other groups. Modifications to this picture are
introduced, however. Lloyd shows very clearly that in practice most compounds
include other people as well as the members of the patrilineage who founded
it. There are ‘stranger segments’ of other clans who attach themselves to a
resident patrilineage as guests. There are also groups descended through a
daughter rather than a son of the patrilineage — and who therefore should
belong to the woman’s husband’s lineage — who become full members of the
woman’s natal lineage and may even, in the interesting cases observed by
Lloyd, take titles in it (Lloyd, 1955, p.245). However, the implication of this
account is that since the localised patrilineage has a strong corporate ideology
and well-defined boundaries, attached segments must be either thoroughly
incorporated, so that within three or four generations they have been
absorbed virtually without a trace, or they must leave to found their own
separate z/e. They must be either in or out. ‘No man will ... admit that he is
a lineage member by adoption’ (Lloyd,1955, p.241). In Okuku, however, as
well as groups that were absorbed or detached in this manner, there were
groups that remained poised on the boundaries, neither in nor out, for very
long periods without showing any sign of moving either way — and without
making any attempt to conceal their dual or ambiguous status.
Eades on the other hand suggests that it is the compound and not the
lineage which has strong boundaries, for it is the compound which constitutes
an exogamous unit, and which functions as the principal organisational
structure in the town. This suggests that if more than one lineage inhabits a
compound, their identity as compound members overrides their identity as
members of lineages. People ‘think of themselves as members of compounds
rather than descent groups’ (Eades, 1980, p.49), and the clear line of
demarcation is around the group that belong together in one compound.
Eades’s lively and refreshing contribution, brief as it is, succeeds in coming
to terms with actual usage in northern Yoruba towns. As he points out, people
rarely talk of ‘:dzle’, the term chosen by the segmentary lineage theorists to
translate ‘lineage’. They talk of z/e, which as we have seen Is usually translated
as ‘compound’. His approach also has the merit of raising further questions
which segmentary lineage theory did not have to address: in particular,
questions about identity. In the segmentary lineage model, identity as a
descent group is represented as dominant, and the boundaries of the
residential group coincide with those of the descent group. This leads to the
unfounded assumption that all the markers of identity used by an dle define
a single, unified localised patrilineage and are couched in the language of
kinship relations. Oriki are represented by Schwab as a kind of poetic
genealogical charter.*° But if, as in Eades’s model, compounds are not
coterminous with lineages, then two different principles are at work. Ifa
compound contains two or more kin groups, then the question arises as to
how compound identity is affirmed, and how and in what circumstances the
kin groups are recognised. If, as Eades suggests, the residential principle is
paramount, then one must ask to what extent the compound is able to define
itself as a solid, homogeneous unit when it is so internally diverse, and
whether the ‘lineages’ within the compound maintain separate identities
which are significant for certain purposes.
In Okuku, it was not possible, in the end, to propose either the ‘compound?’
or the ‘lineage’ as the fundamental social unit. Rather, the principle of descent
and the principle of residence were entwined and interpenetrated at every level,
down to the foundations of social identity. And this identity was continually re-
defined according to the circumstances, giving rise to different ‘groups’, differ-
ently recruited in different situations, so that no single definition of a primary
social unit was in the end possible. One term — z/e — was used for almost all
significant groups: but it turned out to refer to different kinds of units in
different circumstances. The word ile has overtones of kinship as well as resi-
dence: it is a ‘house’ in the sense of a dynasty (as in the ‘house of Lancaster’)
as well as a ‘house’ in which people live. Which connotation came to the fore
depended on the circumstances. The term ile could also be used inclusively
or exclusively. It seemed to shift its boundaries whenever you looked at it.
When I first arrived in Okuku I was told authoritatively that there were
seventeen compounds in the town. I naturally set out to interview the baale
of each compound and learn the history and genealogy of its members. But
as I proceeded, more ile appeared. I realised that seventeen was simply a
traditional number, and that my informant had overlooked a number of small
ornew ones. The number went up to twenty-four. Then as time went on] kept
hearing — not when I made formal enquiries, but only in casual conversation
— about still more ‘ie’ that I hadn’t known existed. There were ile within le;
ile attached to ile, ile that were sometimes recognised as such, and sometimes
not. Some, I realised, could be accounted for simply as sections of larger
groups, as described by segmentary lineage theory: if four branches of one
family all build their own houses, each house can be referred to by the name
of that segment’s founder without calling into question the unity of the larger
ILE TIN OKUKU 159
we. But other cases were less straightforward. There were z/e that were sometimes
described as being part of another compound and sometimes as independent
units. There were tle which were lumped together as one organisational unit,
and which shared a baale, but which nevertheless claimed equal and
independent status, and had their own names and buildings. There were tle
which claimed to be separate but which lived under one roof. And there were
all kinds of permanent and significant relationships between tle that the picture
of unitary, separate, bounded groups had not prepared me for. By the time
I left Okuku three years later I had arrived at a list of twenty-nine tle which
seemed to be generally accepted, for most purposes, as independent
compounds, and a further twenty-one units which though attached to ‘host’
compounds nevertheless had varying degrees of autonomy. These z/e and
attached groups are shown in the Appendix, with information about their orzkz
orile, stories of origin, rules of exogamy and relationships to other groups. But
since definitions of z/e were relative and depended on the functional context,
any list such as the one I constructed is not only provisional — if ] had stayed
longer, new situations would have revealed further groupings — but also
misleading if it is taken as a description of solid and permanent social units.
It should be read, rather, as an indication of the range of possibilities open to
social groupings as they adjusted their boundaries according to context.
The lability and complexity of the social structure was to be understood in
the following terms: instead of having a determinate number of solidary,
bounded units each of which operated as a corporate group for all purposes,
somewhat different groups were recruited for different purposes. The
boundaries of any ile depended on what it was being invoked for. Title- and
land-holding; co-residence; co-operation in communal work, whether for the
oba or for other members of the ie; internal administration and social control;
town administration and taxation; exogamy: each of these functions might
call upon a different range of ‘members’.
In Okuku, each z/e, as in Lloyd’s account, was constructed around a single,
notionally agnatic, descent group. Each ze, that is, was recognised as having
a core of real or fictional kin, a ‘lineage’ represented as three to five
generations in depth and descended from a named male ancestor. These
genealogies, as was seen in Chapter 3, are greatly foreshortened and there is
considerable — not obviously motivated — variation in the version given even
by two very closely related members. But if lineage elders disagree about the
interrelationships of people named in the genealogy, they do almost always
agree about who is included and who is not. This core group is invoked for
one crucial purpose: access to title. If the compound owns a title — and
especially if it is a senior olopaa (staff-carrying) one — it is only those people
who are recognised as belonging to the core group of agnates that will be
allowed to compete for it. In Okuku, ‘children of females’ — i.e. descended
through a daughter rather than a son — are almost always excluded when it
comes to title. In some compounds the core group is large; there are
compounds, indeed, which are almost entirely composed of one agnatic kin
group, conforming to the classic segmentary lineage model. -
But most compounds contain a number of other groups, also describing
themselves as patrilineal kin groups, that are not agnatically related to the core
lineage. In some compounds the core group is actually outnumbered by this
kind of ‘attached lineage’. Such sections come into existence, as we have seen,
when a man or a party of men arrive as strangers in the town and are offered
hospitality by an already-established compound. In many cases there is a
matrilateral link to promote this attachment. The newcomers.are housed in
the compound and land is usually made available for them to cultivate food
crops. After about two generations the land will be acknowledged as theirs,
to be inherited by their children.”! They can then be described as oredebi—friends
become family. In the course of normal expansion and dispersal into separate
houses these groups will sooner or later build their own. Sometimes two or
more sets of strangers build together, but they continue to be regarded as part
of the compound of the host lineage.
These sections are not on an equal footing with the core lineage, for they
are excluded from access to the title. But what is remarkable about them is
the sheer variety of relationships which they can enter into with the ‘host’
lineage and with other groups in the town.
Some attached lineages do conform to the segmentary lineage model in
that they are almost completely amalgamated with the host lineage. They are
always called by the host lineage’s name, they own lineage land, and they
participate in all compound activities. Only when a title falls vacant is their
separate origin referred to: otherwise, both host and guest lineages are shy of
suggesting that there is any difference between them. But there are also
sections that are less completely absorbed into the host lineage. Although they
use the name of the host lineage for identification at all times, they do not deny
or conceal their separate origins. They do not relinquish their family orisa,
special funeral observances or the recognition of other groups sharing the
same orile. They combine with the host lineage for all purposes except title-
holding, but their different origin is still, after a hundred years or more, openly
acknowledged by both sides and there seems no prospect therefore of their
being absorbed into the host lineage without a trace. |
But the most interesting cases are those attached lineages which are
sufficiently independent of the host lineage to maintain a kind of permanent
dual identity. For some purposes they regard themselves as part of the host
lineage and call themselves by its name. For other purposes they are
autonomous. Faderera’s family, zle Awoyemi, (1b in Appendix) is an example.
It was founded by Bolakanmi, son of Olunlade, amember of the royal lineage
of Ola, an ‘ancient town’, sometime before the nineteenth century. Bolakanmi
left Ola with a large body of kinsmen and supporters (‘two hundred people’)
ILE IN OKUKU 161
after a succession dispute, and travelled to Oyan. The party of immigrants was
welcomed and given the title Eesa, in second position after the oba himself.
They settled there for some time, after which ‘some of them remained there,
and some scattered’. In the reign of Edun of Okuku, in the middle of the
nineteenth century, a group of them, led by Bolakanmi’s son, moved on.
Bolakanmi’s mother was Edun’s elder sister by the same mother, so his group
took up residence in Okuku as guests of tle Oba. They are debarred from the
obaship but for all other purposes can today be counted as members of ile
Oba, Edun branch. They share the royal family’s exemption from communal
work and the right to dress their daughters in the oba’s regalia on their wedding-
days. They are the custodians of Paje, the oba’s egungun. Alternately with
another attached segment of z/e Oba, they fill the post of Araba, the oba’s own
Ifa priest. They attend the monthly family meeting or farajo of tle Oba, and
play a significant part in it— one of their family is currently the secretary of the
meeting and another, Faderera’s brother the Ifa priest, has a prominent role
in the settlement of disputes.
However, they also exist as ze Awoyemi in their own right. They have a
separate farajo of their own to which the descendants of their ancestor
Awoyemi Akanbi come. Sometimes, also, descendants of the group that
remained in Oyan will come if they are in the neighbourhood. This faraje is
held on the same day as all other farajo — the last Friday of the month — but
earlier in the morning, so that they can finish it in time to attend the t/e Oba
meeting. At festivals the head of the household participates in the oba’s sacrifice
and feast, like all other members of z/Je Oba, but unlike the rest he also holds
a big sacrifice and feast of his own. On this occasion his ancestors are saluted
, and their origins recalled. Faderera performs the Ola oriki orilg, never the Kookin
oriki belonging to tle Oba. The ancestors of the royal lineage proper are not
mentioned. All the members of z/e Awoyemi are called Abe, their own ‘totemic
name’, not Okin, that of ile Oba.
There are several attached lineages in Okuku that have this kind of
relationship to their hosts. Often, their exclusion from the title held by the
core agnatic group is compensated for by their exclusive access to a religious
title. Araba, Oluawo Onifa and Alapinni are all traditional cult titles that
belong exclusively to one or two semi-autonomous attached lineages.
There is no sign, in any of these cases, of incipient erosion of the attached
lineage’s identity. Nor, on the other hand, is there any sign of impending
separation into an autonomous lineage. At least two of these attached lineages
— tle Awoyemi described above, and i/e Elemoso Awo (19b in Appendix) —
appear to have maintained a relationship with a host lineage on the same
footing of dual identity since the middle of the nineteenth century.
The composition of a compound, then, is variable. There is always a core
agnatic lineage. This lineage has exclusive access to the principal title if the
compound has one. But title-holding is usually the only function for which the
core lineage members alone are recruited. Attached lineages live in the
compound, share in all compound activities, usually hold compound land
and in varying degrees partake in a compound identity. These attached
groups can remain autonomous for some purposes and identify with the core
lineage for others; and this dual status can endure for long periods. How the
various i/e are identified depends on the context, and on the interests at stake.
For example: if they are looking for building plots, members of the segment
1b in the Appendix will say they are members of zle Oba (le Oba is the only
compound that still possesses unused land); but when the Ifa cult title Araba
is being discussed, they say that they, asmembers of zle Awoyemi, will be entitled
to it when it next falls vacant.
For some purposes and in some situations, people could be recruited on
an even broader basis. The history of residence patterns this century, for
instance, does not conform at all to the model of exclusive, solidary residential
units. Two independent ie with their own names, their own baale, and their
own corporate property (land and titles) could actually live in the same
building for long periods. After the return from Ikirun in 1893, only eight
buildings were at first erected to house the whole population. After some
time, a number of ile built together in pairs. Each pair would share all
compound activities but would retain their separate names, authority structures
and identities. The Appendix shows four such pairs. One of them, z/e Oluawo
(7) with ze Oluokun (20), stayed together until 1954; the others split up a few
years earlier. It was also possible for one section of an independent ile to leave
that compound and live with other people without relinquishing its original
identification. For example, iJe Aworo Otin (8a) built a compound of its own
after the return from Ikirun, but one section of the main agnatic lineage went
to live in ze Jagun and did not return to ze Aworo Otin untill 1953. This happened
, because a wife of zle Aworo Otin was from Ada, where the mother of Chief
Jagun also came from. She felt safer with a fellow townswoman after all the
disturbances of the last evacuation of Okuku, so she took her.sons with her
to live in Chief Jagun’s household. [Note that this link, as described by the
people concerned, was, in the first place, between two women, andin the second
place, not based on kinship but on common (recent) membership of another
town.] All the sons grew up in i/e Jagun and lived there all their lives, but they
were still members of ze Aworo Otin in their own eyes and everybody else’s.
Two groups, each recognised as an 7/e in its own right, could therefore live
together for long periods within one compound. If co-residence in a single
compound did not always mean that people belonged to the same z/e, neither
did the fact that they combined together to do communal work. Work which
was allocated to a compound as a whole included labour on the baale’s ajoyeba
land (land belonging to the title, for the use of successive incumbents), labour
on the royal farms or on town projects, ewe on behalf of any man of the
compound who required it, and the important work of preparing for ceremonies
ILE IN OKUKU 163
such as funerals, marriages, child-naming and house-opening. The internal
organisation of the compound made it easy to mobilise all its members to
participate in these functions. Those mobilised always included all the people
actually living in the compound. When two independent z/e lived under one
roof, they would always combine to do communal work (in some cases one
would claim that the other ‘served’ it, but this would be denied by the latter).
But the grouping for communal labour could also include people who did not
live in the same compound. Jle Jagun (14), though it had its own compound
soon after the resettlement of 1893, did communal labour with ile Oluawo (7)
and ile Oluokun (20), who were living together in another compound.
Whenever communal labour was required these three z/le would be called on
as a unit and would work together. Similarly ze Odogun (10), de Osolg (13)
and ile Araro (12) formed a single unit for communal labour. Sometimes an
early, brief period of cohabitation was followed by a much longer period of
co-operation. fle Oloyan (16) went on combining with ile Odogun (10) for .
communal work long after they had ceased to share a compound, and the
same was true of z/e Alawe (15) and ze Baale (4). Sometimes complicated
arrangements about co-operation reflected the multifarious and indeterminate
relations between two groups. Ile Elegbede (23) was one of the groups that
arrived from Otan early this century. They associated themselves on arrival
with tle Oluawo (7) to whom they were related by marriage, rather than to the
other Otan groups. They lived for some time in the Oluawo compound, and
when they built their own, it was on land made available for them by zle
Oluawo. They are sometimes classed as part of ze Oluawo, sometimes as a
separate compound belonging to the Otan group. When communal work is
called for, the men of tle Elegbede always unite with the men of z/e Oluawo,
sharing the same Balogun. But the women do not unite for communal work.
The wives and daughters of z/e Elegbede have their own separate organisation
with their own Iya Ipeere.
Equally variable and overlapping discriminations are made by the rule of
exogamy. According to Lloyd, exogamy is distinctive of a ‘clan’, and, at the
local level, of the clan segments localised as residential agnatic descent
groups. The boundary drawn around the descent group as an exogamic unit
thus coincides with all other practices that define the lineage as a corporate
group. According to Eades, it is not the lineage but the compound which is
an exogamic unit, reinforcing his claim that it is the compound and not the
descent group that constitutes the basic building block of Yoruba social
structure. But in Okuku, exogamic units overlapped and intersected, because |
they were constructed both according to residential and according to kinship
principles. People living in the same compound cannot intermarry, even if
they belong to separate groups unrelated by kinship. People recognised as a
kin group cannot intermarry, whether they live in the same compound or not.
People who claim a common town of origin are considered to be ‘one’ and do
not marry each other. This blurs rather than strengthens the boundaries of
groups. For if a compound contains an attached lineage of different origins,
this lineage, but not the rest of the compound, will be forbidden to marry into
other z/e with which it shares the same orile. For example, ide Oguntayo (5b),
though very closely associated with its host lineage i/Je Oloko (5a) — indeed, for
most purposes indistinguishable from it — observes different marriage
prohibitions. The main lineage of ile Oloko (5a) are free to marry into ile Alubata
(22) and tle Oluawo Onifa (2d), but Oguntayo’s segment (5b) is not, because
it shares I[koyi origins with them and is therefore regarded as related to them
by kinship. Thus the rule of exogamy may actually divide a compound rather
than mark its boundaries. At the same time, however, the rule asserts the
importance of groups created by co-residence. It covers all groups who once
lived in the same compound, even if they are genealogically unrelated and
even if they subsequently moved into separate compounds. Thus all the pairs
of lineages that were co-residential in the past are forbidden to intermarry. If
one nuclear family within a compound goes to a ‘far farm’ and there shares
a house in its early pioneering days with another family from a different
compound — something which often happened — all the descendants of these
two men would be forbidden to intermarry even ifthe period ofhouse-sharing
was short. Even a strong bond of friendship between two men is sufficient
grounds for them to set up a prohibition on marriage between their descendants
if they so wish.
In Okuku, then, constituencies whose boundaries were drawn not only by
kinship and by common residence, but also by common organisation and co-
operation, sometimes coincided, but sometimes cut across each other. All
groups entered into a variety of relationships with other groups, according to
expediency. The strains of the nineteenth century wars and the consequent
depletion and fragmentation of the population meant that strategies had to
be adopted to reconstruct workable units in the town. It is quite possible that
before the nineteenth century, there was less diversity in the i/e and in the
relationships between them, fewer ‘stranger’ groups and weaker bonds
between and across compounds. Perhaps z/e were more unitary and more
strongly bounded. On the other hand, both Lloyd and Eades have suggested
that the descent group has become more strongly corporate in relatively
recent times. Okuku oral history offers no evidence either way. What is
| noteworthy, however, is the readiness with which twentieth century ile have
amalgamated, the variety of forms which their amalgamation took, and the
length of time that some of their arrangements lasted. Bearing in mind the
probable high degree of population mobility before the nineteenth century,
one may suspect that flexibility of group boundaries, and the possibility of
invoking a variety of principles of recruitment, was already present in the
social system then, to be drawn on in different ways and with increasing
intensity as the need increased. Perhaps, in this case, the strongly-bounded
THE DEMARCATION OF ILE BY ORIKI ORILE 165
unitary corporate group was never more than one of several available models,
towards which actuality tended, more or less approximately according to the
historical circumstances.
5. THE DEMARCATION OF ILE BY ORIKI ORILE
If the town is made up, not of well-defined, strongly corporate groups, but of
a variety of bodies of people recruited for different purposes and entering into
variable relationships with each other, then the question arises: which of these
bodies of people are demarcated by orthi orile? Each party ofnewcomers brings
with it, as we have seen, the ortki orile by which it is recognised. But it
subsequently enters into a variety of relationships with other groups: with a
core lineage and other attached lineages if it joins an established compound;
sometimes with other compounds for co-residence or communal work; with
other lineages sharing the same ore within other compounds.
Onki orile are in fact the last thing that any group will relinquish. An
attached lineage may live in the host’s compound, be called by its name,
receive land from it and participate fully in its internal government and all its
activities, but it will still preserve a memory — even if only in private — of its
own orthi orile. As long as it does this, it will be excluded from access to the
principal compound title. And it will retain a relationship, marked by
exogamy and ritual obligations, with other core and attached lineages in other
compounds if they share the same orie. If it abandons its ortki orile, this is a
sign that the last barrier has been crossed and that the attached lineage has
now become fully amalgamated with the core lineage in its compound, even
for the purpose of title-holding. For obvious reasons it is impossible to know
how often this happens.
However, occasionally there is evidence that a merging has occurred: for
instance when the pace of an attached lineage’s incorporation is forced, so
that even after it has been absorbed by the core lineage there are still people
who remember the time when it was a separate segment. This happened in
ile Oluode. A daughter of the main agnatic line went to marry a husband in
Ira. When he died she returned to her father’s compound, not only with her
own children but with those of her co-wives who were quite unrelated to zle
Oluode. All ofthem took up permanent residence in izle Oluode. All the children
were at first saluted by the ortki orile of their father, the Ira man. But one of
these sons, Odelade, was so successful a big man that he overshadowed all the
men in the main lineage and eventually took a title. In the following
generation this title, to which his son succeeded, was made the principal one,
and its holder became the baale of the whole compound. This meant that he
must be of the core lineage. So because of Odelade’s pushiness, a stranger
lineage had been incorporated de facto after only two generations. Although
these events are too recent to have been forgotten yet, the Ira oriki orile have
been abandoned. Members of Odelade’s branch of the compound are saluted
only by the ortki orile of the main agnatic lineage. |
It may also happen that when one lineage incorporates another, evidence
is left in the oriki themselves, for sometimes instead of the attached lineage’s
oriki being completely abandoned, they may become combined with those of
the main lineage. This seems to have happened in the remote history of :le
Oloko. Je Oloko claims descent from the royal lineage of Oyo, and uses the
‘Erin’ (Elephant) emblem in their ortki orile. But, as we have'seen, they also
use the ‘Opo’ (Housepost) orile from a town of origin called Iwata. According
to Babalola (1966b), one branch of the Oyo royal family was of Opomulero
descent; but it was a different descent group from the Erin line. Both these
sets of ortki are attributed to the main agnatic line of descent of the founder
of ile Oloko. When questioned about the presence in one lineage of two orile
— with two different emblems, Opo (Housepost) and Erin (Elephant) — elders
said ‘Okan nda ni?’ (‘It’s all one’) and seemed uninterested in the question of
whether in fact two different lineages were merged to constitute that ‘one’. All
the members of the lineage that claims this mixed orile have access to the
principal town title belonging to the compound. If merging did take place, the
only evidence is in the combined oriki orile: and to the lineage members
themselves, the two orile have become one. |
But if we do not know how common it is for attached lineages to abandon
their oriki orile in the process of becoming incorporated into the core lineage
of their compound, we do know that a great many attached lineages remain
unincorporated and demonstrate this status by preserving their own oriki
orile. Each of the twenty-one ie listed in the Appendix as being attached, more
or less closely, to a main lineage in a compound, is demarcated by its own ortki
orile and maintains a relationship with other groups in the town which have
the same ore. All the main lineages, the cores of compounds, of course
preserve their own oriki orile and can appeal to them in chieftaincy contests
when they want to eliminate a female or stranger branch. Within the
compounds, the distinctions that oriki orile make show which people can
claim to be real agnates.
However, the ortki orile were not always used in the same way. How they
were used depended on the precise relationship between host and guest
lineages. For example, an attached lineage that had no independent existence
and which was the same as the host lineage for all purposes except title-
holding would keep rather quiet about its separate ortk: orig. They would
probably only be performed on occasions when no other members of the
compound were present— for instance, as early morning greetings in their own
part of the compound. Sangowemi, who knows the origins of every lineage
segment in Okuku, would salute members of such attached lineages with their
own ortki orile if she went to greet them in their own house on a private visit.
But on a public occasion, she would salute them with the ork: of the core
lineage — though she would sometimes bring in a few lines of their own ortki
THE DEMARCATION OF ILE BY ORIKI ORILE 167
as well. The more independent the attached lineage, the more publicly it
would proclaim its oriki orile. Those that occupy an apparently permanent.
semi-attached status always use their own ortki orile. As these lineages usually
own an important cult title, they play a prominent part in many ritual or
ceremonial events, and for this reason have conspicuous opportunities to
make their oriki known. Each of the three most important ‘semi-attached’
lineages in Okuku happens to have an exceptionally talented performer.
Faderera, as a daughter of the important semi-autonomous lineage zle
Awoyemi, always plays a prominent part in ceremonies there; Ere-Osun is
married into tle Elemoso Awo, which is attached to ile Elemoso but which is
distinguished, as its name suggests, by the fact that the head of the household
is the Elemoso Awo in the Ifa cult; and Sangowemi herself was married into
ile Oluawo Onifa, a lineage attached to ile Ojomu and again distinguished by
having as its head the most senior of all the Ifa priests.
Thus ortki orile are consciously used by performers to assert lineage
boundaries and relationships. As a general rule, an outsider always uses the
ortki that make the broadest discriminations, while the insider hangs on to
those which differentiate his/her group most finely. But the more independent
an attached lineage is, the more aware the outsider will be of the ork: that
distinguish it from other groups.
*
Oriki orile taken as emblems of identification have presented us with two

apparent contradictions. They demarcate units in the town which are
conceived as descent groups, but they do it in terms of a common town of
origin. And instead of reinforcing the boundaries of important organisational
units — the compounds — they maintain internal divisions, demarcating the
many fissures within each compound, and perpetuating them. Though their
animating intent is to affirm group solidarity and pride, their effect is to insist
on the diversity of people’s origins, and their separate past experience,
however small the fragments become.
The groups that ortki orile demarcate are not coterminous with most of the
social units that actually function in the life of the town. Within any given ile,
the people claiming unity through ork: orile often do not function as a discrete
and exclusive group for any purpose but one: that of title-holding, and then
only in the case of the core lineage. The core lineage will try to preserve its own
boundaries so that it retains exclusive access to the compound title; other
attached groups, whether they like it or not, will thus be kept separate. But
apart from this function, each group recognising unity through ore will operate
almost all the time in amalgamation with a variety of other groups: land-
holding, residence, communal labour, town administration and the regulation
of compound affairs all call forth groups in which the ‘lineage’ demarcated by
oriki orile acts in combination with other lineages or parts of other lineages.
Although ork: orile are so much cherished, the perpetual negotiability of these
relationships rubs off onto them. Orki that appear to be different are declared
‘the same’; ortki that appear single then unravel into separate strands.
Continually merging and diversifying, matted and intertwined, their aspect
changes according to the perspective of the user.
6. ORIKI ORILE OF THE MOTHER
There is a further reason for the dense imbrication of references in ortki ortle.
Identity in terms of an agnatic descent group is always shot through by
identifications through the mother. One of the crucial openings in the wall
erected around a group by ortki orile is the ‘ile rya’: the mother’s house. It is
not normal to attribute to a subject only the ork orile of his own — that 1s, his
father’s — patrilineage. He must also be saluted ‘ni idi tyd’: on the mother’s
side, by the ork: orile of his mother’s patrilineage. Many ortki texts make this
requirement explicit, proclaiming, for instance: |
Ipaké won jolé iya, Awéyemi, iwaju té o ri n 16 jolé baba
A alé rarinji, Akandé, k4 a solé iyé nu
Mobomiléjo, ka a gbélé baba ka i léju gegeege
Imi idaji oo, Akinsowo6n
Ara iyaa re ni
Ito idaji, ara iyda re ni.
lya 16 ni wiwé kankin
Mobomiléjé, baba té 9 ri n 16 ni jije mumu |
J6 kan dugbé
Akandé, ijé
Omo ii fii sola da iya é tan”?
kan dugbé ,
house |
The back of the head is like the mother’s house, Awoyemi, the
forehead is like the father’s
However far you go, you can never throw away your mother’s
Mobomilejo, and, living in your father’s house, treasure. that

above all
ERarly-morning shit, Akinsowon
It’s your mother who is dirtied with it
Early morning piss, it’s your mother who is dirtied with it
The mother’s job is washing and powdering the child
Mobomilejo, the father’s job is providing food and drink.
Because of the days when she was heavy
Akande, because of the days when she was pregnant
The child never uses its position to mistreat its mother completely.
The mother’s house and the father’s are inseparably locked together in
ORIKI ORILE OF THE MOTHER 169
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every individual’s identity, just as the forehead and the crown of the head are
inseparable aspects ofa single entity. Introducing the z/e zya into a performance
of oriki orile does two things. It defines the subject more precisely, for mothers
are the source of difference within a lineage. Full brothers (ome zya: children
of the mother) are socially virtually indistinguishable, but brothers with one
father but different mothers (gmoo baba: children of the father) are socially
distinct. Inheritance is divided according to the number of wives the dead
man had, and each group of emo tya, however large or small, will share one
equal portion. The segmentation of the lineage, likewise, is reckoned according
to branches springing from each of the co-wives of the apical ancestor.” Each
wife, therefore, is the source of a separate sub-segment within the lineage.
While the ortkz orile of the father affirm the solidarity of the whole group, the
ortki ortle of an individual’s mother assert that this man has his own position
within the group. Secondly, the woman is the source of contacts, assets, and
alliances outside the lineage. She brings with her, on marriage, a thread which
can be used to draw in great bodies of affines who may supply support, land,
shelter, and even in some cases a permanent home to her descendants. The
apparently solid patrilineality of the Okuku social system conceals far-
reaching and long-maintained relationships ‘on the mother’s side’.**
Anexample of this is the story of the sisters Aworoka and Awotutu, daughters
by the same wife of Ikumowuyi of z/e Arogun, a great nineteenth century
medicine man and the earliest remembered holder of the title Oluawo
Oniseegun (Head of the Herbalists). Aworoka married Awogide, the head of
a lineage attached to zle Ojomu. She had two daughters by him, Oyatundun
and Oni. On his death she was inherited by Awogide’s son by another wife,
Osundina, and had several sons by him including Samson Adebisi (whose life
story is told in Chapter 6). Awotutu married a man in Iragbiji and had three
sons for him. When he died, she married another man in Igbaye, taking with
her the youngest of her sons. She had another son for the Igbaye man, and this
son, Elijah Folayan, is now the oldest of the surviving children of the two
sisters. Once a year a meeting is held at his house in Igbaye to ‘discuss family
business’, settle problems, and contribute money to a fund intended to
promote the interests of the members. The meeting is attended by all the
children, grandchildren and greatgrandchildren of the two sisters, whether
descended through males or through females. It thus involves, among others,
Samson Adebisi (z/e Ojomu), Ere-Osun (z/e Odofin, married into ile Elemoso
Awo) and G.A. Akindele (t/e Oluode). It involves the families of the sons born
to the Iragbiji and Igbaye men, and all the descendants of Aworoka’s children
by both her husbands in z/e Ojomu. It does not include any one else from any
of these compounds not descended from Aworoka or Awotutu. The children
of Awogide and Osundina by other wives, for instance, are excluded. Although
the annual meeting and the savings fund represents a relatively small
investment of time and money, it shows how relationships through women
ORIKI ORILE OF THE MOTHER 171
can be kept active over long periods and how they can bring together people
who, in terms of patrilineage, are widely separated. Women can be mobile.
Awotutu moved from Okuku to Iragbiji to Igbaye, and as she moved she took
a son with her, thus establishing close links between two groups of men who
belonged not only to different patrilineages but also to different towns.
Links through women take many forms and are ubiquitous 1n the networks
of relations between fragments of lineages. Many attached lineages were
actually brought to the town by a woman who had relatives in the ‘host’
lineage. Some groups were the ‘sons of females’ mentioned by Lloyd. Ile
Awoyemi, one of the ‘semi-attached’ groups described above, was an example,
being descended from a daughter of zle Oba, Edun’s sister. In ze Ojomu — one
of the z/e with a very large number of attached groups — Awogide’s section was
attached because his mother was a daughter of z/e Ojomu; but there were other
kinds of links as well. Akoda’s section came when Akoda’s mother brought
her children to stay with her sister, who was married into tle Ojomu. We have
seen how a wife of ze Aworo took all her children to live in ie Jagun because
she was from the same town as Jagun’s mother. Connections through women
could draw in new parties of people to swell the compound, through ties that
could be based on kinship, marriage, friendship or common town membership.
The value of these connections is affirmed in ortki performances. In the
passage just quoted, to forget one’s mother is represented as unforgivable
because a mother’s bond with her child is the most fundamental relationship
of all. The mother suffered to bring the child into the world and to see it
through its infancy, and for this reason, however important a child may
become in the world, he can never cast his mother off altogether. Passages like
this, asserting the importance of the de zya, are used to signal an intention to
switch theme, from the father’s to the mother’s orki ore. Almost all
performances of oriki orile contain such switches, and usually, as the signalling
device shows, the transition is clear and the distinction between the two sets
of oriki is maintained. But sometimes the transition is not marked 1n any way.
Intrusive passages or even mere phrases of one oriki orile may suddenly appear
in the midst of the performance of another. Those in the know will be able to
explain that the intrusive element derives from the ze zya. But the frequency
and ease of their juxtaposition makes it more likely that some of the ortk: of
the ile zya will sometimes get absorbed into the ortki of the zle baba. Structural
relations between groups provide conditions highly conducive to such
merging.
Oriki orile emerge as dense mats of references: but the concentration of
traces which an oriki chant contains do not explain their own history. They
do not tell you why a performance within one compound should call up
several different oriki orile, or how this situation arose. Disentangling the
references made by ortki orile often requires formidable inside knowledge of
the history and interrelationships of innumerable small groups in Okuku: a
knowledge to which most inhabitants of the town have incomplete access, and
from which I as a newcomer and outsider was often completely excluded.
Middle-aged and elderly people, especially those who took an interest in the
intricacies of social networks, often had an enormous field of discriminations
at their command. They could track down links between :/e and segments of
ile apparently inexhaustibly. Nonetheless, no-one knew it all. Each ortki
chanter made her distinctions from the standpoint of her own field of
knowledge, which did not completely overlap with anyone else’s. Not only
this, but the performers themselves often could not fully explain why they
made certain identifications or how certain links had arisen. Sometimes there
was a parallel tradition of ztan tle which shed light on these questions, but the
fields of reference they covered only partly overlapped with the field evoked
by ortki performers. Each performance, it seems certain, is surrounded by
differential layers of interpretation, determined by the knowledge, interests,
age and position in the community of the hearers.
Oriki orile are like talismans, potent symbols through which lines of
demarcation are drawn or covered over according to the needs and interests
of the users. In a society subject to continual population movement, the
ancient core of emblems surrounding each town of origin provides each
wandering group with a strong and unmistakable label. But the endless
accretion and diversification of oriki orile enable those groups to make more
detailed discriminations within the towns where they settle. What they
emphasise and what they conceal; how loudly they proclaim their origins and
affiliations, and in what company; how the insiders’ version differs from the
outsiders’; what subsidiary ork: orile they incorporate (for instance, from a
mother’s lineage): all these are clues to what exactly someone is asserting
when he or she performs oriki orile or has them performed on his or her behalf.
7, EMBLEMATIC LANGUAGE -
At the funerals of old men and women in Okuku there is sometimes a drama
put on by the members of their lineage. This drama is called oro tle (family
ceremony, ritual belonging to the z/e), and its purpose is emblematic. It
exhibits in spectacular fashion one of the themes associated with the deceased’s
orile. Because these themes are also at the centre of the ortkz orile, the oro ile
points out, by analogy, the emblematic quality of the ork:. Here is an example.
It occurred during the funeral of Efuntohun Arinke described in Chapter 4.
Efuntohun came from another town, [kirun, but married into i/e Baale and
stayed there so long that she lost touch with her own people in:[kirun. It was
known, however, that her lineage claimed origins in Ikoyi, so her husband’s
family asked z/e Alubata (22) and z/le Oluawo Onifa (2d) to help by doing their
oro tle at her funeral. Both of these z/e claim origins in [koyi, though they
arrived separately in Okuku and attached themselves to different, unrelated
host lineages.
EMBLEMATIC LANGUAGE 173
On the third day of the funeral the daughters of the two lineages armed
themselves with switches and danced to the dundun drums, singing:
Won mo mo ni e wa soro nilé
Gbogbo Ikoyi e dorikodd, omo ogun
Won mo mo ni e wa soro nilé
They’re calling you to come and do a family ceremony
All you Ikoyi people gather round, children of war [or
‘warriors’ |
They’re calling you to come and do a family ceremony.
Meanwhile a young boy of the lineage was dressed up as a woman and armed
with a bow and arrow, while a girl was dressed up as a man and armed with
a long sword. The twin themes to be enacted were the two legendary
occupations of the Ikoyi people: warfare and robbery.
The two actors set off on an expedition around the town, pausing every so
often to stage a scene in which the girl-dressed-as-a-man pursued the boy-
dressed-as-a-woman, brandishing her long sword at him while he cowered,
dodged and sought refuge behind the band of singing women. Occasionally
the boy-dressed-as-a-woman retaliated by aiming his bow and arrow at the
other and feigning a shot. Then they confronted each other and took it in turns
to sing tauntingly, while the women provided the chorus:
Solo 1: Oju olé reé! Chorus: Ole!
Solo 2: Ow6 oléw6d! Chorus: Ole!
Solo 1: Aso alaso! Chorus: Olé!
Solo 2: Ewa eléwtt! Chorus: Ole!
Solo 1: Fila onifila! Chorus: Ole!
Solo 2: Gelé onigele! Chorus: Olé!
Solo 1: Omo olémo! Chorus: Olé!
Solo 2: Oyu oleé reé! Chorus: Ole!
Solo 1: There stands a thief! Chorus: Thief!
Solo 2: Someone else’s money! Chorus: Thief!
Solo 1: Someone else’s clothes! Chorus: Thief! ,
Solo 2: Someone else’s gown! Chorus: Thief!
Solo 1: Someone else’s cap! Chorus: Thief!
Solo 2: Someone else’s head-tie! Chorus: Thief!
Solo 1: Someone else’s child! Chorus: Thief!
Solo 2: There stands a thief! Chorus: Thief!
After they had toured the town performing this scene, they returned to the
graveside where they had started. There the two actors mounted overturned
mortars and confronted each other, threatening each other with their weapons.
Each had a party of women behind to restrain them. Then the girl-dressed-
as-a-man was given a hen, the boy-dressed-as-a-woman a cock, and they
proceeded to flail each other with these while the women sang:
Solo: Omo Enikoyi, é¢yin da?
Chorus: Awa réé, 166r6 gangan!
Solo: Children of Ikoyi, where are you?
Chorus: Here we are, standing tall!
The ceremony was finished by an offering of palm oil, cotton fibre and
water at the foot of each mortar, and divination was done at each with kola
nuts which were then thrown onto the grave mound.
This drama unites the two themes of fighting and stealing into a single
image: the two actors, each of which has ‘stolen’ the other’s clothes, attacking
each other with weapons. That these themes are emblems for the Ikoyi people
is underlined by the women’s songs summoning the ‘omg Entkoyi’ and
demanding their participation. .
Thievery and warfare are also the two most prominent themes in the Ikoyi
oriki ortle. One version presents them like this:
Es6 Ikoyi o!
Ka waa ji nyoojumo ka dira ogun
N 16 mt: Yanbilolu tagun
Enikoyi olori olé ti i daburo |
Agbalagba olé abifila gongo |
Won lOnikoyi 6 m6 jalé mé o
W6n waa séégiin, Enikoyi ni fesé gbdbe' |
Onikoyi oldri olé ti i gbaaga aso.” |
War-captains of Ikoyi o! |
‘Let’s rise every morning and arm ourselves for battle’ -
That’s how Yanbilolu scattered the enemy
Ikoyi man, head of the thieves, who wears a cap of felt -
Master-thief who wears a cap turned down at one side
They told the Ikoyi people not to steal any more
clothes. ,
They brought out the masquerades, the Ikoyi man swiped a knife
-_ with his feet! }
Ikoyi man, head of the thieves, who made off with a hamper of
The analogy of the oro ile suggests that what might look like references to
real people and real incidents in the past are included in the ork: for their
emblematic value. The Ikoyi man who was so adept at stealing that he could
even do it with his feet, in the midst of a public entertainment, may indeed
really have existed, but in the ortki he represents all Ikoyi people. He is the
epitome of the qualities that have been chosen to characterise them and
distinguish them from descendants of other orile.
Other oro ile are emblematic in the same way. The Oko people are famous
for the jealousy of the women, and much of the Oko ortki orile is on this theme.
For their oro ile they stage a furious confrontation between ‘husband’ and
‘wife’ (again, both parts are played by the wrong sex) in which the ‘wife’
accuses the husband of mistreating her and favouring her co-wife. One of the
Ofa emblems is the wrestling match which is performed in the annual new
yam festival. In the oro ile, little boys are organised to wrestle in pairs at the
graveside. Oro ile show that the principal themes associated with an orile can
be summed up ina single dramatic image: two people fighting and stealing;
two boys wrestling; a jealous wife berating her polygamous husband. Although
so much more elaborate, ortki orile are doing something equivalent. They
circle around a theme, embellishing it in artful ways, but the poit of them is
to put on display a motif which could be summed up in a word or an image.
The ‘totem’ of the Opomulero people from Iwata is Opo, a housepost. The
story of the ancient oba of Iwata who was a master carver of houseposts has
already been mentioned. In some magical way the posts, or the logs from
which they were carved, were associated with the fertility of the oba’s wives
and the continuation of his lineage. At a later date, when the Iwata line had
become incorporated into the Oyo royal lineage, there was an Alaafin who had
two hundred houseposts carved in commemoration of his mother. In funeral
ceremonies for their members, the Opomulero people, as we have seen, set
up a miniature post inside the compound and wrap it in cloth, in
commemoration of this Alaafin’s action, to assert the identity that they share
with the deceased. The orkz orile make much of the theme of the house-post,
and particularly of the house-post wrapped in cloth. Arara tyawo version goes:
Emi lomo opo6 korobiti korobiti
Emi lomo opé korobiti korobiti
Emi lomo opé réso opé gbaja
Ilé wa ni won ti i rogi laso, Alé-Oyun.
I am the child of the round round post
I am the child of the round round post
I am the child of the post that wears a wrapper, the post that ties
a sash
It’s in our house they dress a post in cloth, Ale-Oyun.
In this version the word opo is embellished with the phonaesthetic adjectival
expression korobiti korobiti and its tonal variant korobiti korobiti. Reference is
made to the custom of dressing a post in cloth, and the last line affirms that
this is a practice that distinguishes the Opomulero people. There is no hint
of why the post is dressed in cloth, of what the post itself represents or of the
history behind it. The point of the passage is to place before the hearer the
emblem itself, in a pleasing setting. In the funeral chant version quoted in
Chapter 4, even more elaboration occurs, this time around the word aso, the
cloth in which the post is said to be wrapped. Three names of cloth are
mentioned; two of them, egbinrin and egbinrin, are again tonal variants of the
same word, included for decorative purposes. Only in the last line is a
historical connection hinted at in the reference to the Alaafin of Oyo.
In circling around the theme of the post dressed in cloth, the ortki are making
an emblematic presentation of what is already an emblem in real life. Opomu-
lero people wrap a post in cloth and set it up as their family emblem; the ortkz
wrap the cloth-wrapped post in a decorative integument of words to display it.
The language of ortki orile continually embellishes key motifs, and devises
decorative settings to present them in. A position where the motif can be
displayed is often elaborately prepared. In the following passage from the ortkiz
orie of the Omu line, the key words are omitoro esin, broth made from horse,
a special dish that distinguished the Omu people. But these words do not
appear until the last two lines of the passage. All that goes before prepares a
setting in which they are finally presented:
Béwuré
Bo ba sont 1Omu
Ké e ma mu 16 mi
Ta nii segbée gbéran-gbéran?
Aguntan kan bolojo
Bo ba sont 1Omu
Ké e ma mu 16 mi
Ta ni i segbée gbéran-gbéran?
Adie okoko
Aragbado-yo
Bo ba sont lOmu
E ma mu 1d mi
Ta ni i segbée gbéye-gbéye?
Esi ogodongbo
Agbamu-rodo
Bo ba sont 1Omu
E waa mu un 106 mi
Opon nla n mo i jomitoro esi
Mo i jomitoro esi, Mési-Ojd6dro.”6 |
If a goat
Gets lost at Omu
Don’t come to me about it
Who are you calling a member of the goat-thieves’ gang?
If a big black sheep
Gets lost at Omu
Who are you calling a member of the sheep-thieves’ gang?
A mother hen
Who rejoices at the sight of maize
If it gets lost at Omu
Who are you calling a member of the poultry-thieves’ gang?
A massive horse
That carries its great pot-belly to the river
If it gets lost at Omu
Why then, do come to me about it!
I drink horse-broth from a huge dish
I drink horse-broth from it, Mosi-Ojooro.
The first four lines establish a syntactic structure which is then reinforced
by two more repetitions. It has the form:
If a ———_ ,
Gets lost at Omu
Who are you calling a member of the ———— gang?
Occupying the first slot are the names of three domestic animals, goat, sheep
and hen, the first a bare noun, the second qualified by adjectives, the third by
a nominalised construction (literally translatable as ‘One-who-rejoices...’).
The second slot is occupied by the name of the kind of thief who would steal
the domestic animal named in the first slot (gberan-gberan: stealer of domestic
sheep and goats; gbeye-gbeye: stealer of fowl).
But in the fourth occurrence of this structure the ‘massive horse’ is
presented — qualified, again, by a nominalised construction — and the sense
of the message is reversed. If a horse is missing, do come to me about it. The
final line of the established structure is dropped, and replaced with the key
sentence which proclaims the reason for the missing horse: the Omu habit of
eating horse-broth. The first three occurrences of the structure are
preliminaries, establishing a pattern into which the reference to horse and
horse-broth can be fitted. They prepare a place for the key motif. The
reference to goat, sheep and hen have no intrinsic significance; they point
away from themselves towards the appearance of the key word, which is
signalled by the reversal of sense in the last repetition of the pattern.
Nevertheless they have a kind of gravity, and take up time, as each one is more
elaborately qualified than the last. The language of ortki orile seems to stand
still, as, instead of making a statement, it prepares a space into which a small
phrase can be inserted.
The framework in which the motif of the horse-broth is displayed 1s
appropriate. Goat, sheep and hen belong to the same semantic universe as the
horse. All four are domestic animals which, in Omu at least, can be eaten. But
horse and horse-broth are not the only motif that can be displayed in this
structure. The Oloje oriki orile use precisely the same sequence to present the
motif of aja dudu, black dog, which is one of their family emblems and which
fits the slot just as well. (Dogs too are ritually eaten.) The structure does not
give rise to its conclusion, the presentation of the emblem; it prepares a space
for an emblem which is already formed. The emblem can also be displayed
in other frameworks, and the framework can be used to-display other
emblems.
Underpinning this kind of structure are lexical sets of two or three related
items. These sets are so well known that as soon as the first item in a set 1s
mentioned, the hearer will expect the others. On these sets are built up
structures, usually tripartite, through which the orile emblems are presented.
It is common for two such sets to be operated together: |
Omo omi se méta won 4 sése
Omi se méta won 4 hanro 10 fa ,
Okan nie penla si oun ,
Koun 6 dokun
Koun 6 dosa |
Okan léba 6 ni e pagbo si oun
Okan Idéba 6 ni e pakuko ganga si oun

Kéun 6 dAgunbélénjé omo 1a kOfa 6 kuin tété
Eyi a penla si, é@ lé dokun ninu ilé oko ,
Eyi ta a pagbo si 6 lé dosa
Eyi tia pakuko ganga si, 6 dAgunbélénjé, omo daalé kaa ribi togun
pin.”
Child of “There were three rivers that misbehaved’ |
There were three rivers that ran wild at Ofa
One said they should kill an en/a cow [a humpless breed] for it
So that it could become an ocean
One said the oba should kill a ram for it
So that it could become a lagoon
One said the oba should kill a big cock for it
So that it could become the river Agunbelenje, child of ‘Get rich
so that Ofa will teem with people’
husband’s house ,
The one we killed an enla cow for couldn’t become an ocean in my
The one we killed a ram for couldn’t become a lagoon

The one we killed a big cock for, it became Agunbelenje, child of
“Restore all that you have inherited so that we can redivide it’.
The river Agunbelenje”® is the emblem that this passage is bringing out. It
is one of the major rivers running past Ofa, associated with the Ofa royal family
and a source of pride to the whole town. To present it, the ortki makes it one
of three bodies of water, each requiring a sacrifice in order to become the kind
of water it wishes. The first time the basic formula is used it takes the form:
One said they should kill a —— for it
So that it could become a ——.
In the first slot is a set of domestic animals, in decreasing order of size and
costliness, that are commonly offered as sacrifices. In the second slot is the
well known lexical pair okun (ocean) and esa (lagoon) and then the key word
of the passage, the name of the river, embellished with a phrase of Ofa ortkz.
In the second series of repeated structures, the same two sets of lexical items
are linked again:
The one we killed a —— for couldn’t become a ——.
On the third repetition there is, as in the Omu example, a reversal which
signals the arrival of the key phrase:
The one we killed a —— for did become a ——-.
The two bodies of water that asked for the most costly sacrifices could not
achieve what they wanted, but the third one, who only asked for a fowl to be
sacrificed, succeeded in becoming the precious and highly-regarded
Agunbelenje river.
The set of animals — en/a cow, ram and cock— are appropriate because they
constitute a series of sacrificeable domestic animals of different sizes and
values, but there is nothing inevitable about this selection; the composer
could equally well have chosen other animals as long as they fitted the series:
ewure (goat) or aguntan (sheep) instead of agbo (ram), for instance; adie
(chicken) instead of akuko (cock). This is not true of the pair okun (ocean) and
osa (lagoon). Once okun has been mentioned, there is no choice but to
complete the pair with osa. This is one of the fixed lexical sets that underpin
the structures not only of or:ki orile but of many other genres of Yoruba oral
poetry.
These lexical sets include eru, zwofa and emo bibi inu (slave, bondsman and
true-born child); za and ikan (okro and garden egg); igun and akalamagbo
(vulture and hornbill); epo and zyoe (palm oil and salt); osun and are (camwood
and indigo). Some sets of three have two fixed members and a variable third
one: aluko and agbe (aluko bird and blue touraco) always go together, but can
be followed either by odidere (parrot) or by lekeleke (cattle egret). When the
third member is lekeleke, this set is often matched with another one, osun, aro
and efun (camwood, indigo and chalk) because the red of camwood, the blue
of indigo and white of chalk match the colours of the three birds.
These lexical sets appear in songs, proverbs, Ifa verses, orisa pipe (invocation
of orisa) and iwure (poetic prayers) as well as in ortki orile. They are always used
to set up a structure of repetition, but the meaning attached to them varies
according to context. They can play many different roles, ranging from full-
blown characters in a story to the most limited and neutral tokens in a figure
of speech. The same sets of words can appear in one context with an ambiance
of symbolic meaning, and in another context devoid of any significance
beyond sheer habitual association together. In Ifa verses, for instance, vulture
and hornbill may play a symbolic role as the consumers of sacrifices and
corpses; in ortki orile the same pair can appear as structural pegs wholly devoid
of symbolic significance.
In one Ifa verse,?? Orunmila is searching for his enemy Eko and receives
directions on the way from i/a (okro), zkan (garden egg) and entyaya (a vegetable
with pinnate leaves added to the standard pair dla/kan to make up a trio).
Having defeated Eko, Orunmila then rewards his three helpers; ila
henceforward bears twenty fruits, zkan becomes blood-red, and entyaya bears
fifty fruits. This story — like many Ifa stories — celebrates Ifa’s triumph over
hostile powers. But it also has an etiological theme, explaining how the three
vegetables came to have the characteristics by which we know them. The trio
are not only important characters in the story but are also partly what the story
is about. Attention is focused on them and their intrinsic qualities: their
fruitfulness and the changes they undergo in growing to maturity. Orunmila’s
beneficent power is demonstrated by his capacity to bestow on these three
‘characters’ their essential properties. |
In oriki the same pair, okro and garden egg, are represented with the same
properties, bearing fruits and growing to maturity. But here they are used as
structural devices to direct attention towards something else. They can be set
up in different ways to introduce different things. Here are three examples:
(1)
Ila so, 6 gbagbé, ila ko
Ikan so, 6 gbagbé, 6 wewu éjé
ly4 mi m6 pe mo gbagbéé re
Okro fruited and forgot, okro went to seed
Garden egg fruited and forgot, it put on a garment of blood
My mother, don’t ever say that I have forgotten you. |
In this passage the key word is gbagbe, to forget, and the statement for which
the performer is paving the way is the assurance that she has not forgotten her
mother (the passage is part of the preliminary homage in which performers
acknowledge their predecessors and teachers). The okro’s going to seed, and
the garden egg’s red hue, are signs that they have been left too long, the result
of forgetfulness. Okro and garden egg are forgetful, she is not.
(2)
Bila ba foribalé ila won 4 maa ko
Bikan to ba foribalé 44 wéewu éjé
Agbanréré té ba foribalé yoo lawo fOloéfinra
If okro bows down, okro will go to seed
If garden egg bows down, it will put on a garment of blood
If the antelope bows down, its horns will grow for the Olofinra
Here the key word is foribale, to bow down or pay homage. The performer,
in the course of paying her respects to the powers that be, is asserting that it
is through homage that people gain the blessing of long life. So this time the
okro is said to fruit and go to seed, the garden egg to go red, as a result of
having paid homage. Going to seed and becoming blood-red are here taken
as a sign that the fruits have lived to a ripe old age unmolested: a desirable fate.
A third item is added to spin out the theme still further: by paying homage the
antelope lives long enough to grow its horns to their full size. In this passage
the statement to which all this is directed is left implicit: ‘And I, so that I may
have a long and prosperous life, am also paying homage’.
(3)
Ila t6 soja iya € so, Oyawalé baba Oloya
Ikan to soju iya & wejé
Oilaki to rAaji ti o ha 1674 Oyawalé baba Oldéya
The okro that goes to seed before its mother’s eyes, Oyawale the
devotee of Oya
The garden egg that put on a garment of blood before its mother’s
eyes
Oilaki who went to Mecca and got back safely before the eyes of
Oyawale the devotee of Oya
This time the key word is soju, before the eyes of, during the lifetime of. The
statement being foregrounded is that Oyawale’s twin sons (Oilaki is the orikz
oftwins) went to Mecca and returned unscathed during his lifetime, for which
the credit goes to him. The okro’s fruiting and the garden egg’s ripening are
therefore said to have happened in the presence of the parent plants (true
enough, as the seeds drop from the ripe fruit onto the ground beneath).
These examples show quite clearly that the sets of images are not included
for any permanent symbolic value of their own. They can be made to serve
whatever meaning the performer wishes to direct attention to. In one case the
ripening and fruiting of okro and garden egg are held to be the results of
carelessness and forgetfulness; in another they are held up as a desirable end,
the reward for humility. The only constant feature is the pairing of z/a and tkan,
and the matching of this set with so/ko (bear fruit/go to seed) and wewu eye (put
on a blood-red garment). Structures are built up around these sets to prepare
a conspicuous place for the key word of whatever theme is being treated.
In these ways ready-made lexical sets are drawn from the current literary
tradition and used to build the structures typical of ortkz orile. The lexical sets
become pegs on which to hang a framework whose purpose is to present a
single motif. These frameworks are endlessly varied but always in a sense
static, woven around a single point and directed away from themselves
towards that point. The motif itself is irreducible: it is elaborated but not
explained. Sequences of ortki orile may be extended and elaborated and even
take on a quasi-narrative form. But the whole structure is erected in order to
fill a space, to prepare a slot into which a small, indivisible sign is placed: often
a single concept, like ‘abundant palm oil’, ‘blacksmith’ or ‘Ori Oke’. In rara
tyawo, the simplest of the women’s chants, the performers often confine
themselves to the artful elaboration of only two or three such signs for each
orile. In the more flexible performances of mature women, greater profusion
of signs may be achieved, and with an elaboration that is less orderly and more
dynamic. However, whatever chanting mode is being used, ortki orile remain
essentially emblematic. It is this that makes them emotionally so highly
charged. They condense into memorable and repeatable signs people’s sense
of the accumulated wealth of their own group’s past: a past concentrated
above all in the moment of origin when everything became what it now is.
Precisely because it is embalmed in condensed, inscrutable yet endlessly
decorated images, this wealth appears to be imperishable.
6
THE ORIKI OF BIG MEN
1. BIG MEN, REPUTATION AND ORIKI

Okuku, like other Yoruba towns, is hierarchical. As we have seen, it was part
of a larger system of authority, nominally subordinate in turn to Oyo, Ilorin
and Ibadan, and also claiming overlordship over a number of neighbouring
towns in the Odo-Otin area. Internally too, Okuku was and is hierarchically
structured. The immense privilege and mystically-conceived authority of the
Olokuku made him ‘second to the gods’. Beneath him, the chiefs constitute
a hierarchy that is elaborately ranked and graded, and the holders of titles
regard these distinctions of status as being of supreme importance. Within the
community at large, steep differences of status are permanently maintained.
As the last chapter showed, each compound is internally stratified; and
outside the compound too, everybody has to know who is senior and junior
to them in order simply to be able to address them correctly. Consciousness
of relative seniority is acute, in some situations even overriding gender
distinctions. ‘You are a small boy to me’, ‘I had given birth even before you
married’, ‘I was walking before you were born’ are comments that are heard
continually as the hierarchy of seniority is reproduced in daily life.
In the past this hierarchy was animated by a dynamic, competitive struggle
for self-aggrandisement which permeated the society from top to bottom.
There was scope for people to create a place for themselves and expand it by
their own efforts. Like the ‘Big Men’ of New Guinea, they did it through the
recruitment of supporters. A Yoruba proverb, often written up as a motto on
parlour walls and the sides of lorries, says ‘Mo low, mo léniyan, ki lo tun ku
ti mi 6 tii ni?’: ‘TI have money, I have people, what else is there that I have not
got?’ Money was one of the principal ways of gaining public acknowledgement
as a big man; but ‘having people’ constituted that acknowledgement itself.
Wives and children, visiting matrilateral relatives, attached ‘stranger’ segments
in long-term residence, bondsmen, labourers, visitors, friends and adherents
of all kinds, from the most permanent to the most casual -—all were the ‘people’
on whose acknowledgement the ambitious man’s standing depended. If their
recognition were withdrawn — if they left, or transferred their loyalty to
another patron, or chose another house to drop in on for gossip and advice
— the man would lose his public standing. His position depended on public
recognition: and recognition of course bred more recognition, for a man with
184 THE ORIKI OF BIG MEN
a great reputation would attract great numbers of adherents whose regard
would in turn boost his reputation still further.
In this process of self-aggrandisement, ork: played a crucial part. They
were the main instrument through which reputation was publicly acknowledged
and enhanced. In an onki performance before a large audience the big man
was put on display. The more extensive and intensive the repertoire ascribed
to him, the more illustrious his name would be. Orikz singers were sensitive
barometers of relative status. In a public gathering they would take care to
address those they perceived as the most important first and at greatest length.
If a still more important person walked in, they would break off their chant
and turn their attention to the newcomer. The most conspicuously successful
men would have the largest corpus of ortki, for drummers, specialist singers
and the townspeople in general would be more likely to compose epithets for
the qualities and actions of outstanding, highly visible men. In public
performance, their accumulated epithets would be held up for all to recognise.
The constitutive role of oriki in a big man’s rise is commented on in the texts
themselves. They often speak of the performance as a gift from singer to
addressee, calling attention to the profusion of epithets the singer has heaped
upon him: ‘T have given you an atin-in mat, now I’ll add an ore mat to my gift’;’
‘We always call someone by three names, but I’ll add more’; “This is what I
have bestowed on you, take it with you when you go’. The performer, fixing
the subject with her concentrated and unwavering attention for as long as she
addresses him, dramatises the role of supporter to a big man. If recognition
and acknowledgement are what make his claims to status valid, then the
praise-singer offers him this relationship in an ideal form. She enacts a
concentrated regard and acknowledgement, calling attention to the relationship
between herself as admirer and him as object of admiration; and he visibly
swells and takes on status under the treatment.
Not only the act of performance, however, but also the words of the texts
bestow on the big man the regard of ‘people’. The use of other people’s names
in these ortki reveal most clearly their role in the creation of big men. Ortki are
full of allusions to genealogical relationships. But these are never records of
family trees; they do not preserve the details of kinship links or make precise
distinctions among them.? Instead, orikz raid the genealogy in order to heap
on the chosen subject a wealth of attributions. The actual relationships
between all the people whose names are brought into play may be known to
some members of the audience independently of the orkz: but it is certainly
not through the ork: tradition that this knowledge is transmitted. The
impression ortki performances give is rather one of a great profusion of
relationships, ordered by only one principle: their common connection to the
central subject of the ortki. The intention which animates these ortki is to build
up one figure through, and often almost at the expense of, others. Fixing a
man accurately on the genealogical grid puts him in his place; ortkz, on the
BIG MEN, REPUTATION AND ORIKI 185
other hand, create the impression that the big man is at the centre of
everything, and, indeed, that the other members of the family tree exist only
by virtue of their relationship to him.
Here, for instance, is part of a performance in honour of an important man
of ze Oloko whose mother was from izle Oluawo. Sangowemi, the performer,
first saluted him with reference to his father’s lineage, and then turned to de
Oluawo: in this passage, she concentrates on connecting the subject with one
illustrious ancestor, Ajayi, the great herbalist of that compound:
Olosundé Ailéwola Ogidi-Oli Akano
Jaayinfa babaa Biléwumo, Ajayi ogbori-efon nibadan
Bi 6 si Ailéw6la, ogun iba kdlé Ado
Aisi Ajayi, ogun ja 6 ja Okiti
Isi Old6sundé, ogun ré k6Bokun
Akuko ko ole posé, babaa Tohtin wad mok6 gbere bi eni 1 le
O waa dana oké mo gbdngbo léhin
O ni bé 0 ba légbaa kisi, babaa mi, Aremu,
O ni 4 md un relé réé ghéyawd
Oldsundé Ogidi-Olu, Jaamédu, babaa mi, 6 ni ba a ba ku,
6 l6moo re ni i peni ni baba
Omo Alola, omo Ogunkéye, omo Atanda Awtréré gboso...
Olosunde Arilewola Ogidi-Olu Akano
Jaayinfa father of Bilewumg, Ajayi ‘One who bore off the head of
a buffalo’ at Ibadan
If it were not for Arilewola, Ado would have been captured in
battle
With Ajayi absent, war raged and overthrew Ekiti
Without Olosunde, war brought down Ibokun
The cock crows, the lazy man sighs, father of Tohun picked up his
hoe like a man who 1s lazy
Then he went and blazed his way through the roots with his hoe,
hurling them behind
He said if you have sixpence in cash, my father, Aremu,
He said you’d better take it home and get yourself a wife
Olosunde Ogidi-Olu, Jaamodu, my father, he said if we die, he
said at least we'll have children to call us their father
Child of Alola, child of Ogunkeye, child of Atanda
Awurere the finely-dressed...
The subject of the chant is being saluted through Ajayi, his mother’s father,
and Ajayi himself is magnified with a whole range of names attached in
different ways. Olosunde was one of Ajayi’s given names, Arilewola an honorific
nickname (‘One who has a house to trail honour in’), Jaayinfa and Jaamodu
both Ifa names deriving from the fact that Ajayi’s father’s family were noted
babalawo. ‘Tf it were not for Arilewola, Ado would have been captured in
battle’: this and the two following lines belonged originally: to the famous
Ajayi Ogbori-efon, Balogun of Ibadan, whose name was well remembered in
Okuku, since it was he who marched to lift the siege of Ikirun, where the
Okuku population had taken refuge, in 18787. Ajayi of ze Oluawo was not a
warrior and had no connection with the Ibadan leader; he was given the oriki
simply on the strength of sharing the oruke amutorunwa, Ajayi. But the name
of Ajayi of zle Oluawo is also amplified by associating it with his own ancestors
and descendants. He is the ‘father of Bilewumo’ and the ‘father of Tohun’.
He is also the ‘child of Alola’, ‘child of Ogunkeye’, ‘child of Atanda Awurere
the finely-dressed’. No indication is given of the relationships between these
people. Since the proliferation of personal names and nicknames is regarded
as desirable, it is quite possible that Alola, Ogunkeye and Atanda Awurere are
all alternative names for the same person — who could be Ajayi’s father, his
mother’s father, his father’s father, his father’s brother, his great-grandfather,
or some other relative of an ascendant generation. It is equally possible that
the names refer to three separate people — each of whom could stand in any
of these relationships to the subject. Furthermore, it is not at:all self-evident
from the text alone that the person being addressed as ‘child of Alola’, etc., is still
, Ajayi; the performer could equally well have finished with Ajayi, and be
addressing these cognomina directly to the living subject of her performance.
Only a person with intimate knowledge of the subject and this compound
would grasp how many people were actually being referred to and how they
were related to the addressee of the chant. The performer moves through
layer upon layer of association, bringing in names from all directions. The
only fixed point in this sliding profusion is the addressee himself, on whom
the performer fastens her gaze. Masses of other people’s names are brought
in, but not to establish and clarify a genealogy: on the contrary, they are
brought in to establish that — for the moment — the addressee-is the centre of
this social universe, and that he ‘has people’ in abundance. —
Oriki, then, are at the centre of a crucial political process: It is a process
conducted largely by men. Women as well as men may have:ambitions and
may build up a position for themselves in the town. A number of such ‘big
women’ are remembered, and some exist today. But they could not follow the
route taken by the big men, for women were part of a man’s household rather
than the head of their own. They could not recruit ‘people’ in the same way,
and reputation does not play the same crucial and constitutive role in their
careers as in men’s. Women remain, by and large, the agents rather than the
objects of the process of aggrandisement through the performance of oriki.
HIERARCHY AND THE DYNAMICS OF SELF-AGGRANDISEMENT 187
2. HIERARCHY AND THE DYNAMICS OF SELF-AGGRANDISEMENT

The oba was endowed with both mystical and material attributes that set him
definitively apart from the rest of the population. Beneath him were three
grades of male chiefs and one of female chiefs. Of the male chiefs, the olepaa
or staff-carrying ones were the most senior. Their mark of office was the
bamboo staff, and they alone among the chiefs were allowed to wear coral
beads. They were internally ranked, and the top six were recognised [at least
since the reign of Oyinlola (1934—60)] as the :wefa mefa or kingmakers. These
chiefs constituted the oba’s council, which normally met every day to discuss
the affairs of the town. They participated in the judicial process and took a
share of the fines and fees that accrued from it. The a/adaa or cutlass-carrying
chiefs were junior to the olopaa chiefs, and were said to have been their
‘followers’ in an earlier era. Schofield (1935) reported that each olopaa chief
had a ‘line’ of aladaa chiefs who would follow him to the palace and wait
outside while he conducted his business there, later helping to inform the
town of whatever decisions the council had decided to make public. Nowadays
the aladaa chiefs sit in the palace with the oba and senior chiefs, but there is
still strong consciousness of their lower status. Finally, the palace chiefs make
up a separate and less important group. They do not constitute part of the
council, but are regarded as being especially close to the oba and much involved
in the regulation of his household affairs. Today only three palace titles are
occupied — the Sobaloju, the Obaale and the Elemona (see Table 2).
The women chiefs are headed by the Iyalode, a title which alternates
between wives of z/e Oluode and wives of i/e Balogun. The Iyalode is considered
the head of all the women of the town, with special responsibilities in the
market. She settles disputes over weights and measures and deals with cases
of cheating in the market. She used to have a string of subordinate chiefs,
among them the Otun Iyalode, the Ileju Iyalode, the Eesa Iyalode, and the
Odofin. According to one woman, ‘Every z/e would choose two women, one
would hold a title and the other would be her follower, when they went to
meetings in the Iyalode’s house’. Only the Iyalode, however, is prominent in
town affairs. She joins the six kingmakers in the selection of a new oba and
is always present at important ceremonial and deliberative meetings at the
palace. The other women chiefs are so inconspicuous that most people —
women as well as men — do not know who they are, or even that they exist.
Whether they were formerly more prominent, and suffered from the
characteristic blind eye of the colonial adminstration, which codified the local
political structures with an overwhelming bias towards the male institutions
— or whether the women’s offices were always a shadow institution without
the power and prestige enjoyed by the male chiefs, is not known.
In the nineteenth century, the rest of the town’s population were either
ordinary free citizens, zwofa, or slaves. Ordinary citizens were not ranked, but
members of the very large royal lineage enjoyed certain privileges that
Semior Town Chiefs (ilu olépad) Fumor Town Chiefs Glu aladad)
Title Owned by Title Current holders
Ojomu Tlé Ojomu Jagun Ilé Jagun
Odofin Né Qdofin Elém6s06
(Mlé Aworé Otin)* Akogun
Baalé Tlé Baale Olégemo llé Jagun
Inurin Tlé Nla Eésinkin®
Saiwd Tlé QOloko Obala Ilé Aword Ol66ku
Arogun Ilé Oluawo Otdn Baalé®
Alala Né Aword Otin Oran Olégemo?
Olémi® Ilé Olugde Eléju>
Alawé Ilé Alawé Alapéé>
Oléyan Tlé Oléyan
Oléwdéyin Ilé Oluode
Osolos Né Os6lo/Inisa
branch of lineage
Balogun llé Aword Otin
Oludkun? flé Oluokun
Aré* Ilé Ar6-Oké
lié Aré-Isale
Odogun4 lé Odogun
Olukotun! Ilé Oluode
Saba‘ Ilé Oluode
Osohit llé Aword Otin
Palace Chiefs
Title Current holders

Sdbaloju lé Aword Otin
Obaaleé Tlé Obaalé
Elémona Ilé Elémona
Mogaji>
Mayégun®
Are Ikélaba°
Arémo?
a. The title was held by this compound once only.

b. Title currently vacant
c. Title alternates between two compounds.
d. Recently promoted from junior grade.
Table 2: Chiefs in Okuku (1975)

members of other lineages did not. They were exempted from communal
labour on the town walls and roads; their daughters brought in a higher bride-
price than ordinary girls; and they had access to much larger reserves of
uncultivated land than members of other compounds — a consideration that
became increasingly important from the beginning of this century onwards.
Members of other large compounds or compounds holding important titles
also enjoyed a certain prestige of a more informal kind.
Iwofa were a large, fluctuating but semi-permanent category of men who
served as bonded labourers in other compounds as a form ofinterest on a loan.
Some, also known as asingba, entered into this arrangement voluntarily, for
a loan they took out themselves. They usually served only one day out of four
or eight, and were free to work on their own farms the rest of the time. Many
iwofa, however, were lent out by other people, usually a senior relative, and
were sent to live full time in the creditor’s house until the loan was repaid.
Many of them had to stay there for years, and there were stories in Okuku of
1wofa who had simply run away when they eventually realised that the debt for
which they were bonded would never be paid off. Theoretically it was always
possible, however, for an :wofa to redeem himself by raising the money to pay
back the original loan; though they were usually treated less well than free
members of the household, there was always the expectation that their status
could change.
This was apparently not true of slaves, though little information was
available about them. Men and women could be either born into slavery or
captured in war. The stigma lasted as long as slavery was remembered,
making it difficult for people to talk about specific cases. It was clear, however,
that the grand office-holding, property-owning slaves characteristic of bigger
cities were not known in Okuku. Slavery was never mentioned except as a
degraded and shameful status. Oral texts emphasised the disadvantages of
slaves in comparison to iwofa and free people. No mention was made, in
Okuku people’s reminiscences, of slaves being able to redeem themselves by
payments to their master. On the contrary, all stories stressed that the only
hope for a slave, and especially a war-captive, was to run away. It was said that
most of them sooner or later did so, making slave owning unprofitable.
Female slaves, however, were often married by the captor and gradually
became absorbed into the family.*
The oral texts suggest, however, that there may have been a more stable
period before the nineteenth century when slaves were an established feature
of the local hierarchy. The most common social division referred to in ortki
is the tripartite one discussed in the last chapter, eru/iwofa/omo b1bi inu: slaves,
bondsmen, true-born children of the lineage — as if these were at one time the
fundamental social categories.* The categories have now become hardly more
than a poetic idiom, used, like other lexical sets, as a structuring device. It is
impossible, of course, to be sure that it was ever more than this; but it seems
highly likely that such a pervasive and unchanging ideational structure should
have been motivated by real social divisions, if only obliquely. At the very
least, the prevalence of the idiom suggests that society was assumed to be
hierarchical — whether or not the poetic categories corresponded to the real
major social divisions at any period. Jwofa, unlike slaves, persisted well into
the present century, the last one being remembered to have obtained his
freedom in 1939. A modified form of asingba, or voluntary servitude, is still
practised today ‘in a polite way’, as one senior man put it: someone in need
ofa loan may agree to ‘thank’ the lender by doing some work on his farm. The
large households with six or ten permanent zwofa in residence, however, do
not seem to have lasted beyond about 1930.
These hierarchical relationships correlate with differential control of
labour and consequently land. Until the second or third decade of this cen-
tury, as will be shown later in this chapter, though lineage land was a jealously
guarded patrimony, actually getting access to land for farming purposes was
never a problem. What determined an individual’s wealth was his or her
control over labour, with which to make and work the farm. In Okuku, the
oba had command over the labour of others that no-one else even approached.
His household was large, because he had almost unlimited access to new
wives, there being a custom that the Olokuku could ‘pick a girl’ from amongst
the townspeople every year during the Olooku festival. In addition to the
labour of his many children, younger relatives, and especially maternal
relatives sent to profit from his high status, the oba had at his disposal a large
number of slaves. It is said that during the nineteenth century wars, after each
slave-raid, every compound whose men had been involved was obliged to
hand over one of its captives to the oba.° Elders’ reminiscences of the late
nineteenth century suggest that, unlike the heads of other households, the oba
was able to retain these slaves in large numbers, either because their prospects
and treatment were better there, or because of the presence of royal officials
to oversee them. But the oba also commanded the labour of the ordinary free
townspeople for specific services. Until the reign of Oyinlola (193460) each
oba, on installation, claimed one man from each compound to serve as his
messenger. These men had their heads half-shaven as a sign of their function
which gave them the name ilar (divided head), and they lived in the palace
and were entirely at the oba’s disposal. The royal farms, which were extensive,
were worked on not only by the oba’s slaves but also by the townspeople as
a whole. Each compound was responsible for one plot and would periodically
send groups of its younger members to clear, plant and harvest that area.
Maintenance of the town walls and the palace buildings was also done by
communal labour. The oba also commanded the fruits of other people’s
labour in the form of tribute. During the annual Olooku festival each com-
pound was required to present him with gifts of money and farm produce.
The representatives of the seventeen subordinate towns also came to pay their
tribute of yams, money and livestock. This custom is still maintained in token
form, and the payment of tsakole for the use of royal land by other compounds
and owo ile whenever a new house is built are customs that have continued
undiminished.
In some compounds, the baale (often also a senior chief in the town
hierarchy) was entitled to similar services from his own compound members,
though on a much smaller scale. Some compounds had #e ajoyeba, chieftaincy
land, for the exclusive use of the baale. Once a year — or more often — he could
call on all the younger men of the compound to do gwe, communal labour,
on this land. In dle Oluawo the baale controlled a large tract of palm trees. The
women ofthe compound were obliged to collect the palm nuts and manufacture
palm oil from them on his behalf. One member of this compound recalled a
baale in the 1920s who ‘kept all the oil in his room and all the proceeds when
he sold it’ but added that ‘most of it was for when he celebrated his festival’.
In general, the baale of a compound was said to have had little direct
advantage from his position in terms of actual command of labour, though of
course heading a large compound brought other benefits, the most important
being the potential support of a large number of people in social and political
affairs.
The ordinary free male compound member would at first owe all his labour
to his father or senior brother, or whoever was head of the household to which
he belonged. As he grew up he would be allowed to make a small farm plot
of his own, and the rest of his career would be determined by his success in
first establishing his own independent household, with or without his father’s
consent, and then expanding it by recruiting further household members. He
controlled his own labour and that of his children, until they in turn managed
to assert their independence. If he prospered, he might also come to
command the labour of matrilateral relatives and zwofa and, in the nineteenth
century, sometimes slaves as well.
A boy or young man sent out as a full-time zwofa by an older relative had
no control overhis own labour, let alone anyone else’s. Denied the opportunity
to start his own farm, he would be held back in the competitive struggle to
establish himself until the relative paid back the loan. Those iwofa who served
the creditor only once every four or eight days could start a farm, but the
labour they lost on the days of service not only reduced the size and
productivity of their own farms, but also expanded those of the creditor, and
thus the differential advantages tended to become entrenched. Finally, a slave
apparently had no control at all over his own labour. All his work enhanced
his owner’s status and perpetuated his own. Even his own children belonged
to the master and worked for him, preventing the slave from ever establishing
his own household. An ortki remarks:
Eri ki i bimo ké mu ’4, ohun t6 ba bi oldw6 re 16 ni ni.
192 THE ORIKT OF BIG MEN
No slave has a child and keeps it, any child a slave has belongs to
the master.
A person’s position in the hierarchy therefore meant real differences in
productive capacity.
With the exception of slavery and membership of the royal lineage,
however, no status carrying privilege or disadvantage was ascribed: all were,
to a greater or lesser extent, achieved. The obaship itself was open, each time
it fell vacant, to a large number of eligible candidates. It was said that ‘in the
old days, whenever the throne was vacant, the strongest omogba (prince) simply
threw the others down’. A loose system of rotation between segments of the
royal family emerged some time in the nineteenth century, but it was not
rigidly followed until after the Chieftaincy Declaration of 1956 — and even
this, as we shall see, was initially treated as an opportunity to manipulate the
succession rather than to stabilise it. Both before and after the Chieftaincy
Declaration, several contestants could emerge in a single segment, and would
compete with each other for the support of the family, the chiefs and the town
at large. In the past as now, much money would be spent on this, both in direct
gifts and in generalised displays of conspicuous consumption.’ Eventually,
the leading town chiefs, in consultation with Ifa, would make the decision.
Few installations met the approval of everybody. Most Olokuku had to
endure feuds, faction fighting and dissident chiefs or rivals who claimed that
the oba was wrongly chosen. Olugbegbe, in the pre-nineteenth century era,
and Oyekanbi and Edun in the middle of the nineteenth century, were all
deposed by their chiefs. The position of oba, then, was achieved, often after
a great struggle, and maintained only by a continuation of that struggle.
Installing an oba makes him into a person of a different sort from the rest
of humanity. Elaborate and protracted rituals of transition precede his actual
assumption of office.® During this period he is stripped of his former status
and invested with royal attributes. He is instructed in the history of the royal
family and in the esoteric ritual duties pertaining to his position. He used to
spend three months (now reduced to three days) living anonymously without
family or friends in the house of the chief Odofin, one of the most senior town
chiefs, during this period of instruction. The investiture endows him with
mystical attributes. Taboos against eating in public, leaving the palace except
on ritual missions, stumbling as he walks, prostrating even to his own father,
all set him apart, thenceforth, as a sacred being. By becoming oba he steps into
a stream that is conceived as having flowed continuously since the days of the
founder of his dynasty: there has only ever been one Olokuku, and on his
installation he becomes the single ‘I’ that has remained unbroken since the
foundation of Kookin. But this process, by which the new oba is set apart from
other people and absorbed into a continuous, mystical and historical identity,
does not in any way preclude continued competitive struggle to maintain and
enhance his position. The oba is both the ‘second to the gods’, a being of a
different order from his chiefs, and at the same time another big man in a town
full ofthem. He too has to struggle to attract people to him: both new residents
to the town, and loyal supporters from among the existing population.
Control over people which is sometimes represented as a ‘right’ turns out to
be an achievement on the oba’s part. Not every oba, for instance, would have
tlan offering to serve him on his accession. Oyekanbi, who reigned in the
middle of the nineteenth century, was remembered for the ilari méfa to la léoj6,
the six z/ari that he made on a single day, and the explanation given for this
oriki was that ‘not every oba would get such a willing response — six people
coming to offer themselves as z/ar1 in one day! Some obas might get only one
or two, because people might not want to be made his dlar?’.’
But the representation of the oba as both a mystically endowed spiritual
being and as a big man is in no way a contradiction, for, as I have argued
elsewhere (Barber 1981b), spiritual beings themselves are like big men. Both
orisa and big men are endowed with their powers by the attentions of
followers; if the regard of their followers slackens, their powers wane. The
oba’s powers, though inherited, are also continually recreated, and sometimes
expanded, by his active recruitment of support and his struggle to put down
any big man who dares to challenge him. In Okuku, as in the towns examined
by Lloyd (1960, 1968, 1971), he does not enjoy harmonious and consensual
rule, either as a figurehead or as an autocrat: on the contrary, he is involved
in a struggle which engrosses political action at every level in the society.
Like the obaship, the town and palace titles are achieved through competition
and the recruitment of supporters. Each title may be contested by several
people within the lineage, and though age automatically confers seniority,
other attributes such as wealth, influence and leadership qualities may
outweigh age. It is true that some people start with advantages and some have
access to higher posts within the formal hierarchy than others. Most of the
senior olopaa titles are the patrimony of only one lineage, or at most of two
lineages who alternate or compete for it. So only someone born into z/e Ojomu
has the chance of eventually becoming Ojomu, the igbakeji oba, second to the
oba, and someone born into z/e Alawe is most unlikely to attain a title higher
than Alawe, half-way down the list of olepaa titles (see Table 2). But even
within the formal hierarchy of titles, enterprising and successful men found
scope for manoeuvre. The grade, rank and accessibility of these titles was not
immutable. Indeed, much of the political struggle that went on in Okuku
throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries revolved precisely around
efforts by chiefs and oba to rewrite the order or resist such rewriting.
The oba could raise or lower the position of titles in the rank order. The
top town chief was Odofin until the time of Olongbe (mid-nineteenth century)
who was a good friend of Oyekanbi and was rewarded by having his egungun
title, Ojomu, converted into a town title and given first place. At one time
Baale (now in third position) was first. Similarly, titles could be promoted
from one grade to another. An example of this occurred in the reign of
Oyewusi IT (1961-80) who, in the course of a long feud with many of the
olopaa chiefs, promoted four of the junior aladaa chiefs — Saba, Olukotun,
Odogun and Osolu — to olopaa status. And titles which had become accepted
as the property of one lineage could be offered to another lineage if the oba
was strong enough and the recipients brave enough to risk the wrath of the
slighted lineage. Oyinlola took the title Odofin from the lineage which claimed
to have held it since the foundation of Kookin, and gave it to his favourite
messenger Aasa of z/e Balogun. On Aasa’s death it was restored to the original
owners; but the new Odofin was one of the leaders of the feud against Oyewusi
II. Eventually he died in the thick of intrigue, and the title was passed back
again to z/e Balogun, who currently hold it. These alterations were always the
result of the oba and chiefs pitting their wills against each other.
Itan are always produced to legitimate such claims. But no such manoeuvre
could succeed if the parties trying to alter the status quo did not have clout:
the clout derived from supporters, wealth and reputation, rather than from
office. This was as true of the oba as of the chiefs and would-be chiefs.!°
Accession to office, and especially to high office such as the most senior of the
town titles, added to a powerful man’s power. It gave him a recognised
position, his for life; a place in the visible formal structures of government;
access to certain material advantages such as fees and fines; and the expectation
that, by virtue of his position, he would have influence — an expectation that
would in turn attract supporters to his side and thus endow him with
influence. Title was also a highly prized end in itself. Struggles to attain titles,
and subsequently to get them upgraded or to defend them from downgrading,
were conducted with a passion and intensity that often engrossed the chiefs
almost to the exclusion of all else. They certainly did not operate merely as
‘representatives’ of their lineages; they were individual ambitious men
fighting for their own advantage with a grim determination that suggests that
title was bound up with personal ambition rather than with the honour of the
lineage as a whole. Indeed, the ordinary members of the lineages concerned
seemed, throughout the feuds that split Okuku while I was there, to be quite
uninterested in the whole business. Title, then, was a goal of ambitious men,
which gratified not only by adding more to his power but simply in itself as
an acquisition. But no one could attain such an office if he were not already
well on the way to becoming a big man. |
What is more significant, but less often discussed in other work on Yoruba
towns, is the fact that there was considerable scope for ambitious individuals
to build up a position for themselves outside the hierarchy of titles. A man
whose standing was acknowledged by numerous adherents was an important
man by virtue of that recognition. His status might eventually be acknowledged
by the formal conferment of a title, but this was a result rather than a cause
BIG MEN IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 195
of his importance in the town. A man with no title, or a small or low-ranking

title, could still be recognised as a very big man, and could wield considerable
political influence as a result.
The hierarchy of Okuku was kept in place by constant vigorous pressure
from both sides, as one party attempted to redraw the lines that demarcated
statuses and another tried to prevent this happening. This pressure was
supplied by the continually self-renewing drive by individuals to self-
aggrandisement. The political events in the town were fuelled by this drive.
Until recently the underlying factors in a big man’s rise remained constant.
A man always needed ‘people’. Recruitment of people proceeded through a
variety of channels, but was most commonly based on the establishment of
a large household and the production of wealth. It was always directly or
indirectly at someone else’s expense. Directly, when a warrior captured a
slave; or when a would-be big man needed to raise money to marry a new wife
or hold a big feast, and lent out his younger brother or son as interest on a loan;
or when a man married in order to use a woman’s labour and procreative
power to swell his household. Indirectly, when a man’s power became
magnetic enough to attract supporters away from other big men. In this
system, nothing succeeds like success; one man’s success breeds another
man’s failure; and almost anything is possible even for those born without
advantages. Itis therefore a highly dynamic, highly competitive, individualistic
and fluid society, and the culture which it has produced reveals this.
Orikt, which helped to create big men, and itan, which gave narrative form
to memories of them, illuminate better than any other source the centrality
of this dynamic to the life of the town. They also reveal that the definition of
a big man and the methods he adopted to attain greatness underwent
historical changes between the early nineteenth and the late twentieth
century. They show, too, that at any given moment, there were a number of
different routes available to the would-be big man and a variety of qualities
or attributes that were regarded as a sufficient claim to greatness. Big men
found their own ways to recruit supporters and gain reputation, adapting to
the historical circumstances and to their own immediate opportunities. Oriki
and ztan thus present us with a rich, overcrowded array of personalities, all
evoked in highly charged imagery, and all distinctive. It is impossible to do
Justice to the sheer proliferation and abundance of memories, stories and
epithets. But the range and variety of big men’s careers, and the way they
changed over time, can at least be selectively illustrated.
3. BIG MEN IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY
Stories of big men before the fall of Ofa in c. 1825 are rare. Whether this is
because of the failure of memory, or whether the turbulence unleashed by the
nineteenth-century wars threw up figures more remarkable than those who
preceded them — and so more likely to generate narratives — is impossible to
tell. It is certainly true that from around the middle of the nineteenth century
there are detailed stories about a lot of big men, who are definitely associated
with the wars and even with specific episodes in them. But for the period
before that, what remains is a few examples of ortki, sometimes quite full-
blown, attached to figures whose historical period is uncertain and about
whom little other information is forthcoming. The ork: themselves are far
from being firm evidence, because of the fluidity of their mode oftransmission,
but they offer the only glimpse of what this period might have been like.
One of these early big men was Winyomi of ze Oluode, remembered as the
first Head of the Hunters in Okuku. Characteristically, he is represented both
as a legendary founding ancestor of remote provenance, and as a real
personality on the threshold of living memory.'! Genealogies offered by elders
of the z/le, however much they varied in other respects, always put Winyomi
in the position of apical ancestor, and the ztan of tle Oluode always began with
the statement that Winyomi ‘brought them from Ofa’ (their ore) to join the
first oba at Kookin. One elder, Chief Akogun, went further than this, claiming
that Winyomi, a great hunter and experienced in exploring the forest, was
actually the one to discover the site where Kookin was to be founded. Here
Winyomi seems a being in the remote past with no definite characteristics
except those essential for the myth of origin: his courage and his powers as a
hunter. But Winyomi’s orki encapsulate other stories, which are told with
more narrative detail. Johnson Onifade, one of the present generation of
elders of tle Oluode, quoted these oriki in the course of his narrative:
A-dominu-kojo
Dina mo ya
O pagbonrin 6 pa tuupu
O pa éyi ti i da won nigi lona oko.
“Blocks the road and doesn’t budge’
‘One who fills the coward with apprehension’
He kills antelope, he kills the bush-hog
He killed the thing that was terrifying them on the farm path.
This was the story that arose from the ortki:
When they were at Kookin, Winyomi had a friend in Otan. His friend’s
son used to carry an egungun masquerade during the festival, and one
year he got into a fight. He was a sword-carrying egungun and he sliced
his opponent in half. The man died, and the friend’s son ran to Kookin
to seek refuge with Winyomi. In due course the people of the dead man
gathered their forces and came en masse, heavily armed, to get venge-
ance. Winyomi was informed of their arrival and went out into the road.
He saw them coming in the distance. When they got nearer they saw him
standing there blocking the whole road. They asked him if he was
harbouring the murderer. Winyomi said yes. Then he added, ‘I am

going to close my eyes, and when I open them you will have disappeared’.
He closed his eyes and when he opened them he saw everybody running
for their lives. They knew he was a great medicine man and they feared
him, that is why they ran. This is why he is called ‘Blocks the road and
doesn’t budge’, and ‘One who fills the coward with apprehension’.
Other stories suggest a period distinctly later than the foundation of Kookin.
One describes Winyomi confronting the Otan people ‘with medicine and with
his gun’, suggesting a period after c.1820.'!2 The vagueness of the historical
placing of Winyomi, and the scope for conflation of several figures, seem to
be enormous. However, hardly any of the stories linked Winyomi with the
‘Tlorin war’. It was Olomi, Winyomi’s ‘son’ (i.e. someone of a later generation
— possibly many generations later) who was said to have ‘taken them to [kirun’
when Okuku was evacuated in 1877-8, and another ‘son’, Ogunsola, was
recalled as a famous fighting man in the Ilorin-Ibadan wars.
The few notions associated with Winyomi’s name in itan suggest a big man
of a certain kind, and even indicate the bases of his position: ‘He was
consulted whenever anything happened. He had many children. He was rich
from farming and from selling meat. He had medicine, and he was courageous.
He was the Head of the Hunters. He founded the egungun Arobate’. ‘He was
a hunter. He had many children. He killed elephants. He was the first Oluode
in Okuku’. But it is in his personal ortki, transmitted at their fullest by the
women of z/e Oluode and not by the men who tell itan, that we find a detailed
representation of the nature of his position. On the surface of the unspecific
image of the wealthy, successful and prolific hunter, the orzk: imprint details
that give a better idea of the concept of personal greatness:
Winyomi Enipééde Olori-ode
Arémiu dina mé ya, Enipéédé a démint kojo
Lakuo Ojo kéni mé féburé
Eni 6 kanlaa Winyomi oliwae ni i waaapon
Daalé mo daa ode, baba okoo mi
- Aida oran 16 dun
Alamtu ni b6 o daran egbaa
O ni baba té o ni 4 jeun léri e
Aso Oibé 6 lalopé
Winyomi ni ‘Fifege 16 se é fege’
Apagbonrin pa tuupu, oldri ode
O péyi ti i da won nigi 1 Godogbd
A pa fan won kéboloé [danu]
Alam ni won 1 poléri ode
Baba okoé mi payi to ri da won nigi 1lAnlé.¥
Winyomi Enipeede Head of the Hunters
Aremu, blocks the road and doesn’t budge, Enipeede, one who
fills the coward with apprehension
In the time of early planting, let no-one pluck the ebure plant
Anyone who plucks Winyomi’s okro is looking for trouble
‘Get into trouble at home, don’t get into trouble outside’, my
husband’s father
‘Not getting into trouble at all is best’,
Alamu said ‘If you get into trouble to the tune of two thousand
cowries’
He said, ‘Your own father will take his cut of the settlement’
European cloth doesn’t wear well
Winyomi said ‘What it’s good for is showing off
One who killed antelope, killed wild boar, Head of the Hunters
He killed the one that was terrifying them at Godogbo
He killed so much meat for them they threw away their vegetable
It’s Alamu they call ‘Head of the Hunters’
My husband’s father killed the one that was terrifying them at Anle.
This Winyomi cannot be a figure from the remote past. Not only the
reference to imported European cloth, but also the the very fullness and
freshness of the orikz, with their continual quotations of Winyomi’s own words,
suggest someone much more recent than a founding ancestor. The ortki
known to belong to pre-nineteenth century figures, such as the early obas of
Okuku, are gnomic and obscure, and much briefer than these. It could be that
the ortki just quoted are modern compositions transferred back onto Winyomi
by well-known processes of borrowing, but this is not very likely — for they are
specific and idiosyncratic epithets, which are not used for anyone else in
Okuku. They do seem to belong to a particular figure: one who has been
conflated in memory with a founding ancestor figure, but who is more likely
to have come from the first half of the nineteenth century.
Winyomi is represented in these ork as the head of a great household — a
household which he ruled with a hand of iron (no-one would dare pick okro
from his garden without permission) but which he supplied lavishly with food.
The reference to okro suggests that he was a great farmer, whose early and
abundant crops attracted poachers. But more important, he was a hunter who
supplied his household with great quantities of meat, so much that they could
afford to throw away the vegetable they had gathered to make their stew with.
His courage as a hunter protected not just his own family but the community
as a whole: he got rid of ‘the one that was terrifying them at Godogbo’, and
‘at Anle’, both fertile cultivated areas belonging to Okuku people — that is, he
killed the dangerous animals that prevented people from going to their farms
(Johnson Onifade explained that the animal referred to was a chimpanzee,
that would follow people on the path to their farms and would make indecent
advances to the women). He is remembered for his ironical sayings. He
advises his household to commit their misdemeanours only in the safety of
their home, not outside where the consequences could be more serious; but
he goes on to suggest that it would be even better not to commit any
misdemeanours at all, for even inside the family, someone is bound to profit
at your expense when you get into trouble: “Your own father will take a cut
of the settlement’.'* And though he dismisses European cloth, with a down-
to-earth practicality, as flimsy stuff, the form of the words suggests that he
himself dresses up in it for show: and so, by implication, that he is a
magnificent figure, an attractive and charismatic man who would do justice
to expensive cloth.
There is a subtle balance in these ortki between communal values and
individual idiosyncrasy. Winyomi is celebrated as a great provider, and as a
defender of the community; but he is also recalled as an individual with an
ironical brand of humour, a love of personal show, and perhaps a tyrannical
temper. His saying ‘Ddalé m6 dada ode’ (‘Get into trouble at home, don’t get
into trouble outside’) is a clue to the tone of the whole passage. The family
represents safety and solidarity, the outside world danger and betrayal; but
even within the family, people will be quick to take advantage of your
mistakes. It is best to protect yourself by remaining aloof and irreproachable.
The oriki celebrates the communal solidarity of the family at the same time
as it warns that, concealed within this solidarity, is a flaw which makes
individual self-reliance essential.
Winyomi, then, is represented as being a big man because ofhis wealth, his
family and his influence. His wealth is attributed to farming and, even more
important, to hunting. Lavish provision of meat is said to have made his house-
hold conspicuous (with the implication that this attracted numbers of hangers-
on). And his personal influence (“He was consulted whenever anything
happened’) is ascribed to his role as communal champion. His formidable
powers, his courage, his mastery of both firearms and medicine, are the
qualities that are said to have made him a centre of attraction. He 1s credited
with ‘people’, not only in the sense of wives and children and followers, but
in the more extended sense of the adherence of the community at large.
The ortki recalling this period evoke an ideal of greatness which is subtle
and many-stranded. One of the finest celebrations of this ideal is in the orikz
of Adeoba, who reigned in the first half of the nineteenth century. He is the
last Olokuku to share the ‘mythic’ aura, the unlocatedness in time and
indeterminacy with respect to events in his reign, that characterises the early
obas, and the first Olokuku for whom we have extensive and circumstantial
orikt. The obas Ladile, Otinkanre, Olugbegbe and Oluronke are remembered
in legends, often with magical themes, and in ortki which are brief and obscure;
and other obas, who appear in some accounts and not in others, are even less
well represented in the literature. Adeoba, however, comes before us in all his
resplendence. Like the onk: of Winyomi , those of Adeoba suggest a more
gracious era than that which followed it. They also reveal most clearly how the
big man’s position was construed as being grounded in the regard of ‘people’,
and demonstrate the role of or1ki themselves in focusing and re-enacting this
regard:
Adéwalé Adéoba
Akanni ow6 636 6 won
Adéwalé, e waduuru yiye ti i yeni
Oriaré Adéstre
Babaa mi agbalagba lOyé
Ko i j6 ani gbaté
Oriaré abij6-ranyin-lagbo
Omo 16 kosé ni gbongan
Baba se haa lagbala
Won sebi ibt lOriaré su
Ara 16 fibt e da, oko Ojisabola
Ogongo-gongo ni fila aran, babaa Sadéyé
O ni nnkan ju on babaa Buola ni i se
O tété rosu: lagbald, babaa Jélastin
Baba to koleé ara
Akanni to koji é si yéyé
Adéwalé k6 Boopé
O koju é si ilée babaa re
O ni bé 9 pé 0 wa, bd 6 pé 9 mé mo ya
Eni 6 pé ni i yalé Akanni a-mére-wt-6n-gbé
Abioyé babaa mi, Olugbola a-gbégi-j6-tomo-tomo
Oso ard 6 ti
Adéwalé, aro ni baba aso
Babaa mi, égbé ni babaa’léké
N ba ségbé ileké
Akanni, laarin ni n ba gbé
Adéwalé, 0 yo ninu egbé da daa da.»
Adewale Adeoba
Akanni, there’s no shortage of money for adornment
Adewale, see how extremely well he befits his position! -
Oriare Adesure
My father, elder of Oye
Even before he dances he gets applause
Oriare, one whose dance whirls around the circle
A child stubbed his toe in the hall
The father cried ‘Ha!’ in the courtyard
They thought Oriare had stumbled

His apparent fall was just a clever stunt, husband of Ojisabola
With his jutting velvet cap, father of Saoye |
Father of Buola is someone who has more than other people
He sees the new moon early from his courtyard, father of Jolasun
The elder who built a fine new house
Akanni who made it face Mother [Otin]
Adewale built ‘If you have no blemish’
He made it face his father’s house
He said, ‘Ifyou have no blemish, come; if you have one, then don’t
turn this way’
Only wholesome types turn into Akanni’s house, one who makes
other people want to carry the image
Abioye, my father, Olugbola, one who takes the image and all its
children to dance
The beauty of cloth dyed in indigo does not fade
Adewale, indigo is what gives the cloth its worth
My father, egbe are the best kind of beads
If I were an egbe bead
Akanni, I would be right in the middle
Adewale, you stand out among your peers most distinctly.
Adeoba is commended for the wealth which he spends on finery, for his
splendid dancing, his spacious and well-decorated house, and for his
conspicuous participation in the royal cult of Otin. Each of these images
presents Adeoba as a figure at the centre of attention, encircled by admirers
and inferiors. He is pictured as the dancer surrounded by a ring of spectators:
and so commanding and charismatic is his presence, so great his reputation,
that the onlookers burst into applause even before he begins to dance. When
he celebrates the Otin festival, the way he carries the Otin images fills people
with the desire to participate, to follow him in the procession. He is compared
to the central, biggest and most conspicuous bead in a string. The singer calls
on her own audience to look at this figure, and ‘see how extremely well he
befits his position’. The effect is to put the hearer in the role of admirer, so
that by uttering the words, the performer recreates the big man’s ideal
situation, as the cynosure of all eyes.
These images belong to a well-established idiom, and are found in a
multitude of variant formulations in the oriki of big men from Adeoba’s time
right up to the reign of Oyinlola. Each one leads through a chain of associations
with other images to the suggestion that the subject ‘has people’ and enjoys
regard. Adeoba is wealthy, and spends his wealth on ‘adornment’: adornment
implies that the owner has physical beauty appropriate to it, and physical
beauty implies a radiant power of attraction. As he dances, his skirts whirl,
suggesting voluminous cloth. Cloth is a well-known image for people: in
another oba’s oriki, it is said that ‘I could take off my robes and wrap myself
in people’. It is also an image that evokes power through the suggestion of a
slapping, flaunting movement in folds of the cloth — made explicit in another
oriki: osdnso-mén-gba-yigi-yigi, ‘one who wears one cloth on ‘top of another,
sweeping the ground with vigorous magnificence’. Adeoba has built a
magnificent house, so spacious that ‘he sees the new moon early from his
courtyard’ (while other people, confined within narrower walls, have to wait
till the moon is high in the sky before they see it). A large house indicates a
large household, full of people — and this oki adds the further suggestion that
all these people must be beautiful. Adeoba is quoted as remarking humorously
that ‘If you are perfect, come; if not, don’t bother to turn this way’, because
‘only perfect people drop in on Akanni’. The house also, of course, signifies
wealth, especially as it is no ordinary house, but z/e ara, one that is in some way
novel or of exceptional beauty. A fine, well-decorated house is the physical
location of the big man’s achievement, the place where he is at ease,
surrounded by his people and by all the evidence of his success.
Finally, the image of beads, linked with that of indigo-dyed cloth, evokes
the big man’s attainment in metaphors that modulate sinuously and fluently
from one to another. Beads are a repository of wealth and a conspicuous
display of it. They are also adornments, implying again the subject’s fitness
to wear them and the magnetism of his personality. These associations are
present in Adegba’s ortki, but the image is also used to convey something
more abstract. “The glory of indigo does not fade’: and Adewale’s own ‘glory’
— both his natural adornments of grace and beauty, and his very worthiness
to be adorned in cloth and beads — are likewise unfading. Just as ‘indigo is the
father of cloth’, bestowing on it an unquestionable superiority, so ‘egbe
[beads] are the father of beads’ — the very best that there are. Adeoba is, by
implication, as naturally superior to other people as indigo-dyed cloth and
egbe beads are to other kinds of cloth and beads. But then the metaphor shifts:
‘If I were an egbe bead, Akanni, I would be right in the middle/Adewale, you
stand out amongst your peers most distinctly’. The beads are now conceived
as a string, the most coveted place in which is right at the centre where the
biggest and most beautiful beads will be put. Like the central bead in the
string, Adewale is conspicuous because of his natural superiority. The
effortless modulations from one metaphor to another are possible here
because the performer is operating in a dense evocative field of significances,
where each image is already linked with all the others through numerous
strands of association, implication and memory.
The language of these ortk: traces a circling metaphorical path. One image
suggests another because they are all signs of each other. Wealth means a
display of adornments; the display means the owner deserves to be adorned,
because of his beauty, presence and charisma; beauty, presence and charisma
WARTIME BIG MEN UP TO 1893 203
mean the attention of adherents. A large house stands for wealth, but also for
a lot of people. Dancing suggests cloth, cloth suggests a following, an
audience suggests the dancer is exceptional. The circling style, as much as the
content of the ortki, evokes an ideal which cannot be reduced to a single
attribute. Wealth is desirable, but it is not an end or achievement in itself so
much as a means by which a visible demonstration of status is effected. Power
over other people is a factor in the big man’s success, but this is not the whole
meaning of ‘having people’. ‘People’ are a constitutive element in the creation
of a more richly-conceived position. What men hoped to attain, it seems, was
not wealth as such or power as such, but a total state of sufficiency and
command over their social environment, a state called ola. Ola is the complex,
composite, shifting and sensuously realised concept that informs the ethos of
oriki. What underlies ola is the notion of recognition, of being acknowledged
superior, and of attracting admirers and supporters as a result. Having people,
in its widest sense, means having people who are guaranteed to go on
acknowledging one. Because the relationship between the big man and his
supporters was not institutionalised it had to be continually recreated.
Ola, then, is ultimately the capacity to attract and retain the gaze of other
people. Difference—the idiosyncrasies captured in Adeoba’s humorous remarks
and in the reference to the peculiar incident of his ‘apparent fall’ which he
turned into ‘a clever stunt’ — is valued because it makes the big man
conspicuous. This ability to ‘stand out amongst your peers most distinctly’ is
the heart of the matter. The purpose of the ortk: is to draw attention to the
subject as the centre of regard in a multiplicity of ways.
4. WARTIME BIG MEN UP TO 1893
During the Ilorin-Ibadan wars, new opportunities for self-aggrandisement
appeared. Dozens of famous men are recalled from this era: almost every
compound has at least one. And it 1s clear that the fortunes of these men were
closely associated with the wars. Some of them were remembered as the head
of the household who had ‘led us to [kirun’ on the main evacuation of Okuku
in 1877-8; others were remembered as having ‘brought us back’ in 1893 and
supervised the resettlement and reconstruction of Okuku. But most of them
were associated more directly with the actual warfare and the slave raiding for
which the wars provided the opportunity. Although the war period began in
c.1825 with the fall of Ofa, almost all the stories associate the big men with
somewhat later episodes, from around the middle of the century onwards.
Men attained towering powers in this period. The turbulent conditions not
only gave big men greater opportunities for asserting themselves, but also, as
Oroge has pointed out, increased lesser men’s need for a patron (Oroge,
1971, p. 150). In the middle of the century, Fatolu the Baale— one of the most
senior olopaa chiefs — became a tyrant in the town. It was he who led the faction
that drove Oba Oyekanbi out of the town and replaced him with his own
friend, Edun. After seven years, he changed his mind and deposed Edun,
recalling Oyekanbi to the throne. He conducted a reign of terror in the town
which was not forgotten or forgiven for a hundred years. The office of oba was
not an enviable one, and at least one oba-elect fled the town rather than
assume it. During the same period, Oyekanbi introduced the secret punitive
and judicial society, the Ogboni, to Okuku. Many egungun were established,
among them Paje, the great royal masquerade whose head-piece was acquired
in araid during the war.'® The idiom of political struggle was agbara (strength)
and oogun (medicine): great men were those who could outlast their enemies
and establish a reputation for invincibility. Oriki of these big men emphasise
not only excess of power and wealth, but also the isolation and danger of the
competitive and ruthless struggle for supremacy. }
In the personal ortki recorded for the earlier figures, Winyomi and Adeoba,
this theme is scarcely touched on. They are celebrated for their generosity,
their magnificence, their idiosyncrasies, their importance to the community.
But from the reign of Adeoba’s successor Oyekanbi onwards, oriki seem to
have established a pervasive idiom of personal aggression and immunity from
personal attack. Oyekanbi himself is saluted as a beleaguered figure, under
constant attack from enemies but able to withstand them all:
Apa ekuté ilé 6 kausa |
Babaa Kolawolé, enu yiyi kiri 16 mo
Burubutu oja bd l6wé6o bamubéamu
Oyéégoiboé baba bo léwo ipin iya babaa won
The houserat can’t control the walnut
Father of Kolawole, he can’t get further than rolling it around the
house
The dry earth of the market escapes the floor-beater
Oyegoibo the father escaped from the punishment planned for
him by other peoples’ fathers [i.e. his enemies] 3
Big men of this period could gain ascendancy through military prowess.
There was no formal military organisation as in some towns. The hunters’
association posted look-outs to warn the townspeople ofimpending raids, but
the actual fighting was carried out by another group, an informal association
of young men nicknamed the egbe Balogun. This group would meet regularly
for ‘training’ — which consisted mainly in instruction in the use of medicines
and charms — and would go out to confront the Ilorins on the road when they
came. They also launched slave-raiding expeditions of their own, going as far
afield as Omu-Aran and Iresa, or ‘wherever they heard that raiding was good’.
They would enter the victim town at night, set fire to the thatched roofs and
then seize the inhabitants as they rushed out of their houses. The captives
would be taken back to Okuku as slaves.
The egbe Balogun remained the only fighting organisation in Okuku. The
founder and leader of the group, Omikunle, became the most conspicuous
and memorable of big men of the period. He is associated with the reign of
Oyekanbi and is said to have been among those who led the population to
Ikirun (in 1877-8). He was a young untitled man of i/e Aworo Otin whose only
advantage appears to have been the gift of leadership. He was nicknamed
Balogun after the famous Ibadan leader, Ajayi, the hero of the 1878 ‘Jalumi
War’ outside Ikirun. He rallied round him young men of all compounds, who
accepted his command and met at his house daily to eat and to plan their next
raids. There was a core of about twenty-five men who actually fought and
went on raids, but ‘all the youth of the town called themselves egbe Balogun’
and associated with the group, supporting them and acknowledging Omikunle’s
leadership. He chose his own second- and third-in-command, whom he
honoured with the titles Otun Balogun (Balogun’s Right) and Osi Balogun
(Balogun’s Left). “They were chosen for their prowess in battle’. He thus
became a force to be reckoned with in the town, the real political decision-
maker. The plans of the egbe would be communicated to the oba, but they
were in no way dependent on his approval: “They just told him afterwards
what they had decided’. After many years the nickname Balogun became
accepted as a real title. When Omikunle died, his younger brother Omileye
in turn became the Balogun, and the conferment of the title was ratified by
the oba. Omileye was an equally formidable war leader, remembered for
riding his horse around the market and ‘abusing everyone, including the oba’.
His young nephew Aasa had to carry his sword and his luggage in front of his
horse when Omileye went to war, and drummers would parade along by his
side saluting him as he approached the battlefront. ‘Nobody could touch him
because of his medicines’. Omikunle had founded a dynasty: after Omileye’s
death, Omikunle’s own son Omileke became Balogun. J/e Aworo Otin has
several town and palace titles — Sobaloju, Alala, Osolu— as well as the ritual
title Aworo Otin, the priest of the goddess Otin, who was formerly also the
head of the whole compound. But the new title displaced the old, and
Balogun become the most important title in the compound — which is
nowadays often actually called z/e Balogun rather than z/le Aworo Otin. No other
compound has ever contested it. Thus Omikunle built up for himself and his
successors a position which became legitimised and institutionalised, but
which began as the informal recruitment of supporters on a scale which was
made possible by the disturbed conditions of the time. Like other towns in the
areas of continuous warfare, Okuku seems to have produced a new kind of big
man whose power was based on military leadership and whose authority in
some respects overshadowed the oba’s. '”
The imagery of their ork: suggests the concentrated, threatening power
possessed by this warlike dynasty. They are represented not as communal
champions, as Winyomi was, but as magnificent, frightening forces dangerous
to anyone who crossed their path:
Alésin-léyé atidi-gun-baaka
Baba 6-gun-bééké jana
Keré-kété Ayindé 0 mo fesin té mi
Njé baba Oyaolé ni ti 4 gesin
Ko i tii fi te baba enikan pa
O suré 1 papa 6 fi esé ko ide
O rin 1 butubutd 6 fesé ko épa."8
Alesi-loye who mounts a camel from the back
Father, one who mounts a mighty beast on the road
Clip-clop Ayinde, don’t trample me down with your horse
: Since the day that Oyaole has been riding his horse
He hasn’t yet trampled anyone to death
He ran in the plain, he brought back brass on his feet |
He walked in the marshland and brought back beads on his feet.
The horse is an image of intense and overwhelming physical power. Aman
mounted on a horse towers above his fellows and can, as the oriki suggests,
easily crush them if he chooses. ‘Don’t trample me down with your horse’
suggests an admiration that is forged out of fear. The hero has mounted and
mastered the ‘mighty beast’ and could use it to destroy lesser men. But the
horse is also an image of riches. It is a precious object in itself, an emblem of
civil status more than one of warlike glory. It is associated with brass and coral
beads, both valuable things and both symbols of royalty and chiefship. The
violence of the image of the trampling horse is thus tempered by associations
of gracious and legitimate power. But the implication that Omikunle’s
position was threatening to the townspeople as well as magnetically attractive
is clearly there: indeed, it is the dangerous quality that makes him attractive,
as a protector, in time of war.
Many of the big men from this period were recalled as members of the egbe
Balogun, and as ‘great warriors’. They were also described: as being very
wealthy, possessing large households with many slaves and :wofa. According
to Adewale of z/e Oloko, who was one of the oldest men in Okuku, ‘all the big
men had slaves, usually about four or five’ but ‘they sold more than they Kept’.
Conditions were too unstable for most men to build up large households of
male slaves. ‘As soon as they got to the farm the slave would run away,
especially ifhe knew where his people were so that he could go and join them’.
So most of the warriors would keep only a few, ‘to cut grass for their horses
and to run errands’, not to work on the farm. They could also augment their
households without the normal delay and expense by marrying their female
slaves. They would sell the rest to traders and use the proceeds to give out
loans to their less wealthy fellow citizens from Okuku and neighbouring
towns. With these loans they secured the services of zwofa, who as local people
could not so easily escape. According to Adewale, ‘:wofa were very common
even when slavery was rife. Everyone had them; some people had a great
many, and a rich man could have as many as twenty’. The active and
successful warriors who went on frequent raids thus had opportunities to
enrich themselves far beyond the scope of the rest of the population. A male
slave was said to sell for. as much as £5 (the modern way of expressing what
was then 400,000 cowries): a huge sum at a time when a load of yams fetched
only 1!/2d (500 cowries).
Other men enriched themselves without actually fighting. Elekede ofze Aro-
Oke, for example, was not a warrior, but he was rich from farming and he used
his wealth to entertain the warriors. Whenever they returned from a raid they
would repay his hospitality by selling him slaves at a special rate. He would
then resell them at a profit and expand his household still further with wives
and :wofa. Most of the big men of the period seem to have managed to go on
farming despite the turbulent conditions. Old men remember that when
Okuku fled for refuge to Ikirun and stayed there ‘17 years’ (c.1877—93), the
Okuku farms became dangerous. Some people would visit them and continue
to grow crops there, but they always risked being captured by lurking Ilorins
or even by the people of neighbouring villages, who pretended not to
recognise them. According to Adewale, ‘if eight men went to the farm
together, maybe only three would come back — anyone who went out of the
town was likely to be caught’. Others borrowed farm land from their hosts in
Ikirun. Households were fragmented and families scattered. Nevertheless,
most of the nineteenth century big men are remembered in words like the
following:
Adekunle had a large farm and a lot of slaves [Ajala Oyeleye, izle Oba]
Fabiyi had a lot of money from farming
Gbangbade was very rich; he had a big farm and captured a lot of slaves
in the war. [Fatoki, zle Oloko] He had no title buthe became an important
figure in family and town meetings — he knew how to organise things.
He had many itwofa. They could not hold meetings without him [Joseph
Ogundairo, tle Oloko]
Olanigbagbe Olowona was a very rich man. He was a warrior who used
a bow and poisoned arrows instead ofa gun. He captured large numbers
ofslaves, and sold them. They also used to get ransom money when they
spared the lives of the obas of captured towns. He had a large farm and
a lot of twofa [Ajala Oyeleye, zle Oba]
Slave-raiding, then, seems usually to have been not an alternative to

farming but a supplement to it, the source of labour which enabled the farmer
to expand as never before. Having a warlike following and the glory of battle
complemented the possession of a great household fed from a great farm,
employing many more people than just the big man’s own relations. The ork
of big men often celebrate war, wealth and farming in the same breath.
This, then, was a period of great personal danger, not only from the Ilorins
who were always a potential threat, but from people of neighbouring towns
and even fellow townspeople. A big man’s success was manifestly at other
people’s expense, for the most prominent men were those who did the best
trade in slaves, and this trade nurtured betrayal as well as violence. ‘It was
commerce. The slaves they captured could be Ekiti men or they could be local
people from their own side — in which case they’d take them off quickly to
another town to sell them so that their families wouldn’t know’. Oriki of these
big men articulate a philosophy of self-reliance. The individual is surrounded
by enemies, and since he often does not know who they are, his best plan is
to trust no-one and keep aloof. The greatest achievement is to be, like
Oyekanbi, impervious to the assaults of one’s rivals. But the individual is also
in danger even within his own family. While Winyomi seemed to think that
the family was relatively safe, the big men of the war period announced that
they could trust no-one at all: “Your worst enemy may be in your own back-
yard’. This counsel of distrust belonged to a period when all relationships
were capable of being converted to cash. It is likely that the influx of cash from
slaves into the hands of a fortunate minority in the town greatly increased the
lending and borrowing of :wofa. People were thus at risk not only from
outsiders who might try to capture and sell them, but from their own family,
who might lend them out to creditors.
. The orki of Bankole Gbotifayo of z/e Aro-Isale articulate the philosophy of
enemies and self-reliance in a highly elaborated form. He was a babalawo who
was also a devotee of Sango and Soponnon. His granddaughter was the mother
of Sangowemi, who knew his story well:
Gbotifayo went to war and brought back slaves. He was a formidable
medicine-man. The war took him to [kirun, where he attracted the enmity
of fellow-diviners by succeeding in diagnosing the problem of a client
whom all the others had failed with. She was a woman in labour but
unable to give birth. Gbotifayo revealed that the problem was that the
child had been begotten by a lover, not the woman’s husband, and that
she would not be released from labour until she named him. The man’s
people hated him after this, and naka si 1 l67u [1.e. blinded him by using
medicine against him]. By the time this happened (the Okuku people
were still at Ikirun) he was old and his hair was white. But he lived a long
time after that and eventually died in Oyekunle’s reign [1916-34]’°.
This story revolves around the idea of Gbotifayo’s enemies, engendered by
his own success, and his eventual survival of their attacks. Although he was
a respected babalawo, he 1s quoted as taking a view of the world that sounds
almost atheistic in its insistence on self-reliance:
Gbotifayo 6 ninnhkan ajibo
Ni won ri pe Bankolé babaa mi
Akandé elékéé léké yé
Gbotifayo babaa mi
O ni ohun ta a ba se, 6 nin ni ké méo yéni
Akandé baba ni nnkan ajibo
O lé e wa ri boF4
Béé 1é 4 bOsun
Oran won 6 i kan toisa
Eniyan to waa bo ind ¢ 16 gbén, Sénibaré
Eké 6 kuni
Ika won 6 ku omo éniyan
Ika 6 fé a rerd 4 sd
Ayodelé Sangodéyi Kasumu babaa mi
O 16 dijé ti ori eni ba soni.”
Gbotifayo has something to rise and worship
That’s how they salute Bankole my father
Akande, the deceiver knows his own deceit
Gbotifayo my father
He said, “Whatever we do, we should understand what it is we are
doing’
Akande the father has something to rise and worship
He said ‘You worship Ifa
And you worship Osun
But the matter of “other people” has nothing to do with the orisa
People who worship their own secrets are the wise ones, Sonibare
There is no end to the world’s deceivers
Not a single person free from suspicion of wickedness
The cruel person does not want us to lay down our load’
Ayodele Sangodeyi Kasumu my father
He said ‘We have to wait till our Ori lifts it down for us’.
Gbotifayo, that is, is remembered for proclaiming that worshipping the orisa,
even Ifa his own patron deity, is no solution to human hostility. The only way
to deal with ‘other people’ is to keep your own counsel, worship your own
‘inside’, and be constantly on your guard, for ‘there is no end to the world’s
deceivers’. The only intentions you can have access to are your own:
therefore, it behoves you to know exactly what you are doing, since you
cannot know what anyone else is going to do. You must rely on your own Ort
(your head, luck, or destiny) to help you out of your difficulties.
A big man had to be able to defend himself and his people from attack.
Rivalry in the town between big men building up great households was
believed to take the form of anger at the survival of the rival’s dependants:
Sinsinnigun ilée wa dari pon, inu ri béye oko
The young lizards of our house are getting red heads, making the
birds in the forest angry ,
Other people attack a man’s household as naturally as birds prey on baby
lizards. When the lizards get too big to swallow (the mark of a mature male
lizard is its red head) the birds are furious. The fury of one’s enemies is a sign
of one’s own success. A big man needs to be able to defend his household —
if necessary, by violent means:
Akangbé 6 si nlé, won naya é
Babaa Fagbére dé, gbogbo won té 9 ri nin bépa
Won ni, Bolakanmi, opa bi mo ti ba 9 nayaa re be.
Akangbe was not at home, they beat his mother
Father of Fagbere arrived, they all began to swear sacred oaths
They said, ‘Bolakanmi, may I be struck dead if I had anything |
to do with beating your mother!’
Faderera, who is the granddaughter of Bolakanmi, commented, “This shows
how much Bolakanmi was feared and respected in the town. With him at
home, no-one would dare to attack the family’. |
This view of the world as pervaded by ‘enemies’, declared and undeclared,
whose intentions are unknown but who can be assumed to be full of malice
and envy, is deeply rooted in Yoruba culture. It is given expression in tan, in
Ifa stories, in the good-luck chants called zwure, in chants addressed to orisa.”!
In their most crystallised form, ‘enemies’ are represented as witches,
malevolent, destructive and — according to most people — always female.
Witches are rarely exposed and expelled from the community; they are dimly
suspected, half-known, and half-tolerated for long periods. No-one can be
sure which women in their own household are witches. But the strongly
drawn picture of ‘the witch’ merges into a whole shadowy region of ill-
intentioned people, simply known as aye, ‘the world’. The world can be
assumed to be hostile. Men as well as women inhabit this region, but no-one
can be sure who they are. They use their own powers, the powers of witches,
the powers of hired medicine-men, and the powers of the ortsa, who are regarded
as being deeply embroiled in human struggles. The individual can depend
only on his or her own On, the principle of individual success, to pick his or
her way amongst this minefield of potentially harmful forces. These conceptions
are pervasive and, I have argued (Barber, 1979), appropriate to a society
driven by the dynamic competitiveness of big men, each of whom is indeed
a potential threat to all his rivals.
But the ork: of the wartime big men also suggest that there was a moment
in history when this generalised mistrust became sharpened and concentrated
and found expression in extreme utterances. Suspicion of his own household
(“Your worst enemy is in your own backyard’) could be inverted so that the
big man was represented as being himself a terrible danger to his own people.
It seems that at this time power in its most nakedly violent form was needed
for the creation and maintenance of big-man status. The most extreme form
of power was the power to destroy, and the most extreme character was
represented as one who could destroy even his own family without remorse.
It became possible to suggest that the best big man — patron and protector of
numerous ‘people’ — proved his claim to this title by menacing those very
people. In the orki of figures like Olugbede, the great nineteenth century
hunter and medicine man of z/e Balogun, introduced in Chapter 2, the normal
disjunctions of oki style have sharpened to a violent paradox:
Ko si nlé omokunrin n dagba
O féeé dé nd, tomokunrin 66 ku pantoro
A gbé jebete léri Ogtin, babaa Lariwd
Ojo sere pépé baba Ogunmédla
WO 6 nihin-in wo 6 l6hun-un, Baba Ogundare
Ajagbé Otabilapd, 6 ri kowéé jéogin ilaya
Ajanaku kdade a-bani-ja-m6-jébi
Ko ri ohun fiin alejo mo, 6 waa fi Fomiké toro
Fomikée moju, ko ba alejo lo
Ehinkulé niki wa, baba Oginmdla
Bi 6 ba siku nilé, tode 6 pani.”
He’s not at home, the young boys are growing up
He’s about to arrive, the young boys dwindle away
One who brings a great load [of meat] to the Ogun shrine, father
of Lanwo
‘Sudden downpour’, father of Ogunmola
We seek him here, we seek him there, father of Ogundare
Ajagbe, Otabilapo, he finds a kowee bird to make medicine for
courage
Mighty elephant, one who fights and takes no blame
When he had nothing to give the visitor, he gave away Fomike
Fomike refused, he didn’t go with the visitor
Death is in your backyard, father of Ogunmola
If there were no death at home, death from outside could not kill
us.
The protective and destructive sides of Olugbede are brought into conjunction
here without any mediation. The oriki hyperbolically suggest that Olugbede
is such a danger that his mere presence in the household causes the youth, who
flourished in his absence, to die like flies. Indeed, the ortki say that even before
he arrives they begin to dwindle in number. But he is a great provider: a hunter
who brings great quantities of meat into the household. After Ogun has been
propitiated, the family will eat the meat. The nickname ‘Sudden downpour’
commemorates the unpredictable violence ofhis character. He is a formidable
medicine man who uses his powers to involve himself in fights and always
come off the better — implying that he can get away with anything. But he is
indispensable to family affairs, his presence always required: ‘We seek him
here, we seek him there’ means that he is always being consulted about
everything. Many people remembered Olugbede as a protector: his medicine
was so strong that no thief dared enter the town during his time. His
command of juju was associated with the ability to see more than other people,
to expose the ill-intentioned and to warn people of impending danger. In the
idiom of orthi, itis suggested that his power could be used either for the benefit
of his family or to dominate and destroy them. This does not mean, of course,
that Olugbede actually was a danger to his family, or even that people would
have admired him ifhe had been. But the violent rhetoric does reveal that big
men’s power was conceived in extreme terms.
In these orki, then, the many-stranded concept of ola is stiffened by a
. paradoxical conception of power, where the capacity to protect and provide
is intimately conjoined but not reconciled with the tendency to do drastic
harm, even to one’s closest relations. The point where the two idioms seem
to be fused, as we have seen, is in the image of the horse: for the horse is both
a symbol of giain its benign and generous aspects, and an engine of destruction,
flattening the grass and churning up the dust under its mighty hooves.
Although horses were kept for ceremonial purposes well into the twentieth
century by big men, and much longer than that by the oba, they feature hardly
at all in the ork: of twentieth century big men. They seem to capture the
contradictory ethos of one period, the nineteenth century period of war.
5. THE BASIS OF BIG MEN’S COMPETITION
When the people returned to Okuku in 1893, the buildings were in ruins and
the farms completely overgrown. The fragmented and reduced population
sheltered in eight temporary ago while they re-established themselves. During
the period ofreconstruction which followed, lineages moved out of the shared
shelters to build their own large enclosed compounds, after which sections of
these lineages, as space became short, moved away to build their own houses
nearby if the compound had enough land, or on the outskirts of the town if
it did not. New parties of refugees arrived, notably the Otan groups who came
in 1915 and established three separate z/e in Okuku. A social history which
uncovers in detail the bases of and background to the rise of big men and the
role of oriki in the creation of their reputations can only begin in this period,
with the memories of the oldest people still alive today.
It was a period of very rapid change. Patterns of residence and the division
THE BASIS OF BIG MEN’S COMPETITION 213
of labour, authority relations within the compound and the control of

income, have all been radically transformed between 1893 and the present
day. This starting point was itself a moment in flux, not a stable base line. This
may partly account for the fact that people’s generalisations about ‘the old
days’, as an ideal picture, were often not corroborated by the details of their
own experience. The stories told by the oldest people are also often vaguely
located in time and often, apparently, already conflated with their memories
of other, older, stories told to them in their childhoods about earlier periods.
Nevertheless, from the collectivity of their reminiscences about their childhood
houses, the organisation of the households they lived in, the arrangements
made about farm land and labour, and the prominent figures that dominated
the social and political life of the town, some kind of picture can be built up
of the changing dynamics of the rise of big men from the early years of this
century onwards.”*
The central fact to emerge is that the competitive struggle of big men had
its roots in the everyday struggle of every man to establish himself as a full
social being. The town was full of individuals competing to build up a position
for themselves. Those who did exceptionally well went down in memory as
great men of their time. But the impression given by these reminiscences is
that every compound had its own prominent individuals. Everyone had a
different set of big men in memory. A few built themselves up so conspicuously
that they were remembered by many people. But many others enjoyed a more
limited and localised fame, among their own clients and families. The picture
is of a multiplicity of individuals competing to make a place for themselves,
rather than a clearly defined universally recognised category of big men and
another category of followers. Every household head was a big man to his own
people, while some became big men whose range reached much further. If
every individual had, or potentially could have, his or her own personal ortki,
this was because every individual was considered to have the potential for
social self-enlargement. To understand the dynamics of big men we therefore
need to know about the domestic, localised struggle that all men engaged in.
Oyewusi, the great wartime oba who ‘brought the people back’ from Ikirun
in 1893, and presided over the reconstruction of Okuku after that, died in
1916. The following year Okuku was officially designated the head of the
Okuku District of the Osun North-east Division, and in 1918 direct taxation
with nominal rolls was introduced. But two economic changes brought by the
colonial regime which had great impact on Okuku people had already got
underway well before this formal imposition of administrative authority.
These changes were the arrival of the Lagos—Kano railway, which reached
Okuku in 1904, and the new availability of waged work — in the Public Works
Department, the railways, plantations in Sagamu, or the gold and diamond
mines in the Gold Coast. Both of these changed the arena within which
individuals mounted their struggle for self-aggrandisement. But the way
people responded to these changes was determined by the existing low-level
organisational structures of domestic authority.
When the population returned to Okuku in 1893, although many of the
farms had reverted to bush, the boundaries of each compound’s land were
clearly remembered. Some of these areas still contained virgin forest, never
yet cleared, which was held in reserve for distribution to newcomers by the
head of the household. Others had extensive tracts of land reserved for the use
of the baale of the compound or for an important ritual titleholder. In some
compounds the reserves of land were not used up until the 1940s; others
divided their whole land immediately, between the returning elders, whose
descendants then subdivided it into smaller and smaller parcels. In the early
years of this century, up to the 1930s, the principal crops were food crops —
cassava, sweet potato, vegetables, beans, but above all maize and yams. Palm
nuts were harvested and some cocoa was planted from about 1910 onwards
— it is not easy to ascertain how much” — as was a little kola, mainly for the
personal consumption of the families at home. But most effort was devoted
to growing food crops. A system of crop rotation with long fallow periods was
used. Yams would be grown on a plot for one year out of three. Growing food
crops did not imply permanent occupation ofa plot. Although every household
head had definite farmland, with clearly marked and recognised boundaries,
access to fresh land for temporary use was easy. ‘People just made farms
wherever they liked’, as one elder told me. Many people, even when they had
extensive land of their own, would borrow plots from other people — often
people from other compounds — both to get a wider range of soil types and to
conceal the extent of their crop cultivation. Since they would only use the land
for a year or two and could not claim possession or use of the permanent trees
which might be scattered through it — palm trees or kola — this kind of borrow-
ing involved no risk for the lender, and was apparently extremely common.
It was not until the extensive planting of kola trees for export, inaugurated by
Oba Oyinlola in the 1930s, that land became a scarce commodity.
When the railway reached Okuku, yams could be exported to Lagos, where
there was a demand for them among the rapidly expanding urban population.
Because of their unwieldiness and perishable nature, it had not formerly been
practicable to transport yams that distance: a four- or five-day journey on
foot. Access to this market by rail suddenly made it possible for big farmers
to expand their production dramatically. Up till about 1930, the issue was not
availability of land, but availability of labour. As one man put It:
Money made people important because they could borrow :zwofa and
thus increase the number of people that they had. People who had other
people to work for them were big men at that time. If their own land was
finished they could easily borrow other land. [Adeleke, z/e Jagun]
Control of labour was the key issue in the organisation of households, in the
relations between fathers and sons, and in men’s establishment of themselves
as independent and socially recognised figures.

The compounds in which the oldest living Okuku men grew up around the
turn of the century varied greatly in size. Some ile, even on their return from
Ikirun, were already well supplied with adult, married men. In z/e Oluode, for
instance, twenty-three grown men are remembered by name as the original
members of the reconstructed lineage. “All of them had wives’: they occupied
the whole of one agg and later built a ‘huge round house’ for themselves.
Other ile, however, consisted of a single man and his sons; a pair of brothers;
or a man and a friend, often also a matrilateral relative, who built their first
house together whether or not they later split into independent z/e. But whatever
the size of the compound, these households were characterised by the same
kinds of tensions and generational struggles. Big houses like ze Oluode soon
began to split into smaller units.” The successive divisions were explained in
terms of the need for more space, but they were also part of the fundamental
process by which individuals established their own social position. Building
one’s own house is the culmination of a long struggle for independence and
visibility, which begins in boyhood and is never relinquished throughout a
man’s life.
The physical building in which people live, however, is less important than
the patterns of authority and obedience between its inmates. A single ‘huge’
house could contain several economic households, each headed by its own
senior man, who commanded the labour and service of a number of younger
male and female relatives. The picture of these households painted by men
who were young in the early years of the century suggests that the male head
of the household was virtually omnipotent:
In those days you had to serve your father till the day of his death. The
father had complete control over the family money. He was the one who
got all the profit from farm products. If they were sold he could do what
he liked with the money. If there was a family craft like carving or
weaving, it was the same thing. He had all the money to dispose of. He
only had to give us our food, and one set of new clothes every year. But
before we got married, we wore only a pair of bante (shorts); we were
treated like small boys. We all slept in the onde (the corridors), or in the
parlour of one of the big men. Only when you got a wife did you get a
room, each wife had her own room and the husband could keep his
things there. Work was hard. [Adedeji, Chief Saiwo, ile Oloko]
Service did not end with the father’s death:
When he died, you went on serving his younger brother. If he had no
younger brother, then you would serve your own older brother. Brothers
with the same mother would serve each other till death. The father’s
land would be shared out to groups of emo tya (sons with the same
mother). The eldest of each group would be a father to the rest. [zbid.]
An unmarried son would work on his father’s plot of land. From the age of
about fourteen he would be given an zdabo, a small plot of his own on which
he could work in the evenings after the main work of the day. But he could
not start to claim an independent social identity until he had‘a wife. His first
marriage was the foundation of his future existence as a social being. The
father was expected to marry a wife for the son. Each son, however, had to wait
his turn, and the wait was often very long:
Who could get married in those days? There was no money. Only the
old men had wives. [zbid.]
This picture is an ideal one in the sense that it represents the norms that the
fathers upheld and tried to make their sons conform to, rather than actual
behaviour. Numerous stories show that in actuality, sons often offered
resistance. They believed it was the father’s intention to keep them as part of
his dependent workforce as long as possible, and to monopolise the women
so that he could expand his own immediate household rather than provide the
young men with the means to establish theirs. Their own intention was to get
a wife as soon as possible and then begin to lay claim to their own share of the
father’s land: that is, to their right to control their own labour and that of their
dependants. The testimony of the oldest Okuku men shows that in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century they often succeeded. A son did not
invariably work for his father until the latter’s death. Those who said they
‘served’ their fathers all their lives often revealed later that at a certain point
this service became purely nominal, and that the son had succeeded in gaining
control over the products of his own labour.”° |
Fathers were often represented as trying to block their sons’ advancement.
Some men, like Babalola of ile Elemoso Awo, appear to have bowed to their
fathers’ rule and waited for him to die:
I was born before coin currency was introduced, and already had two
younger brothers before the railway reached Okuku. Asa boy I worked
on my father’s farm. The work was hard and I was often punished. One
day in four I was sent to work for the Elemoso Awo of tle Nla — I was
apprenticed to him [as a babalawo]. My father did not allow me to leave
Okuku to do paid work. I was not given a wife and even my older
brother, the Alapinni [an egungun title], was not married till after our
father’s death [which occurred when Babalola was in his late thirties].
All of us worked for our father till his death. ... About four years after my
father’s death I went to Ijebu to work as a labourer. When I got back I
married my first wife. I made all the arrangements and payments myself.
After that I married three more. After the second one, I moved out of
the compound and built my own house. |
But others were quicker to take matters into their own hands, like Samson
Adebisi of ze Ojomu:
I worked from childhood for my father on his farm. When I was about
thirty my father lent me out as an iwofa in exchange for a loan of £4. I
was sent to live in the house of my father’s creditor, the babalawo

Toyinbo. After three years the debt was paid and I was allowed to leave
and go to Abeokuta as a P.W.D. labourer on the roads. I spent ten
months there and got £1 10s for it. When I got home I handed over the
money to my father. A girl had been betrothed to me but my father did
not produce the money to pay the bride price. So, I left. I joined Jacob
Ajayi of cle Oluawo [a maternal relative] and went to Ghana with him.
That was in 1930. I worked as a firewood gatherer, serving Ajayi. In
1932 I came back and paid the bride price out of my savings. It was fixed
at £7 5s. After the wife had come to my house, I refused to work for my
father any longer. I told him he could not expect me to continue serving
him, since he had not paid the bride price or helped me in any of my
difficulties. I went to the farm and seized the plot I wanted to use. I
cleared it for myself without my father’s consent. All my younger
brothers by my father’s other two wives did the same thing, one by one,
after they married, until only one young boy was left working for my
father. I trained as a tailor. The money from tailoring was good enough
for me to marry two more wives. Eventually I moved out of the main
compound of #/e Ojomu and built my own house at one corner of it.
These stories make clear the importance of obtaining a first wife as the
essential first step in a man’s career. Without a wife and some children, any
attempt to claim the right to ‘serve himself’ would fail. Fathers could delay
the marriages of their sons on the grounds that there was no money available.
Marrying a wife was certainly expensive. Bride price itself, for a first wife, was
quoted as costing £3 15s (in the reign of Oyewusi: i.e. before 1916) and
between six and seven pounds throughout the period 1920—50. But this was
a small proportion of the total expenditure. There were other gifts to be made
to the bride’s family,”’ as well as the inawo, the ‘spending ofmoney’ or wedding
celebration, which according to one man brought the total costs up to about
£40. There were other dues and obligations in kind as well. 7® These dues were
felt to be such a burden that many men regarded it as an advantage to ‘take’
a wife from someone else rather than marry her from her father’s house.
‘Taking’ a wife meant paying a sum determined in court to her former
husband — a sum which was quoted in many cases as being £12 10s, though
one man paid £30 (in 1950) and another paid £40 (in 1937). Nonetheless
these wives were described as being ‘ofe’ (free of charge) because none of the
traditional payments or service were exacted. The average bride price alone
was the equivalent of more than the cash value of a household’s entire food
crop consumption ina year, and the total expenditure on a marriage was many
times more than this.”’ There was good reason, then, for the frequent comment
that ‘there was no money for marriage in those days’. Fathers did not in fact
live up to their obligation to provide their sons with even a first wife.*° The sons
had to shift for themselves: and it is clear that it was the need to raise money
for a wife that impelled so many of the young men in the period 1900—1950
to go away to search for temporary wage labour. |
When a man had some savings from wage labour, he would return and
either make his own arrangements, or hand the money over to his father in the
expectation that it would be used for this purpose. Samson Adebisi’s rebellion
was sparked off when he realised that his father had taken the savings he
dutifully handed over but was not intending to get him a wife. Samson went
off for a second time, earned a lot more money, and this time paid for a wife
himself. After this he felt no further obligation even nominally to ‘serve’ his
father.
But going away to work for cash also gave a young man a practical
independence from his father for as long as he was away. Most young men
went alone or with friends or maternal relatives from other compounds.
Though they might ‘serve’ such a relative ifhe were older, it was comparatively
easy for them to detach themselves when they wished. Wage labour therefore
accelerated a young man’s journey to independent status in two ways, giving
him experience of running his own affairs while away as well as the means to
establish his own household on his return. It is not surprising that nearly every
informant over the age of 40 had been away as a wage-labourer at least once
in his life. The first wave of migrant workers did Public Works Department
jobs, building roads and laying railway lines, and they also worked as
agricultural labourers on private plantations. Almost all of this work was to
the south and west, in the Abeokuta, Ota and Ijebu areas. The second wave
went to Ghana, not so much to work in the gold and diamond mines as to
trade among those who did. The somewhat younger men — those who were
growing up in the late 1930s and the 1940s — were even more likely to go to
Ghana, and tended to spend longer there.*! Like their elders, they mostly
worked as petty traders, or collected and cut firewood, though one man
trained and worked as an electrician and two worked in the diamond and gold
mines. Some went several times and spent many years away before returning
to settle. Some never returned at all, and some only came back from Ghana
when all Nigerians resident there were expelled in 1968. But among those
who did return, the pattern was clear. Wage labour provided cash which gave
a man a start in life. Very occasionally, it was also used later in his life as a
supplement to his main income. His real career of self-aggrandisement,
however, could only be conducted on home ground, and was based on the
expansion of the household his earnings had helped to found.
These longer trips to more remote places made the young men less
accessible; they could not be summoned home so easily. This made them
more independent of their fathers than the earlier generation. They were also
more likely to learn another occupation as well as farming. There were
carpenters, palm-wine tappers, motor mechanics, government workers,
blacksmiths, Islamic doctors, teachers, store-keepers, produce buyers, lorry
BIG MEN 1893-1934 219
salesmen, shoemakers, bricklayers, petty and long-distance traders, and
drivers among them. This meant that even those who came back to work on
their fathers’ farms had a potentially independent alternative source of
income. Many of these trades were learnt in Ghana and some were made
possible by a few years at school, which they were more likely to have had than
the older men.”
In general, the few men who did not travel to make money stayed at home
for one of three reasons: they were training as ritual specialists, whether as
babalawo, herbalists or Islamic priests; they were going further in school than
their age-mates, with a view to becoming teachers or clerks (only two of the
informants did this); or their fathers simply refused to let them go. Many men
said they went against their fathers’ will, borrowing money for the journey and
simply ‘running away’, but a few bowed to their fathers’ wishes and stayed at
home on the farm.
By the time the youngest group of informants grew up, however, few
fathers tried to control their sons to this extent. Young men in their twenties,
with fathers still hale and hearty, said openly that they had ‘freed’, that they
worked for themselves alone and served no-one. This generation did not
travel to find paid work. Their life patterns were determined by a third great
change in the economic opportunities open to the Okuku people — the advent
of cocoa growing on the ‘far farms’, which began in 1949 and became the
principal occupation of almost all Okuku men from then until the present.
The fathers of these young men belonged to the first wave of pioneers who
discovered the land for the ‘far farms’ in Ife, Ondo and Ijesa areas and opened
the first farms. The sons lived with their fathers and worked for them on the
far farms as young boys. But successful men soon needed to rent new land,
often in other areas, and they often put their sons in charge of the second and
third farms. Thus Sunmibare (begun in 1949) is full of farms rented or owned
by middle-aged and elderly men, while Odigbo (1963) has a much higher
proportion of very young single or newly-married men just starting a farm.*?
The fathers of these men may claim that the sons still serve them, but the sons
usually insist that they are independent. Almost all these young men have a
second occupation — barbering, tailoring, and bicycle repairing were among
the most popular. This enables them to get through the first five years of the
cocoa-farm, before the trees begin to fruit, without having to depend too
heavily on their fathers. The urgent desire for independence can be seen in
the way these young men live. They build a tiny one- or two-roomed mud
house in the farm town, and live there alone or with a friend or brother. They do
without all luxuries and some do not even come home for the first few years.
Changes in the pattern of domestic labour relations, then, can be seen as
the eager and determined response to new economic openings by people who
were engaged in a struggle for independence and subsequently for a labour
force. One reason why fathers are now more willing to release their sons is
that, according to Okuku farmers, less labour is required for cocoa farming
than for yam farming, and another is that in a cash-dominated economy what
labour is needed is easier to obtain outside the family than formerly.**
In the early years of the century, however, old men’s reminiscences make
it clear that recruiting people and building a large household was everyone’s
ambition, and one which men would take considerable risks and undergo
great hardships to attain. Everyone, however insignificant, was engaged in the
same struggle to establish themselves at the centre of a circle of ‘people’.
Those who were more ambitious, more determined, and luckier than their
peers were able to push this process beyond the usual limits and create a
position for themselves which gained acknowledgement from all or many of
their fellow citizens. These men are remembered by a later generation as the
big men of their time, and are celebrated in personal orikz.
6. BIG MEN 1893-1934
The greatest of the big men in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century
was undoubtedly Abiona, the chief Elemona, nicknamed Alapepesile. He was
the big man most frequently remembered in the old men’s stories and most
widely recognised throughout the town. He was associated with the reign of
Oyewusi I, which ended in 1916, but not with the period of the Ilorin-Ibadan
wars. He was famous for his enormous wealth, but it was a peacetime wealth
derived in the first instance from his profession as a carver. He seems to
belong, therefore, to the first phases of the reconstruction of Okuku, from
1893 until perhaps 1920.
He belonged to a small section of Oje people attached as visitors to zle
Elemoso. Wood carving was their hereditary occupation. Abiona made enough
money from it to invest in zwofa. He deployed them both in his workshop and
on his farm:
He was famous because of his great wealth. He had a big farm and
borrowed a huge number of zwofa. [Amos Ojediji, z/e Baale]
Baba Adebisi, Alapepesile, had sixteen :wofa who came from Ijabe
every four days. They carved drums. He had another seven who lived
in his house. No-one was as rich as he was. He lent 1200 bags of cowries
for 1200 x 5/-, i.e. £300] to Ijabe to hire them.
Someone else estimated that he had one hundred and twenty-four zwofa. His
carving, an occupation shared by no other group in Okuku, must have been
greatly in demand in this period of reconstruction, to provide door posts,
heavy wooden doors, and window shutters, as well as drums, stools, chests
and other objects. Many people spoke ofhis great farm, but as a manifestation
as much as a cause of wealth. Since the local markets were restricted and the
railway era had not yet got under way, it is likely that he used the bulk of his
farm produce to sustain his large household. Emphasis is placed on the extent
to which his numerous iwofa were incorporated into his compound:
BIG MEN 1893-1934 221
He borrowed eighteen zwofa from Ijabe and had others who lived in his
house. He was called ‘O-ydmo-ydfa’: one who hires people Ifa and all
{i.e. body and soul]. [Joseph Ogundairo, ile Oloko]
During the Olooku festival, on the day of the oba’s ceremonial wrestling
—a high point in the royal ritual year —- Elemona would come out in state too.
He would have a big carved chair carried in front ofhim by his zwofa, and when
he reached the palace marketplace he would have it set down opposite the
oba’s chair, facing it across the market square. All his family, followers and
iwofa would surround him as he sat in state. The oba’s drummers would
challenge him from the other side of the square:
Elémona rora, oba k6 lo je!
Elemona, take it easy, you are not an oba!
The Elemona’s drummers would reply:
Eyi ti mo 11 je yii, 6 ju oba lo.
The position I hold here surpasses that of an oba.
But the challenge was a friendly one. The Elemona and the gba lived side by
side, and there are no reports of the Elemona’s involvement in the chiefly
feuds which were prominent in Oyewusi’s reign and even more so in that of
his successor Oyekunle. Elemona was a title brought by the family when they
came to Okuku as fairly recent immigrants. The oba allowed them to retain
it, and inserted it into the ranks of the Palace chiefs, which signified particular
closeness to the oba but no great political importance. Abiona’s position had
been built up not through the chiefly hierarchy but independently of it, and
his relatively lowly standing in that hierarchy did not at all affect his position
as one of the most memorable of big men.
But though Alapepesile is recalled with pride and admiration for his great
wealth, and is cited whenever the topic of ‘the old days’ arises, he figures
hardly at all in the political history of the period. The political intrigues that
characterised the reign of Oba Oyekunle (1916-34), and to a lesser extent
those of his predecessor Oyewusi (c. 1880—1916) and his successor Oyinlola
(1934-60), play a very specific role in present-day town affairs. Animosities
have been inherited and must be explained; titles have been transferred,
upgraded or demoted, and those who were the losers use the story of how this
came about to justify their demands for the reinstatement of the status quo
ante; land has been confiscated, redistributed or even stolen, and the same
applies. The recollection of political history is therefore less casual and more
intense than the history of neutral figures like Alapepesile. The big men that
operated in this arena are remembered with a greater wealth of detail: and,
significantly enough, they usually acquired more extensively elaborated orzkz,
often in language both sombre and alarming: encapsulating stories of plots,
assassinations and vaulting ambition which are reconstructed.in well-formed
narrative already half way to becoming legend.
The accession of Oyekunle in 1916 coincided with the establishment of
: colonial authority in Okuku. From this moment the basis of big men’s power
began to shift. But initially, the colonial authorities were exploited in the
political contests between big men in a manner that seemed to heighten the
traditional dynamics of self-aggrandisement.
Chieftaincy disputes and matters of succession were referred to the
Assistant D.O. for adjudication. The petitions and counter-petitions he
received show that the British authorities often distorted the balance of power
in ways that conformed to their own conception of how ‘traditional’ society
worked. It was they who introduced the idea of :wefa mefa (the six kingmakers)
who were to be responsible for the selection of a new oba, as ‘was customary
in some other Yoruba towns. It was probably they who insisted that the
rotation of the crown between four designated segments of z/e Oba should be
fixed in one unalterable order, and that selection procedures should be frozen
into one pattern.* It was they who made each compound’s baale into its official
representative, responsible for the collection of taxes from every adult male
and accountable for their payment. By paying stipends of different amounts
to different grades of chief (in 1935 the oba got £120 a year, some senior chiefs
got £72 and other chiefs got £24), the colonial administration added a new
incentive for competitive struggle between chiefs but also attempted to fix
something which had formerly been negotiable: the perquisites received by a
chief formerly depended mainly on the goodwill of the oba and were an
instrument of manipulation for him. The various colonial administrators had
very definite ideas about the ‘traditional’ order, and their selections and
distortions, though often conflicting, had the same end in view, to bolster up
what they saw as a fixed hierarchical system in which power flowed in one
direction, from the top down.* The chiefs must be made to acknowledge the
oba’s authority; the ‘subordinate’ towns must be made to acknowledge the
superiority of the ‘head’ town in the district.
The motive for this view of the ‘traditional’ system on the part of colonial
authorities trying to implement a system of indirect rule is obvious enough.
But what is interesting is the endless difficulties and entanglements it caused
them, as power brokers in the local systems perceived new ways of manipulating
the rules. The failure of the colonial authorities to impose their view of the
world is evident not only in the disturbing (to them) proliferation of court
cases, petitions, complaints about acts of insubordination, and outrageously
incompatible historical claims and counter-claims”’ but also in the oral evidence
which suggests very strongly that during this period of the inauguration of
colonial rule, big men and their ideology flourished as never before. The
attempted imposition of alien rigidities and regularities seemed initially to
stimulate a greater degree of self-aggrandisement by self-made men, who
BIG MEN 1893-1934 | 223
bypassed the chiefly hierarchy and challenged the oba’s authority more than
ever before. In the ork, there are intimations of an indigenous view of the
colonial authorities, which are represented as only one factor in the all-
absorbing competition between big men.
Oyekunle himself was the first man to take advantage of the opportunities
offered by the ignorant but authoritarian character of colonial government.
On the death of Oyewusi it was the turn of the Oyeleye branch to provide the
next oba. The chosen Oyeleye candidate asked the son of his younger cousin,
Oyekunle, to go with him and the chiefs to Ibadan with the news, since his
work on the railway had given him experience of the ways of Europeans and
of the train journey to Ibadan. The son, Ajiboye (now an extremely old man
and respected teller of history, who has often been quoted in earlier chapters)
got off the train before the others and took a short-cut to the D.O.’s office.
He told the D.O. that the chiefs of Okuku were bringing the wrong candidate
and that his father Oyekunle was the legitimate successor to Oyewusi. The
D.O. accepted this on the spot because he knew Oyekunle (having put him
in charge of the Okuku railway station in 1904) and afterwards would brook
no opposition to the candidate whose appointment he had endorsed.*®
Oyekunle thus began his reign in the teeth of bitter opposition from his
chiefs — an opposition which continued through most of his reign. He survived
because of the support of the colonial authorities. In 1928 it was reported
(Gribble to Chadwick: Handing-over Notes) that the Olokuku was an old
man, ‘extremely courteous but very afraid of being spoken against by his own
chiefs, and appallingly suspicious of everything and everybody’. The report
commented on the ‘need for our influence to make the bigger towns realise
they are under him’, and observed that ‘the chiefs in this area don’t co-operate
— there is constant friction, and several chiefs have been deposed at different
times and some fined by Judicial Council for accepting bribes’. There were
many boundary disputes, which were ‘difficult to settle because of the
weakness of the Olokuku’. Other comments tell the same story: the colonial
authorities were constantly protecting Oyekunle against insubordinate chiefs,
towns and big men. One report notes that Inisa, a neighbouring town, was
very prosperous and that the Baale of Inisa had to be warned that he was not
respectful enough to the Olokuku. The Baale of Ekosin, another subordinate
town, appeared before the Olokuku in a beaded crown and was told by the
A.D.O. that he must take it off. It was reported that the Olokuku failed to
impose his own candidate for Baale on Okua, ‘a tiny hamlet’, because of his
weakness. Oyekunle was clearly rather a disappointment to the British, but
in the eyes of the Okuku people, his friendship with the ‘European’ was a great
coup. His oriki say:
Obatala Oké Otin lArémt ti i fiinni léyii ti 6 wuni
O suré moni ka, aboré wontiwonti
224 THE ORIKI OF BIG MEN ,
O ja gudu nind tala, oko Asalété |
Eni Oyinbo gba niyaw6, Kélawolé lomo ara oko ni foju di.
don’t want }
friends ,
Aremu is the Obatala of Oke Otin who gives people what they
Asalete |
He hastened to know all the important people, he had innumerable
He shrugged magnificently into his velvet cloth, husband of
The man the European took as wife [i.e. treated with lavish
hospitality, or became exceptionally intimate with], Kolawole
is the one that ignorant bushmen were rude to. ,
According to Ajiboye, ‘they called him “Aremu who gives people what they
don’t want” because he could do anything he liked. In his reign they brought
the court here and he was the head of it, so people had to accept everything
he said and did’. Oyekunle is regarded as having won the long drawn-out
struggle through his own cunning in getting the British on his side. By the end
of his reign most of the chiefs had come round, earning him the ortki ‘he had
innumerable friends’ — but this was seen as a result of his own strategy of
hastening to ‘know all the important people’, notably the colonial officers. His
whole reign is seen in terms of this struggle, and all its political personalities
are defined according to whether they were for the oba or against him.
This feud is seen not mainly as a contest between men occupying official
positions in the hierarchy, but more as a struggle between slippery and
unpredictable forces, construed in terms of the command of ‘medicine’.
Apart from two senior chiefs — Molomo the Ojomu and Awoleye the Arogun
— Oyekunle’s principal friends were said to have been the following: Ajibade
of tle Jagun — a medicine man and babalawo but not a chief; Ogunlade of ile
Oloko — a member of the Ogboni society and a ‘powerful man’, but also not
a chief; Ajayi of ie Arogun — a famous herbalist and wealthy man, but not a
chief; Toyinbo of ze Balogun, who was given the minor palace title of Sobaloju
in appreciation for his support for Oyekunle; and Idowu, a firebrand from ile
Ojomu who led the campaign against the people of Iba in the boundary
dispute. His main enemies were said to have been the chief Odofin, Fadare,
the second most important town title after Ojomu; another Fadare, of dle
Oluode; Ajibade of zle Oloko, later made chief Saiwo, one of the top six titles;
and Fawande of ile Baale, a formidable egungun priest and medicine man, who
later became the baale of tle Baale. Other chiefs were doubtless involved in the
feud, but they did not figure in reminiscences as active agents in it. The
contest for power was believed to have been actually fought out by those in
command of medicine, Ifa and other supernatural forces, even though chiefs
and other big men may have been behind them. :
Explanations of this feud are vague. Some people suggested that Oyekunle’s
BIG MEN 1893-1934 225
stratagem to gain the throne was never forgiven. But Toyinbo’s son, the
present chief Sobaloju, said:
It wasn’t because Oyekunle tricked them in getting the throne. They
settled that amongst themselves. No, it was because of the grass that
they used to thatch their houses. In those days iron roofs had not come
in. The town was building a new house for the oba. Some of them were
happy about it, some were not. Because as you know, no-one can be
liked by everybody. There will be some who like you and some who
don’t. Those who didn’t like Oyekunle were saying ‘Why should we
build a house for him?’ So it became a quarrel that went on and on. They
took it outside the town, they involved the Ogboni all around...
In other words, it is to be expected that the oba or any other prominent figure
will have enemies. This does not need explaining. The occasion which
precipitates this latent enmity into open feuding can be explained (‘it was
because of the grass’) and the reasons why specific people took one side or the
other can also be explained. Fawande of iJe Baale, for instance, opposed the
oba because his mother was a full sister of Fadare, the Odofin, who was one
of the oba’s leading opponents. Fadare of zle Oluode opposed the oba because
he was married to a daughter of Oyeleye, the prince who was done out of the
throne. He was punished in the end when Oyekunle confiscated a huge tract
of his land and gave it to Idowu of z/e Ojomu, who had supported him. ‘Some
took sides out of friendship’, and compounds could be split by such cross-
cutting loyalties: ‘Ajibade of zle Oloko plotted against the oba — he just didn’t
like him. A few people in the compound went along with him, but others
remained loyal to the oba. The compound could even divide into three or four
— every household head within the compound would do as he liked, section
by section’. But the underlying presumption is that enmity is always there
(‘no-one can be liked by everybody’) and can erupt on relatively trivial
provocation. Once engaged, the struggle is pictured as deadly and implacable.
Enmity does not need explaining in a society of rivalrous big men, where
opposing the oba is merely a way of demonstrating one’s success, and
supporting him is a way of protecting oneself against the attacks of other big
men.
Of Oyekunle’s supporters, the two most impressive were Ajayi of ile
Arogun and Toyinbo of ze Aworo Otin [ie Balogun]. Ajayi was described as
the maker of benign but very powerful medicine, a great benefactor of all
mothers with sick children, and also a leading member of the Mercy of God
Association in the C.M.S. Church. But Toyinbo was an even greater
medicine man, a babalawo and the closest of all Oyekunle’s confidants. His
story demonstrates one of the advantages that members of his profession
enjoyed in internecine intrigue: their wide-ranging contacts with fellow-
professionals from other towns. They had an organisation and loyalties which
transcended those of ordinary townspeople, and this sometimes enabled
them to control otherwise dangerous situations. Before he became gba,
Oyekunle while on his travels abducted another man’s wife from a northern
Yoruba town, brought her back to Okuku and married her. Her first
husband’s people discovered her whereabouts and sent a party of herbalists
to attack and kill Oyekunle with their medicines. They were already acquainted
with their fellow herbalist Toyinbo, and stayed at his house when they arrived.
During their stay they confided their intentions to him. Toyinbo begged them
to wait, and promised to get the woman back for them without the death of
Oyekunle. He then went secretly to Oyekunle, and told him what had been
planned. Oyekunle begged Toyinbo to help him, and Toyinbo promised that
if he restored the woman to her husband no-one would be harmed. The affair
was settled in this way, and Oyekunle, on his accession, did not forget Toyinbo’s
friendship. He gave him the palace title Sobaloju and made him his closest
adviser. Toyinbo became indispensable to Oyekunle: all visitors to the palace
had to be vetted by him before Oyekunle would agree to see them, and any-
_ thing he told Oyekunle about the suspicious behaviour or intentions of people
in the town would be implicitly believed. As one descendant of his put it:
He was very powerful through medicines. He would protect the oba from
his enemies’ medicines. He could tell at a distance whether visitors had
bad medicines in their pockets and he could predict exactly what the
medicines were. [Samuel Olantyan, z/e Oloko]
And someone else said:
He lived in the oba’s house. He was a medicine man and he could divine
anything that was going on in the town. His medicine could make
anyone triumph over his enemies. He hung a mortar up by a single
thread [to demonstrate his powers]. He was courageous. [Moses
Oyedele, z/e Eesinkin]
But Toyinbo was perceived as a relatively benign figure. He was known as
‘A-ki-rabata-nilé-agbalagba’— “Tough and invincible one in a house of elders’,
but most of his ortki refer to more peaceable attributes:
Omitdéyinb6 omo Olulotan
Oyinbo ni i fi paant kolé
Omitdéyinbo 16 folddyo ké gbagede
Onimeyji l[Ayoka
Bi 4 ba 1 pAyéronbi 1 mé6o pOmoogun
Omo Olulotan, omo odkan i i fore, omo 4 yan bi eéji.*”
Omitoyinbo {his full name], child of Olulotan
Oyinbo [short for Omitoyinbo] roofs his house with iron sheets
Omitoyinbo built a verandah with corrugated iron
Someone who has two [wives], someone who has Ayoka
If he calls Ayeronbi, he’ll call Omoogun too
Child of Olulotan, child of ‘One [kola segment] doesn’t utter good
BIG MEN 1893-1934 227
things’, child of ‘It comes out right when there are two’ [1.e. just
as one segment of kola alone cannot be used to do divination
and get an answer, so two wives are better than one]
Toyinbo is here being commended for his wealth — he was the first person
to roof his house with costly imported iron sheets, and was extravagant
enough to make not just a roof but a whole verandah out of them. He was said
to have boasted that a single wife was no good to him: he needed at least two,
and preferably a few more (he was ‘someone who has Ayoka’ as well).
The opposition, however, seemed to have more terrifying medicine men.
The most famous was Fawande ofi/e Baale: the only one of the oba’s opponents,
according to one account, to survive. All the others died ‘ninu ote’ — in the
midst of the intrigue. Fawande was seen as the leader of the faction opposing
first Oyewusi and later Oyekunle. He was a babalawo, as were many ofthe men
in ile Baale, but he also revived the old lineage profession of entertainment
masquerading. His powers were said to have been obtained partly by
travelling and learning, but partly vouchsafed by a mysterious stranger who
came to Fawande’s house in his absence and left him a package, inside which
was an tdan eegun: a charm that gave him the power to perform magical feats.
This charm made him invincible:
One day he went to perform for a friend who was a member of the
egungun cult in Inisa, on the occasion of the man’s father’s funeral.
When he got there, there were some hostile rivals present who had
plotted with a medicine man to bring on a rainstorm to spoil Fawande’s
group’s performance. Rain threatened, covering the whole sky. Someone
went to Fawande inside his egungun cloth and said ‘Look at the sky’. He
lifted up the cloth and saw that the performance would be ruined. He
| heard a rumour that this was the work of malevolent people. So
Fawande went to his load and got out his own medicines. He told them
to find him a scabied dog. They searched high and low and brought him
one and he took it to the crossroads. He planted a certain medicine in
the ground and began to utter incantations. He brought out a medicine
sword, he told them to hold the dog stretched out in mid-air, and as he
uttered the last incantations he struck off the dog’s head. As the dog’s
head came off there was a tremendous thunder clap.
The medicine man who was making a fire to cook the rain-medicine
on inside his room was blown out with the blast and found spreadeagled
outside, dead. Then the medicine fire in his room died out and the sky
cleared. They went on with the funeral celebrations and Fawande’s
troupe performed their show undisturbed. Because of this he is called:
O faja eléékiiku se kisa ni Inisa.
He used a dog with scabies to do terrible things at Inisa.
It was these magical powers that enabled him to survive the dangerous feud
against the oba. Like Toyinbo, Fawande owed his life to his outside contacts:
The oba called a medicine man from another town to. come and kill
Fawande. But Fawande was a much-travelled man and had made
friends with many herbalists in different towns. When the oba told his
visiting medicine man the names of his proposed victims, the medicine
man secretly found out where Fawande lived, because herrecognised the
name. In the middle of the night he slipped out and went and knocked
on Fawande’s door. He was admitted; and he revealed the whole
situation to Fawande. He said he himself would refuse to do the task
given him by the oba, but if the oba called in a different medicine man,
Fawande would bein trouble. So he gave Fawandea special prophylactic
medicine to use for himself, his wives and his children to protect them.
This is how Fawande and his family survived. Others kept dying but he
did not. That is why he is called A pa 4 pa 4 6 ku: ‘We kill him and kill
him, he doesn’t die’.
Fawande’s onki convey, in compressed but striking imagery, his violent
and flamboyant personality. He was evidently a man of extremes and one who
took unheard-of risks. His ortki suggest that when he danced masquerade
dances, he worked himself up into a frenzy whose violence was as dangerous
to himself as it was to onlookers, and ugly in its extremity. He was a formidable
foe, one who would store up his evil intentions in silence till he unexpectedly
unleashed them. His violence was as sudden as a thunderburst. And, unlike
his fellow masqueraders, he had the bravado to build his house right up
against the palace wall while engaged in a bitter feud against: the oba:
Agidi ojé tii j6 bi alagbaaleé
Awonyé ojé ti i bura re san wonyin-wonyin ,
Eegun paali ti i télée fard
Aja eléekuku abilagba 4 furo
Séyii ti yoo se kuu’nu, oko Tinuomi
A pa apa 46 ki, oko Aasa
Ojo sere pepe, oko Ronké
Agidi ojé ti i bélojaa sora
Gbogbo ojé 16 i kolé ti i fidi tigbé }
Oko Ronké kélé, 6 fara palé oba lo.
Violent masquerader that dances like a man in debt
Greedy blood-sucking insect of a masquerader that bites himself
into a frenzy
Broad flat pelvis-bone that lies above the arse
Scabied dog lean-flanked as a whip-lash
Tinuomi
One who harbours schemes of revenge in secret, husband of
We kill him and kill him, he doesn’t die, husband of Aasa

‘Sudden downpour’, husband of Ronke
BIG MEN 1893-1934 229
Violent masquerader that made an enemy of the oba
All the masqueraders are building their houses near to the bush
Ronke’s husband built his house next to the oba’s palace.
Typically, these lines make references on several levels. To someone who
knew Fawande’s history, ‘Scabied dog lean-flanked as a whip-lash’ would
unlock the whole story of the incident at Inisa and the dog he decapitated to
avert the rainstorm. But to listeners without this knowledge, as the story-teller
himself remarked, the phrase would suggest an image of Fawande himself,
lean, savage, and fast-moving. ‘Sudden downpour’, likewise, could suggest
the rainstorm that his magic prevented from falling, but it is also a metaphor
for a violent, overwhelming and unpredictable personality.
The images of the blood-sucking insect, the scabied dog and the furo, aruder
word than ‘arse’, are Fawande’s own peculiar epithets, evoking his extreme
and alarming personality. But idiosyncratic as these images are, they also
stand for a general notion, the notion of unlimited and intensely concentrated
personal power. ‘We killed him and killed him, he didn’t die’; ‘Sudden
downpour’: these formulations are recognisably part of an established discourse
of power. Fawande can do outrageous things and get away with it, and this
is the best proof of power there is. All the details of his extraordinary and
excessive behaviour, expressed in extraordinary and excessive language,
contribute to his establishment as the biggest of political big men of the time,
measured by a common well-understood standard.
As in the war period, then, medicine and magic is the idiom in which
political struggles were thought. Contests which revolved around the retention
or transfer of parcels of land; the upgrading or demotion of titles; the right of
access to titles and other privileges; all these were fundamentally exercises of
will by the oba, the chiefs, and the powerful men of the town. ‘Having people’
in this context meant asserting a position and seeing whether you could get
support for it. “T'radition’ was the gradual accumulation of outcomes of such
struggles — which in turn would be used as models and justifications for future
struggles — and not a set of fixed rules as the colonial authorities believed.
Spiritual and supernatural force was the idiom in which the concept of will
was expressed. It is not surprising that every politically prominent figure of
this period was almost automatically credited with cogun, for this was the way
power was construed.
Ote (intrigue or plotting) was the word used most often to describe political
processes, and what ote involved was the alignment of collaborators in
assertions of the will. Friendship, kinship ties, old grudges were all activated
in the manipulation of these alignments; what was taken for granted was that
there always would be enmity to fuel the process. The violent imagery that,
in the wartime oriki, represented enmity as actual physical harm, is not
common in the ortkz of twentieth century men. But the idea of enemies as a
pervasive, incalculable force continued into the period of reconstruction and
even underwent further elaboration. 7
Big men of this period continue to be associated with cynical mistrust of
human relations and especially of family bonds. Sentiments like these are
often put into the mouths of big men themselves, confirming the supposition
that it is a philosophy particularly appropriate to the process of self-
agerandisement. Domestic distrust seems not to have diminished with the
ending of the wars. Jwofa continued to be lent and borrowed until as late as
the 1930s, and in a situation where earning opportunities did not meet cash
needs, loans of this kind remained a significant part of the local economy.”
Several of the old men’s biographies revealed that they had themselves served
as iwofa within the town, and about a third of them remembered their fathers’
households in the first two decades of this century as having included a
number of residential zwofa. The sentiment that ‘your worst enemy is in your
own backyard’ continued in the oriki of quite recent big men, and received
even greater elaboration than in the nineteenth century ortkz.
Big men of the early twentieth century continued to be celebrated in the
idiom of unassailability, independence of spirit, and indifference to the
attacks of rivals. These attacks, however, were now represented as being
directed above all to the destruction of the man’s reputation. After the peace,
the big man’s enemies were less often assassins, more often plotters and
detractors. But the danger from this kind of diffuse and unlocatable malevolence
was considered to be no less real. Since the big man’s position depends on his
reputation, malicious talk can seriously diminish and even destroy him. IIl-
will and bad talk are indeed more pervasive and uncontrollable than overt
aggression. So even though the concentrated imagery of violence characteristic
of the war period is muted and not further developed in the twentieth century,
the gracious world of Adeoba and Winyomi-— steeped in gla, conceived almost
entirely in terms of wealth, beauty, and generosity — is not recaptured either.
7. FARMING, TRADE AND BIG WOMEN © ,

Though the railway arrived in 1904, it was not until the 1920s that the real
age of yam-exporting got under way. It continued at full swing up to the early
1950s, when the mass movement out to ‘far farms’ put an end to it. With the
railway, ‘money came to Okuku’, and other forms of trade followed in its
wake. This gave an opportunity to ambitious women, who could not
reproduce the classic pattern of big men’s self-aggrandisement but who
succeeded in finding alternative routes to wealth and influence.
In the 1920s and 1930s nearly two-thirds of the households on which I
have information expanded their yam production by 50—150% to supply the
Lagos market.*’ Some farmers were quicker to see the possibilities of the
railway than others, and some had greater means to take advantage of it.
These men were able to outdistance their peers by a long way. The best-
remembered of these was Idowu Pakoyi, like Alapepesile a recent immigrant
FARMING, TRADE AND BIG WOMEN 231
belonging to a small attached lineage. Pakoyi not only produced yams for sale,
but moved early into yam trading, buying up surplus from local farmers and
chartering railway wagons to take them to Lagos. The factors in his rise to
prominence were somewhat different from those in Alapepesile’s. He is said
to have employed labourers more than iwofa: and although labourers also
lived in their employer’s house as long as the job lasted, the relationship was
not a semi-permanent one based on family obligation as was the relationship
between zwofa and master. Prices quoted in the stories about him show that
his labourers’ tasks were measured and paid for in precise and quite small
units, and once done, the labourer would go and find another job somewhere
else.*? Labourers living in did not swell a man’s household in the same way
as resident zwofa did. Pakoyi did have a large family (‘three wives and many
children’) but building houses had become almost as important as marrying
wives: Pakoyi built two, apart from the compound where he lived, and one of
them was a prestigious ‘upstairs’. Whereas at the turn of the century a large
house was a sign of wealth because it was evidence of the large human
population inside it, by 1950 bricks and mortar were valued in themselves.
There were new outlets for reinvestment as well as for conspicuous
consumption. Other men of Pakoyi’s generation who made money out of the
yam trade diversified, moving into a variety of new businesses:
Oni was the first person to have a grinding mill and also to have a car.
[Aderinola, zle Arogun]
Adekeye was one of the first people to have a transport lorry. [Aderinola,
ile Arogun]
Oso bought a Lister engine — the first in Okuku. [Alhajji Mustafa, ile
Baale]
Oso made a great yam farm and he was also a babalawo. He was the first
person to buy an electric saw. [Sunday Adewole, ile Oloko]
But the fundamental dynamics of the process remained the same. A man
built up his position by gaining command of people — whether his own
household or hired labour — and investing their labour in the expansion of his
farm. Increased profits and reinvestment enabled him to acquire yet more
people. Whether the relationship between big man and his ‘people’ was one
of kinship or one of payment for services rendered, the model remained a
familial one. Pakoyi’s large mixed household of relatives, iwofa and labourers
was still seen as the basis of his position. His relation to the household was that
of paterfamilias, like the male household heads of the great compounds of
earlier times.
New trade goods entered the town with the railway. There were successful
male entrepreneurs like Adegboye of z/e Oba, who sold ‘ot: oyinbo’ (European
liquor) and became so rich that at his mother’s funeral ‘he got off his horse
and planted money in the market like maize grains’. But Adegboye was
outshone by another more determined entrepreneur — a big woman called
Ayantayo. She was described as bordktini aldgbdra ilu — a highly-placed and
powerful person in the town — and was Known not only for her wealth but for
her ability to get her own way. Like Alapepesile with his carving, she had an
initial edge over other people which enabled her to get started: she inherited
dukia (moveable property) from her mother, and was therefore oldré funraa
ré (rich in her own right). She founded her career in cash crops: but she
cultivated not yams but palm nuts, and to a lesser extent kola. According to
her grandson, Emmanuel Oyeleke, she specialised in palm nut production
‘between 1917 and 1922’, ata time when cash crops ofany kind were a novelty
in Okuku. Through these crops she laid the foundations for her career in other
kinds of trade. The preparation of palm oil and of kola nuts for sale was
women’s work. This choice of crop, rather than yams, made it easier than it
would otherwise have been for her to get labour, since she could recruit a
female work-force; easier for her to supervise since she had experience of the
work herself; and less directly threatening to the men. She employed large
numbers of women from Okuku and other towns as labourers during the
palm-oil season to work in the ebu, the manufacturing sites in the farm. She
also employed women to wash and peel the kola. She is also said to have had
male zwofa who tended the trees and harvested the kola and palm nuts.
She was a daughter of z/e Alubata, married to Bamgboye of z/e Oba, and
after his death inherited by Oyewole who was the father of the future oba
Oyinlola. She thus had influential affines. But according to Emmanuel
Oyeleke, both her husbands were much older than her and died while she was
still an active woman. After the death of the second, she chose to live on her
own. Since she was rich, some of her children and grandchildren joined her
household and worked for her. Emmanuel was one of them: he explained that
‘her being rich meant that I did not have to work as hard as I would have had
to on my own father’s farm. Although I helped her on the kola and palm nut
farms, it was not heavy work’. Like a big man, she extended patronage to her
household. She took a special interest in Emmanuel, and had a song which
celebrated her role as protector:
E mé yan Ilufoye je
Omo kékeré Akandé
E mo yan Ilifoye je.
Don’t dare to cheat Ilufoye [Emmanuel]
Little Akande
Don’t dare to cheat Ilufoye.
Through her help, Emmanuel became one of the first educated men in
Okuku, and took a succession of jobs in teaching and local government.
But if Ayantayo was able to circumvent the problems of recruiting a labour
force, and to a certain extent those of establishing a household, she met
FARMING, TRADE AND BIG WOMEN 233
greater difficulties in getting hold of land for her cash-crop production. For
the cultivation of palm nuts and kola it was hard to borrow land, because trees,
as permanent crops, constituted the ultimate title to a piece of land. Though
owners were willing to lend plots out for temporary food crops, they were very
reluctant to risk lending the permanent symbols of their ownership. The
importance of the tree crop in this regard is well attested.*? Ayantayo, according
to several accounts (not, however, including Emmanuel’s) simply seized the
land she needed. They say she took a large piece from z/e Baale, forcing this
compound to pool all its remaining plots and reallocate them so that no-one
would be left entirely destitute. How she got away with this — if she did — is
not clear. She had a strong link with ze Baale, for it was her wealthy mother’s
compound, but the stories told about Ayantayo suggest that her requests for
land on the strength of this were turned down. Her husbands’ section of ée
Oba was the largest and most influential of the four, and they may have
intervened on her behalf; at any rate Oba Oyekunle, who was a friend of
Osayomi of zle Baale, lent a huge piece of ile Oba land to ile Baale to compensate
them. But most people explain her coup by saying simply that she was ‘very
tough’ and that ‘everyone was afraid of her’ — which implies that she was a
witch. She hung onto the i/e Baale land for fifteen years, a feat which is still
recounted with indignation by members of that compound.
From this base she moved into other kinds of trade, and her fame was as
much to do with her innovations in trading as with her actual wealth.
According to Emmanuel:
She traded in meat. She was an indomitable woman (akikanju obinrin),
and one who was awake to progress (0 /aju). All the big obas who came
Visiting knew her in the palace. She was the first person to sell European
drinks in the town and the first person to build a house with an iron roof.
So all the big visitors would go to stay with her. She had two horses, one
white and one red, and went to the farm on them. She died around
1938....She built a house near the railway station, and opened a beer
and stout shop there.
Her success, like that of the big men, thus depended not on money itself but
on the influence that money could help to establish. She used her kinship,
social and trading contacts to build up a clientele of ‘big visitors’ from outside,
important people who knew her better than they knew anyone else in the
town. Not only her wealth but her innovative ways of spending it (on an iron
roof, European drinks) attracted important people. It is significant that she
established her reputation through traditional symbols too: the two horses,
‘one white and one red’, were the classic marks of outstanding wealth and
distinction. Ayantayo was not afraid to compete, and to take over big men’s
property, methods and insignia of success when she could.
This period seems to be one which particularly favoured economic success
for women. Unlike in Ibadan and Lagos,* the period of the wars in Okuku
does not appear to have given women scope for self-aggrandisement: there are
no memories of Okuku women thriving on the nineteenth century slave trade.
It was precisely the newness of the trade in European imports — because it had
no prior gender associations — which gave Ayantayo an opening. Indeed, since
women already controlled the local market and had well-established trading
networks, it gave her an advantage. But there were limits on.a woman’s self-
agerandisement, limits whose nature is revealed in the hints at witchcraft. A
woman’s career was blocked in a crucial respect. Although Ayantayo could
acquire wealth and networks of influence, she could never really establish a
great household in the same way as a big man. As Faderera put tt:
A woman cannot stand alone. She must be with a man, and if she tries
to stand alone the results will be bad. The man’s role is to be her
authority, so that other people will not be able to bother her or ‘touch’
her [with medicines]. ‘The man protects the woman. But a woman can
be free once she’s had a husband — if he dies, she will stay with her
children and look after them and no-one will say anything.
Ayantayo became ‘free’ after the death ofher second husband, and established
her own household, drawing into it her children and grandchildren. But even
as a wealthy widow with children, she could not become the head of a
compound. It was her sons who expected to become the recognised household
heads of the future, with their own wives and children to support them.
Ayantayo could attract her grandchildren to profit from her wealth and
influence, but she could not demand their labour as of right: they did not
‘serve’ her in the way that Babalola of tle Elemoso Awo ‘served’ his father and
then his eldest brother until well into his middle age. And though from the
point of view of her individual dependants her position in the town was
admired and regarded as convenient and advantageous, from the point of
view of the town at large, women who tried to convert their economic success
into social and political capital on the pattern of big men were regarded as a
threat. A woman is the fountain-head of a man’s household, the source of his
‘people’ in the shape of children and affines that supply him with labour and
support. A woman who tried to build up her own household: would not only
be taking potential supporters away from a man; by removing her own
reproductive powers from his orbit, she would be undermining the very
foundations of his social position. |
The story ofanother big woman of the period, Omolola of z/e Ojomu, suggests
that economic success was something women did better to keep quiet about.
Omolola also made her money from the cultivation of palm trees. Unlike
Ayantayo, she used money and persuasion, rather than force, to get the use
of the trees. But though she was successful, she did not want this known:
She lent out money in different places and got :wofa in exchange. She
would also lend money out in exchange for the use of palm trees.
Eventually she would get her money back but she would have had the
BIG MEN 1934-1984 235
use of the trees until then. The profits from palm oil and palm kernels
were good, so she did well, building herself up from small beginnings.
She was married into z/e Ojomu but she worked for herself. She was rich:
she had women to process the palm oil and men to clear the farms. But
she had no ortki about it: she didn’t want anyone to know that she was
rich. [Samson Adebisi, zle Ojomu]
Omolola ‘did not want anyone to know that she was rich’ because her wealth
could not be fed into the male cycle of aggrandisement. For a man, a house
full of ‘people’ created wealth and wealth drew in more people. Wealth spent
on display enhanced reputation, reputation attracted more people and this
led to greater wealth. Reputation was the medium through which men’s
power was constituted. But since a woman could not ‘have people’, in the
shape of a great household of wives and children under her command,
reputation could not play the creative and constitutive role in a big woman’s
career that it did in a man’s. For a woman to have reputation at all was
suspicious. It suggested a threat of encroachment into male territory.
Reputation in a woman therefore almost automatically turned inside out and
became an accusation of witchcraft. Successful women were almost always
branded as witches. Despite Omolola’s caution, several people who mentioned
her name hinted at her frightening powers. And the only other big woman
discussed in this connection was unequivocally credited with witchcraft as the
source of her power:
She lived near the station beyond Matego’s house ~— a lonely place. She
was a medicine woman and the head of the witches. She could cure mad
people, knew people’s enemies and prescribed sacrifices. She was there
in Oyinlola’s time [1934-60]. She had no family or dependants here
[she came from Reke, a town near Opete, and was known as Iya Reke
or ‘Mother from Reke’], but she was a friend of the oba and of Toyinbo
[the great babalawo|. She supported the oba. But she rarely came into
the town. [Samuel Olantyi, tle Oloko]
Women, that is, were not debarred from participating in the struggle for
self-aggrandisement. Although they suffered certain disadvantages in the
competition to make money, those who were sufficiently ingenious, determined
and courageous could certainly do it. But when they tried to convert their
wealth to public status they ran into obstacles. Ayantayo displayed her wealth
and contacts and was called a witch; Omolola did not dare display hers, but
was suspected of witchcraft anyway, while Iya Reke’s importance was ascribed
solely to her supernatural powers. As we have seen, men’s power in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was very often conceived in terms of
the possession of oogun (medicine). But in their case this was a source of pride.
It was openly mentioned, in tones of admiration and satisfaction, and detailed
narratives were told about men like Toyinbo and Fawande to show just how
extensive their command of spiritual forces was. Medicine and magic were a
common if not a necessary part of the composite state of social esteem, gla,
to which every man aspired. Command of juju and charms is a metaphorical
representation of command of resources and people. A man credited with
great juju is aman who can protect people from enemies: it is publicly asserted
and is a source of attraction to supporters.
But witchcraft was hinted at in hushed tones which suggested fear and
condemnation more strongly than admiration. Far from contributing to a
woman’s gla, it branded her as a pariah, not fully human, and not fully
integrated into the community. Control of spiritual powers which was
creditable in a man was reprehensible in a woman. Witchcraft is represented
as a power over people which is essentially secretive and destructive. It is also
something innate, something that lives inside the body, connected with the
woman’s femaleness in a way that juju is not connected with maleness. A big
man’s success depends on command of the social environment, including
women whose fertility must be harnessed to his project of social expansion.
A woman who threatens to alienate her fertility to her own project of self-
control of juju.® :
aggrandisement is a therefore a witch rather than merely a big woman in
Ayantayo, Omolola and Iya Reke ‘had no orik?’ about their achievements
because in their careers the cycle of self-aggrandisement suffered this crucial
block. Any reputation at all was likely to turn to a reputation for evil. Thus
a woman had to be discreet about her networks of contact, her employees and
her influence. She could not display her achievements in public, and for this
reason, though there were — and still are— a number of successful and wealthy
women in Okuku, they are not usually marked down in memory as people of
great reputation. They are spoken of with reluctance, and with a mixture of
disapproval and unwilling admiration, by other women as well as by men.
There were women, however, who could and did attain social esteem, and
who had beautiful ork: of their own. Women’s position as intermediary and
as producer of children held advantages as well as limitations. This will be
discussed in the next chapter.
8. BIG MEN 1934-1984
Moses Oyinlola was installed as Olokuku in 1934. He was the first Christian
oba of Okuku, and the first to have travelled extensively outside the Odo-Otin
area. He had spent many years in Ghana -— originally as a houseboy of Jacob
Ajayi, the great herbalist of zle Arogun. Ghana made him wealthy. He brought
back with him a large, white, type of kola nut which was new to the area and
which was considered greatly superior to the abata nuts that people grew
before. Unlike the abata nuts which were grown mainly. for domestic
consumption, the ‘Olokuku’s kola’ was exportable to the north, and was in
great demand. It was Oyinlola, then, who started the wave of kola cash-crop
production which at first almost equalled cocoa in its importance to Okuku
BIG MEN 1934-1984 237
farmers, and he was at first the sole distributor to local farmers. ‘Ifhe gave you
just a single nut, it was like gold’. He used this power of patronage astutely
and collected many loyal adherents on the strength of it.
Oyinlola was an immensely popular oba, both with the colonial authorities
and with his own people. Ulli Beier described him thus:
The Olokuku of Okuku is of huge stature and has a strong face like a
lion. His laugh is deep and his manner jovial. He is of unusual
friendliness and hospitality. He is extremely popular in his town, and
although he has had no schooling, his intelligence and judgement have
earned him the admiration of a long succession of administrative
officers (Beier, 1956, pp.167-8).
He was remembered by the young men of the town for his conspicuous
wealth. (‘His wealth was very apparent’, commented one admirer.) He
married seventeen wives, apart from those he inherited from Oyekunle, and
was said to have had ‘at least fifty children’. However, it was not the numbers
of his children that impressed observers so much as the fact that he had the
foresight and ‘enlightenment’ (olaju) to educate them all.*© Today, these
educated sons and daughters of Oyinlola constitute a formidable dynasty of
professionals, employed in bigger cities but retaining the dominant voice in
all affairs concerning the ‘progress’, ‘improvement’ and ‘welfare’ of the town.
Like Oyekunle, Oyinlola had the backing of the colonial authorities in
every contest of strength against insubordinate individuals or towns. But
unlike Oyekunle, Oyinlola took the lead in these contests, leaving the colonial
officers to trail behind, tidying up after him where they could. Oyinlolaneeded
no protection. His opponents were no match for him: there were numerous
confrontations recorded in the colonial documents, and he seems to have won
them all. His high-handed, intemperate manner is vividly portrayed in one
document: it is a letter from one Okunade, the Native Authority Dispenser
at Okuku, who was caught up in a land dispute with Oyinlola in 1952. Okunade
was rash enough to take his case to the Magistrate’s Court at Osogbo. Oyinlola
responded by taking out his own injunction against Okunade in the Okuku
court, of which he was President. Next time their paths crossed, according to
Okunade, Oyinlola addressed him in the following terms, reported verbatim
in Yoruba:
Okunade, don’t you hear that I’m calling you?.... Who do you think you
are?.... You bastard. I’m going to drive you out of this area. You don’t
want to release that land and you don’t want to go. I’m telling you you
will go, you'll definitely leave this place whether you like it or not, you’ll
leave this region. You liar. This 1s war between us.
The A.D.O. commented rather feebly “The above is somewhat novel’; but
four days later he became the instrument by which Oyinlola’s threat was carried
out, by getting Okunade recommended for transfer to Otan.
But Oyinlola’s supremacy depended not only on the classic big man’s
virtues of aggression, pride, intransigence, and unassailability, but also — and
perhaps mainly — on his ‘enlightenment’: that is, his ability to manipulate the
new colonial instruments of government. In local disputes, the most important
of these was undoubtedly the Chieftaincy Declaration, intended to spell out
and codify forever the local systems of election to high office. In the Odo-Otin
area, the declaration was made in 1956 by the Odo-Otin District Council, of
which the Olokuku was chairman. Oyinlola, well aware of the significance of
this exercise, appears to have made the most of the ignorance of the colonial
officers who sent out their ‘questioneers’ about ruling houses, order of
succession and rules of election for each town in the District. Subsequent
chieftaincy disputes in subordinate towns often involved bitter accusations by
the losing factions that the Olokuku had fixed the succession to his own
advantage.*’
From this ‘interference’ Oyinlola enlarged not only his wealth (from aspirant
claimants to the various vacant thrones in the locality) but also his reputation
for being able to do exactly what he wished with the full support of the
bemused A.D.O. While this provoked resentment from the rebellious
‘subordinate’ towns, it was celebrated gleefully in Okuku. There, Oyinlola’s
reign is remembered as the real golden age of Okuku. His ork: show how keenly
he was appreciated, both as a wealthy innovator and as a headstrong,
domineering overlord. The more high-handed he was, the more the praise-
singers exulted:
A-w6n-bi-agbon
Ordoro Ko se é je méran
Ajala Okin kdlée moto 16to
Oyinlola, 6 k6 telépo
O k6 ti alaagbamu
Abara hoihoi
Aaba demo déya
Oko iyalate
Hibé Oké Otin
Ajala ti damo lékun 4-ri-se-kéntadiigbon
A-muniilé-kOyinb6o-t6-dé
O fidi alaseji bomii gbona
Ajala gbéna Ibadan léw6 aldawiigbd
Oyinlola a-gba-teni-t6-ranpa-kan-kan...*®
Rare as a wasp
“The gall-bladder can’t be eaten with the meat’
Ajala Okin built a separate house for his car
Oyinlola, he built one for the petrol
He built one for the lizard
The scabby-skinned one
BIG MEN 1934-1984 239
Staple that pins down both mother and child [1.e. the whole world]
Husband of the senior woman
The European of Oke Otin
Ajala has stopped people being insolent
One who locks people up until the white man comes
He dips the overreacher into hot water
Ajala blocked the road to Ibadan for the disobedient people
[people who don’t hear when we speak]
Oyinlola, one who seizes the goods of the man who defies him [the
man who squares his shoulders with resolute indifference]...
While Oyekunle was en ti dyinbé gba niyawé, the person the European took
to wife, Oyinlola has become a European himself: “The European of Oke
Otin’. His power is part of that of the colonial authorities and he is praised for
using the colonial apparatus of justice for his own ends: ‘One who locks people
up until the white man comes’. While Oyekunle was commended for
surrounding himself with friends, Oyinlola could use force to control his
people. He is compared to an aaba, a staple used symbolically in magical
charms to give the possessor power to hold people down. But while the charm
is usually made specifically for the control of one person, Oyinlola holds down
the whole community with a power no-one can escape. He will tolerate no
opposition or resistance, and the ortki dwells gloatingly on what happens to
people who dare offer it.
These ortki continue to celebrate the qualities that were made so much of
in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They select for special
comment those aspects of Oyinlola’s reign that fit the picture of the big man
as tough, intransigent, domineering and ruthless. His ‘progressive’ aspect is
referred to only briefly and indirectly, when the special house he built for his
car is mentioned as a modern symbol of wealth. (He was so wealthy that he
could even afford to build a house for the lizard, ‘the scabby-skinned one’, the
last possible candidate for such a favour!) His Christianity and his interest in
education are not mentioned at all. But in the comments of young men who
grew up in a world dominated by Oyinlola, and who often spoke ofhim as one
of the most important big men of their youth, his ‘progressive’ aspects are
given more attention than his toughness:
He helped everybody and did things for people. He celebrated the
Olooku festival in grand style. He was praised as ‘Oyinlola Olékuku, a-
tOkuku-so-bt-eri-sogba’ , ‘Oyinlola Olokuku, one who mends the town
like someone mending a calabash’. [Niniola zle Aworo Olooku]
He told the truth and could settle problems peacefully. [Raimi Gbadebo
de Ojomu]
He looked after all his children so that they all got high posts. In his time
] water and electricity were planned for. [Lasun Adeniyi, z/e Nla]
240 THE ORIKI OF BIG MEN |
He did a lot for the development of Okuku [Gustus Adebomi, ze Otun
Baale]
Oyinlola was a new kind of big man. A fundamental change in the way
power relations were constituted, begun in Oyekunle’s reign, had now
become fully established. Oyinlola’s power had a source outside the web of
support deriving from his subjects. The police, law courts and the permanent
presence of the British always ready to back up his authority gave him a
fulcrum for his manoeuvres outside the traditional client—patron relationship.
His principal characteristics as a big man were ones associated with colonial
institutions and policies: education, the law, the acquisition of ‘development
goods’, the manipulation of colonial bureaucracies. As a corollary of this
change, his power depended less than formerly on the ability to build up a
large household of his own (though Oyinlola certainly did this) and more on
the creation of extended and diffuse networks of influence. Influence meant
not only providing pioneering leadership which guided the Okuku people
towards the benefits of ‘modernity’, but also, more specifically, it meant
manipulating local government, educational institutions, political parties and
other structures to the advantage of the town and of individual clients.
Oyiniola overshadowed other big men in Okuku in a way no previous oba
had done. But there were many other men considered to have been ‘big’
during his reign, and they shared with Oyinlola not only the new personality
profile but the new, institutionalised sources of power. ,
Some of the classic attributes of nineteenth century ‘big-manism’ were
still there in modified form, but some of the most prominent of them had
virtually disappeared, and a number of new ones had been added. Medicine,
for instance, the dominant idiom in which power was discussed in the earlier
periods, was hardly ever mentioned as a modern attribute. Only two of the
thirty-nine modern big men mentioned by my informants were said to have
had outstanding magical powers, one as a herbalist and one as a hunter who
protected Isale Okuku from thieves single-handed and owned fifty guns.
Wealth, more surprisingly, was only once cited as the main reason for a man’s
importance in the town: and this was in the case of Adebisi Olongbo, the
grandson of the famous rich man Alapepesile, chief Elemona. What remained
a continuing and pervasive theme in these portraits was the notion of
‘toughness’; but toughness now manifested itselfin a rather different complex
of characteristics, associated with a different range of life chances. The
spheres of action with which it was now associated were educational
achievement; positions in local government; new professions such as plumbing
and printing, or pioneering ventures in the old occupation of farming;
leadership of all kinds, in party politics, town affairs and in the Second World
War; and ‘sponsorship’ of other people, which meant getting them jobs,
getting them out of trouble, and getting them sent to school. A new big man
had to use his toughness to achieve a place in the formal structures of authority
BIG MEN 1934-1984 241
introduced by the colonial regime, and operate his patronage networks from |
there.
Of all these new big men, perhaps the most prominent was Tio Falohun
of ile Baale. He seems to typify the qualities most often attributed to big men
by the younger generation today. He was educated and helped others to
education; a local councillor who used his position to rescue people who got
into trouble with the authorities; a man with friends in high places who used
his influence to get people jobs; and a political leader in the 1960s who stuck
to his guns when the town was almost at war with itself.
He was always ready to help people in trouble: he would leave
everything to help them. He went to school and although he only read
to Standard VI he knew more than some people who have been to
Grammar School. He was very generous. He had a big farm, and sent
labourers there with his money. He built the Falohun house. He was
called: ‘Roro agbo tit bi1tkoko ninu, lasdn lasan ni ini n bi babaa won’ [The
big ram’s head that annoys the wolf (because it is too big to swallow) the
miserable sods can get as annoyed as they like, it won’t do them any
good (i.e. Falohun’s opponents can eat their hearts out)]. [Salau
Abiodun, tle Oluawo]
He had influence with the Government to help anybody in his own
family who got into trouble. He was made a Councillor. [Samson Ojo,
ile Baale]
He was like the oba of the town up here. He was always ready to help
anyone in Baale ward who got into trouble with the authorities. He
could do this because he was an educated man and personally known
to the officials — like the Health Inspector — and ready to spend money
on drinks and food for them in order to persuade them to let his people
off. He was a councillor. [Jimo Abefe, ile Oluawo]
He was a councillor and a leader in the N.N.D.P.. He helped people in
the party who got into trouble with the police. [Lasisi Olowolagba, ile
Oluokun]
Falohun’s education gave him an official place (as councillor) and hence
an unofficial network of influence among other officials. From this position
he was able to build up a clientele who needed his assistance in dealing with
colonial structures ofauthority. His following was large: ‘Baale ward’ comprised
a third of Okuku. The ‘helpfulness’ these clients sought required a more
pacific approach to social relations than was exhibited by earlier big men. The
kind of ‘toughness’ that was now admired did not include challenging the oba.
It was a much higher recommendation in a patron to be a friend of the oba,
and thus have access to some of the ‘progress’ that was being introduced
under his auspices.
Big men are still a prominent feature of social and political life in Yoruba
country today. Recruitment of a following is still a key. component in
politicians’ and businessmen’s success. Clients do jobs for the big man and
swell his public appearances by their attendance. The big man in turn uses his
networks of influence and his access to the centres of power to do favours for
them. Studies done in Yoruba cities show that the patron-client relationship
is fundamental to modern social organisation and outlook (Barnes, 1986 and
Peace, 1979 in Lagos; Lloyd, 1974 and Gutkind, 1975 in Ibadan). But the
basis and character of the modern big man’s power is different from those of
the war leaders, farmers, traders and medicine men of the ‘nineteenth and
early twentieth century, whose careers I have been describing.
In the first place, wage-labour, government posts and cash-crop farming
introduced a new constellation of relationships around the production of
wealth. Before the time when there was a market for large agricultural
surpluses, a big man’s ‘people’ both produced wealth and were wealth. They
produced food and consumed it; to be wealthy was to be the centre of'a very
large circle of such producers and consumers. The great ‘household was
simultaneously a labour pool and an outlet for conspicuous consumption.
But wage labour and government posts made it possible to accumulate wealth
without the labour of others. ‘The market for cash crops and the proliferation
of other business openings made it possible to reinvest agricultural wealth
directly, not through the medium of the great household. The source and the
end of wealth thus became separated. Individuals could be wealthy without
being installed at the heart of a ‘huge house’. Occupations which required
labour — as cocoa farming did — could be structured as individual or small-
household operations by buying in labour as required. It was not because
food-crop farming required a lot of labour that large households existed; but
because the generation and consumption of conspicuous surpluses of food
crops could only take place through large households. |
The impact of these changes took time to be felt. In the height of the com-
mercial yam-farming era, people still thought of wealth in terms of household.
But the break-up of the great household was driven on, as we have seen, by
the dynamic of individual self-aggrandisement which fired not only the
successful big men who tried to build the huge households, but also all other
men, at the domestic level, who strove to break away from their seniors’ control.
Wage labour, government posts and cocoa farming far from the parent
compound gave these young men opportunities they had not had before to
begin their career building early in life. The ‘huge houses’ holding multitudes
who were at once the household head’s source of wealth and his social and
political support group have declined and all but vanished. ‘Having people’
is no longer conceived in the organic language of reproduction and nurture,
in which the big man’s household produces the people who then produce his
greatness; itis more appropriately described in the language of clients, favours
BIG MEN 1934-1984 243
and services.
Secondly, there has been the shift in perspective following Okuku’s
gradual incorporation into the national arena. Even though many people live
and die within Okuku and with aspirations focused on achievements within
the town, those who have been most successful in modern terms are always
those who have been away. The educated sons and daughters with jobs as
doctors, bank managers, and civil servants do not live in the town. The
context and source of their success — the institutional frameworks within
which they operate and which give them their money and power — are far away
and unfamiliar to most local people. The new influential people come back
perhaps three times a year, and though they take an active interest in the
welfare of the town, it is very clear that their success is not rooted in it. Local
interests, opinions and support are no longer all-important to them. More
generally, the mass movement to the ‘far farms’ has diluted the intense
concentration of interest in the activities of prominent figures in the community.
For nine months of the year, people are scatttered in some fifteen settlements,
travelling home only rarely on brief visits, with little opportunity for the
leisurely gossip which is the seed-bed of growing reputations. Reputation
does not have scope to develop.
This change, however, has deeper roots in a third shift, the importance of
which has already been suggested. With colonial rule, new positions became
available which conferred power or influence independently of the recognition
or adherence of the community. A police corporal had the power to arrest
people by virtue of his appointment by the colonial authorities, not (as was
the case with Omikunle the war leader) because his followers recognised and
supported his right to do so. If anyone resisted arrest, external forces would
be brought in to back the corporal. Even inside the community, then,
positions of power were no longer created from within. Those who learnt the
knack of dealing with this external source of power became the new brokers
and wielders of influence. They were essentially mediators between the local
system and a superordinate one imposed from above. This meant that a big
man’s supporters no longer constituted his power by their adherence and
recognition. Reputation no longer had the same crucial role.
With these changes came a change in the values surrounding the big men.
Personal magnificence, generosity, self-reliance, ruthlessness, destructive
power and its obverse, the capacity to offer protection, were not erased from
the definition of big men; but a new and apparently dominant set of values
was written into it, associated with the education which was the new big men’s
principal avenue to power: values of Christianity, literacy, honesty, public
spiritedness, helpfulness.
Thus the very grounds of ortki’s existence were shifting. The disappearance
of the great household meant that one of the primary fields ofreference in oriki
was lost. Personal ortki attributed the possession of ‘people’ to big men by
heaping up allusions to household members, with the formula ‘child of..’,
‘father of...’ ‘husband of..’ Profusion was possible because the household
provided an abundant source of names and because the real, known
interconnections of these people allowed the performer to hurl their names
promiscuously together without collapsing into incomprehensibility. Ortki
orile were affected too, though less directly, for the great household was the
visible embodiment and concrete manifestation of the ‘lineage’ which these
oriki celebrated. They placed the subject of the onk: against a deep, wide
background of kin, who would be acknowledged whatever form the household
took; but there is no doubt that the great household where many people
shared the same orki orile provided an image of the unity of the larger kin
group in a way that small scattered households could not.
Onki were created in a situation where activities within the local community
were all-absorbing. Little incidents, peculiar happenings, favourite remarks,
were observed, discussed, taken up and commemorated in epithets.
Continuous interaction in a small town meant that nothing escaped notice.
The composers of new oriki selected some things and not others to comment
on; but the underlying presumption was that whatever the town’s prominent
people did was of interest and importance. A genre that draws so much on
idiosyncrasy and difference can only thrive in a community where people are
closely observed; and one that relies so much on allusion and the unsaid can
only thrive where everyone knows everybody else or at least where there are
audiences who know what lies behind the words. When the most successful
and powerful people from the town were those who worked in other cities, and
when the whole of the active and vigorous part of the population was away
most of the year, the hothouse conditions necessary for the generation of new
ortki were removed.
Most important of all, however, is the fact that orki enacted the regard of
‘people’ and guaranteed its continual renewal. They did not merely reflect,
but participated in, the constitution of a power based on public recognition.
An orki performance demonstrates a perfect mutuality: the performer
heightens the subject’s reputation, and this enhances his power to help her.
: She takes on the role of quintessential supporter, whose adherence to a big
man is what makes him big. When an alternative, external source of power
enters the picture, this mutuality is broken. Supporters continue to hope for
advantages from their patrons, and patrons continue to benefit from the
adherence of supporters, the more numerous the better. The big man’s
economic and political operations are still helped on by the visible presence
of his ‘people’, who establish confidence by producing an aura of success.
Reputation is still important and praises, therefore, continue to be sung. But
the ultimate source and guarantee of the new big man’s power lies outside the
immediate community. Power is no longer created and measured by the
regard of others within the town. It 1s not the gaze of the community, enacted
BIG MEN 1934-1984 245
in concentrated and exemplary form in the ort1 singer’s address, which alone
lets us know that a man is important. Once power was no longer constituted
in this way, ortki were no longer at the heart of political process. They have
remained a gratifying acknowledgement of public status, a way of advertising
a big patron’s means and generosity: but they are no longer indispensable.
The creation of new personal oriki to commemorate the activities of new
personalities in Okuku is now rather rare. And those that have been recently
composed have perpetuated the old idioms of power, instead of creating new
ones. These old idioms articulate fears and aspirations which are still very
much alive in the community: rivalry, fear of enemies, the need for self-
reliance. But they express only the long-established part of people’s experience;
the values associated with new experiences under colonialism and after are
articulated in personal reminiscence and informal narrative, but not in ortkz.
When stories about Falohun are told, for instance, only one attribution,
“The big ram’s head that annoys the wolf...’, is quoted by his admirers. And
this epithet is a traditional proverbial formulation which asserts the subject’s
unassailability and the frustration ofhis enemies’ evil intentions towards him.
He has no ortki celebrating his education, his Christianity, or his position as
Councillor. Most of the new breed of patrons acquired similar brief epithets,
sometimes not much more than nicknames. Oyinlola’s ortkz were abundant,
but as we have seen, they too were composed in the idiom that had prevailed
at least since the mid-nineteenth century, emphasising his domineering
rather than his ‘helpful’ side. Omonije, one of the few big men of Oyinlola’s
reign to have been given a substantial corpus of epithets, was a striking figure,
ebullient, tall, handsome, and influential with the oba. He was described as
‘a big man in the church — the Secretary of the Church Association’, but his
oriki do not mention this. They emphasise his ability to get away with
outrageous acts:
A-kélépo-6-ta-ni-gbigbona, oko Oyébdla
Asoro-ana-di-ba-miiin
Ona ti yoo je mo niin yan babaa Popdola
Gbhadéjobi, Babalogun
Ajanakt onibid6 mo riba baba okod mi...”
One who makes the palm-oil seller sell while it’s still hot, husband
of Oyebola
One who resurrects yesterday’s problem to make a new one today
He’s preparing the ground for the raking in of bribes, father of
Popoola
Gbadejobi, the Balogun [of zle Oba] |
Mighty elephant of the camp, I pay homage to my husband’s
father...
Fiery, rash, and acquisitive, this persona demonstrates his greatness by
doing things that would be condemned in other people. Like earlier big men,
he is pictured surrounded by enemies. His unassailability in the face of
malicious attack is commended in words reminiscent of the ortk1 ofhis ancestor
Oyekanbi a hundred years earlier, quoted in section 4 of this chapter: “They
gang up on the ose tree, the ose tree flourishes/They conspire around the well,
and risk falling in!’. As in the ork: of other big men after 1893, his enemies
are seen as elegan (‘despisers’) and ayonuso (“‘busybodies’) — the performance
ends with a vitriolic attack on these types — but this idiom, as we have seen,
chants today. ,
is an extension of the earlier language of enmity. It continues to animate ortkz
This idiom is not in any way irrelevant to present-day values and concerns.
Indeed, it could be argued that in some communities ideas concerning
enemies, rivalry and self-protection may actually have intensified, with the
ruthless struggle for the new cocoa and oil wealth, and the alienation
attendant on massive urban expansion. Nor is it anything new that ortkz reflect
only one dimension of prevailing ideology. Different Yoruba genres always,
as far as one can tell, expressed different aspects of experience articulated in
different models of human and spiritual relationships. Folktales did not stress
the same values as ortki, nor present them in the same cosmological framework
as Ifa verses (Barber, 1984b). However, the divergence between the ork: and
the personal narratives now current in Okuku seems to have become wider
than was the case before, suggesting that oriki production has reached a limit,
a point where there are things which it cannot say, whole zones of social
experience from which it is excluded. :
The future development of the tradition may lie outside the long-established
modes of performance that are the subject of this book. Oriki have found a
new medium and a vast audience in popular juju music, where they are one
of the stock sources of lyrics. Some of Sunny Ade’s most exquisitely caressing
songs are couched in the classic oriki idiom of medicine, violence and
intransigence. But the development of the form in this case lies in the musical
rather than the textual dimension. It is in other neo-traditional genres —
notably the solo chants of Tunbosun Oladapo and Larewaju Adepoju — that
the linguistic resources of Yoruba oral poetry, including orzkz, may be developed
along new lines in a way that reconciles the long-established values with the
new ones in the fulfilment of a new function. Ortki as a mode, a resource, a
impetus.
field of expression, are probably not dying out but being recycled, just as
folktales have been recast and revived on the popular Yoruba stage. But the
specific oriki tradition discussed in this book may well have lost its creative
Onki performance flourishes in Okuku, and the new breed of big men are
frequently saluted in public gatherings: but with the personal ortki of their
fathers and grandfathers and the ortki orile of their fathers’ and mothers’
BIG MEN 1934-1984 247
lineages, rarely with new ork: of their own. And when new personal ortki are
composed, it is always in the old language. Today’s big men, therefore, are
saluted in the idiom of an earlier age. The creation and legitimation of
reputation has now become synonymous with an invocation of the past, and
those who make ‘progress’ are hailed in the language of nostalgia.
7
DISJUNCTION AND TRANSITION
1. INTRODUCTION
Oriki mark individuality. They are imprinted with signs of idiosyncrasy
through which they evoke and recall the differences between entities. But at
the same time they are the means by which boundaries between entities are
crossed. We have seen how the actual utterance of or1ki opens a channel between
speaker and addressee: a channel which is also a bond, both intense and all-
engrossing. Through it, power flows. The individual human recipient of or:ki
experiences an enhancement, thought of as a translation beyond the normal
human condition. Egungun are revitalised by ortki chanting, orisa are
empowered. The dead are given the impetus to return and bless the living,
their latent presence actualised.
Women, the principal bearers of the ortki tradition, are the ones who cross
— as rara tyawo so poignantly observe — from one compound to another, and
often from one town to another, when they marry. They combine two
different lineage identities, in an ambiguous conjunction that is never fully
resolved even on death. But ifthey cross boundaries between groups, they are
also, as we have seen, the source of structural differentiation within them. Not
only do they provide the points at which a patrilineage segments, they also
introduce to their own children alternative networks of relationships which
other members of that lineage do not share. They sometimes, also, import
their own orisa which after their death will have to be taken over by someone
else in the compound. The frequent statement made in ork, that ‘Ifthe father
is important, so is the mother’, and ‘Who can salute the father without first
saluting the mother?’ is not a mere piety. It encodes the fundamental principle
of alternatives in society. It is the woman that makes differentiation possible
and that offers the social actor alternative paths to pursue.
It is the disjunctiveness of the discourse of orikz that makes it possible for
them to assert identities and at the same time to cross boundaries between
individuals and groups. The discussion of ortki opened in Chapter 2 with the
observation that they are a mode of discourse that 1s essentially and genetically
disjunctive, an accumulation of utterances of different origins and intents,
juxtaposed in performance but not fused into a single coherent statement.
From this inner fragmentation the dominant stylistic features of an ortki text
CROSSING BOUNDARIES AND MERGING IDENTITIES IN ORIKI 249
were seen to flow. Fluidity, boundarilessness and centrelessness are all made
possible by the separateness and interchangeability of the text’s constituent
parts. It became clear, however, that an ortki chant is not a mere jumble of
unrelated items. Chapter 3 showed that the text coheres around its subject,
the present or absent addressee. Each utterance in a chant is united to all the
others by a relationship of equivalence: all are alternatives to each other and
to the subject’s name. Chapter 4 suggested that the nature of this address, the
relationship established between performer and subject, depended on precisely
what the performer was doing in chanting; and that this in turn was defined
by, and achieved meaning in, a particular context of utterance. And beyond
this, there is a prevailing thematic homogeneity: in ortki orile (Chapter 5), a
tendency to circle around and elaborate a small number of key emblems; in
personal orzki (Chapter 6), a preoccupation with a cluster of values each of
which stands in a metaphorical or metonymic relation to all the others. Beauty
means people, people means wealth, wealth means gorgeous adornment,
gorgeous adornment means beauty: and out of this perpetual circle of
suggestivity emerges a transcendent value, ola. But the disjunctiveness and
lability of the orki text remain fundamental features of the genre; the very
features that underpin the capacity of oriki to uphold difference and
simultaneously open boundaries between separate entities. We now need to
look at how this is done, and how the function of or1kz and the role of women
are related.
2. CROSSING BOUNDARIES AND MERGING IDENTITIES IN ORIKI
When a performer utters ortki, she attains special access to the subject. She
1s felt to have touched the heart of the subject’s identity. At the same time, she
constructs her own identity, as the interlocutor personified. The more skilled
the performer, the more repeatedly does she refer to the act of utterance itself,
and include passages from her own orki. The performance of ork: thus
dramatises, and represents in heightened form, dialogue as such.
This goes beyond the mere opening of channels of communication
between beings. It can involve — indeed at one level always does involve — a
merging of identities or the subsumption of one identity by another. Orisa are
saluted through the orzk: of their devotees, and devotees through the ortki of
their ortsa, and this is the way in which the completeness of their mutual
dependence is expressed (see Barber, 1981b and 1990b). But this is only an
extreme form of what happens in all ortki. All ortki mark individuality, but all
have a tendency to float, to be shared by more than one subject. An
individual’s ‘own’ ortki are a tissue of quotations, a collection of borrowings
from diverse sources. This floating is not accidental but is a fundamental
feature of the eclectic and incorporative mode of onki. Individual subjects
thus share with others the components that make up their innermost identity,
and recognise fragments of it in other people wherever they go. There is also,
250 DISJUNCTION AND TRANSITION
as we have seen, merging between the identities affirmed in ork: onle and in
personal oriki. Oriki orile belong collectively to a group, but they are usually
addressed to individuals. The group emblem is thus bound up intimately with
individual self-consciousness and self-display, and appears in contexts where
the purpose of the performance is to enhance the individual against the
background of — even at the expense of — other, rival individuals. Individual
identity is constituted out of communal identity: and at the same time it is
through the salutation of the individual that group identity is reaffirmed.
Because there is gradual absorption of personal ortki into ortki orile, individual
idiosyncrasy, even the most trivial, can become part of the the symbolic self-
representation of the group.
This interchange between personal ortki and ortki orile, however, 1s better
understood in the light of a process that goes on continually in all ortki
performances: a shifting of persons. The performer fixes her attention on her
subject as if nothing else in the world existed. Yet under cover of this bond,
as her chant proceeds, she turns out to be sliding with often almost unmarked
transitions from one subject to another. The other subjects are always related
to the initial addressee, and usually of an ascendant generation, though a
subject’s wives and their parents might also be included. This, as we have seen,
is a technique for surrounding the subject with ‘people’ and a pedigree, so
crucial to his standing in the town. The big man of here and now is credited
with a wide penumbra of associations, in space and time, to support him. But
it does not usually stop there. The singer often appears to have shifted the
actual focus of her utterance, so that she is no longer attributing relationships
with others to the big man of here and now, but 1s evoking, calling upon the
others themselves — people who stand behind his shoulder: his father, his
grandfather, his mother. Whether these people are alive or dead makes no
difference to the style of address nor to the ease of the transition. They assume
in turn the role of addressee, the singer all the while keeping her eyes fixed on
the living man before her.
When the living addressee is relatively young, or when he is greatly
overshadowed by the fame of his ancestors, the transition may occur almost
immediately. Addressing Asapawo, the younger brother of the present chief
Sobaloju and the son of Toyinbo, the Sobaloju before him, who was a famous
medicine man and Oba Oyekunle’s confidant (see Chapter 6), Sangowemi
named him as ‘son of Omitoyinbo’ (Toyinbo’s full name) and then moved
straight into the ortki of this great man:
Omo Sobaldju o ku abo, omo Omitdibdé o kt abo
Omitdib6 omo Olulotan, oun naa ku afidi balé nibé un
Astinmé omo ord nisan
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O Oo
Son of Sobaloju welcome, son of Omitoyinbo welcome
Omitoyinbo son of Olulotan, I greet him too for being seated over
there
Asunmo child of Wealth-at-Isan
Oibo [Toyinbo] roofed his house with iron sheets
Omitoibo built a veranda with corrugated iron...
Because the occasion was the Egungun festival, when the ancestors were
especially close to the world of the living, Sangowemi could picture Toyinbo
‘seated over there’, and address him as ifhe were among the living celebrants.
But, as in other performances of or1ki, the bridge to this salutation was through
made easy.
her immediate subject, Asapawo. By addressing him as ‘son of Sobaloju’, ‘son
of Toyinbo’, the path to the ancestral subject is opened and the transition
The ancestral hinterland the singer thus evokes is always specific to the
immediate subject who is the occasion of her address. Though the purpose
of an oriki chant is not to record genealogy, the singer may draw on detailed
genealogical knowledge in order to evoke a succession of predecessors for the
subject of her chant. In the performance just mentioned, Sangowemi moves
on from Toyinbo to the personal ork: of a number of other men of the same
compound but senior to Toyinbo: Olulotan, Enipeede, Alade and Moronkeji.
According to Sobaloju and to Sangowemi herself, the relationships between
these names is as in Figure 3 (though other members of the compound gave
other versions). If Olulotan was Toyinbo’s father, Enipeede his father’s senior
brother, Alade his father’s father and Moronkeji his paternal great-grandfather,
then she has moved up by stages through her version of the genealogy of the
lineage, with Asapawo as the starting point. In other performances, the paths
traced back from the immediate subject may include ones that go through the
mother or the father’s mother or other relatives. They are usually shorter than
the five generations Sangowemi evokes here, and often move laterally as well
as vertically. Often a singer will evoke several different paths. The aim is not
to lay out a genealogical map, but to trace the channels through which an
individual acquired his accumulated fund of social attributes.
What this suggests is that although profusion of names and associations 1s
always desirable, with often bewildering results, there is an informing
principle directing the choice of attributions the singer heaps on her subject.
The underlying idea seems to be that a person occupies a place created by
someone who went before. Toyinbo, Olulotan, Enipeede, Alade and Moronkeji
are not named just because they are ancestors of Asapawo; rather, Asapawo
is seen to inhabit a social space created by them.
In the case of title and religious or other office, this space is formalised and
clearly defined.! A title is held to be a continuous, unbroken space stretching
backwards in time, successively occupied by different individuals who are, in

this context, nevertheless the ‘same’ person. This continuous identity is
affirmed by the oriki and by other forms of address. The head of Elemoso
Awo’s compound, for example, was an egungun priest with the important title
Alapinni, the most senior of the nine egungun office-holders. He made this
title even greater by his munificence and his formidable personality. When he
died, he was replaced as Alapinni by a small boy of the same family. During
the biennial egungun festival this boy would go with the other senior priests
to ‘heaven’ to fetch back the ancestors, and a vigil would be kept for him at
home by the women of his compound. They sang:
Mé leé sun 07
Meé leé stin oorun nkoju o
Enigboori baba wa 16 béégun seré lo...
_I cannot sleep
I cannot sleep though my eyes are heavy
Enigboori our father has gone off with the egungun...
The boy 1s addressed as the representative of the whole ide, whose ortki orile
is Enigboori. Their collective identity is concentrated in him. He is referred
to as ‘our father’, though the leading singer was in fact the boy’s own mother.
The greatness of the title of Alapinni is maintained through these oriki, and
the little boy, in occupying it, becomes an elder for as long as his role as
egungun priest is activated (that is, till the end of the festival). In taking on the
role, he takes on the attributes of a man fit to occupy that role; and,
specifically, those of his predecessor who had expanded that role and imbued
it with his own personality.
In the case of important offices such as oba and Ojomu, the most senior
town chief, it is well within the scope of ork: performers to trace a long chain
of succession. In these cases they reverse the usual direction and start from
the first office holder, working their way down through all his successors to
the present incumbent. The women of i/e Ojomu were able to trace the title
Ojomu from Olongbe in the mid-nineteenth century down through seven
other title-holders to the present one. In one solemn performance, the soloist
the succession of the next: |

marked each step with a formula signifying the death of one title-holder and
Gba elééyun yé wéré t6 foyéé lé

O waa kan...
When that one stepped aside and laid down the title
It was the turn of ....
She also used another formula that showed why this succession was being
invoked. She was calling on the accumulated powers of the Ojomu’s
254 DISJUNCTION AND TRANSITION .
predecessors to assist in the performance of a family ritual, for the present
generation can do nothing on their own:
Ara ayé 6 morod se
Ara isalé 6 waa gboro naa se.
The people of the world (the living] do not know how to do rituals
Let the people of below [the dead] come and do the ritual for us.
Even when no title and no specific position is inherited, however, everyone
enters a space prepared by his or her predecessors. Thus in Sangowemi’s
salutation of Asapawo, the oriki and the identity of Asapawo, Toyinbo,
Olulotan, Enipeede, Alade and Moronkeji can be superimposed one upon the
other, for each of these men successively occupied the space created by his
antecedents. The transference is a more diffuse expression of the notion of
reincarnation recognised when a new baby is named as the returned mother,
father, or grandparent (“Babatunde’, ‘Iyetunde’: ‘Father has returned’,
‘Mother has returned’). It is not, then, just that the alaseku (‘those whose deeds
remain’, i.e. the ancestors) are always potentially present among the living, to
be evoked by the utterance of their ortki: it is also that they are perpetually
present im and through their descendants, who occupy the spaces formerly
performance of ortki. ,
occupied by them: and that these spaces are maintained and renewed by the
The spaces are not neutral; they are not genealogical positions on a grid.
They retain the personality of those who created them. Indeed, when there
is no formal office or title involved, it could be said that the space zs that
personality, having no other dimensions. What the descendant steps into is
an ambiance, a cluster of associations, a fund of symbolic resources deriving
from the personality of his forebears. In this case the relationship is not one
of strict or exclusive inheritance, for an individual may be felt to inhabit a com-
posite space created by several different chains of succession, and conversely
several different descendants can be seen as occupying the same space at
different times. For example, on the occasion of his egungun festival, Asapawo
is the one who is represented as filling the space created successively by Moron-
keji, Alade, Olulotan and Toyinbo his father; but on other occasions his elder
brother Michael Adeosun, who took over the title Sobaloju, would be more
likely to be the focus of attention and be hailed as the occupant of this space.
Thus the present-day individual lives in his ancestors and his ancestors live
in him. This permanent presence is kept alive to consciousness in the ortki
addressed to the living, by the continual sliding of the subject away from and
through the living to those whose deeds remain.
The shifting of person in ortk: is facilitated by the lability and polyvocality
of the texts. The autonomy of the component orki in a chant makes possible
a continual shift and indeterminacy in the reference of pronouns. Each unit
may be spoken by a different voice standing in a different relation to the
subject. Not only the ‘you’ who is the subject, but also the ‘I’ who addresses
the subject, are always moving their position and depth. The two ‘persons’
involved in the powerful dyadic communication of oriki never stay still. In the
case of the ‘you’, we have already seen how the ostensible subject may almost
imperceptibly be replaced by other subjects, his predecessors in the role he
occupies or people associated with him in other ways. But the ‘T’ is even more
elusive. From moment to moment the first person singular speaks from a
different place.
In a performance of the royal oriki, Sangowemi sometimes spoke in propria
persona, as herself, in the here and now, addressing her main listeners Ajiboye
and his son Israel. From time to time she elaborated this ‘I’, quoting her own
ortki to establish a full-blown image of the oral performer so expert that she
excites the enmity of all her neighbours:
Emi Abéni i pé 6, eégun-inu omo Fakémidé
Nitori enlé apa otun 6 fojtu re weni ti ri pe lébaldba
Imoran ika ni tosi n gba
Abéni, ebo ké jade n tokankan ni ri
Kutukutu ti mo rikun dana si...
It is I, Abeni, calling you, ‘inner masquerade’ [genius], child of
Fakemide
Because the householders to the right don’t look kindly on a
person who salutes all the great obas
The ones on the left are planning wicked revenge
Abeni, the ones straight ahead desperately wish she would leave
I who from my earliest days had a mind that could follow many
paths...
Even in this construction of her own persona, a shift can be observed, from
speech coming directly out of her own mouth (J Abeni am calling you) to a
reference to herself in the third person (‘the ones straight ahead desperately
wish she would leave’). Soon afterwards, however, she is not speaking as Sang-
owemi but as a generalised transhistorical member of the public, excluded
since ancient times from the privileges of the royal lineage she is saluting:
Akanji Ajibéyé babaa mi jé n ba 0 délé ara Kookin
Tord Abébi omo Anayé mo waa ba yin délé Alara
Bi mo ti pé t6, omo Adémola Wuraola, mi i gbodo figba Alara
mumi ni Kookin
N 6 fawo ikoko sebé 1Otin
Akanji Ajiboye my father, let me go with you to the house of the
native of Kookin
Toro Abebi child of Anaye, I went with you to the house of the
Alara [the oba’s title before the move from Kookin in the
eighteenth century]
Long as I have lived there, child of Ademola Wuraola, I must not
use the Alara’s calabash to drink water at Kookin _
I don’t use his clay pot to cook soup at the Otin.
A few moments later she speaks with the voice of a member of this lineage,
participating in its privileges rather than being excluded from them:
Mo dagba dagba mi 6 ti bord Moko Orodin.
I became very old but I did not quickly lose my looks, "Moko
Orodun.
Even a chant addressed by one member of a lineage to another, where both
are insiders, undergoes the same constant shifts. The ‘I’ changes position so
rapidly and fluidly that normally the switches would not be registered by the
listener except as a satisfying quality of overall texture. In the egungun vigil
chant I have already quoted several times, the shifting position of the poetic
Meé leé sun o ]

‘speaker’ is particularly clear. It is worth quoting again, at greater length:
Mé leé sun oorun ni koju o

Enigboori babaa wa 1d béégun siré lo
Oka yanhtnyan 6 di gbongan |
Idi i mo dirt [Aguré 5
Nigba tin 6 réni ti 60 gbéruu mi
E ba n wa kékeré eégun ko gbé lé mi
Ebi won i i pojé
Kaka kébi 6 pa mi o 10
Ebi 6 yoo pa aréku lailai
N 00 puro flin iyaa mi

Maa ni babaa mi gbobi méji
Ko ni i kobi lasan
Ayéronfé, a ko iyan rugudu a nin flin baba
Babaa mi 0 nikan je é 15
Babaa mi milaa je é
Emi waa dako ok0é
Nilé Ayéronfé
Iwo naa dako ok66
O ni mo kare mOkomd6ko 20
N 0 kuku da teéddogbon tan yanyan
O se ni mo kare mokomoko
Emi naa lomo artkt ti i tori baso
Igba n mo yego nigbalé
Oki yanhunyan 6 di gbéngan 25
Idi n mo dirt kalé lAguré ,

Bi oko mo mii ké
N 60 lo réé dégbéje aso
N 60 lo reé dégbéfa 30
Aimo mi i ké
Kiké taiké
N 60 réé dégbéédégun
Enigboori, n lomo Yau i fii daso...
Oni la 6 y66 stn téjumé 6i modo
Oni la 6 yoo stn nitori omo Babalola o 35
Eki won ki i hun ojé
Mo sebi isu ta a ba sun ki i hun obe
Ara da obinrin ni ii fii mawo
Obinrin 6 mogbaleé
Iba se pobinrin
N ba gbénd éku: wék
lé mawo 40
Ayéronfé ma gbénu aso ma tun waso
N ba si gbénui ago so iléké...
Bi mo ba bimo ti 6 se ilawi ojé
N 60 ta iya é ma waa fi sow6 emu!? 45
I cannot sleep
I cannot sleep though my eyes are heavy
Enigboori our father has gone off with the egungun
A disruptive corpse was put a stop to
I tied up my bundle at Agure 5
Since I can’t find anyone to carry my bundle
Find me a little egungun to lift it onto my head.
Oye entertainers never go hungry
Masqueraders will never starve
Rather than go hungry 10
I'll tell lies to my mother
I’ll say my [dead] father is asking for two kolanuts
She won’t bring kolanuts alone
Ayeronfe, she’ll add a little pounded yam, she’ll say I’m to
give it to father
My father won’t eat it by himself 15
My father won’t eat it alone |
I went and bought 20 cowries’ worth of hot ekg
In the house of Ayeronfe
You too bought 20 cowries’ worth of hot eko
You said [sarcastically] well done, great expert on eko! 20
I didn’t even buy 25 cowries’ worth
So how can you say I’m a great expert in buying eko?
I too am the child of the masquerader who puts his head
inside the cloth
When the costume suited me in the sacred grove
A disruptive corpse was put a stop to 25
The moment I tied up my bundle at Agure —
If my husband knows how to care for me
Pll go and buy fourteen hundred cloths ,
Not knowing how to care for me
Pil go and buy twelve hundred 30
The moment he takes care of me
Pil go and buy three thousand cloths ,
Enigboori, that’s how the children of Yau buy their cloth.
Today we won’t sleep until daybreak |
Today we won’t sleep because of the child of Babalola. 35
Masqueraders’ costumes never bring retribution on the gje
I say the yam we roast never brings retribution on the knife
Women are impatient, that is why they cannot know the secret cult
Women do not know the sacred grove
If women were allowed to know the secret cult | 40
I would wear one masquerade costume after another
Ayeronfe I would wear one cloth after another
And inside the costume I would wear beads... |
If I have a child who doesn’t become a singing masquerader
Ill sell his mother and spend the money on palm wine! 45
This chant opens with the voices of the women performers, wives and
daughters of le Elemosg Awo, in their own persons. They announce that they
will keep the vigil, hard as it may be, for the sake of their ‘father’, the Alapinni.
The performance itself is the way they keep the vigil: they are therefore
speaking as people involved in a family ceremony, announcing that they
intend to do it properly. This relatively direct voice (mediated by the
conventions of the form in which it is expressed, but commenting on, and
arising from, the performers’ real situation at that moment), returns towards
the end of the excerpt, in lines 34—5, when the singers reiterate that they will
not sleep that night because of ‘the child of Babalola’, i.e. the Alapinni. But
between and around these two points the ‘I’ undergoes many transformations.
In lines 4—9 the voice speaks on behalf of the whole lineage (for an
interpretation of these lines see Chapter 2, Section 5), drawing attention to
the occupational specialisation which marks it out, i.e. masquerading. This
voice has masculine overtones, for it is the men who actually wear the
costumes and who would be responsible for ‘tying up the bundle’ in which
these are carried around. Lines 10—16, however, are clearly the voice of a child
— it could be either a boy or a girl — boasting of the trick he or she uses to get
a meal out of his or her mother. The child lies to the mother that the spirit of
the dead father is demanding kola, knowing that when she offers kola she will
add food as well, and that the people around will help to eat it. The purpose
of this unit is humorously to reiterate the theme of the ancestors with whom
the lineage specialisation is so much concerned. But lines 17—22 sound like
a speech from one co-wife of the compound addressed to another. The
speaker protests that the other person has no right to tease her about the
amount of eko she buys — after all, they both buy exactly the same amount.
(The significance of this, however, I was unable to discover.) Lines 23-6 are
spoken in the voice of a generalised male of the lineage, but lines 27—32 are
the words of a wife, boasting how much she is pampered by her wealthy
husband. The status of this passage as a quotation of someone’s words is
made clear in line 33, which rounds it up with the conclusion ‘that’s how the
children of Yau buy their cloth’, i.e. the wives who boast of the number of
cloths their husbands give them are testimony to the wealth of the lineage as
a whole.
Lines 34—5 are once again the singers in person, reaffirming their
determination to keep the vigil. Lines 36—7 are a generalised reflection on the
honour and fittingness of the profession of masquerading, and could be
spoken by anyone or everyone connected with the lineage. But the next
passage is distinctively a women’s utterance, lamenting their exclusion from
the secrets of egungun. The value of the secret from which they say they are
excluded is enhanced by the expression of desire: ‘If women could know the
secret, I would wear one costume after another’, i.e. would participate to the
full in the thrilling performances of the egungun. The fact that by this phrase
the women reveal that they do know the ‘secret’ — that egungun are actually
human beings — is a point to which I return later. What I want to call attention
to here is that the point of this passage depends on the gender of the voice
uttering it: the voice represents those who are associated with egungun but
excluded from the cult’s inner secrets, and whose frustration and desire serve
to heighten the cult’s mysterious ambiance. This voice switches markedly in
the last two lines of the passage quoted, becoming definitely male, the voice
of a husband and father in the lineage. The speaker jokes that masquerading
is so ingrained in the lineage and such a matter of pride to him that if any son
of his fails to learn the trade he will sell his mother and spend the money on
drink.
The ‘T’ of an oriki chant thus moves continually between male and female,
adult and child, insider and outsider, specific and generalised persona. It
occupies at times the position of the performer herself, at other times shifting
completely across to the addressee and speaking in a voice that could be his.
The text is all quotations, but they are not like the quotations in The Waste
Land, identifiable fragments torn from some other context. There is no
260 DISJUNCTION AND TRANSITION .
textual frame or background into which the oriki ‘quotations’ are inserted;
rather, the whole performance slides endlessly around the shifting pronouns,
: and no voice can be identified as a stable centre, as a starting point or as a
frame of reference. Bakhtin (1981, p. 69) speaks of mediaeval texts where
“The boundary lines between someone else’s speech and one’s own speech
were flexible, ambiguous, often deliberately distorted and confused. Certain
types of texts were constructed like mosaics out of the texts of others’.* Oriki
go beyond what he describes; without either reverence or parody, both of
which imply an authorial point of view, they simply are constituted out of the
speech of innumerable, shifting others, incorporated into a single speaker’s
utterance.
This is possible, in the first instance, because the units of an ortki chant all
come from different places. But this inherent polyvocality is deliberately
heightened by stylistic means. Far from being subordinated to a unifying
design of the performer’s, the diversity of voices is overlaid and reinforced by
an added indeterminacy. Shifting of persons is a positively sought effect. Even
within one coherent unit, the performer often shifts position and speaks from
different places, with a weaving motion that gives an or:ki chant its characteristic
rippling quality:
flé k6t6 won 6 ni i gba’Gbari nibi won gbé bi n lomo
Babaa mi o6dédé won 6 gbOlojé 1Eju
Yara k6t6, Ej Okomi, 6 ni i gbédin owd
A ii bimo nlran ka posé ow6
| Aha koto ni won fi i wonw6 fayaba? |
I was born
A little house can’t contain all the Igbari people in the place where
My father, the corridors cannot contain all the Olojo people at Eju
A little room,_Eju Okomi, will not accommodate all our money
We never bear a child in Iran only to sigh for money
They use little calabashes to dole out money to the royal
Wives |
This passage is a single utterance, playing with the theme of the container (the
house, the passageways, the inner room, the calabash) by which the wealth
and populousness of the Okomi people are measured. But within this unit the
performer varies the pronoun, from a generalised ‘I’ (speaking from the
position of a member of the lineage) in the first line, to an implied ‘you’ (‘my
father’, ‘Eju OKomi’) in the second and third, to ‘our’ and ‘we’ in the third
and fourth, and ‘they’ in the fifth. This habitual sliding from pronoun to
pronoun establishes as a fully developed aesthetic feature the indeterminacy
that was made possible by the oral mode of transmission and accumulation
of ortkt.
DISJUNCTION AND JUXTAPOSITION 261
If orikt cross boundaries between persons, then, they do so by a continual

transference and alternation of voices. The moving ‘T’ characteristic of ortki
texts effects an interpenetration of person. The performer frequently speaks
from the position of the addressee — as a member of his or her lineage, or, in
the case of personal ortki, with his own words, the sayings which he is
remembered by. But at the same time she always retains the powerful dyadic
bond that locks speaker and hearer together for as long as the address
continues. She may thus speak simultaneously as another person and to him,
just as she may speak simultaneously as ‘herself’, the persona she constructs
as utterer in the performance, and as representative of many other categories
of person. The ‘person’ she addresses sometimes coincides more or less with
the actual, living man or woman before her, sometimes with a generalised
representative of the group, sometimes with other positions in the social map.
These positions are never fixed in orik1, and the address slides easily from one
position to another. Thus the capacity to open channels and effect a
confluence of identities is built into the very composition of orik1, revealing
that this is indeed what they are for.
3. DISSUNCTION AND JUXTAPOSITION
The disjunctive juxtapositions so characteristic of or1ki need to be looked at
more closely. For if ortki are above all a means of crossing boundaries and
transcending divisions in the very act of affirming differences, then the
divisions and disjunctions within the text itself are of particular significance.
Gaps, like shifting persons, are not merely the by-product of a particular
mode of composition and transmission: they are also a deliberately inserted
stylistic feature. To the existing disjunctions, supplementary ones are added.
The art of ortki is above all the art of handling gaps.
These gaps are discontinuities between what I have called textual ‘units’,
and to pursue the analysis this notion of the unit must be reviewed. A
performance of orki is put together out of more-or-less ready-made, more-
or-less internally coherent, more-or-less fixed blocks of text. A block can be
identified by form and meaning: ifit is stylistically patterned and semantically
unified it is reasonable to treat it as one item and to assume (though with less
certainty) that it originated as a single composition. These subjective
identifications can be corroborated by quoting the first line. People will
complete it if there are other lines that are felt to belong with it. But the
definition of these blocks as ‘units’ is already misleading and problematic.
The notion of units carries with it the implication of regularity: units in
counting and measuring are after all defined by their uniformity. The
conception is quite appropriate to some praise poetry: Sotho dthoko and Zulu
izibongo, for instance, can be divided into units because they are made up of
stanzas of a regular pattern even if of varying lengths (Kunene, 1971, Damane
and Sanders, 1974; Cope, 1968). But in ortki, a ‘unit’ can be anything from
a single phrase to an extended, internally patterned and subdivided passage.
The nominalised phrase
Obumubimu-sagbé-lérigbdlorigbd
One who dips and drinks, dips and drinks, and makes the beer
barrel slosh noisily
is an oriki that stands alone, complete in itself, and it can therefore be treated
as aunit. But in the ork: orile of Omu, quoted and discussed in Chapter 5, the
performer unfolds a long and elaborate textual structure before ‘landing’, that
is, before arriving at the single key point the passage is designed to display.
The whole of the passage introducing in turn the goat, the sheep, the ‘mother
hen/Who rejoices at the sight of maize’, and the ‘massive horse/Barrel-
bellied’, and concluding with the emblematic “They use a great wooden dish
to drink horse-broth at Omu’, would have to be treated as a single unit. Lists,
like the seventeen rivers of Okuku (see Note 3 to Chapter 5), and incorporated
genres like are (quoted in Chapter 3) can produce even longer ‘units’ than
this. One unit and the next may have nothing, except a putative internal
coherence, to make them comparable. Structurally as well as thematically
they may be quite unlike; and when passages are borrowed from other genres,
remaining recognisable as such, there may be an impression of shifting modes
between one passage and the next.
‘Units’ that are as heterogeneous as this are not easy to identify with
confidence. It is not always possible to decide whether a sequence of lines
really goes together, forming a coherent block, or not. People experience and
remember them differently, and what to one person is an invariable sequence
may not be to another. Moreover, some performers — those who are most
skilful and experienced — will deliberately break up patterned sequences of
text, inserting interjections of other ortki, or simply quoting the first line of a
passage and leaving the rest to the hearer to supply. She may come back to
it and treat it more fully later in the performance, or she: may leave the
quotation uncompleted. Oriki orile, the best-known and most highly patterned
of ortk1, are most often treated like this. Thus even though there are a great
many extensive and coherent passages in ortki, there is nothing that cannot be
broken up. Almost any utterance and almost any part of an utterance can thus
be juxtaposed with any other.
This is possible not just because of the autonomous origins of each ‘unit’,
but because the style of oriki is disjunctive. There is a general absence of
connectives even within semantically coherent passages. This makes the
component parts of any utterance potentially free-standing; grammatically,
they are self-sufficient even when semantically they are not. The following
two lines from the ortki of de Oba are a unit in the sense of having a single total
meaning; when someone says the first line people will automatically complete
it with the second. Nevertheless the four clauses that make it up are left
unconnected:
Mo kowe, mii kdjé
Mo waa k6jo tan, ij6 1 yo mi lénu.
I learnt to swim, I didn’t learn to dance
I finished learning to dance, dancing was a nuisance.
The sense of the passage is this: being a member of the royal family, which
‘owns’ the River Otin and other major rivers flowing past the town, the subject
is credited with having been able to swim even before he or she could dance.
Having learnt to dance, however, the subject has become so good at it that she
or he is never allowed to rest; thus dancing has become a ‘burden’ — an ironical
way of saying that it was his or her pride and joy. The implication is that the
subject is admired, the centre of attention, as in other similar passages
discussed in Chapter 6. This passage is made up of four short sentences, and
with the possible exception of wad in the third sentence, which has the
suggestion of ‘then I finished learning to dance’, there is no connective
between any of them. The sentences are just jammed up against each other,
the connections implied only by the requirements of the sense.
This kind of paratactic structure is highly characteristic of oriki. The
coherence ofa succession of statements is often implied not by explicit linking
but by making them parallel to each other in structure, and variants of each
other in meaning.° Even metaphor, which is nothing if not a fusion of ideas,
is accomplished most often in or1ki by a bare sequence of statements:
Ajé funfun ni i séri ow6
Neké funfun ni i séri oldrisa
Omo ti mo ba wu 6 bi
Emi Abiké Ométanbajé
Mo momé ni un ni yoo sérii mi.’
Silver coins bear witness to wealth
White beads bear witness to a worshipper
Whatever child I may bear
I, Abike, “The child put an end to disgrace’,
I say, indeed, he will bear witness for me.
The formal simplicity of this passage of rara tyawo conceals a comparison
based on a polysemic use of séri, to bear witness, vouch for or testify to. Ajé
funfun nii séri owd: “White wealth vouches for money’, that is, the shining silver
appearance of coins shows their genuineness and value, and they in turn bear
witness to the wealth of their possessor. [/éké funfun ntt séri olorisa: “White beads
vouch for the devotee’, that is, the beads worn by the orisa worshipper testify
to her membership of a cult, being a public and incontrovertible mark of her
identity as a genuine devotee. Omo timo bad wu o bi... un ni-yoo sérii mi: the child
the bride hopes to have will be proof that she is a genuine wife, a complete
woman, and the child, by resembling the father, will testify to her fidelity. Ayé
fSunfun (white or silver coins) and iéké funfun (white beads), both of which are
shining, valuable and beautiful things, are being used metaphorically to
suggest the beauty and value of the child. The relation in which these things
stand to their owners, as testimonies to their genuineness, is also transferred
metaphorically to the relation between child and mother. But the form of this
passage is merely three parallel statements, the third one being elaborated at
greater length and thus showing that it is the key statement, the others being
preparation and support for it. Formally, the passage is identical to those
discussed in Chapter 5, in which a ‘slot’ is prepared for a key emblem of an
orile. In those passages, the parallel sequences of statements were not
metaphorical. For example, in the passage just reviewed, ‘If a goat/Is lost at
Omu...’, the goat, sheep and chicken are not metaphors for the orile emblem,
the horse, they are rather precursors of it. The kind of relationship between the
structurally-parallel statements is in both cases left unstated. The difference
in the nature of the implied links is not visible in the form. |
Parts of utterances, therefore, often have the capacity to stand alone.
Sometimes they continue to imply the rest of the utterance, but sometimes
they detach themselves and function differently in a new context. Rather than
seeing an oriki text as a ‘whole’, divisible into a number of discrete ‘parts’, it
might be more productive to see the performance as a process of juxtaposing
elements from a repertoire of utterances which float: that is, elements which
make sense when taken on their own but which can be brought into
conjunction with other elements in variable combinations and variable
contexts, acquiring new meanings in the process. Unlike in the epics which
are the basis of Parry and Lord’s oral formulaic theory, these recombinations
are not restricted by the requirements of a narrative line. The ‘units’ are rarely
entirely discontinuous, but they are equally rarely glued permanently together.
The possibilities open to the performer are great, but her methods of |
combination and selection are far from random. Let me illustrate this with
passages from a performance by Sangowemi in honour of Jayeola, the father
of the blind babalawo Gbotifayo discussed in Chapter 6 and Sangowemi’s own
great-great-grandfather. One of Jayeola’s ortki is aldyd 16 logan, ‘It is the
courageous person who gets the anthill’. This is a proverb-like formulation
meaning “Only a daring person can seize the opportunity to get what he or she
wants’. It could be applied to other subjects than Jayeola, but for some reason
— perhaps because it was a favourite saying of his — it has become specially
associated with him. This is how it occurs the first time in Sangowemi’s chant:
Omo Aladé alaya 16 logan
Ayésemi abisuu-yagba-oge
Child of Alade, ‘It is the courageous person who gets the anthill’
Ayesemi, owner of yams that break the girls’ calabashes
The second line commends Jayeola (Ayesemi) for having a farm that produces
yams so large, or in such large quantities, that they break the calabashes in
which the girls carry them home. Sangowemi goes on to develop the theme
of the farm: ‘If you see something huge, going right down to the river, that’s
Jayeola’s farm...’ In this passage, the idea behind aldyd ié logan has nothing
much to do with the idea of abisuui-~yagbd-oge. They deal with separate aspects
of Jayeola’s reputation. But they are held together by their similarity of form.
The nominalising prefix ab- in abisuu-yagbd-oge is equivalent in structure and
function to the nominalising prefix alin aldaya 16 logan.
Later in the performance, however, she pairs alaya lo logan with a different
second line:
Aladé, alaya 16 logan
Gbogbo ojo 6 maa ko tilé Agbaa lo
Alade, ‘it’s the courageous person who gets the anthill’
Let all the cowards go off to Agbaa or somewhere
Here the structure of the second line is quite different from that of the first,
but in meaning it is a continuation of it. The brave get the prizes: cowards
should go off, no-one cares where. (This is the interpretation Sangowemiherself
gave; it seems possible, however, that at one time, or to certain people, the
reference to Agbaa — a town in the Osun area — had a more specific meaning.)
Thus in each case alaya 16 logan seems to ‘go with’ the line that follows it, the
first time because it matches structurally, the second time because it follows
semantically. And aldyd 16 logan could equally well be interjected into a
passage as a free-standing epithet having no formal or semantic link with the
lines surrounding it.
As fragments of text are juxtaposed, the skilled performer often makes
temporary adjustments to accommodate them. These adjustments do not
always involve structural parallelism or semantic continuity, as in the examples
just given. All kinds of links can be extended. Compare the following two
passages, from the same Jayeola text:
(a) Tjif ja won 0 gbolo
Efaufa lle won 6 gbdké
Iji jako 6 yan
Jayéola, Oyéédokun, babaa mi akoikoi ekun
The storm rages, it cannot carry away the grinding stone
The gentle breeze cannot carry away the hill
The monkey robbed the farm, it swaggered
Jayeola, Oyedokun, my father the ferocious leopard
(b) Omo ijii j4 won 6 gbdlo
Efaufa 141é won 6 gbdké
Bi 6 wu éfuufa lélé, Ayindé, ni i dari igbé si
Bi 6 wu oléwo6 eni ni i ranni...
Child of “The storm rages, it cannot carry away the
treetops
grinding stone’
‘The gentle breeze cannot carry away the hill’
Wherever the gentle breeze wishes, Ayinde, it can turn the
Wherever a master wishes he can send his slave...

Both of these passages begin with a pair of lines which are a standard
formulation in ortki to praise unassailability: the subject, like an immoveable
hill or a grinding stone, cannot be shifted by the attacks of his enemies. The
first passage then proceeds Jji jdko 6 yan... The link here is the similarity in
sound, between #ii ja (the storm rages) and #ji 74 [oko] (the monkey plucks
(fruits from the farm]). The monkey, robbing the farm and then swaggering
away with impunity, is another familiar image of the big man’s power — his
ability to do outrageous things and get away with it. The last line then goes
with the preceding one because it is another animal image — a leopard — this
time suggesting the terrifying and ferocious aspect of the big man’s power.
But in the second passage, Sangowemi picks up not the sound of #7474 but
the sense of éfiuifu lélé (the gentle breeze), and she goes on to elaborate the idea
of the breeze into a metaphor for a great master, whose servants bow to his
behest as the trees do to the wind. Notice however that though the words
bfuufu léelé’ carry through, providing a kind of continuity, their zmportis actually
reversed as she moves from one idea to the next. In the opening lines the
subject is like a mountain, and his enemies are like the wind, powerless to move
the mountain. But in the subsequent lines, the subject is like the wind, and his
bondsmen are like the treetops which even a gentle breeze can bend. Both,
of course, are images of power, but in the first it is the power to withstand the
wind, and in the second it is the power of the wind, that is attributed to the
subject. It is as if Sangowemi were suddenly reminded by the phrase ¢gfuufu
lélé of another chunk of orikz, and veers off into it letting the word association
stand as the only link. In this way the performer can take off in different
directions from the same chunk of text, stringing the next bit on with the most
temporary and tenuous of connections.
Sometimes utterances take on a new significance when they appear in new
textual surroundings. There is a good example in another performance, this
time by Faderera, where the phrase Eléyin ni ijogun érin recurs several times.
This is a proverb-like expression meaning, literally, “The owner of teeth is the
one who gets the inheritance of laughter’, that is, ‘It’s the person with
beautiful teeth who benefits from laughing’. Attributed to a subject, as a free-
standing oriki unit, it would be taken to be praise of his or her appearance and
cheerfulness, embodied in a dazzling smile. But at one point in Faderera’s
chant, she hooked it into a context where it did other work. It became an
extremely subtle image for an abstract notion of mutuality:
Babaa mi Akandé mo riba orin-in re ki n t6 maa baré lo
Eé ni i hun mi, iran babaa mi ni i sawo
Eki diran oje, OJ¢ diran éku o
Eléyin ni i jogun érin
Ki ni yii diran baba to bi mi.
My father Akande I pay homage to your song before I go on with
my performance
It will not bring retribution on me, my father’s lineage is one of
diviners
The masquerade costume is of the gje entertainers, the oye
entertainers are of the masquerade costume
The owner of teeth is the one who inherits laughter
This thing belongs to the lineage of my father who begot me.
This is the performer’s customary acknowledgement of her predecessors and
teachers. Her performance is her father’s, to whom she pays homage. She
prays that it will bring no ill-effects, stating that oral performance is an
attribute of her father’s people. The masquerade costume belongs to the ge,
that is the lineages associated with egungun entertainment; the ge in turn are
defined as a group by their association with the masquerade costume — they
‘belong’ to the costume just as the costume ‘belongs’ to them. In the same
way, having white teeth predisposes one to laughter, just as laughter displays
the teeth. The skill she is displaying in performance both derives from, and
is justified by, her membership of a lineage of babalawo. For that reason, she
says, her father’s spirit will ensure that she does it well and without shame.
As in the earlier example, the complex metaphorical relationships in this
passage are only implied by the contiguity of a number of independent
statements. The repetition of the key word zran (lineage, generation) establishes
a semantic continuity between the second and third lines. It also establishes
a semantic parallelism between the third and fifth lines, of the form “The
costume belongs to the lineage of entertainers...“this thing” [i.e. oral
performance] belongs to the lineage of my father’. Eléyin ni 1 jogun érin, the
phrase under discussion, is inserted between these two matching lines, and
this allows its abstract meaning to emerge. It functions here as an image of a
kind of mutuality or self-reinforcement. Like the apparently simple but
actually subtle evocation of the relations between costume, masquerader and
lineage (éku diran ojé, dj¢ diran éku) the phrase eléyin ni 1 jogun érin looks like
a standard praise-epithet but functions as a profound metaphor for the
relationship between the performer’s art and her father’s lineage. But a few
minutes later she uses the same expression again, as an ordinary free-standing
unit of praise commending the subject’s attractive smile.
There is often a shifting, drifting effect in ortkz as potentially ‘free’ utterances
are brought into and out of contiguity with each other. There is a haunting
example in the chant for the dead Sango priestess, discussed in Chapter 4.
One passage of this text runs:
Efantohun alotilému
—Omo a-rinu-muti-0j0, omo alotilému
Basé ba mumi a tan ninu re
Agéré to ba mumi 4 jodlé
Onisangé Arinké maa bémi lo, émi 66 maa sofe
Efantohtin m4a bémi lo, émi 60 maa sofe
Basé ba mumi 4 si tan rind asé
Arinké bigéré t6 ba mumi 4 joolé
Amemu ti i be 16ké Aga 0, Efuntéhun ni i se, ’mo alotilému.?
Efuntohun, one who has both liquor and palm wine
Child of one who has the stomach for drinking liquor daily, child
of one who has both liquor and palm wine
lament }
If the sieve drinks water, it will all run out
The woven fish-trap, if it drinks water, it will leak away
Sango-worshipper Arinke, go with the water, I will stay and
Efuntohun go with the water, I will stay and lament

If the sieve drinks water, it will all run out
Arinke, if the woven fish-trap drinks water it will leak away
The palm-wine drinker who is up at Aga, it’s Efuntohun, child of
one who has both liquor and palm wine.
This passage begins by hailing Efuntohun with the personal orikz ‘one-who-
has-both-liquor-and-palm-wine’ and ‘child of [1.e. associated with] one who
has the stomach for drinking liquor daily’: the ork: of a flamboyant, generous
and wealthy figure in the town. The verb mu (to drink) is picked up from the
second line and becomes the pivot on which the performer now turns her
chant in a new direction. The next two lines are a well-known proverbial
formulation to the effect that it is no use trying to keep water in an open
wickerwork structure like a sieve or a fish-trap. It is used to convey the
hopelessness or fruitlessness of a given undertaking. In the context of this
chant, performed immediately after the death of Efuntohun, it expresses a
sense of loss and suggests the impossibility of imprisoning and detaining a
departing soul. Life is like the water which leaks ineluctibly away. In line five,
however, it is the word om: [water] which has become the pivotal one. The
water is now pictured not as a measurable quantity escaping a small container,

but as a great river which carries the dead away to the other world. The
performer says farewell to Efuntohun as she is swept off, promising to stay (on
the riverbank) and lament her passing. She then retraces the steps by which
she has arrived at this image, returning first to the sieve and fish-trap and then
to the drinking of palm wine and liquor. The imagery of liquidity, of draining
and flowing, establishes a consistent ambiance appropriate to the theme of
loss, grief, change and death. But the way one ‘unit’ gives way to another
seems adventitious rather than in conformity to some prior overall schema.
The performer seems herself to be drifting in the stream of her own utterance,
and eddies carry her now this way, now that.
So although it is a necessary starting point in the analysis, the notion of the
autonomous, self-sufficient unit does not take us all that far. Almost any
verbal formulation in oriki can be broken off, made to stand on its own, and
jammed up against other formulations in a manner which positively exaggerates
the discontinuity between them. In this sense the style of orzkz is essentially
disjunctive. But almost any gap, by the same token, can be bridged. The links
may. be solid planks of structural symmetry, laid out in parallelism and
repetition. Or they may be so fragile as to look like sleight of hand on the
performer’s part: a single stray word, not prominent in one unit, may become
the key word of the next, or a chance resemblance in sound may be enough
to set her off in a new direction.
The predominant impression is of utterances that ‘go together’ in one way
or another without having been composed exclusively for each other. In ortkz.
orde there is a higher proportion than in other kinds of ortki of solid and
enduring bridges, producing long patterned sequences. In personal ortki
there is a greater tendency for the links to be tenuous and for the text to seem
to shift from moment to moment. There are also great differences in
performers’ styles: some performers produce far more gaps than others.
In the process of becoming habituated to the chanting of oriki, the performer
becomes familiar not only with the textual materials on which she will draw
but also with ways of moving on within a chant. If her materials are a repertoire
of potentially or actually free-standing utterances, not grammatically linked
to the utterances that co-exist with them in her repertoire, then her skill is to
play with disjunction. The underlying presence of the gap is the grounds and
condition of possibility of her art. It is the gap which makes her performance
exciting, as she throws out one fragile and temporary bridge after another.
There are no rules about how this is to be done. But the infinite variety and
unpredictability of her practice is produced by what Bourdieu (1977) has
called a ‘disposition’ that derives from a few basic principles.’ Any kind of
resemblance (including opposition and strong contrast) can be used to bring
two utterances into conjunction: syntactic, semantic, lexical, tonal; through
sound, through structure or through meaning. The resemblance can amount
to almost complete identity, or it can be so faint as to be almost imperceptible.
It can be in one aspect only, in several or in all. The more definite the
resemblance is, the more the sequence will tend to ‘stick’, becoming fixed in
the performer’s mind and always performed — by her at least — in the same
order. But even in strongly stuck-together sets of lines, the performer can break
in, with interjected passages, or break off, curtailing the passage altogether.
The more skilled a performer is, the more she will produce conjunctions
and juxtapositions which create tension. If too many lines:resemble each
other too strongly — if there is too much obvious parallelism and patterning
— the performance is felt to be dull. This is why old people in Okuku would
complain about young girls’ performances of rara tyawo, which tended to
consist of long stretches of highly patterned oriki orile without interjections or
interruptions to relieve the monotony. If not enough lines resemble each
other, on the other hand, the chant is said to be superficial, presumably
because it is so fragmented that it seems incapable of holding any deep
information. This was a comment made about Sangowemi sometimes. She
broke off, interjected and changed course so much that some people felt that
she never got to the heart of the orikz. The women whose performances were
most highly regarded were the older wives who had become experts in their
households and led the chanting in public and domestic ceremonies without
being regarded as entertainers or professionals. These women’s performances
balanced difference and resemblance, disjunction and continuity, in a way
that called attention to the excitement of risk that lay at the centre of the poetic
project. There always seemed to be the possibility that the singer would come
to a stop, that a gap would extend itself and, becoming uncrossable, would
end in silence. This often actually happened with young and inexperienced
performers. Slightly more experienced ones, instead of breaking down
completely, would carry on by fits and starts as new items occurred to them.
But skilful singers seemed deliberately to play on this fear, throwing up gaps
in the act of crossing them. The goal seems to be to maintain an intensity of
disjunctiveness. From moment to moment, the performer extends slender
threads of connection which are no sooner made than abandoned, one
congruence no sooner proposed than left behind while the performer moves
on to another. It is this that gives ortki chants their characteristic weaving,
shifting, fragmenting and merging quality so fascinating to listen to. Thus the
mode in which the text is constructed is the means by which it fulfils its
function of merging personalities and crossing gaps between beings in the act
of asserting their unique individuality. |
4. THE ORIKI OF WOMEN
Women’s public faces are less differentiated than those of men. The past of
Okuku is thickly populated with colourful, idiosyncratic big men, remembered
in affectionate detail for their witticisms, their oddities and their achievements.
THE ORIKI OF WOMEN 271
Though everyone agrees that there were big women too, their personalities
rarely emerge in stories about the past. They are as if submerged in the family
or cult in which they operated. At any celebration, the relative social
prominence of men and women will be easy to observe. The big men, heavy,
authoritative, individual, few in number, sit as if enthroned. Their faces are
memorable, their names readily imparted to the visitor. They drink beer and
eat pounded yam. In some other room, or out in the corridor, sit a long row
of women. They will be on the floor, they will be eating eko, they will be drinking
Fanta or at best palm wine. They do not spring out as individual personalities.
It is much harder to find out who is who. When people attempt to distinguish
them in conversation, it is often through their husband or their cult [ tydwo
Ladgbé — éyi kékeré to sésé kd s6do ré’ (‘the wife of Laagbe — the young one who’s
just come to his house’), “yd Oldtin ié Oluode’: ‘the Otin woman of ile
Oluode’)]. Women undertake their public duties in large groups. At every
funeral and festival, teams of women in ‘ankoo’ go in procession round the
town. Daughters who have married bring back groups of thirty or forty of their
‘co-wives’ to important family events, and no festivity can go forward without
an influx of female relatives to collect firewood, cook the food and serve the
guests. Women are publicly visible mainly as members of a female crowd (one
reason, no doubt, why many people believe that women outnumber men in
the proportion of five to one — a statistic always cited in justification of
polygyny!).
However, despite their lesser social salience, women do become the object
of attention as individuals from time to time. A woman can be the principal
‘celebrant’ on certain occasions (for instance, at a funeral, if she is the
daughter of the deceased; at a festival, if she is a priestess of the cult; at a
wedding, if she is the bride). On these occasions ortki will be addressed to her.
In most cases, however, these oriki will be ortki orile or the ortki of her father
or other ancestors. In most modern events this is of course true of men as well:
the appellation slides quickly over the here-and-now subject to layers of other
subjects that stand behind him in the past. But the point is that almost all the
personal ork thus attributed through living people to dead ones or from dead
ones to the living are the personal ork: of men. It is unusual to find personal
oriki of women. If a woman is saluted through her dead mother, it will be the
mother’s ortki orile — the onki of group membership — not individual,
idiosyncratic, personal oriki that are heard. The ortk: that are composed for
women tend to be salutations of motherhood in general, applicable to all
mothers, not to differentiated individuals. Women can be praised for suffering
the pains of childbirth and the drudgery of motherhood, or for producing one
good son rather than thirty useless ones. The commemoration of unique
personalities is not developed as it is in the oriki addressed to men.
But a few women do have personal ortkz. In those that I have been able to
find, there are two strongly marked characteristics. The first is that the
woman’s claim to fame is expressed at least partly in terms of the man she
married or the children she bore. The second, however, is that apart from this
emphasis, these ork are not essentially different from those of men. The same
conception of power, the same qualities of character are portrayed in the same
idiom. The ‘first’ Iyalode, wife of Winyomi of zle Oluode, was saluted thus:
Durddola n 16 jéyalode nilé oléri ode.
Isokunrénké iyako mi, Ogé-Imélé
Afooro jori eja
lyako mi a-ro-mini joyé Arésa
Ko bénikan soré
Durddola toba nii se
Opéléngé Old6kukt Durédolé omoldju Oluode.
Durodola was the Iyalode in the house of the Head of the Hunters
Isokunronke my husband’s mother, Oge-Imele
One who rises to eat the heads of fish
My husband’s mother, one who is so good-looking she takes the
title of Aresa
She makes friends with no-one
Durodola takes the oba’s part
The slender friend of the Olokuku, Durodola the favourite wife of
the Head of the Hunters.
Durodola is introduced as the Iyalode ‘in the house of the Head of the
Hunters’, and at the end of the passage the reference is amplified to ‘Durodola
the favourite wife of the Head of the Hunters’. Her position as wife and her
good standing in the eyes of her husband are felt to be significant. But
Durodola is clearly also a great figure in the town in her own right. The same
qualities are vaunted, and by the same rhetorical ploys, as in men’s personal
ortki. Durodola lives in a wealthy household (she rises to eat the heads of fish,
a rich diet). She is beautiful, and the beauty implies qualities of personality
—calm, sufficiency, magnetism — which attracts to her a senior title. She knows
her own mind, stands aloof, ‘makes friends with no-one’ (that is, forms no
political alliances within the town), but rather stays loyal to the oba, earning
his affection.
| Personal onki of women, like those of men, affirm simultaneously their
subject’s good background and her capacity to stand out against that
background, surpassing all those who surround her. A daughter of ile Aro-
Isale, said to have married the early oba Adeoba (but possibly one of Adegba’s
royal descendants), was given these ortki:
Enikééjinmi nké, Mogbéola abébé soso omo ord nisan
Enikééjinmi omo adoko nibi ow6 gbé so
Abébé s6s6 n tiibi 6 jé 6 réko ni
O waa se kélé, 6 waa bddlé Adéoba
Arinké alaragbaida
O yo ninu egbé da daa da
A-seniyan-lakun-bi-ileke
Aimd6jé ni i jalejo6 j6
Iya mi Arinké 1é jé jalejd lo
Omo tité lewé ata
Ogogo Aran omo ekolé yo
Nbi 6 wu Arinké n 16 sofé é lo
N 161 relé Adéoba o
O waa sofé réPo
O wArinké iye wa 6 sofé rOfa
O wArinké n 16 sofé réJagb6
Gba 6 wArinké n 16 sofé é relé oba..."!
What about Enikeejinmi, Mogbeola, one whom we plead with to
dress up, child of ‘Wealth at Isan’
Enikeejinmi, child of one who finds lovers where money is plenty
One whom we plead with to dress up, one whose family [status]
prevented her from finding a husband
She proceeded gently and arrived at the house of [i.e. married]
Adeoba
Arinke one who has everything anyone could want
She stands out among her peers most distinctly
She’s a person who stands out like the middle bead in a string
Not knowing how to dance allows the visitors to dance
My mother Arinke knows how to dance better than the visitors
Child ‘of “The pepper leaf spreads’
Real native of Aran, child of “The worm rejoices’
Arinke can go masquerading wherever she likes
So she went to the house of Adeoba
She went entertaining to Ipo
Our mother Arinke felt like going entertaining to Ofa, so she went
Arinke felt like going entertaining to jagbo, so she went
And when she felt like it, she went entertaining to the house of the
oba.
Arinke’s greatest achievement, as represented here, is the fact that she
married the oba. It is for this reason that she is remembered among her
descendants. But the metaphors with which the ortki establish her draw on the
same things as men’s oriki. She comes from such a good family that it is hard
for her to find a suitable husband: but eventually (by ‘proceeding gently’) she
outdoes all her sisters and marries the oba himself. Like Adeoba her husband
(see Chapter 6) she is compared to a bead which ‘divides the string’, 1.e. stands
out conspicuously amongst her neighbours, and, again like him, she is noted
for her superlative dancing. With a characteristic hairpin-bend effect, her ortki
says that normally visitors get a chance to show off their dancing because the
locals, not being experts, are shy; but Arinke knows how to outdance even the
visitors. In this passage, even the oriki orile shared by all of tle Aro-Isale (and
also by ale Baale and z/le Balogun — see the Appendix) are adapted to make a
personal comment about Arinke. People of Aran, whose profession is gje
masquerading, are praised for their travels: wherever they go, they are
welcomed and rewarded for their performances. These salutations can be
applied to any ‘child of Aran’; but Sangowemi, the performer of this chant,
gives the attributions a final twist. Arinke can travel anywhere and be well
received: to Ajase-Ipo, to Ofa, to Ijagbo (all neighbouring towns to the north
and east of Okuku), but eventually she ‘goes entertaining’ to the oba’s palace,
and stays there as his wife. Even more than the Iyalode Durodola, Arinke is
remembered for the man she married; but in other respects, these ortkz are
very close in tone and imagery to the personal oriki of big men. There are no
recognisably ‘women’s oriki’. |
Durodola was famous as the Iyalode, the chief of the women. Arinke was
famous as the wife of the oba. But one of the most important arenas in which
women exercised power and influence were the cults. Asked about big women
of the past, chief Sobaloju said: |
Those whom we can call great women in the old days: were those who
practised traditional religion. They could say what'was going to happen,
and it would happen. There were many of them, in all cults. Some were
greater than others. I don’t know their names. They were devotees of
Oya, of Osun, of Sango, of Enle, of Orisaala — all kinds.
The apparent anonymity of this exercise of power did not prevent people
— men as well as women — from recognising its existence. Within the cults,
great women devotees of the past are frequently commemorated in oriki
performances. The idiom in which this is done is highly significant. Ere-Osun,
one of Sangowemi’s age-mates and a skilled performer, was a member of the
Erinle cult. One of her predecessors in the cult was Aworoka, whose role as
ancestress of a large body of people has already been discussed in Chapter 5.
The scattered descendants of Aworoka recognise a relationship with each
other through their common descent from her, though being a woman she did
not create ‘place’ in a patrilineage which any of them could: step into. What
she did create, however, was cult responsibilities and powers. Aworoka was
following terms: ,
Ere-Osun’s mother’s mother, and Ere-Osun describes her inheritance in the
Aworoka ni ni ki un
Oisa ti ri be léri Awéroka ni i ki un
Awon waa lo sidii érisa awon
Won waa lo ni minimini
Won ri lo minimini
Olo6ri enimojési
Awon 16 k6 n JEnlé rilé omi
O waa lo sérun ké dé mé ebora té 0 ri n ni ni baa je
Awon og4 oniworddguin 0 0 o
Awon naa 16 ké mi ni orokéto
O waa deni
O déji
O déta
Oga oniwdrddgun ti n be LOyé-moko
Nlée Kookin
Ayabt l6na térd
Adébinpé
Alénruurt orin lénu
Paakdéa bdétébotée
Adébinpé alénirdurt orin lénu
Awon 16 ké mi niworddgun n 6 ni i sise
: Mo kéré nnti oniwordogun o
Awon naa 16 ran n Idde n 6 ni i sdde lo...
Aworoka 1s the one I am saluting
It’s the orisa upon Aworoka’s head [i.e. that devolved upon her]
that I am saluting
Then she went to the shrine of her ortsa
She went dressed very neatly
She went all spick and span
Head of all the lesser cult members
It was she who taught me about Enle at the bottom of the water
Then she went to heaven and didn’t come back, she’s dining there
in the company of that spirit that you know of
She, the master of the praise-singers
It was she who imparted to me the gift of the gab
There was one
There were two
There were three
Masters of praise-singing at Oye-moko
In the town of Kookin
Where travellers stop to drink
Adebinpe
One who has all kinds of songs on her lips
Little masquerade that frays its lips with talking!
Adebinpe, one who has all kinds of songs on her lips
She was the one who taught me praise-singing, I will not make any
mistakes
outing... .
I am small among the praise-singers
It was they who sent me out, I will not make any mistakes in my
At the beginning of this passage the importance of inheritance of the orisa

itself is referred to. Aworoka, a former devotee of the cult, now dead, is saluted
in conjunction with her orisa, a manifestation of Erinle: and it is explicitly
stated that this manifestation was ‘on her head’, i.e. devolved upon her from
some even earlier member of the cult. Aworoka was keeping open a place in
the cult, a place now occupied by someone else. It is not just a slot in the cult
membership that Aworoka left behind to be filled, but a relationship with the
spiritual world — a relationship which her successor has a duty to maintain.
And the second crucial feature of this situation is the fact that Aworoka is
remembered, above all, for her gifts as a praise-singer. She is not just a
matriarchal figure in the cult (olori onimojesi — literally the head of all the
mothers of toddlers, i.e. other female cultmembers); she is also oga oniworoogun,
the master of the vocalists. Ere-Osun acknowledges Aworokaas the one from
whom she has inherited place: the place belonging to a leading vocalist in the
cult. She pays tribute by saying that Aworoka taught her everything, and that
she herself is a novice. It is only by the good will and protective beneficence
of Aworoka and the other expert vocalists of former times (she prepares at one
point to name two others, but does not do so) that she can carry out her
assignment without mishap.
It is common in all oki performances for the performer to acknowledge
his or her teacher. But the text just quoted goes further than this. It suggests
that the cult itselfis conceived in terms of great chanters. Ere-Osun of this text
was not a specialist performer who would routinely pay homage to her
predecessors in the praise-singing profession. Neither was her subject,
Aworoka. Aworoka’s prominence arose rather from her position as a senior
member of the Erinle cult. But her position in the cult was conceived in terms
ofher mastery of the cult chant. The past of the Erinle devotees, that is, is seen
as the transmission not so much of title or office but of a capacity to
communicate. The great devotees are those who can best cross boundaries
between mortal beings and spiritual ones.
If women “are not interested in being known’ in public, one reason may be,
as suggested in Chapter 6, that in women’s careers reputation:cannot play the
same role in the cycle of self-aggrandisement as it does in men’s; it is therefore
dangerously liable to turn sour, to become a reputation for evil. But an
underlying, less easily elicited explanation is that women’s power is
acknowledged but not made visible in the development of public personality,
as among men, because women are above all the mediators and the knowers.
PROFUSION AND DIFFERENCE 277
If it is they who link compounds through marriage, it is also they who are in
charge of the channels of utterance through which powers flow between
beings. So when women do have orki, these oriki dwell on the woman’s
mediating role as wife or mother; or on her mastery of the oral arts that open
the boundaries between humans and spirits, living and dead. A master of the
vocalists does not need to be a publicly recognised figure, for it is her activity
which creates the conditions of possibility for the development of all public
personalities and for their enhancement through contacts with the spiritual
world.
But women who do have their own ortki participate in the public idiom of
power and grandeur. There is no women’s style, no special womanly content.
Women can be as tough, proud, magnificent, and rich as men. Their ortkz,
though not as extensive as those of men, affirm that they can do what men do.
Oya is called ‘Obinrin gbdéna, okunrin sd’: the woman blocks the road and men
flee. If orisa are created by the same process as big men (see Barber, 1981b),
then mighty female orisa tell us something about the way human female power
is construed. Unlike in many traditional African cultures, the Yoruba world
is not dichotomised into clearly distinct male and female sectors. The rigid
pairs of correspondences that appear in so many accounts of African
cosmology’? are not on view here. The house is not divided, nor is the mental
world carved into male and female domains. Gender classifications are not
organised in a fixed schema: they are ambiguous and fluctuating.’ This, again,
must be understood in terms of the importance placed in the culture upon the
maintenance of a multiplicity of differences and alternatives.
5, PROFUSION AND DIFFERENCE
Okuku, like other Yoruba towns, was and is a highly differentiated society.
The traditional political structures, as we saw in Chapter 6, are hierarchical,
and day-to-day life is based on the fundamental and radical distinction
between a person’s inferiors and his or her superiors. There was highly
developed occupational specialisation, and goods were produced for trade far
afield as well as for domestic consumption. Blacksmithing, carving, drumming
and weaving were, and to some extent still are, the inherited occupations of
particular zle, providing, as ortki orile show, one of the cornerstones of their
identity. Personal oriki, as we saw in Chapter 6, make much of individuals’
excellence in specialised skills: there are ortk: for brilliant diviners, exceptional
hunters, and outstanding masqueraders and medicine men. There was
marked differentiation through cult membership, which set up strongly
solidary groups that usually cut across membership of an ile. There was not
one single mode of self-aggrandisement to which all big men conformed, but
a variety of routes to position in society, all of which would be cited by the big
men’s admirers with equal satisfaction. The big man could be a war leader like
Omikunle, or a leader of civic action like Idowu who, though young and
untitled, led the opposition to Iba during the boundary dispute through sheer
nerve and bravado. He could make his way in the world through diplomacy,
like Aasa, Oyinlola’s messenger who was given a high title as a reward for his
indispensable tact. He could be wealthy but uninvolved in intrigue, like
Alapepesile, or a powerful intriguer not noted for his wealth, like Fawande.
He could gain a following through his powers as a hunter and defender of the
community, like Winyomi and Olugbede, or because he could cure people’s
illnesses, like Ajayi of zle Arogun. If there was a historical shift in what was
regarded as the ideal, one thing that remained constant was the profusion of
alternative avenues to greatness. All the horizontal differences are vigorously
advertised. Big men advertise their unique personalities, cults insist that they
are different from other cults, z/e affirm that they do not resemble other #/e. In
every domain there is an insistence on difference and division.
The principle of vertical social inequality is represented in oriki ina
formulaic pattern which is taken completely for granted, so that it normally
would scarcely call attention to itself: the triad eru/Awofa/omo bibi inu (slave/
bondsman/free-born child). This schematised tripartite structure stands, in
an oblique way, for hierarchy itself rather than for the actual social divisions
that are most significant in real life. But if hierarchy is ‘automatised’ in
formulas like this, it is also consciously reflected upon and affirmed in onki
chants. Social difference is represented as a fact of nature; inequality is
represented as a feature that humanity shares with the whole of the known
world, whether natural or cultural:
Sanyan ni baba aso
Alaari ni baba éwu
Yankata ni baba agbado
lyanringobi baba ’yanrin
Kéténkéri baba odokédo
Ba a ba ni i puro, okunrin po juraa won lo
Sanyan silk is the best of all cloths
Alaar cloth makes the best of all gowns
The giant-grained maize cobs are the best of all maize
The zyanringobi vegetable is better than ordinary yanrin
Ketenkeri river is the father of all rivers
If we are not to tell a lie, some men are greater than others.
Baba, which means ‘father of...’ also implies ‘superior to...’. Thus an
inevitable relationship, that of parenthood, is subsumed into, and made to
stand for, a larger notion of hierarchy. Fatherhood appears as a specific case
of a universal, inescapable vertical stratification which embraces nature [rivers
as the superiors of their tributaries, the large zyanrin plant (Lactuca capensis)
as the best of its type], cultivated crops (big-grained maize as superior to
small) and human artefacts (high-grade sanyan as the best kind of silk, robes
of red-dyed alaari cloth as the best of all robes). Against this backdrop the
conclusion that ‘some men are greater than others’ appears inevitable.
Since the work of ortk1is to effect transitions in status — to enhance the social
size of their subject (in the case of a big man by confirming his claims to the
regard of his following of ‘people’) — philosophical statements endorsing
hierarchy must be understood in a dynamic not a frozen way. By asserting that
‘If we are not to tell a lie, some men are greater than others’, the performer
is launching a very strong claim for her subject. She is asserting that he is
important by nature, because he just zs greater than his rivals. ‘This statement
is part of the competitive struggle. It does not indicate a fixed scheme of social
relationships, it indicates that once a big man has succeeded, the ortki singers
will go to all lengths to legitimise and uphold his position.
But such statements about social inequality can also be read on another
level, as an aspect of the permanent commitment, in ortk1, to social and cultural
diversity in every form. Oriki orile are entirely dedicated to establishing and
maintaining symbolic differences between social groups. Emblems of identity
are inevitably assertions of difference. Personal ortki attempt to capture the
distinctiveness of the individual, enshrined in idiosyncrasies and trivialities,
as well as his conformity to public ideals. Each collection of personal ortkz 1s
like a thumb-print, confirming the possessor’s common humanity and
accountability to society while marking down his individual irreducible
uniqueness. Oriki are positive and affirmative about difference. They often
express a kind of gleeful delight in non-conformity. The masquerading
lineage, for instance, rejoices in being released from the tedium of the normal
agricultural cycle. While most of the population is bending over the soil, the
masquerader is ‘pointing his head about inside the cloth’. This alternative
source of income gives him the freedom to neglect farm-work and, with
characteristic exaggeration, the oriki suggests that he never does a stroke:
Apaa mi 6 kuku roko
Eyin mi 6 tié béré
Béé ni mo fé ohun té6 dun un lo
Béniyan 6 mut mi lapa mu mi lésé n o lé tu gaga eéran
Gbogbo agbé, Ilokoi, ti lé idihan tan
Enigboori, mo lémi 4 sori gogo labé aso...'*
My arms are not accustomed to farm-work
And my back does not bend
But I do want things that are nice to use :
If I’m not seized hand and foot
I can’t pull up a single stalk of eeran grass
All the farmers, Ilokoi, have finished their mulching
Enigboori, while I am pointing my head about inside the
masqueraders’ costume...
This sense of being different, of being out of step, is protected by an assertion
that masquerading cannot do any harm to a lineage traditionally associated
with it. The implication is that each social group is best served by its own
inherited body of practices. Masquerading would not necessarily suit other
people, but it suits the Enigboori:
Eku won ki i hun ojé
knife. |
Mo sebi isu ta a ba sun ki i hun obe. }
The costume never brings retribution on an oye masquerader
I maintain that the yam we roast never brings retribution on the
says: |
It is an axiom of this culture, expressed in other genres as well as ortk1, that
the town’s work is composed of a range of different specialisations, each of
which has its own characteristic implements and techniques and each of
which provides its practitioners with a separate path to success. An Ifa verse
Ojyumo mo, ol6wo gbowoo ré
Won réé gbé keké |

Ranwu-ranwu
Won koko roko :

Rokoroko
Jagunjagun
Hunso-hunso
Won gbapata ogun
Won béré gbasa

Boju ba m6 mo mo gbaroyéé mi
Ardyé lémi 60 se la nilé ayé.
Day breaks, the trader takes up his trade
The spinners
Go to take up their spindles
The farmers
Take their hoes to the farm
The warriors
Take up their war shields
The weavers
Bend to take up their combs |
When day breaks I begin my talking ,
Talking is how I, for my part, will get rich in the world.
“Talking” here refers to the babalawo’s command of divinatory and incantatory
utterances. People all have their own métier, their own chosen route to
achieving the same common goals of wealth and honour. One of the functions
of Ifa is indeed to direct people to the specialisation that will best suit their Or
(luck, destiny) and will best reward them. There is no suggestion of caste, of
a generally agreed ranking of the various occupations. Each is best for its own
practitioners.
The same attitude informs people’s attachment to their orisa. Difference
between spiritual beings is significant not so much for the production of a
comprehensive ‘cosmology’ as because what is good for one devotee may not
be good for another. Indeed, the efficacy of the relationship depends precisely
upon its particularity. It is because this orisa is ‘mine’ that it will bless me.
Devotees go out of their way, in ortki, to deny their association with other
people’s objects of devotion. The Otin worshipper says she will have nothing
to do with children given by medicine men and herbalists, all she wants is
children from Otin, the Cool Water. The masquerading lineages say they
don’t get their children from Ifa but from egungun:
Ogbori me ii ya 16j4 opén
Eégun ni i yamo low9o wa.
Ogbori, I never appear in the utterances of Ifa
It is egungun that provide us with offspring.
The orisa themselves are credited with similar differences in their spheres of
interest and in their tastes. Each has its own special food, for instance, and the
different preferences of a list of four or five orisa are often cited in ortki and Ifa
literature. The attitudes underlying these and other discriminations made in
ortki are summed up in the well-known formulations dealing ostensibly with
personal appearance, but with an application that goes well beyond it:
Dudu élu yelu
Pupa epo mépo lara.
The darkness of indigo suits the indigo
The redness of palm oil is what palm oil is used to.
and
Kukuru oka yoka
Ejola fi gigin se rogbodo.
The shortness of the viper suits the viper
The python combines length with hefty roundness.
In other words, every species, and by implication every person, has its own
qualities which suit it but which would not suit others. What seems to be
suggested is that beauty lies precisely in contrast. The difference between the
palm oil and the indigo, the viper and the python, allows the proper beauty
of each to be seen. Viewed from the standpoint of an individual, what he or
she is, has and does is the best; her own ortsa surpasses all others, his family
occupation makes his family unique. But these elements are not fitted into a
general cosmological hierarchy shared by the whole community. The whole
point is that each individual and each group should be different and should
have their own characteristics and properties. The contrasts are maintained
because each individual, cult or lineage vigorously upholds the merits of its
own properties.'° Oriki, as a concatenation of independent ‘voices’, are a
perfect embodiment of this ideology.
Furthermore, there is glory in profusion. The more contrasting and
contesting elements the better. The value placed upon profusion is evident in
every aspect of ortki. It is seen in the incorporation of materials from diverse
sources; in the frequent lists (of names of rivers, uses to which palm trees can
be put, etc.) and chain-like aro sequences; in the constant repetition and
recycling of elements to give them more mileage. Some of the motives
underlying this impulse to multiplication have been discussed. If or:ki are
equivalents to names, and names imply qualities, reputation, and regard, then
the more ortki attributed to a person the better. The sliding movement from
the subject’s own ortki to those of a host of other people provides the subject
with a plenitude of ‘people’, the basis of social position. Similarly, in ortk orile,
if oriki represent the glory of the lineage, the more that is said:the better; and
if they represent lineage connections, as they also do, then the more lines of
affiliation and descent the better. The mother’s orig, the grandmother’s, the
wife’s and even the wife’s mother’s provide valuable lines of connection to
potential influence and aid. Thus the continual proliferation of ‘heads’ of ortki
orile within a chant addressed to a single subject. ,
The impulse to profusion is inscribed in the innermost form of ortk1. The
most common rhetorical structure in ortki is a sequence of parallel cases,
usually concluding with the key one. The nature or importance of (d) is
established by the comparable, though in some respects contrasting, cases of
(a), (b) and (c). Sometimes these sequences are based on standard lexical sets
(okro/egg plant, vulture/hornbill, and so on) but sometimes they introduce
original and wide-ranging comparisons. In a text of rara zyawo, one sequence
Tbi ni i jola ibi ,

juxtaposes humans, animals and artefacts to make a single point:
Eni a bini m6 ni i jola eni

Ahere 4 jola tié loko
Gongo ni je tiré laatan
Agbéde ni jola ému
Emi mom6 4 jol4a mém6o mi
Ire lénii orii mi afire.!”
The family enjoys the privileges of the family ,
Someone born among us enjoys the privileges of being one of us
The farm-hut enjoys its own privileges in the farm
The gongoe worm enjoys his in the dung-hill
The forge enjoys the privileges of the pliers
And I enjoy the privileges of my mother
Thus to establish a claim, it is placed in parallel with several other
statements of the same structural form. The existence of these parallels
creates a rhetorical climate in which the real claim can be accepted as incon-
trovertible. The passage above boils down to ‘Everything in creation enjoys
the privileges of what pertains to it; I enjoy the privileges of my relationship
to my mother’. This rhetorical strategy has the effect of continually reiterating
the variety of the world and the separateness of its components: every entity
or being has its ewn domain, and pays no attention to the domains of others.
The paratactic structure bears this out. There is no attempt to unite the farm-
hut, the worm, the forge and the mother into a single ‘scene’: each is a separate
instance of a universal principle, and that principle is ‘each unto his own’.
The disjunctive style of oriki makes possible the fullest expression of this
principle. The chant does not subordinate one element to another or any
elements to an overarching design which assigns each a determinate place in
relation to the others. The chant is rather held together by the suspension of
contrasting elements in juxtaposition with each other. As the chant proceeds,
each element asserts itself and then drops out of sight as it is succeeded by
another. Each, in turn, is centre stage, just as each big man, for as long as the
performer addresses him, is the centre of attention. Though performers are
adept at making their materials do different things, according to the nature
of the occasion, these materials still retain a certain irreducible independence
from the performer’s intent and from each other. This allows something very
interesting to happen. Though ork: may ostensibly be dedicated to upholding
social difference in the interests of the successful, the voices of the downtrodden
may still momentarily surface and assert themselves — partially but never fully
co-opted into the project of the chant as instrument of social aggrandisement.
The result is amost profound irony. In Sangowemi’s salutation of Jayeola that
was discussed earlier, the privilege of the big man Ayesemi (Jayeola) is
contrasted with the suffering of his servant, the :weofa:
"Bi 6 wu efuiufu léle, Ayinla, ni i dari igbé si
*Bi 6 wu oléw6 eni ni i ranni
Olow6 waa mobi égiin, 6 ro
Ni won 6 ki Jayéola babaa wa
Babaa mi, iwofa tibi égun béré
Botuta ba n pawofa, Aladé,
Won a 16 ko ise é dé
Bi 1 ba i. somo Ayésemi, won a4 gbon epo ra a gede.
The gentle breeze, Ayinla, can turn the treetops whichever way it
likes
One’s master sends one wherever he wishes
The master knows the thorny patch, he doesn’t hoe there
This is how they salute Jayeola, our father
My father, the zwofa bends his back over the thorny patch
If the zwofa starts shivering, Alade,
They’ll say he’s up to his tricks again
If it was the child of Ayesemi they would rub him lavishly with
palm oil.
As Sangowemi asserts, the purpose of her performance is to enhance the
reputation of Jayeola — “This is how they salute Jayeola, our father’ — and in
this context the misery of the :wofa only serves to intensify our apprehension
of the master’s well-being. The master is someone who does not need to do
the hard, painful work on the farm, for he has other people to do it for him.
The master’s life is one of affluence and ease; any little ailment, and the
master’s children will be tenderly cossetted. The distance between the
master’s comfort and the iwofa’s wretchedness is a measure of the master’s
greatness. Nonetheless, these lines speak with the voice of the zwofa. ‘If the
iwofa starts shivering...they’ll say he’s up to his tricks again’: when the zwofa
is ill, he will be accused of malingering, and the unfairness of this comes across
clearly. These lines sound as ifthey could have originated as an :wofa’s lament,
protest, or ironical comment on his condition of servitude. They have been
co-opted into the ortki of a big man, but the accent of disaffection is still heard.
If, as Bakhtin said, one’s language is never fully one’s own, but in using it one
strives to appropriate it, in orzki one’s own utterance may be appropriated by
others but can never be completely assimilated by them.
Women’s voices sometimes come across with a similar double-sided
effect. Consider the words of the women’s egungun vigil chant, already quoted:
Ara da obinrin ni ii fi mawo
Obinrin 6 mogbaleé
Iba se pobinrin lé mawo
N ba gbénu éku wéku.
, Women are uneasy [or frustrated, fed up], for they cannot know
the secret
Women do not know the sacred grove
If only women were allowed to know the secret
I would wear one masquerader’s costume after another.
Women’s exclusion from the secrets of the egungun cult is what gives this cult
its authority and mystery. As I have argued elsewhere (Barber, 1981b), ‘the
secret’ is at the centre of the sacred in Yoruba religious thought, and human
collusion in maintaining the secret is indispensable. On the eve of the great
biennial egungun festival, women keep watch for their husbands, the priests
of the cult, and uphold their spiritual glory by asserting that they themselves
can know nothing about it. The voice is the voice of a woman, not a man, and
speaks with accents of loss and desire: ‘If only women were allowed to know
the secret/I would wear one masquerade costume after another’. But, as with
the z:wofa’s lament, the sense of sorrow or grievance has been co-opted (by the
women themselves) to the greater glory of the male ‘secret’. ‘The ambiguity
of the text is revealed in the expression ard da obinrin ni ii ft mawo. The
grammatical construction of this sentence suggests a translation “Women are
impatient/restless/unreliable, that’s why they can’t know the secret’ — a male
perspective on the exclusion of women. But the performer, Ere-Osun, told
me it meant ‘Women are fed up/frustrated because they cannot know the
secret’ — a female perspective.'®
This passage, however, reveals a further and more profound irony,
bordering on paradox. Women assert that they cannot know the secret, but
in the same breath they reveal that they do in fact know it: ‘I would wear one
masquerader’s costume after another’. Egungun costumes have human beings
inside, and this is the ‘secret’ that women collude in pretending not to know.
Because of the continually shifting voices in ortkz chants, the performers can
go on to give, in the voice of a young boy of the lineage, graphic details of the
experience of wearing an egungun costume:
Aroyé isé babaéa mi ni
lyaa mi 6 tété mo
O waa yan éko dé mi
O seb’é6ko ni mo lo
Ko mo pabé odan n mo wa bi éga
Ti mo ni tin sawo enu
M6 j66bun ojé 6 ba mi rékuu mi .
Bobtn ojé ba n gbago won 4 ba mi laso jé
EHléyun-un nii 4 waa sori palagun labé aso
Bi kékeré Ogbori ba ti gbagd 4 m6 yan
Bi agba Ogbori ti gbagd 4 m6 rin
Bi kékeré IlOk6 ba gbagd yoo wt 6
Enigbo6ori, eyin 4 waa fun kinkin labé aso.
Vociferous talking is my father’s work
My mother was slow to realise
She went and bought eko to keep for me
She thought I’d gone to the farm
She didn’t know that I was under the fig-tree like a weaver bird
Where I was chattering interminably
Don’t let a dirty oye wear my egungun costume
If a dirty ge wears my outfit he’ll spoil my cloth
That one has a misshapen head under the cloth
If a little Ogbori puts on the costume he’ll know how to swagger
If an old Ogbori puts on the costume he’ll know how to walk
If a little Iloko puts on the costume he will delight you
Enigboori, his teeth will be shining white under the cloth.
The woman in this scene, the mother, 1s in ignorance of what her son is
really doing. She thinks he’s working on the farm, but he is really with his
father’s band of entertainment masqueraders performing iwi, the egungun
chant, in a public place (‘under the fig tree’, which usually marks a market).
The boy makes a sharp distinction between the egungun costume and the
person under it which exposes the ‘secret’ in unmistakable terms. Because of
the multiple, shifting, voices of ortkz it is possible for a woman to utter words
such as these in the persona of a boy. She maintains an appearance of proper
collusion in the ‘secret’ (in her role as a woman, she is like the mother,
ignorant of the masqueraders’ activities) while at the same time opening a
crack in its facade which women as well as men can see through.
In these ways horizontal difference and vertical hierarchy are simultaneously
upheld (by being built into the structure of ortki as well as being explicitly
stated) and ironically subverted. At the heart of the world view proposed by
oriki there is an irresolvable paradox. When human and cultural differences
are represented as parallel to natural differences, this is usually taken, in
sociological literature, as a strategy of legitimisation. It suggests that the
human order is naturally and inevitably as it is, that it could be no other way.
Berger and Luckmann (1967) suggest that this process of legitimisation
creates a world view which encloses the people like a dome, allowing no
prospect of an alternative. Bourdieu, similarly (though from a somewhat
different perspective), argues that in societies without class there can be no
‘orthodoxy’ because there is nothing to contrast it with, no possibility of
heterodoxy: there is therefore just ‘doxa’, the way things naturally are
(Bourdieu, 1977). The disadvantaged groups in Okuku are not conscious of
themselves as classes and do not articulate an alternative view of the world.
But the ‘view’ articulated in ortkz is itself heterogeneous, full of contrasts and
alternatives, and as we have seen offering possibilities of different interpretation
according to the standpoint of the speaker. A central instance of this essential
polyvocality and ambivalence is, precisely, the way the relationship between
culture and nature is represented. Natural models are continually used to
between birds:
represent human stratification and differentiation. But look at this passage,
which expresses human religious specialisation in terms of the differences
Iran agbe ni i pasoo ré lard

Iran aluk6 ni i pasoo ré l6stn
tran Oloya ni ilo ayan
Mo sebi iran-an mi ni i sawo.
The Blue Touraco’s lineage is the one that dyes its cloth in indigo
The aluko bird’s lineage is the one that dyes its cloth in camwood
The Oya devotees’ lineage is the one that wears ayan beads
But my lineage is the one that goes masquerading.
At the same moment that the Oya cult is represented as being ‘naturally’
different from the egungun cult, the touraco and aluko birds are represented
as being culturally different from each other. Not only do the birds have
‘lineages’, like people, but they also wear clothes which they dye in blue and
red, respectively. If human differences are legitimised as natural, at the same
} time the whole of nature is brought within the sphere of the cultural. The
whole known world and all its categories is a cultural artefact. In this moment,
the text seems to contain a hidden acknowledgement that divisions, difference
(and by implication, hierarchy) are not naturally given, in-born characteristics
but social products. They could therefore be changed.
This is not an isolated or atypical perception. As I have argued elsewhere,
a similar moment of inversion and paradox seems to me to lie at the heart of
the whole of traditional religious practice. The intense and fervent
communication between devotee and orisa is founded on the acknowledgement
that ‘man makes god’. Onk: are the central channel through which this
acknowledgement is articulated. Similar ambiguities are found in all areas of
thought. Each statement is shadowed by its opposite. The outcome is a kind
of permanent suspension of resolution. ‘In every voice... two contending
voices, in every expression a crack, and the readiness to go over immediately
to another contradictory expression’ (Bakhtin, 1984a, p. 30). Every institution
and every entity is represented as being at once fixed, ‘natural’, beyond
human intervention; and as malleable, the outcome of an exercise of choice.
The ideal of choice is used to flatter subjects. In ortki, qualities we would
think of as inevitable, as ‘natural’ par excellence, are attributed, hyperbolically
and amusingly but still with serious intent, to the free will of the subject:
Igba to wijokun 16 i du idu djé
O waa wu Babalola Omitétan 6 daddu tan 6 feyin seke.
It was by choice that the zokun plant became as black as lead
And by choice Babalola Omitotan became perfectly black with
teeth as white as gristle.
Both nature (the yokun plant) and human beings (Babalola) are black
because they have chosen to be so.
Difference is what creates opportunity and the scope for choice, as this
quotation from tyere Ifa demonstrates:
B6l6k6 ba segba
Oldbo layeé gba
Aijo eranko layéé gbekun.
If there are two hundred people with penises

It’s the one with a vagina who has scope
Not being like other animals is what gives scope to the leopard.
In oriki, to summarise observations that have been made in this and
earlier chapters, the following features are found. Utterances are juxtaposed
without one being subordinated to another. The discreteness of the
elements in ortki is heightened by supplementary stylistic disjunctions. The
‘T’ of the utterance moves continually, speaking with different voices, which
are not ‘placed’ in relation to each other or to the self-presentation of the
performer. The text is like a tissue of quotations, but quotation is never
distinguished from context — it is al] quotations — and these quotations
modulate fluently and sinuously from one to the next within the prevailing
mode of attribution. There is no overall design, no dominant ‘authorial
voice’ in relation to which other voices are calibrated, no framework within
which the disparate elements are assigned a determinate place. These
features are what keep open the possibility of alternative states. While
affirming ‘the way things are’, orzki statements contain the seeds of their own
opposite. Orki are the means by which any given state is transcended. It is
clear that the withholding of a fixed framework, of a single ‘point of view’
from which the world can be regarded, is what makes this perpetual motion
of transcendence possible. Oriki easily accommodate, indeed their mode
encourages, the juxtaposition of opposites. These opposites are contained in
one place and held together by a kind of surface tension, the thinnest of
skins. Within the transparent integument — the ‘bag’ of ortkz into which all
kinds of materials are thrown — continual transformations and modulations
take place. Oriki never criticise the community’s ‘orthodoxy’, for as
Bourdieu suggests, they cannot. But they always hold open, by the
oppositions and contradictions embedded in them and deliberately held
unresolved and suspended, a tiny ‘loop-hole’, as Bakhtin (1984b) put it: the
possibility of things being otherwise.
This is the context in which women’s powers are construed. There are few
situations in which women are told they cannot pursue a certain course because
they are women. It is said that they do not choose to pursue it. Despite the
heavy disadvantages that weigh down an ambitious woman, if she decides to
become something, it is accepted that she can do so. Comments about
Sangowemi’s mother Fakemide, the babalawo, were illustrative of a general
attitude to the flow of power and the acquisition of status. Fakemide was the
granddaughter of Gbotifayo, the renowned babalawo and herbalist. Gbotifayo
had sons and grandsons who could have taken over his position. But
Fakemide became a fully fledged member of the diviners’ association, doing
consultations for clients, chanting zyere Ifa before the oba during the Ifa festival
vigil in competition with all the male babalawo, and travelling far afield in
search of greater knowledge. Her ortki call her ‘Omo Sonibaré tii tun Ifa ro lénu
emo awo bi agogo’, “The child of Sonibare who re-forges Ifa in the mouths of
trainee diviners like a bell’: not only does she know Ifa, but she has apprentices
of her own whom she instructs and corrects. When I tried to discover how
people accounted for this extraordinary behaviour, no-one ever suggested
that there was anything odd about it.’* Men and women alike asserted that no
code was transgressed by her actions and that no disapproval was directed at
her. According to Sobaloju, who had himself been a babalawo before his
conversion to Christianity in 1927:
She learnt Ifa. If a woman goes to school she becomes an educated
person; if she learns Ifa, she becomes a babalawo. Her father was a
babalawo, so was her husband, so she picked it up little by little from
them. There was never a time when the association of babalawo said she
had no right to participate in their activities. She would go to the cult
house and participate in meetings just like the others. They would ask
her about a certain verse of Ifa: if she answered correctly, they would
accept that she was a babalawo. The verses she learnt were the same as
those of the other babalawo. Once she learnt them, she was a babalawo.
Then she also had the right to examine other people on their knowledge,
just as they had examined her. Both men and women would come as
clients to consult her.
When I asked why there were not more female babalawo, he said, “hey
aren’t interested. If a woman was interested, there’d be nothing to stop her.
The babalawo would actually be happy! You, for instance, could become a
babalawo, and I would teach you.’ Sobaloju speaks like an existentialist. A
woman becomes a babalawo by choosing to be one; once she acts as a
babalawo, she is one. There was no alternative Ifa for women —Sobaloju stressed
that she was a babalawo just like the men, doing the same ceremonies, reciting
the same verses, and offering consultations to the same range of clients. In this
philosophy, women are not debarred from the man’s world. In a political and
social universe where power is construed in terms of the exercise of will,
anyone who exercises that will can attain power. Power flows through any
channel that is opened to it.
Most women, however, do not ‘choose’ to compete in male arenas of self-
agerandisement. Faderera learnt oriki from her famous father Awoyemi, but
not Ifa verses. “That’s not our way’, she said: that is, that is not the route
women choose to take. If they do compete with men, no-one will denounce
them: but if they succeed, people are likely to hint at witchcraft. Sangowem1’s
mother, like Ayantayo and Omolola, was feared for her alleged witchcraft. In
reality, therefore, women’s freedom of choice is more limited than the culture
declares. Like Babalola’s or the yokun plant’s freedom to choose to be black,
it expresses a cultural principle which it is not always possible to put into
practice.
But women do operate the very channels through which power flows. This
does not mean that they are invisible or self-effacing. In the dramatised
dialogic relation between performer and recipient of orzki, the performer ts as
present, as much the centre of attention, as the recipient. As Sangowemi boasts,
the command of oral art is itself a power: a power that is vouched for, just as
the big man’s is, by the envy and hostility of other, inferior people. But hers
is a power based on knowledge and intelligence. In her own ortki she is called
‘eegun-inu’, one like a masquerade inside, that is, a brilliant mind, a gentus.
And she adds:
Kutukutu ti mo rikun dana si

I who from my earliest days had a mind that could follow many
paths.
Having much knowledge of orki is equivalent to having many social
connections, the prerequisite of successful social navigation. As Faderera
said, amplifying a well-known formulation:
Ko si orilé a 0 mewe
Ko momo si orilé a 6 mowe
Ko si orilé won 6 bi mi dé
Won bi mi nidii iya béé won bi mi nilée baba...
If there were no orle we wouldn’t recognise itching beans
And if there were no orile we wouldn’t recognise bean sprouts
There is no orle that I was not born into
I was born on the mother’s side, I was born in the father’s house...
It is not just men who operate their social strategies through connections
made possible by women. As Faderera’s words show, women also enjoy a
power of manoeuvre through their knowledge.
The ‘many paths’ of social knowledge that Sangowemi alludes to are paths
traced by ortki. They lead into the thicket of contemporary social relationships
and back to influential forebears, ‘those whose deeds remain’. They are paths
that are kept open to allow the flow of power and beneficence between beings.
They join a big man and his ‘people’, swelling his persona through the
appropriation of multiple other personalities, and creating, in paradigmatic
form, the dialogic bond between them. They run from the living individual
straight back to the moment of origin, when social difference was installed.
They allow the past to inhabit the present, perpetually accessible and
contiguous. They are paths that are not always easy to follow; but they are
marked along the way with clues to their own decipherment, for oriki
themselves tell us what orkz can do.
APPENDIX
Ile in Okuku
NOTES
1. This table was compiled mainly from information given by the head of each ile,
in some cases supplemented by other elders from that or other ile.
2. It cannot be emphasised too strongly that this table should be read as a map of
possibilities and not as a fixed or exhaustive scheme of relationships. It represents the
state of my knowledge at the time I left Okuku in 1977, which was uneven, and most
detailed in the case of those compounds I was closest to. More importantly, the
definition of i/e and the nature of the relationships between them varied not only from
case to case, but also from moment to moment. The picture also varied according to
the perspective of the viewer.
3. lle which were always or almost always acknowledged as independent units are
written without parentheses; those which are attached to a ‘host’ group are written in
parentheses after the group to which they are attached. No attempt:has been made,
however, to indicate the degree of closeness or independence in this relationship,
which varies from semi-autonomy to virtual absorption.
4. Following local custom, the ze numbered 1-7 follow the order of titles owned
by each compound from oba down through the six ‘kingmakers’, while the rest of the
de are presented roughly in order of perceived importance, according to a variety of
criteria including size, seniority of title, and presence of prominent men among them.
5. Although in almost all cases the town of origin was readily named, together with
the or:ki orile,the period at which the group arrived was often described in vague or
contradictory terms. When no information at all was forthcoming, the relevant
column has been left blank.
6. The historical periods referred to are as follows:
Period I: from the foundation of Kookin (seventeenth century?) to its sack in the
Ijesa Arara war (c. 1760).
Period II: from the sack of Kookin and foundation of Okuku (c. 1760) to the
fall of Ofa and involvement in Ilorin wars (c. 1825).
Period III: period of Ilorin-Ibadan wars (c. 1825 to 1893).
Period IV: from the resettlement of Okuku (1893) to the death of OyewusiI and
beginning of colonial administration (1916).
Period V: colonial and post-colonial period (1916 to the present day).
7. Population numbers for each ile were estimated from the 1977-8 electoral
register, but since they are not reliable it would not be helpful to publish them.
However a rough indication of size may be useful. Of the fully-independent i/e, the two
largest had about 2000 male and female adult members (la, 8a); two had between
1500 and 2000 (5a, 9); several had nearly 1000 (2a, 4a, 6a); most of the rest had
200-650. Some ‘attached lineages’ had 100-300 members (Ib, 14b, 14c, 21b) but
most had less than 100. Several independent ile however, also had less than 100
members.
APPENDIX 293
8. Senior town titles (z/u olopaa) are italicised. Religious titles which are exceptional
in belonging to specific lineages are in parentheses. Of the junior town titles (7/u aladaa),
and palace titles, only those which have become firmly associated with particular
lineages are listed.
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NOTES
Notes to Chapter 1
1. It would be neither accurate nor desirable to draw strict lines between history, the
social sciences and folklore. This study is based on the assumption that only an
integrated approach can advance our understanding of literature in society/
society in literature. However, in order to clarify my aims, it is helpful to place this
study in the tradition of anthropology that sees ‘the text’ and representations of
‘the past’ in dialectical relation to social forms, rather than as the sole end of study
in themselves. Oral historians, in the attempt to use representations of the past as
a source of data, necessarily tend to discount those of their features that are most
bound up with contemporary social interests and conventions and therefore most
likely to be ‘biassed’ or ‘corrupted’. Folklore, though a broad and eclectic field
accommodating a great variety of approaches, does tend either to focus fairly
closely on the text-in-performance or to see the text as exemplar of widely-
distributed motifs and structures. If the former, only the social forms and
processes most closely implicated in performance are integrated into the picture,
and the larger society appears as ‘background’. If the latter, social forms and
processes do not need to be included in what is essentially a classificatory project.
Studies which look at the way social forms produce, and are produced by, ‘the text’
and representations of ‘the past’ have usually in fact belonged in the anthropologi-
cal tradition. In African oral historiography, such studies include Cunnison
(1951) and Bonte and Echard (1976).
2. See especially the work of Victor Turner (1967, 1968, 1975),:who achieved a
breakthrough in the study of ritual action by treating it as dramatic text.
3. Henrietta Moore (1986) has shown brilliantly how a textual interpretation,
construction of space. |
drawing heavily on current literary theory, can be brought to bear on the social
4. In Geertz’s formulation (Geertz, 1973), culture itself has become a ‘text’, and the
anthropologist’s task is to ‘read’ it. The kind of interpretative anthropology
represented in different ways by Turner, Geertz and Moore is not, of course,
incompatible with a closer anthropological scrutiny of actual literary texts, and
may be an inspiration to it.
5. Volosinov is believed by some scholars to have been one of several pseudonyms
used by Mikhail Bakhtin. See Clark and Holquist (1984) on the disputed texts,
and the arguments for regarding them as Bakhtin’s work. I refer to these disputed
texts by both names, without wishing to suggest that Iam competent to judge their
authorship myself. As will be seen in the next chapter, Bakhtin, like “Volo’inov’,
has a great deal to offer the interpreter of ortki-type texts.
6. According to J. L. Austin, every utterance is an ‘illocutionary act’ — for instance,
the act of asserting, complaining, reminding, persuading and so on — and if it is
successfully performed, it is also a perlocutionary act, that is, it has the intended
NOTES TO PP. 1-9 305
results. But to be successfully performed, the situation must be appropriate and
the utterance must conform to the conventions that define what counts as an
example of that speech act (Austin 1962). The context of utterance is thus
inseparable from the utterance itself. The importance of context was redefined
and analysed further by H. P. Grice (1975); see also John R. Searle (1969).
7. Pratt (1977) approaches the question from the point of view of the audience,
suggesting that literary texts arouse greater expectations than most utterances,
and are therefore accorded greater attention. She argues that literary texts, in
common with a number of other kinds of utterance such as anecdotes, jokes and
so on, are ‘display texts’ which require an audience to suspend the normal rules
of conversational turn-taking and yield to them an unusual amount of time and
concentration. Richard Bauman (1977, 1986), from a performance theory
perspective directed specifically to oral texts, proposes that what distinguishes oral
literary performance from other speech genres is that the performer accepts the
responsibility to display verbal skill beyond the requirements of normal conversa-
tional exchange.
8. Pierre Macherey (1978) suggested an inverse and complementary model of
literary discourse’s power to articulate what is otherwise unspoken. He said that
in attempting to impose coherence on the ideological materials of daily life, gaps
and flaws break through the smooth surface of the text in the places where
something ‘cannot be said’. Because of the requirement that a literary text should
be a unified whole, these ‘silences’ are always significant; they unwittingly throw
up the inherent limits of the ideology to view. This view of the relations between
ideology and text was differently developed in the deconstructive criticism of
Derrida, de Man and others. Though Macherey’s version of the theory has great
attractions for the analysis of certain kinds of text (notably post-Renaissance,
written, European works), its applicability to or1kz is doubtful, for the same reason
that deconstructive criticism is inapplicable: see Chapter 2.
9. For some suggestions about how these techniques are used in the interpretation
of Ifa divination verses, see Barber (1990a). Etymology quickly became the stock
in trade of academic as well as traditional enquiry: see for example the Revd.
Olumide Lucas’s method of tracing Yoruba origins back to ancient Egypt (Lucas
1948).
10. Howard Bloch suggests that twelfth and thirteenth century France was such a time
and place. The subsequent rise of historical and scientific enquiries led to a
reorganisation of the fields of knowledge and literature lost its role as the key
organising discourse. But for a time it was a ‘privileged forum’, and a ‘key to the
anthropology of the age’, offering ‘a unique opportunity for an anthropology based
upon the practice of the text’ (Bloch, 1983, p. 14).
11. Useful as this suggestion of Ong’s is, it comes from a theoretical background which
has rightly been criticised — one which proposes ‘oral society’ and ‘literate society’
as polar opposites and sees the whole of human history as the slow but inevitable
(1988). |
and unilinear passage from one to the other, powered by the intrinsic properties
| of writing rather than by the social and political factors that determine how literacy
is used. For a well-balanced and cogent assessment of this position, see Finnegan,
12. See for instance accounts of patrons and their clients in Lagos by Barnes (1986)
and Peace (1979), and a more general discussion of patronage among the modern
elite by Lloyd (1974). For a discussion of concepts of relative status among the
Yoruba, see Bascom (1951).
13. Iam indebted to Graham Furniss for suggesting this way of putting it: see Furniss
(1989, p. 26).
306 NOTES TO PP. 10-38
14, This is asserted especially of oriki orile: see for instance Babayemi (1988, p. 23-
4).
15. Most of the many studies of Yoruba social structure have dealt with larger towns:
e.g. Oyo (Morton-Williams 1960a, 1964, 1967), Ijebu-Ode, Ado-Ekiti, Iwo (Lloyd,
1958, 1960, 1962), Ife (Bascom 1942, 1951), Osogbo (Schwab 1955), Ibadan
(Lloyd et al. 1967), Lagos (Aderibigbe, 1975), Ilesa (Peel, 1983). Research has
been done with smaller towns as the base: for instance Awe (Sudarkasa 1973), but
much of this work has remained unpublished: e.g. Guyer (1972), Clarke (1979),
Schiltz (1980), Francis (1981).
16. Performance theory focuses not on a literary text per se but on the ‘performance
event’, thus making it possible to include in the analysis many non-verbal features
of the performance: the vocal style of delivery, dramatic action, pacing and timing,
interaction with an audience, the use of responsive and creative variation, and so
on. It directs attention to the processual and emergent qualities of oral texts
instead of reifying them as verbal artefacts. A comprehensive description of the
elements of ‘performance’ is given in Finnegan (1970). Some important
contributions to the field are: Abrahams (1977), Ben-Amos (1975), Bauman
(1977, 1986), Ben-Amos and Goldstein (1975), and Bauman and Sherzer
(1974). One of the most far-reaching and illuminating extensions of the notion of
performance is found in the work of Tedlock (1983).
Notes to Chapter 2
1. Jtan and their relationship to ortki in Okuku will be discussed in detail in Chapter
3. Fora general discussion of itan throughout the Yoruba-speaking area, see LaPin
(1977), and for a discussion of Ijesa examples see Peel (1984).
2. Alo are rarely told nowadays. In the three years I spent in Okuku, I never heard
a spontaneous session of story-telling in the town itself. But once when I was
staying at Odigbo, one of the Okuku farm towns south of Ife, the family I was
staying with told a/o in the evenings after supper. There was no electricity in
Odigbo, and no school, so the children, instead of doing their homework, were
sitting around waiting to join in. Apart from that, children are told alo at school,
or made to read them (much of the Alawtye Yoruba reader series is based on folk
stories), but their parents will probably only tell them if specifically asked to do so
by a researcher. However, there is widespread latent knowledge of the stories,
which resurfaces in other genres, such as modern popular theatre. For detailed
and illuminating analysis of ala, and many examples in Yoruba with English
translation, collected from all over the Yoruba-speaking area, see LaPin (1977).
For a large collection of Yoruba texts of one type of alo, the tortoise trickster tale,
see Babalola (1973a, b).
3. For studies of ese Ifa and the Ifa system of divination see Abimbola (1975a, 1976,
1977), Bascom (1969), and McClelland (1982).
4. For accounts of eleegun oje (also known as apidan, agbegijo and alarinjo), see Gotrick
(1984) and Adedeji (1969a, b, 1972, 1978). For a description and analysis of the
twi chant, see Olajubu (1972).
5. Among the conspicuous, widely known and well-documented oriki-based chants
are the hunters’ chants zala (Babalola, 1966a) and iremoje (Ajuwon, 1982), the
masqueraders’ chant zw: (Olajubu, 1972), the brides’ chant ekun tyawo (Faniyi,
1975), the Sango devotees’ chant Sango pipe (Isola, 1973). There are also countless
localised chants based on ortki of one kind or another: see Babayemi (1988, pp.
2-3) for a comprehensive list.
6. This kind of ortki has been labelled oriki borokinni (the oriki of notable people,
people of high standing). See S. A. Babalola’s Awon Onki Borokinni (1975), which
contains a selection of personal oriki, mostly from nineteenth-century Ibadan.
7. For a fuller discussion of akija see Barber (1979, pp. 185-6, 308-12).
8. From a performance of rara tyawo by Susannah, wife of Elemoso Ogun of tle
Odogun, recorded 1976.
9. ‘Awon ortki orilé nda kun fun adabé ore — ore ti a i-so fun omoluwabi tabl omoran, ti si
t-dé’nu ré tt i-d’odidi’ (Babalola, 1966b, p. 13). My translation.
10. Yoruba scholars such as Babalola (1966a), Olajubu (1972), Olatunji (1973, 1984),
and Ajuwon (1982) did not of course have the experiential difficulty with oriki that
I did in my first encounter with them: that is, the feelings of discomfort and
bewilderment which were clearly as much the result of my sheer unfamiliarity with
the culture as because of any theoretical literary preconceptions. Their work
shows their intimacy with, and appreciation of, the orikz-based chant form. However,
the critical language and analytical tools needed to create a poetics of oriki-based
texts have not yet been developed. I suggest that this is partly because formal
literary education in Nigeria has always been resolutely writing-oriented and
modelled on mainstream European conceptions of literature. The meta-language
available, with the deep freight of assumptions it carries with it, just is not
appropriate. See Yai (1989). For further discussion and examples see note 17
below.
11. Roger Fowler quotes the linguist C. F. Hockett as being of the opinion that ‘a
poem 1s a long idiom’ (Fowler, 1966, p. 20).
12. See for instance the immense critical effort that went into reconstituting The Waste
Land into a smooth, seamless ‘whole’ by filling the gaps and fractures with other
levels of meaning, clearly documented in Cox and Hinchliffe (1968).
13. This characteristic of orzki chants has been well described by Isola (1973) in the
case of Sango pipe, the ortki of the orisa Sango. Different chanting modes tend to
favour different formulas for changing tack as well as for beginning and ending a
performance, as do individual performers.
14, See Olatunji (1979) for an account of how a skilled performer might approach
a well-known theme from an unexpected angle, causing delight and astonishment
when he or she finally reveals what it is.
15. Some of the key texts expounding these ideas are Barthes (1975, 1979), Derrida
(1976, 1979) and Miller (1979). For clear exposition and critical discussion of
them see Culler (1975, 1981, 1983), Belsey (1980), Norris (1982) and Eagleton
(1983).
16. ‘Composition in performance’ (Lord, 1960) describes the way oral performers
create/recreate a text in the act of performing it, by means of a stock of formulas
combined with metrical rules. It has probably been the single most influential
notion in the study of oral literature, and has had revolutionary implications for
the analysis of the Bible, Old English literature, and many other historical genres,
as well as for contemporary oral traditions. However, the tendency to regard
composition in performance as a single technique by which al/ oral texts are
constructed has been criticised (e.g. Finnegan, 1988) and, in a study of a Xhosa
‘praise-poetry’ tradition not unlike oriki, Opland (1983) has shown that the approach
yields little when applied to non-narrative poetry. It works best on genres which
are both narrative and metrical, like Homer and the Yugoslavian epics which Parry
and Lord did their own research on. Other aspects of Parry and Lord’s approach,
however, which have been less highlighted by subsequent scholarship than the
search for ‘formulas’, have enduring value for our understanding of non-narrative
genres and indeed for other cultural behaviour than the generation of literature
(see Bourdieu, 1977. p. 88). For further discussion see Chapter 7.
17. Inthe detailed and well-researched Oxford Library of African Literature series, for
instance, where Southern African ‘heroic poetry’ is particularly well represented,
the aesthetic preference of the authors for unified, regular, boundaried forms is
clear. In their commentaries, they tend to play down the fluidity and irregularity
which is evident in the texts. Cope, on Zulu izibongo (Cope, 1968) and Kunene,
on Sotho praise poetry (Kunene, 1971), focus on the formal regularity and
internal coherence of each ‘paragraph’ or stanza, paying less attention to the
indeterminacy of the relations between these units. Damane and Sanders, also
writing about Sotho heroic poetry, declare their preference for ‘poems’ which are
‘logical and straightforward... balanced and well-rounded’, and observe that
though the ordering of stanzas often appears arbitrary, sometimes, ‘with a little
imaginative effort, it can be seen to follow a definite train of thought’ (Damane and
Sanders, 1974, p. 36). These preferences for order and unity were in part a
rejection of early ethnocentric depictions of Southern African heroic poetry as a
mere untutored outpouring (e.g. Van Zyl, 1941) but also clearly end up reaffirming
a European view of what a literary work should be. Schapera, writing about
Tswana praise poetry, has no difficulty in acknowledging that these ‘praise poems
do not seem to have any consistent unity of structure’ (Schapera, 1965, p. 10), but
his analysis is brief and does not propose any view of how this poetry does work.
Though oriki chants are even more fluid and irregular than the Southern African
praise poetry, Yoruba scholars have been less concerned with the question of form.
Olajubu (1972), however, argues that zzz chants have a regular overall structure,
basing this view on the presence of opening and closing formulas. Ajuwon calls
iremgje ‘poems’, but devotes little attention to their textuality, beyond the
comment that they are ‘characterised by cumulative linear verse lines which
consist of a free combination of accepted traditional formulae’ (Ajuwon, 1982, p.
10). S. A. Babalola (1966a) also calls ala texts ‘poems’, but his attention is much
more on the properties of poetic language itself, and his treatment is the best and
richest discussion of any mode of onk: performance yet to appear.
18. S. O. Babayemi (1988) suggests the use of ortki orilg to trace the movements and
dispersion of the groups of people claiming the same origin. The fragments oflarge
groups of people could be mapped out over a wide area, and, in conjunction with
itan explaining the groups’ movements, some kind ofhistorical demography could
be attempted. Such a study, which would involve a large-scale comparative
be undertaken. |
exercise of collection and collation, would indeed be very valuable, but has yet to
19. This is admittedly a large assumption, and there is no evidence either to support
or to refute it. Babalola’s dating is probably too specific: he says ‘Itan dwon baba-
nla ati tya-nld ti a n sérd ba wonyt yid lo séhin séhin dé atyé atyd gan-an kété léhin ti
Ordnyan te Oyo ilé dé, éyiini ni ninkan bitedun A.D. 1250’ [Thesestories of our male
and female ancestors that we’re talking about go back into the distant past to the
time immediately after Oranyan founded Oyo Ile, that is to say about 1250 A.D.
(my translation)]. But the topicality and allusiveness of so many of the references
suggest a contemporary context in which all the circumstances surrounding the
formulation and giving it meaning were present in people’s minds. It is likely, then,
that oriki were usually composed soon after the events they allude to.
20. See Chapter 6 for examples. |
21. My translation of ‘Féré féré, ni oriki nada yid maa yan itan atyd; dlayé kikun vid si ku
si owe iwadii ati itopinpin-ord’. |
22. As David Henige points out, this kind of apparent triviality has long troubled the
oral historian: Robert Lowie complained that ‘oral tradition tends to remember
only the insignificant and fails to record “the most momentous happen-
ings”’(Henige, 1982, p. 17).
23. Cf. McCaskie (1989, p. 85) on Asante hermeneutics.
24. In this fascinating analysis, Tedlock suggests that the anthropologist’s impulse to
separate the narrative into two components, an authentic text and a secondary
commentary, does not correspond to the Zuni view, in which the telling of a story
of origin is ‘simultaneously something new and a comment on that relic, both a
restoration and a further possibility’ (Tedlock, 1983, p. 236). ‘For the Zuni
storyteller-interpreter, the relationship between text and interpetation is a dialectical
one: He or she both respects the text and revises it. For the ethnologist that
relationship is a dualistic opposition.’ Tedlock’s emphasis on the unity of ‘text’
and ‘commentary’ is highly pertinent to the case of oriki, and the difference between
this and the Zuni example seems to be only a matter of degree.
Notes to Chapter 3
1, Unfortunately no new map has been issued since the construction of this road;
Map 3 therefore shows the old road as it was when I first went to Okuku in 1974.
2. The seventy-five men from whom life stories were solicited in Okuku had had, at
one time or another, a total of 172 wives between them. Of these, seventy were
from towns other than Okuku. These women came from twenty-nine different
places — some as far afield as Abeokuta, Ilorin, and even the mid-West and Ghana
— but mainly from towns in the Odo-Otin District. The most heavily represented
towns were Okuku’s nearest neighbours ljabe, Inisa and Ekusa. As the informants
were selected to represent three age-ranges (over 70; 40-69; 20-39) and as the
proportion of outsider wives was about the same in each group, it seems
reasonable to suggest that this marital relationship with the neighbourhood is a
well-established and continuing custom.
3. Okuku is traditionally said to have ‘17’ festivals. The ones I observed during my
stay there, in order round the calendar, were: Olooku (May/June); Esile (same time
as Olooku); Orisa Oko (July); Ori Oke (July/August); Ifa (August); Osanyin
(August); Otin (October); Osun (October); Erinle (October); Sango (November);
Gbedegbede CNovember); Ogboni (December); Soponnon (January); Oya
(February/March); Egungun (March/April); Ogun (same time as Egungun).
4, For a description of this festival, and a speculative assessment of its origins and
political significance, see Beier 1956,
5. One elder of le Oba, Oyeleye, said that there were four orisa belonging to the royal
family, brought by the oba Alao Oluronke from the old town of Kookin. Each
belonged to a different oba of this early period: Ifa to Olugbegbe, Soponnon to
Oladile, Orisala to Oluronke Alao, and Otin to Otinkanre. For further discussion
of these obas, see the next section of this chapter.
6. Berry (1975, 1985) provides a broader perspective on this kind of migration,
which 1s characteristic of large areas of northern Yorubaland.
7. Osun Div. 1/2 File no. 294, Intelhgence Report: Okuku District, 16/12/1935.
8. According to an Intelligence Report, a motor road from Ikirun to Okuku was
‘under construction’ in 1936 (Osun Div. 1/2 Os 294), and by 1940 it had reached
Ofa, ten miles beyond Okuku.
9. Oyo’s sovereignty ended probably some time between c. 1825, when the Ilorins
entered Ofa, and 1831-3, when the city of Old Oyo was sacked (Law 1970). The
form it took is unclear: the only reference to it that I came across was in the legend
about Olugbegbe, the magical oba who turned into a leopard (see below). The
Alaafin was said to have interested himself in Olugbegbe’s case to the extent of .
trying personally to get rid of him, but without success. There are indirect and
ambiguous references in stories to the role of Ilorin during its period of overlordship.
In Oyeleye’s version of the story, Adeoba, who may have begun his reign around
1830, was said to have been called to the throne and to have come ‘from Ilorin’
— though what he was doing there was not explained. In the same narrative,
Adeoba’s successor Oyekanbi was driven away from the town and took up
residence in Ofa, by then an the Ilorin outpost, from where he was recalled seven
years later. Though the Ilorins are always referred to as the enemy, nevertheless
more than one old man recalled that slaves captured by Okuku men would be sold
off ‘to Ilorin’. The ajele system is remembered well. Some ajele settled in Okuku,
attaching themselves to host compounds, and their descendants are still known to
be ‘ome ayjele’, children of the ajele. For more information about the ajele system,
see Awe (1964b). According to colonial records (Schofield, 1935), Ibadan.also
extended to Okuku the system of assigning the town to an Ibadan chief (baba ogun)
who acted as their patron. 7
10. This characteristic of :tan ile as exclusive to the groups that own them, and
symbolic of their identity, has been discussed by Lloyd (1955, p. 237).
distance is maintained. }
11. Apossible exception to this is Olugbegbe, the leopard king, from whom a discreet
12. This of course is a widespread phenomenon in Africa and elsewhere; a thoughtful

and influential early treatment of it is Cunnison’s discussion of the ‘historical
notions’ of the Luapula (Cunnison, 1951). Sahlins has recently extended the
discussion in an inspiring essay (Sahlins, 1987).
13. Asimilar process of progressive conflation of historical ‘landmark’ incidents was
noted by J. D. Y. Peel in Ilesa (Peel, 1984). }
14. The ‘official’ version of Okuku history (as published in the publicity for the present
Olokukw’s coronation) assigns dates, something my own narrators never did for
any event before the twentieth century. The dates are based on-reign lengths and
go back to Adeoba. As Henige (1982) has convincingly shown,.such dating must
be treated with great caution, and in most of my discussion of the nineteenth
of the past. | |
century, here and in Chapter 6, I have deliberately left things vague, as did Ajiboye,
Oyeleye, Adeosun, Adewale, and many other Okuku elders who told me stories
15. Beier’s version of Okuku history, culled from unnamed ‘praise singers’ of the
town, corresponds in all salient points to the summary given here. He observes that
“The praise singers of Okuku list fifteen Obas. There is agreement on the order of
succession only among the first two and the last six rulers. There is disagreement
about the order in which the intervening obas reigned’(Beier, 1982, pp. 38-9).
Versions I collected did not even agree about the first two, nor on which obas were
to be included in the early period.
16. It is noteworthy, in view of prevailing assumptions about Yoruba kingship
ideology (e.g. Smith, 1969, Kenyo, 1964, Beier, 1982), that none of the elders
who told me itan of Okuku ever traced the story back from Aramoko to ultimate
origin in Ife. However, the Olokuku himself, Olaosebikan Oyewusi II, an educated
man, did; and this is also reflected in the ‘official’ version of the history presented
for public consumption by the oba and the educated elite. __
17. Estimated dates for the foundation of Osogbo vary widely. Schwab, who did field-
work in the town in the 1950s, places it ‘at about 1800’ (Schwab 1955, p. 355)
which must certainly be too late and probably the result of the kind of foreshortening
of past time by local narrators discussed above. Akintoye (1971, p. 30) estimates
the late seventeenth century, whereas Peel in his account of the expansion of the
Ijesa (Peel, 1983, p. 21) puts it further back, in the late sixteenth century.
18. When the colonial authorities established Okuku as the head of one of the twelve
districts of Ibadan Division of Oyo Province (1914-34), they listed the following
towns as subordinate to Okuku: jabe, Igbaye, Okua, Ekosin, Faji, Ilyeku, Ekusa,
Agboye, Ila-Odo, Inisa and Oyan. Elders of the royal family of Okuku, however,
claimed that in addition to those listed, Okuku also had overlordship over Ore,
Oponda, Opete, Imuleke, Iba and Asaba, making seventeen in all. It claimed
authority over them by virtue of having granted the land to them when they first
settled. Some of those listed were satellites of others — Imuleke, for instance, was
subordinate in the first instance to Igbaye, having been founded by Igbaye people,
Faji was subordinate to Ekosin and Asaba was subordinate to Oyan. Some of these
towns formally denied being subordinate to Okuku, notably Inisa and Oyan, which
were rapidly outgrowing Okuku (according to Schofield, in 1935 Oyan was already
more than twice the size of Okuku, and Inisa was not far behind). Others, like Iba
and Igbaye, with whom Okuku was engaged in land disputes, told stories of origin
in which they claimed to have preceded Okuku to the area. Nonetheless, Okuku
clearly did have a ring of smaller subordinate towns around it, and these in turn
sometimes had even smaller subordinate hamlets. For towns of origin claimed by
each ile, including moves from one town to another before arrival at Kookin, see
Appendix. After the establishment of Kookin, new towns were also created in the
area by outward expansion. Eko-Ende and Ijabe are both acknowledged as
settlements founded by princes of the Kookin royal family, and to this day they
claim the same core ortki relating to origins in Aramoko and the cults and customs
established at Kookin, notably the relationship to the River Otin.
19. Johnson (1921) mentions an ‘Ijesha Arera War’ between Oyo and the Ijesa ata
much earlier period, in the reign of Obalokun, which according to Law’s calculations
must have been some time in the early seventeenth century. J. D. Y. Peel (1983)
refers to the incursions northwards into Igbomina territory by Ilesa in the eighteenth
century. Kookin was further to the west than the towns known to have been the
object of Ilesa’s interest, but only by about twenty miles. The Arokin — the oral
historians and praise-singers of Oyo — mentioned the ‘Ijesa Arara’ in an interview
with them in 1988. They said that Sango sent Timi to Ede in the hope that he
would be set upon by the Ijesa Arara who had the habit of ambushing people on
the road. This story identifies the Ijesa Arara with the earliest, mythological era of
Oyo history, but the Arokin went on to suggest that the warlike Ijesa Arara were
a permanent feature of that area. Their account is therefore no help in dating the
fall of Kookin. The problem of written sources re-entering oral tradition 1s of
course well known to oral historiographers: see David Henige’s “The Disease of
Writing’, in Miller (1980).
20. For detailed accounts of the events after Alaafin Abiodun’s death in c. 1789 up to
the fall of Old Oyo in c. 1835/6, see Johnson (1921), Law (1977), Akinjogbin
(1965). For discussion about the chronology of these events, see Akinjogbin
(1966), Law (1970), Abdullahi Smith (1983).
21. Sources on which this brief summary is based include Johnson (1921), Ajayi and
Smith (1964), Akintoye (1971), Law (1970, 1977) and Atanda (1973). All
information relating specifically to Okuku, however, is derived from oral sources.
22. According to Lloyd (1960, p. 233), ‘Deposition could only be effected by death
and never by exile or abdication, for only by the death of one oba could his successor
perform the consecration rituals necessary to validate his own rule’. Though Lloyd
is speaking specifically of Ado-Ekiti, the reference to consecration rituals applies
to Okuku. Only the turbulence of the war period and perhaps the uncertainty as
to which town was Okuku’s overlord explains how Oyekanbi got away with it.
23. J. D. Y. Peel (1984) has proposed a concise and well-formulated rebuttal of the
‘presentist’ theory of oral societies’ accounts of the past, and offered in its place
a dialectical view of the relations between present action and past precedent: on
the one hand, present-day actors are guided by their conception of the past and
attempt to make on-going events conform to it; on the other hand, when the
‘perturbations of history’ result in a radical departure from these precedents,
people then attempt to revise history so as to maintain a sense of its unbroken
continuity with the present. This picture of the ‘past in the present’ is one of
continual mutual adjustment between action and representation. To this model,
with which I am in agreement, my analysis suggests the addition of a further point,
that is that the discussion needs to take more account of the medzum in which Yoruba
representations of the past are formulated. As I have shown, the episodic and
unconnected character of itan, existing as they do in a symbiotic relationship with
the disjunctive discourse of oriki, shows that like ortk1, tan do not attempt to present
a total, consistent overview of the past. There is therefore always a large reserve
of latent information, of dormant precedents which are not ironed out and
brought into line with current practice. In this respect, the repertoire of
representations of the past is much more like what is usually associated with a
literate, archival culture, where texts may be left lying for decades until they once
again suit some new political or social purpose. It also means that there is always
material for oppositional views to work on.
24. In Okuku, it is said that the Eesa was banished on a wrongful charge of adultery
with the oba’s wife, who had taken refuge with him after a quarrel with the oba.
He thereupon went and founded Inisa. In Inisa itself, a different story is told,
ascribing the foundation of the town to a hunter unconnected with Kookin, who
was later joined by the Eesa. Similarly, the ruling house of Iba is reported to have
claimed this town’s independence, asserting that their forefathers came from Ife
long before the foundation of Kookin (File 60/1923, Osun Div. 2/2, document
dated 11/9/1936).
25. A passive prefix a- followed by two syllables, the word’s tonal pattern being either
low-low-high or low-high-high.
26. This process of accumulating personal oriki has been well described by Babalola
(1975).
27. Egbo is made from mashed boiled maize; ewa usually refers to boiled beans, but
} here means a mixture of boiled beans and boiled maize.
28. See Adeoye (1972), Oduyoye (1972) and Sowande and Ajanaku (1969) for
excellent discussions of the structure and meaning of the various categories of
Yoruba names.
29. From a performance by Faderera, daughter of ze Awoyemi, wife of ile Oloko, at |
the grave-shrine of her grandfather Awoyemi, during the Egungun festival of
1975.
30. Béwé: according to Babalola, ‘mashed, boiled yam pieces mixed with palm oil’
(Babalola, 1989, p. 170).
31. In Okuku there are four main types of egungun. The eegun rere (good egungun) belong
to compounds rather than individuals; they wear large, square sack-like robes of
dark blue material, do not carry a mask, and behave in a mild and co-operative
way. They seem to represent the benign aspects of the collectivity of acompound’s
ancestors. The eegun nla, or great egungun, were founded by individuals, and each
remains in some sense the alter ego of its founder, though with the passage of time
becoming the property of a compound or a section within a compound. They are
flamboyant and individualised figures, with colourful costumes and carved masks,
NOTES TO PP. 87-134 313
their own names and ortki, and a tendency to be ferocious. There are small egungun
called pakaa carried by young boys for fun. Finally there are the eegun oje,
entertainment masquerades, who perform as a group on special occasions. The
now disbanded Okuku group has already been mentioned. The categories of
egungun vary from town to town; for a useful survey, see Drewal (1978) and the
articles by Houlberg, Drewal and Drewal, Pemberton, Poynor, Adedeji and
Schiltz in the same volume.
32. From a performance of rara tyawo by Susannah Faramade, married into i/e Arogun
(1976).
33. A comparison of any two collections of ortki — such as those compiled by B.
Gbadamosi (1961), S. A. Babalola (1966), C. L. Adeoye (1972), or S. O. Babayemi
(1988) — shows that there is no such thing as a complete and discrete corpus of
units for any orde. Although each informant and collector tends to treat his or her
own collection as definitive, there are wide variations between one collection and
the next. In some cases, the same units of ortki can be attributed to two or three
different orile by different authorities. Even within the context of one community,
variations occur. No performer could ever claim that her own repertoire of units
for a given lineage/clan was exhaustive. Other performers will know a different
range. Some units, which could be regarded as the core oriki ore for each kin
group, will be known by all performers, but these turn out to be a surprisingly small
proportion of the total range.
34. For a full discussion of arg narratives see LaPin (1977, pp. 66-72).
35. In some cases, it is not clear in which genre a piece of text originated: there are
formulations which are shared by several genres. The Ifa corpus — the other great
Yoruba poetic genre — is also incorporative, though for different reasons and in
different ways. [See Barber (1990a) for this.] Thus passages may be shared by both
Ifa and ortki, and who borrowed from whom is a matter of speculation.
Notes to Chapter 4
1. From a performance by Iyabo, daughter of ile Oloko, February 1976.
2. Johnson Onifade of ile Oluode.
3. From a performance by Elizabeth, Olumide, Yemisi, and Ibiyo, all daughters of
ile Oloko, February 1978.
4, This is not to say that all specialist/professional performers produce chants as
fragmented and eclectic as Sangowemi’s. Visiting akewt whose performances I
recorded were generally in fact more coherent. However, they, like Sangowemi,
were entertainers in a way that the obinrin ile were not, and their performances
reflected this. The general point holds, which is that the knowedge of the obinrin
ile is more restricted to particular bodies of ortki orile and personal orik1, but is also
‘deeper’.
5. For another description of Yoruba betrothal and marriage procedures, based
mainly on the Egba but incorporating references to other Yoruba groups, see
Fadipe (1970, pp. 69-86). Though this account is very detailed, it contains no
mention of ekun tyawo, confirming the suggestion of Faniyi (1975) that this is
principally an Oyo genre.
6. Nowadays only brides of special categories are stripped: these categories include
twins, the arugba or ceremonial calabash carrier of the Otin cult, and daughters
of ze Oba. Other girls undergo a token washing of the feet only.
/ 7. For detailed descriptions of the hierarchy within Yoruba compounds, see Bascom
(1942), Schwab (1958) and Fadipe (1970, pp. 114-34).
8. From a performance of Erinle pipe by Ere-Osun, daughter of Je Odofin, married
314 NOTES TO PP. 87-134
into ze Elemoso Awo, May 1977.
9. A similarly ambiguous attitude to marriage is expressed in the wedding songs of
the Limba, though in a less elaborated and eloquent form (Ottenberg, 1989). .
Faniyi (1975) also gives examples of the expression of fears and anticipation of joys
in ekun tyawo from Oyo. In the interesting cases described by him, brides would
sometimes engage in chanting contests if they met on the road (Faniyi, 1975 pp.
691-2), and were sometimes able to improvise verses on the spot (Faniyi, 1975
p. 693), something I never saw in Okuku. .
12. Ibid. 7
10. From a performance by Susannah Faramade, wife of Joseph Ajeiigbe Faramade
of ze Arogun, February 1976.
15. Ibid. |
11. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
16. From a performance by Omiyiola, Iyaa Laagbe, daughter of z/e Oba, wife of ile
Asipa, February 1978.
17. From aperformance by Adedigba Akindele, daughter of ile Oluode, February 1975.
18. From a performance by Motunrayo, daughter of ze Odofin, February 1975.
19. For an example of such a treatment of the Lagbai passage see Chapter 5.
20. Fora fuller text of the [koyi ortk1, which revolve around the twin themes of warfare
and thievery, see Chapter 5.
21. The details of the ceremony were as follows. The family had to provide objects for
sacrifice: 55 kobg (the modern equivalent of 22,000 cowries); a large billy-goat;
one cock and one hen; a tortoise; a snail; chalk; camwood powder; shea-butter;
twenty naira. As is the usual practice, the body was washed with hot water and
dressed in men’s trousers put on back to front. Her head was then shaved and the
osu (or gga as the Onisango called it) was cut off and put in a calabash. All the
animals except the goat were killed without the use of any instrument, and their
blood was poured on her head. Other medicines which had been prepared at the
Baale Sango’s house were brought and piled on her head. White cloth was put over
her face and marked with blood to look like a face. The corpse was sat up and
draped in cloth. Then everyone was allowed to come in and look, and give money
to the children of the deceased. .
22. In some chants that I recorded, the refrains were quite different from each other
and changed every few lines, yet the chorus always seemed to know which one to
sing. This remarkable unanimity has been commented on by Akinwumi Isola
(1973).
23. For a fuller quotation and analysis of this passage see Chapter 7.
24. An egungun priest, and therefore expert on the spirits of the dead, told me ‘A gbéde
lond 6run nitori pé tyd td bi Ogun 16 bi eégun’ (The smithy is the road to heaven
because the mother of Ogun [orisa of blacksmiths] is also the mother of Eegun
[Egungun]). This use of puns and invented etymological links (here, the similarity
of sound in ‘Ogun’ and ‘Eegun’) to explain relationships amongst spiritual beings
was a very common discursive strategy. }
25. There is also a story told in explanation of the ortki ‘Moja-Alekan’, which says that
the oba of Iwata was a carver from whom the Alaafin commissioned 200
houseposts (Professor Wande Abimbola, personal communication).
26. On the occasion when this chant was recorded, the ceremony was being performed
in honour of Yooye, a daughter of ile Oloko who had married into ile Oluode.
Normally, when the deceased is a woman, the oro ile is performed in her own (i.e.
her father’s) compound, but the burial itself and the dancing, spending of money
NOTES TO PP. 135-182 315
and serving of food that follow take place in her husband’s compound. However,
in this particular case the woman was not buried in her husband’s compound, zle
Oluode, but in her father’s, zle Oloko. This was because her husband had died long
before and she had no surviving children to keep her in ile Oluode, and she had
therefore moved back to de Oloko to live. The whole ceremony was performed in
we Oloko.
27. Orisa Oke could mean either the Hill deity (whose cult, in Okuku, belongs to zle
Ojomu, a compound related by origin in Ofa to Aboyarin’s compound tle Nla); or
‘the Orisa Above’, i.e. God.
28. For the various categories of egungun recognised in Okuku, see Chapter 3, Note
31.
29. This was the explanation given me by several participants in one such ceremony.
However, a babalawo, Asapawo, gave a characteristically more complicated
explanation, involving a story about a man with three wives who, after his death,
all told lies about him. One said she had given him all her savings; the second said
he never bought anything for her, and that all her clothes were bought with her own
money; the third complained that he had never given her a child. The dead man’s
friend told them he would make the dead man come alive on the seventh day and
they should repeat their stories in front of him. Then he wrapped a banana stem
in cloth — the kind that the eegun rere wear nowadays — and buried it in place of a
corpse. He told each of the wives to bring an egg, a ball of cotton and 1s 8d and
place them on the heaps that had been dug on the path. But all the while, the
husband was not dead at all, he was hiding in the rafters watching the behaviour
of his wives. After the ‘burial’ he burst out and confronted them with their lies.
This is why there is a prohibition against lying about a dead person, and why there
is always a ceremony at the funeral in which people with grievances against the
dead, or debts owed to them by him, are asked to come forward. The objects the
women were told to bring were presented as an offering, so that what they had
done would not rebound on them fatally; they were also symbolic. The egg is
something cool and delicate, which Obatala moulded with great care; it is also the
offering we make to witches. Its purpose was to prevent the household becoming
‘hot’ (painful, full of trouble) for the wives. The ball of cotton was offered so that
the wives’ loads would not become too heavy for them, 1.e. so that their problems
would not become intolerable. This explanation makes use of a pun on the words
dwu (cotton) and wuwo (heavy), as well as of the fact that a ball of cotton is itself
light. The money was for the dead to take with him to the other world; but it was
also given in the expectation that the dead would repay those who gave him the
money many times over.
Notes to Chapter 5
1. S. A. Babalola (1966a), showing how ala chanters use formulaic utterances to
correct each other’s performance, significantly uses ortki orile as his example.
2. In Dance and Society in Eastern Africa, Ranger describes the Beni dance as a ‘trace
element’ (1975, p. 6) and as ‘a good decoder’ (1975, p.165), in the sense that
tracing the history of the growth and spread of this popular dance form reveals
aspects of popular consciousness and popular organisation which might not
otherwise be accessible.
3. Onki orile of tle Oba, Okuku. This is the version that everyone knows. Sangowemi,
always given to even greater profusion than other performers, attributed no less
than seventeen rivers to the Okuku royal house in her version.
4. As in many other African cultures, ‘farm’ is a Janus-faced mediator between
316 NOTES TO PP. 135-182
‘settlement’ and ‘forest’, ‘civilisation’ and ‘the wild’. Depending on the frame of
reference, it can be positioned on either side. This is revealed in everyday idioms.
Ara oko (literally, person of the farm, farm-dweller) is an abusive expression
meaning ‘bush-man’, ‘boorish, uncultivated person’. Similarly eranko (animals of
the farm) means wild as opposed to domesticated animals. However, oko (farm)
is also used as a metaphor for any place of productive (i.e. civilising) work: a carver
goes to oko ona, the ‘farm’ of carving, and the trader goes to oko owo, the ‘farm’
of trading, i.e. goes on a trading trip. |
5. This is not the only transformation that is taking place, of course. The trees are
represented as animate beings themselves, waiting for Lagbai’s arrival and
wondering which of them he is going to cut down. Trees are inhabited by spirits,
who have to be propitiated by the carver before he cuts. But they are spirits of the
bush, not part of the human community. When the carver has produced an image,
this image is likely to be used in religious ceremonies in which spiritual powers are
invoked. But this time they will be orisa, gods who, even if not once human
themselves, are at least in communication with humans and responsible for the
foundations of human culture. Thus on the spiritual level too the nature: culture
transformation is repeated.
6. Apd: Afzelia Africana (Abraham, 1958, p. 57).
7. Iroke: ‘African teak’, Chlorophora Excelsa (Abraham, 1958, p. 316).
8. Since the status order is slave~-bondsman-—freeman, one would expect the value of
the carvings to be similarly ordered from smallest to biggest. The reversal which
makes the value of the bondsmen’s carvings less than that of the slaves’, is however
a characteristic rhetorical pattern in oriki and in everyday figures. of speech.
9. According to S. O. Babayemi (1971), Ola, though attacked in the early nineteenth
century, still exists. The people of ze Awoyemi however do not refer to this, saying
that Ola was destroyed in the ‘Fulani war’. Further investigation is needed to
establish whether it was one of the many towns that were destroyed and then
rebuilt, often on a new site; whether it was a different Ola; or whether zle Awoyemi
simply lost contact and lacked information about it. |
10. Facial marks in certain circumstances can also indicate status. The royal lineage
of Oyo, for instance, had different marks from other Oyo lineages: see Abraham
(1958, p. 300). It seems likely, however, that the primary signification of the royal
marks is the royal lineage’s place of origin; because they are a high-status lineage,
the marks also take on that significance. .
11. From a recitation of ortki orile by Oketundun, daughter of z/e Oloyan, married into
tle Oba.
12. S.O. Babayemi suggests that this incorporation ofan outsiders’ views characteristic
only of ortki orile of towns outside the central Oyo area. He points out that the or:ki
orile of Ife have the same perspective as the Omu ones. In his view orth: orile were
not characteristic of the outlying areas, and can be assumed to have been made up
for the townspeople by people from central Oyo. (Babayemi, personal
communication and 1988). This does not conflict with my general point that all
14, Ibid. )|
presentation to outsiders. |
oriki orile are about insider—outsider relationships because they are exercises in self-
ile Oluode.
13. From a recitation of ork: orile by Iyaa Lajire, daughter of ze Elemoso, married into
15. It is possible that early Northern Yoruba towns were more like the towns of Ijebu
and Ondo today, where emblems of lineage membership are diffuse and of less
importance than emblems of town membership. According to E. Krapf-Askari, in
NOTES TO PP. 135-182 317
these towns ‘the same facial marks are ... shared by all ara du of a single town, only
the royal lineage bearing additional distinguishing scars; oriki and food taboos,
along with land and priestly titles, descend through women as well as men...’
(Krapf-Askari, 1969, p.75).In a situation like this, the most strongly demarcated
unit would be the town: in Northern Yorubaland one can add ortki orile to the ‘facial
marks’ Krapf-Askari refers to. Lineage ortk1, being claimed equally by descendants
through females and through males, would not demarcate agnatic corporate
groups and would have a less powerful identifying function than the town orik.
However, a less radical hypothesis would account equally well for the importance
of ortki orile.
16. For explanation of these terms see Section 3 of this chapter.
17. Three of these towns, mentioned by Babayemi (1971), were Igbori, Ogbin, and
Oje, all of Tapa (Nupe) origin and all intertwined in the ortki orile of ile Odofin in
Okuku: probably a case of conflation as in the Oyo example discussed. The sack
of Oyo by the Nupe is supposed to have taken place in Alaafin Ajaka’s reign. Since
this oba belongs to the same kind of mythical, non-chronological era as the obas
of Kookin, in which the accounts vary greatly, any attempt to assign him to a
period — even to the nearest century — must be considered highly speculative.
18. I am grateful to Professor W. Abimbola for telling me this story.
19. According to the Iwe Itan Ofa by Olafimihan (1950), Ofa changed its site nine
times before the nineteenth century. Babayemi (1968, 1971) is my source for the
status and location of these towns.
20. Schwab speaks of ‘ortki idile’ (the ortki of descent groups — not a phrase in common
use in Okuku), which are supposed to trace the relationships of all the members
of the lineage and ‘serve to define the structural relations of persons and groups
within a lineage’ (Schwab, 1955, p. 354). The way genealogical relationships are
actually treated in ortk: is very different, as will be shown in the next chapter.
21. Asis common in Yorubaland, all compound land, ifa group within the compound
dies out, reverts to the compound as a whole for redistribution by the compound
head. None of the land belongs absolutely to any segment, nor have they the right
to sell it; but it is usually regarded as theirs as long as they and their descendants
survive to claim it.
22. From a performance by Faderera, daughter of zle Oba/Awoyemiy, wife of tle Oloko,
at the family celebration of the Egungun festival, 1975.
23. Schwab points out that there are two simultaneous principles of cleavage. He
distinguishes the tsoke, a segment descended from a common male ancestor, from
the origun, a segment differentiated by reference to the mother: Schwab (1955, p.
353).
24. In his discussion of Yoruba medicine, Buckley describes the compound as ‘an
enclosure containing a male lineage’ where ‘the men encounter, coming from the
outside, a flow of women’: an inversion of the Yoruba model of the healthy body
and therefore, according to Buckley, regarded as a potential threat to the integrity
of the corporate group, while at the same time being essential for its survival.
Women make links with the outside world which are both dangerous and
necessary (Buckley, 1985, p. 168).
25. From the funeral chant by Iwe, daughter of ile Baale, discussed in Chapter 4.
26. From a performance by Iya Lajire, daughter of ile Elemoso, married into ie
Oluode.
27. Ibid.
28. In other versions the river is given as ‘Agunlofa’ and ‘runmolé lOfa ti gbogbo ayaba
n pon én mu’ [the spirit at Ofa from which all the royal wives drink.] This ortk: is
probably to be associated with Olafimihan’s reference to a river flowing by Ofa-
318 NOTES TO PP. 183-247
Igbo-Oro, one of the early Ofa settlements, which was so good that only the wives
of the Oba Okunmolu were allowed to use it, and which was called Odo Ayaba,
the river of the royal wives, up till today (Olafimihan, 1950, p. 5).
29. The verse, performed for me by the Araba of Okuku, Akanbi Opaleke, has been
included in LaPin’s collection of narratives (LaPin, 1977, pp. 139-42).
Notes to Chapter 6
1. Atin-in mat: a mat characteristic of Ijesaland. Oré mat: a highly valued type of mat
found widely in Yoruba country, often included in a bride’s ‘dowry’, i.e. the
collection of household goods she takes to her husband’s house for distribution to
her husband’s people (see Chapter 4).
2. People remember the main names but do not bother much about the relationships
between them, even in the generation immediately before their own. People often
skip a generation, calling themselves the grandsons or granddaughters of people
who were actually their great-grandparents. There are considerable differences
between the genealogies produced (on the demand of the anthropologist) even by
full brothers — and regarding even their own father’s generation! These variations
seem in most cases not to be the result of political or other interests at work so
much as a lack of use for detailed distinctions. Only when one branch of a lineage
was traced through a daughter do people bring up ancient genealogical issues in
chieftaincy contests (see Chapter 5). The royal family is somewhat more rigorous
in its genealogies, at least in its accounts of the last three generations, because of
the rotation of the crown between segments whose relationships have to be
accounted for. But even here there are considerable divergences between one
version and another, as was shown in Chapter 3. Chieftaincy contests which the
colonial authorities collected evidence about in Ijabe (Osun Div 1/1 File 175 vol.
IT, 1933), Okua (Osun Div 1/1 886D/2A, 1957) and Inisa (Osun Div 1/1 2173,
1953), show that this degree of malleability was common in the area. There is little
interest in genealogies, in general, in this area. There is no formal oral genre for
the preservation of genealogical knowledge and such knowledge is rarely called
for.
3. For details of Ajayi’s leadership during the Ikirun campaign, see Johnson (1921,
pp. 428-34), Ajayi and Smith (1964, p. 45) and Akintoye (1971, pp.98-101).
4. According to Fadipe (1970, pp. 180-9), domestic slavery among the Yoruba was
‘mild’. The right of slaves to emancipate themselves by payment of a standard fee
was universally recognised; slaves were allotted their own farmland to work on
after they had finished their day’s work for the master; they were treated like
members of the household and often eventually absorbed into it if they did not buy
their freedom; and no stigma attached to children of female slaves. On the other
hand, he reveals that the slave could hold no property, and that the master had the
right to beat him to death! Oroge (1971) also stresses the mildness of the slaves’
treatment and the high positions of power and privilege which some slaves
attained. Law (1977, p. 206) postulates that by the early nineteenth century a
more exploitative form of slavery had developed alongside the relatively benign
patriarchal form described by Oroge.
5. Oroge’s study (1971, p. 419) implies that the institution of zwefa, though an ‘age-
old...system’, was of little economic or social significance until the suppression of
domestic slavery, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Oral texts
however hint that it was an important institution well before this period.
6. According to Okuku people, one slave out of the total captured by the members
ofa compound on any expedition would also be given to the baale.A similar custom
NOTES TO PP. 183-247 319
is mentioned in passing by Fadipe, in his detailed but generalised description of
Yoruba social structure, when he says that of the slaves captured in a campaign
by the members of a compound, ‘one or two were sure to be passed on’ to the baale,
and also that the oba would take a ‘certain percentage’ (Fadipe, 1970, pp. 111,181).
Johnson describes a complicated set of rules operating in Ibadan, by which free-
born soldiers would hand over to their ‘captains’ either one- or two-fifths of their
captives and keep the rest, but slave-warriors would hand over three- or four-fifths
(johnson 1921, p. 325). According to Lloyd, ‘One-third of all war booty was
handed over to the oba, and a further third to the chief under whose jurisdiction
the captor lived’ (Lloyd, 1960, p. 229). The details of the system evidently varied
from place to place, but the principle remained constant.
7. Michael Adegsun, the present chief Sobaloju, said that in the old days the new oba
would be chosen from among the competing candidates in a secret meeting of all
the chiefs, using Ifa divination. ‘But everyone present would be told, “You mustn’t
breathe a word of this outside”. So all the chiefs and babalawo would keep quiet,
and all the contesting princes would be sending presents, bringing food, and even
holding feasts for the chiefs, not knowing that Ifa had already chosen one of them.
That’s how the chiefs got their share of the good things arising from chieftaincy’.
8. For a detailed description of the selection and installation of the oba of Okuku,
with special reference to Olaosebikan Oyewusi II, see Beier (1982, pp. 14—22).
9. So memorable was Oyekanbi’s achievement in ‘making six z/ari in one day’ that
the names of all stx are recorded in his ortkz:
Gba 6 wa lalari t6 la méfa 160j6
O la *Ku-d-mona
O la ’Ki-d-yalé
O la ’Ku-yé
O la ’Péjin
O 1a’Jobo
O la ’Gbéjé, n 16 waa rigba nla muti baba ’léya
Abilari dogba jalé baba Apéjin...
When he made six dari on a single day
He made Ku-o-mona [Death-doesn’t-know-the way]
He made Ku-o-yale [Death-doesn’t-come-to-this-house]
He made Ku-ye [Death by-passes]
He made Apeyjin
He made Ajobo
He made Gbejo, the one who had a great dish to drink liquor
from, father who is a devotee of Oya
Owner of d/ari who are exactly alike, father of Apejin...
According to Ajiboye, a descendant of Oyekanbi, ‘the baale of each compound
would hold a compound meeting after the accession of the oba, to decide who to
send from the compound to be an dar?’, but if the gba was unpopular they might
not bother. He added that “The dart shaved half his head and plaited the unshaven
half into a point like a woman’s. After six months, when the hair had grown back,
he would shave the other side. This was to make him immediately recognisable as
the oba’s messenger, so that if he were sent to fetch someone, that person would
know that it was a serious matter; he would be frightened and obey at once.’
[According to Johnson (1921, p. 76) the provincial kings of Oyo were allowed only
one ilari each, and according to Oroge this rule was still in operation in the mid-
nineteenth century (Oroge,1971, p. 80). Oyekanbi’s action may have been made
so much of because it was a decisive act of defiance. But it is equally likely that
320 NOTES TO PP. 183-247
1982).] .
‘rules’ emanating from the capital were unknown or disregarded in small towns
like Okuku. The rule that provincial obas could not wear fringed beaded crowns,
ade (Law ,1977, p.98) certainly did not hold in Okuku, where the undoubtedly
ancient collection of such crowns is one of its most famous possessions (see Beier,
10. Robin Law (1977, p.62) observes that ‘Political power normally lay with the senior
“chiefs”, or holders of titles (oloye). However, generally speaking, these men were
given senior titles in recognition of their power; political power does not derive
from possession of a title’. ‘This account corresponds to some cases in Okuku, but
not all; the amendment made by Peel (1983, p. 266), to the effect that title is not
merely a ratification but also a source of power, is a valuable one. Law is surely
tight, however, to stress that ‘Power was based ultimately on the control of
resources, more specifically on the allegiance of followers and the accumulation of wealth
— ‘men and means’, to use an illuminating phrase of Samuel Fohnson’ [ibid.: my italics}.
Whether chiefs got their titles mainly because they were already big men, or
expanded their position significantly only after getting a title (and both these
things happened in Okuku), the principle of their success was the same: men and
having wealth. }
means, i.e. building up wealth by having ‘people’, and attracting ‘people’ by
11. The genealogy, however, is only four generations deep: Winyomi is represented
as the great-grandfather of the oldest men of ile Oluode living today. The greatest
foreshortening of the genealogy occurs between the third and the fourth ascendant
generations, for Winyomi’s ‘sons’ Olomi, Ogunsola and others did exist within
living memory.
12. The first systematic use of firearms in Yoruba country has been estimated to have
been around 1820 by Ajayi and Smith (1964) and Akintoye (1971). Alan Richards
says that a few guns reached the Oyo area in the eighteenth century, but that it was
not until the early 1850s that ‘guns had become the standard weapons of most
Yoruba warriors’ (Richards, 1983, p.83). The reference to the gun, however,
might well have been added to an older story anachronistically. :
13. From a performance by Okeyoyin, wife of Daniel Ogundiran, Chief Saba, of ile
Oluode (March 1978).
14. Fadipe, writing in 1939[1970], says ‘Before the establishment of colonial rule, the
baale had many opportunities of turning to his own advantage the misfortune of
members of his compound’, notably by taking ‘an extra percentage’ for himself on
any fine he imposed on offenders (Fadipe, 1970 [1939], p.111).
15. From a performance of the royal ork: by Abigail Olatundun, daughter of Oyekunle
branch of ile Oba, married into ile Oloko. For a comparison of this passage with
the ork: of the warlords of Ibadan, in the context of an analysis of changes in social
structure and ideology in the nineteenth century, see Barber (1981a).
16. For a discussion of the different categories of egungun in Okuku, and the way in
which ‘big egungun’ like Paje are founded, see note 30 in Chapter 3.
17. Historians have noted the rise of a new kind of big man in a number of war-ridden
areas in the nineteenth century. Akintoye describes how the warboys of Ekiti
raised private armies, and went on raids not instigated by their oba; they constituted
‘new pockets of power and prestige which were frequently in conflict with, and
potentially threatened, the position of the obas’. But because of their ability to
resist Ibadan ‘these new men were generally welcomed and adored’ (Akintoye,
1971, p. 77). Awe describes vividly the scale of operations of the military leaders
in Ibadan (Awe 1964a). Although the Olokuku’s household expanded with
wartime access to an increased supply of slaves, the actual power of the oba probably
NOTES TO PP. 183-247 321
diminished. Lloyd shows clearly that this was the pattern in a number of larger
nineteenth century kingdoms (Lloyd, 1971).
18. Recited by the late Ogunbuyi, Iyalode of Okuku, married into z/e Balogun.
19. Gbotifayo was remembered by the present Chief Alawe, Samuel Ayantunji, as an
ancient, blind babalawo to whom he was sent to learn Ifa as a child — around 1910-
15.
20. From a performance by Sangowemi, addressed to members of ie Aro-Isale,
descendants of Jayeola and Gbotifayo his son, May 1975.
21. For further discussion of this complex of ideas, illustrated with samples of all these
genres, see Barber (1979, pp. 233-45)
22. The story and ortki were told by Ojeyemi of tle Baale. Ojeyemi was a former ge
masquerader, a title-holder in the egungun cult and an accomplished akewi
(performer of iwi, the egungun style of chanting), hence his unusual knowledge of
ortki. He was a most brilliant interpreter of the meaning of words, ztan and ortki.
He was a philosopher. Sadly, he died before he reached old age.
23. This information is based on interviews with seventy-five men, divided into three
age groups with twenty-five in each: the old men (over 70); the middle-aged (40-—
69); and the young (20-39). These age divisions are of course approximate, as few
of the older men knew their exact age. I made no attempt to obtain a statistically
random sample, for the most important thing was to talk to people who were
’ willing and able to give a detailed account of their earliest memories — and they
tended to be the people I knew best. I talked to more people from the compounds
around the house where I stayed (z/e Oluode, ile Oloko, ile Baale, zle Oluawo) than
from ‘downtown Okuku’; and to more people who supported the oba in the chiefly
feud than to those who opposed him, for my honorary adoption by zle Oba made
this inevitable. The information is supplemented by numerous other interviews
and informal discussions I had with certain very nice old men, like Johnson
Onifade, Adewale baba Olosun, Joseph Ogundairo, Michael Adeosun and others.
Attempts to question women about household, land, labour and residence
invariably led to a referral to the husband. But women’s informal comments and
reminiscences about their own grandfathers and great-grandfathers, especially in
connection with their ortki, were illuminating and are included.
24. In the first extant report on the Iba—Okuku boundary dispute which began around
1910, the A.D.O. sent from Ibadan in 1921 was under the impression that the
problem concerned the planting of palm trees in an area beside the River Otin
claimed by both towns. He observed that ‘no dispute apparently arose until 1910
(possibly when palm trees became to be known more and more as profitable
possession)’ and also that there were ‘some 60 farmers from Iba, with farms inside
the disputed Area’, all of which were planted with palm trees. ‘Both the Eburu
[Baale of Iba] and Olokuku contend that they each have been reaping the Palm
Trees’. He adds ‘I believe there is some Iba Cocoa in the Area, but the rains and
flooded condition of the Streams forbids a more detailed sketch of the actual farms
and crops’ (R.H.Lapage, 21-26 September 1921). However, subsequent reports
speak only of cocoa on the disputed land (e.g. Resident to D.O. Ibadan 1923,
A.D.O. to Olokuku 1924); they say that ‘all [the Iba farmers and chiefs] admitted
that they had planted the cocoa since 1914’ (Senior Resident to Secretary of
Southern Provinces, 1923); and list twenty Okuku farmers whose land was alleged
to have been overplanted with cocoa by Iba people. It is also made clear that Iba
people had also planted cocoa on other land whose ownership was not disputed.
It seems likely that the problem arose because the Iba people were quicker to
embark on cocoa farming than the Okuku people, whose own accounts of the
322 NOTES TO PP. 183-247
period speak overwhelmingly of yam farming rather than either cocoa or palm
trees. But at least two women were involved from an early date in palm tree
farming: see section 7 of this chapter.
25. “Three years after the influenza epidemic’ (i.e. in 1921), seven members of le Olugde
—a set of five brothers and another pair related to the first through a maternal link
— moved out to build a separate house ‘because there was not enough room any
- more’. The new house was also ‘huge’ and ‘had seventy rooms’. Seven of these
were occupied by the matrilaterally-related pair of brothers, who stayed for fifteen
| years and then moved out to build their own house. Throughout the 1940s and
1950s the remaining five brothers — or their sets of grown-up sons — one by one
moved out or rebuilt their own sections of the compound as separate buildings.
Chief Saba, for instance, the son of the eldest of the five brothers, rebuilt his
father’s section of the compound in 1940 as a ‘long house with a parlour’ for
himself and his full brother. In 1971 he moved further up the road to a new site
and built an ‘upstairs’ — a square two-storeyed house — for himself, his wives, his
two grown sons, and his apprentices. The others did the same, :so that now ‘le
Oluode’ consists of about twenty buildings. Only one man was eventually left on
the original site in the centre of town: and he is in the middle of pulling down the
remains of the old compound and putting up a storeyed house there.
26. Eleven of the twenty-five oldest informants said they stopped serving their fathers
once they had married and got children of their own. They obtained their own
share of their fathers’ farms before his death, and had complete control over its use
and produce. Even less often did sons continue to serve their uncles or older
brothers very long after the father’s death. If the sons were young, they might work
for a senior relative for anumber of years, but eventually the farm would be divided
and only sons of the same mother would continue to work together in groups.
Often even these, the closest units in the system, would split up before their deaths.
Even some of the very oldest men, those who were young boys before the
beginning of this century, said that as children they worked not for a group of men
— as might be expected if the ideal were realised — but for a single man: their own
father or, if he had died, his nearest male relative. This means that even as long
as eighty years ago, full brothers did not necessarily conform to the ideal of staying
together and serving the eldest among them all their lives. Only four out of twenty-
five of the oldest men said they worked for a partnership. ‘Three of these
partnerships were pairs of full brothers, and two of them broke up before the
partners’ deaths. The fourth was not a real partnership, for though the brothers
did not divide the farm, each of them worked separately on it.
27. At the isthun ceremony one man paid {1 1s; at the parape ceremony several men
said they paid £2 10s; some paid for a sacrifice (£2 10s).
28. Aman owed the woman’s father one day of owe labour every year, or every other
year, throughout the period of betrothal. This involved the recruitment of a large
body of age-mates and friends from his compound — it was said that less than forty
people would not be acceptable — to do a full day’s work. He also gave the father
a parcel of yams (one man said nine yams made a parcel) and a-basket of maize
one, two, three or even four times a year, as well as a chicken for his annual festival.
29. During this period, the average area cultivated for the food for a household was
between 2000 and 8000 yam heaps, that is, between two-thirds of an acre and 2
and two-third acres. Two thousand yam heaps were estimated to yield 20 ofaasu,
that is, twenty lots of 120 yams; and around 1930 one ofaasu would fetch 5/- in
the market. These figures are of course approximate and based on memory rather
than record, on individual reminiscences rather than statistics.
NOTES TO PP. 183-247 323
30. Among the twenty-five oldest informants, only nine said their fathers paid the first
bride price for them. Seven more said their fathers made all the arrangements but
left it to them to produce the money. The son’s obedience did not seem to affect
the father’s readiness to meet this obligation. Out of the fourteen men who said
they ‘served their fathers till death’, only four were given wives by their fathers.
31. While the oldest group of twenty-five informants spent a total of forty years
between them in Ghana, the middle group spent a total of one hundred and forty-
four years. They also spent more years away from home altogether — whether in
Ghana or elsewhere — averaging more than nine years each in contrast to the older
men’s seven.
32. Ofthe twenty-five oldest men, three went to a Christian school and one to dle Kewu,
the Islamic school. Of the twenty-five men in the middle group, five went to
Christian school and two to de Kewu.
33. Fora discussion of the different age ranges of cocoa farmers in farm towns founded
at different periods, see Berry (1975, pp. 160-4).
34. However, as Sara Berry has shown (Berry, 1975, pp. 126—52), labour shortage was
still the main constraint on cocoa farmers. She found that this problem was often
solved by hiring wage labourers who were themselves young cocoa farmers, whose
trees had not yet started to bear fruit and who were therefore in urgent need of
cash. As well as the secondary occupations such as barbering, tailoring, etc. that
I have already mentioned, wage labour on neighbours’ farms was certainly an
option some Okuku men took up.
35. Since the genealogy is, as we have seen, easy to revise, present versions do not
demonstrate when this rotation was instituted or to what extent it really ever
operated. The number and order of segments was finally fixed only by the
Chieftaincy Declaration of 1956. Before this, four segments appear to have
contested the throne but only three ever succeeded in getting their candidates in.
Moreover, the order of rotation was certainly not immutable. Even in the colonial
period, each chieftaincy contest saw vigorous campaigns staged by segments out
of turn, no doubt in the belief that if the candidate was attractive enough the order
would be overridden. According to Michael Adeosun, the present chief Sobaloju,
rotation between segments in a set order only came in in the time of Oyinlola, but
he attributed this not to colonial intervention but to the Okuku chiefs’ wish to
imitate the Ibadan system.
36. When Oyekunle died in 1934, the six ‘kingmakers’, together with the Iyalode and
the Sobaloju — Oyekunle’s closest confidant — wrote to the Assistant D.O. at
Osogbo to say that they wanted Moses Oyinlola to succeed him, “but we have not
ready yet we are making the funeral of the late, we only hint you aforehand because
many of our people will be given you trouble that they like the post’. A week later
the A.D.O. hurried over to Okuku to supervise the selection process, and then
reported approvingly to the D.O. at Ibadan that ‘In the presence of the chiefs, the
members of the late Olokukuw’s family and people of Okuku and some representatives
of neighbouring villages, Moses Oyinlola was unanimously elected to become
Olokuku....’ (30/10/1934: Osun Div 1/1, File 175, Vol II: Chiefs:Okuku
District:Matters Affecting). This drew a stinging reply from the Resident himself:
‘An Olokuku should be ‘selected’ by the chiefs and not ‘elected’ by the people’.
The A.D.O. was responding to the flexible and consensual aspect of the process
of selection, the Resident to the privileged position of the chiefs who made the final
choice among candidates who had already competed to win popular favour. The
A.D.O.’s democratic leanings were quashed, for the dominating tendency in
colonial rewriting of tradition was to make the hierarchical and fixed elements
324 NOTES TO PP. 183-247
prevail over the open and competitive ones.
37. There is a wealth of detail on such disputes in the colonial records. See for example
the reports in Osun Div. 1/1, 1933-38, Chiefs: Okuku District 326. 175/Vol. II, and
1948-53, Chiefs and Chieftaincy Disputes 326.175/Vol II.
38. This at least is one of the versions of the story that circulated. Ajiboye’s account
of this adventure is too long to quote in full, but it includes some episodes that shed
an interesting light on local perceptions of the colonial authorities. When Ajiboye
saw the ‘oyinbo agba’ (the senior European) in Ibadan, this man sent for the ‘oyinbo
kekere’ (the junior European), the one who had visited Okuku. The junior
European confirmed that he knew Oyekunle very well, that Oyekunle was the one
who always came to see him and brought him eggs when he visited Okuku, whereas
he didn’t know Oyeleye at all. The senior European then wrote three letters, to
Ibadan, Ikirun and Oyo, announcing that Oyekunle was to be the next oba. When
the letter was read out in Okuku — by a literate forest guard, a-stranger working
there — there was uproar. They said a European had never made an oba before,
obas were always made by themselves in the marketplace of Okuku, and that their
choice was Oyeleye. They went to Ikirun to tell the European this when he arrived,
but the European insisted that he would install Oyekunle. So the chiefs decided
to install Oyeleye before the appointed day. When Ajiboye heard rumours of this
he ran all the way to Ikirun, found that the junior European had left for Osogbo,
ran all night and reached Osogbo just in time to glimpse the European leaving in
his car [szc], learnt he had gone to Ogbomoso so ran all day and reached Oko just
as night fell. At dawn he found people to take him to Ogbomoso to look for the
European. When they had found him and explained the situation the European
said ‘WHAT! He wrote three letters on the spot and sent them to Ibadan, Ikirun
and Oyo. He told Ajiboye to start walking home and promised that before he got
there the Europeans would have arrived. Just as Ajiboye reached Okuku, the
people from Ibadan, the Europeans and the African officials arrived. It was the day
of the installation. ‘The European sat down in the market and called all the chiefs,
all the heads of the subordinate towns, and all the supporters of both contestants.
The he asked ‘Does the choice of Oyekunle please you?’ They said no. Then he
read the letter out to them and said “That’s that. That’s what the Government
says’. They installed Oyekunle that very day. His supporters danced and started
singing ‘Eni dyinbo gba ntyawo ti ara oko fojudi’ (The person the European took to
wife, when the bushmen insulted him) This became part of his ortkz.
39. From a performance by Sangowemi, on the occasion of Sapawo’s egungun feast,
further discussed in Chapter 7.
40. I am indebted to John Peel for suggesting this way of putting it.
41. As was mentioned in Note 25 above, before the Lagos era, most farms were
recalled as being 6d-2/- ebe, that is 2000-8000 heaps or two-thirds to two and two-
third acres. After Lagos selling came in, the farms were in many cases said to have
increased to a size between 3/- and 5/- ebe: that is, four to six and two-third acres.
The middle-aged group, speaking of their childhoods in the 1930s and 40s,
remembered farms as big as 5/- to 10/- ebe: that is, six to thirteen and a half acres.
42. Prices quoted for labourers’ wages in Pakoyi’s time include the following examples:
‘Labourers’ fees were 4d for building 200 heaps, 2d for hoeing 200 heaps, 1!/2d
for mulching 200 heaps’ (Amos Ojediji, ile Baale). This informant added ‘They
came from Ilorin, and stayed in the house of the host, but only until the job was
done’.
43. Astory told by Mohammed Akanbi of z/e Oloyan, about an incident in Oyinlola’s
reign, illustrates this. Mohammed’s grandfather Faliyi had had a great friend
NOTES TO PP. 183-247 325
Morakinyo in ze Asipa, whose farmland adjoined his own. Faliyi lent part of his
own land to Morakinyo to use for food crops. One day when they were working
near to each other in the farm, Faliyi offered Morakinyo some kola nuts and after
they’d eaten a few, Morakinyo jokingly said ‘Why don’t we plant one so that we
can eat it together in the future?’ Faliyi took this as a symbol of their friendship and
agreed. In due course the seed grew into a tree and both men ate the fruit. Years
later, after Faliyi’s death, Morakinyo’s son claimed that Morakinyo had planted
the tree there and that that meant he had a right to all the land between it and the
(former) boundary of i/e Asipa’s land. The matter became a big court case and
because Oyinlola had a grudge against ze Oloyan, for a quite unrelated reason, he
supported z/e Asipa. J/e Oloyan lost the land on the grounds that the person who
plants a permanent crop has title to the land on which it is planted.
44. Two notable nineteenth century figures were Madame Tinubu of Lagos and
Efunsetan of Ibadan. Both built up formidable households of followers and slaves,
and Madame Tinubu was herself deeply involved in the slave trade. She was
eventually driven out of Lagos by the oba Dosunmu at the instigation of the British
Consul (Biobaku, 1960; Oroge ,1971, pp. 181-3). Efunsetan was also defeated
by the male chiefs of Ibadan, led by Latosisa, and expelled from the city Johnson,
1921, pp. 391-4). The importance of these figures in popular memory is attested
by the success of the Yoruba-language play Efunsetan Aniwura (Isola 1970), later
made into a popular film by a travelling theatre company, and an English language
play about Madame Tinubu, also by Akinwumi Isola.
45. In the considerable body of recent work on Yoruba witchcraft, all the elements of
this picture have been touched on. Beier (1958), Hoch-Smith (1978), the Drewals
(1983) and others have related notions of witchcraft to female fertility, pointing
out that the ambivalence towards ‘witchcraft’ powers derives from the ambiguous
power women have, either benignly to produce offspring or malignly to interfere
with their production. Belasco (1980), on the other hand, argues that women were
accused of witchcraft because their control of local trade aroused male jealousy:
men produced goods, women merely manipulated them and yet came out rich
from it. Marc Schiltz, in a recent perceptive paper (1987), has suggested that
economic success in women created an anomalous and unlocatable power, one
which could not be exercised through the normal channels ofhousehold patronage
and redistribution. It was a power that had no ‘natural’ outlet, and was therefore
regarded with suspicion and, if it went too far, interpreted as witchcraft. Regarded
from the perspective of the dynamics of self-aggrandisement, all these notions can
be related. Men can convert wealth to reputation; in women, reputation means
they are encroaching on male territory, and is therefore almost certain to be evil.
The Drewals, in my view, exaggerate the benign aspect of the ‘mothers”’ powers.
What people said in Okuku corresponded much more closely to the account of
witchcraft given by Peter Morton-Williams (1956a, 1956b, 1960b, 1964). When
a woman is released by her husband’s death from the obligation to swell his
household, she is given licence to live on her own; but this transition makes her
not only useless from the point of view of the expansion of men’s power, but also
potentially a rival to male household heads. Older women are more likely therefore
to be ‘witches’ than young ones.
46. For a full discussion of this concept, central to modern Yoruba notions of
‘progress’, see Peel (1978).
47. See the account of a chieftaincy dispute in Okua, one of the subordinate towns,
in 1957 soon after the Chieftaincy Declaration had been made (Osun Div 1/1 886D/
2A).
326 NOTES TO PP. 248-291
48, From a performance of zw: by Ojeyemi of Ekusa, an itinerant professional akewi,
commercial records.
well known in the locality and beyond through his radio performances and
49. From a performance by Janet Bolatito, Iya Denle, wife of ze Oba, Edun branch.
Notes to Chapter 7 |
1. Palace titles could be passed from father to son. Michael Adegsun, the present
chief Sobaloju, is the eldest son of Toyinbo, the previous incumbent. Junior town
titles of the aladaa grade could also be inherited in the same way. Some important
religious titles were ritually required to pass from father to son — the priesthood of
Olooku, for instance (also noted by Murray, 1950) — while most could be taken
over by a variety of successors, and ‘place’ in a cult could switch gender or skip
a generation. But senior town titles of the glopaa grade tended to rotate between
segments of the lineage that owned it, in the manner described by Lloyd (1955)
— especially when the lineage was large. In these cases, the title was certainly seen
as a continuous ‘place’ successively occupied by different individuals all of whom
took on the identity of the office; but at the same time, each of these individuals
created a personal place, expressed in oriki and itan, which would be taken on not
by other segments of the lineage but by his own descendants.
2. Mé leé stin: a dialect variant of the standard Yoruba m1 6 /é stin or mi i lé stin.
3. The leader of this performance was Ere-Osun, daughter of #le Odofin, married into
tle Elemoso Awo, on the occasion of an egungun festival vigil. Each line was repeated
by a chorus of other obinrin dle and omo-osu.
4. This is an example of the way oriki converge with Bakhtin’s concerns in an oblique
way that raises questions rather than answering any. Bakhtin’s argument, in the
essays published as The Dialogic Imagination, was that polyvocality, the frequent
and easy incorporation of the voice of the ‘other’, was the product of culture
contact, exposure to other languages or registers of language. That is when the
enclosing, limiting orthodoxy of the patriarchy is breached and people realise that
the patriarchal language is not the only one. Polyglossia is associated in Bakhtin
therefore with joyous liberation, with mockery and satire, and with a new self-
consciousness. In ori, the quotations are seamless. They do not become an object
of representation, as in parody, and cannot therefore be seen as a chink through
which self-consciousness and criticism may enter discourse. However, as I argue
here, they do nevertheless represent in some sense a deferral ofideological closure.
Alternatives and opposites are held in juxtaposition without being resolved or
4. .
subordinated to a higher unity. Formally, they represent the extreme end of the
range of possibilities Bakhtin outlines, and indeed go further in polyvocality than
any of the European texts he examines.
5. From a performance by Oni Okekanyin (Iya Olose), married into ile Obaale, on
the occasion of the funeral of her co-wife Adeboyake, April 1977.
6. Olasope Oyelaran, in an illuminating paper (1975), argues that syntactic parallelism,
not stress, is the basis of ‘rhythm’ in Yoruba oral poetry, and that it ‘pre-conditions
any other factor, including logical or sense parallelism’. }
February 1976. |
7. From a performance of rara tyawo by Susannah Faramade, wife of ze Arogun,
8. From a performance by Sangowemi supported by a chorus of women devotees of

Sango, on the occasion of the funeral of Arinke, wife of ve Baale, discussed in Chapter
9. In his exposition of the idea of ‘habitus’ or ‘systems of durable, transposable

dispositions’ , Bourdieu (1977, p. 72), re-examines the oral-formulaic theory of
NOTES TO PP. 248-291 327
Parry and Lord. The important thing to Bourdieu is not the idea of the formula
itself, as in many subsequent applications of the approach, but the way the
Yugoslav poets learn to use it. The gusiar gains his practical mastery of formulaic
composition ‘through sheer familiarisation, “by hearing the poems”, without the
learner’s having any sense of learning and subsequently manipulating this or that
formula or any set of formulae: the constraints of rhythm are internalised at the
same time as melody and meaning, without being attended to for their own sake’
(Bourdieu, 1977, p. 88).
10. From a performance by Okeyoyin, wife of Daniel Ogundiran, chief Saba, of ile
Oluode, March 1978.
11. From a performance by Sangowemi in honour of members of ze Aro-Isale.
12. See, for instance, Stenning (1959) on the Wodaabe pastoral Fulani; Okonjo
(1976), Van Allen (1972, 1976), Ifeka-Moller (1975) and Amadiume (1987) on
the Igbo; Edwin Ardener (1975) on the Bakweri; Moore (1986) on the Marakwet.
13. Little systematic work has been done on this fascinating question — perhaps
because scholars of the Yoruba do not see any striking classificatory dichotomies
to investigate. The questionnaire on male/female stereotypes administered by
Asuni (1987, pp. 272-85), despite its methodological limitations, confirms that
the whole range of qualities ascribed to men can also be ascribed to women; the
proportions and order of importance vary, but it seems to be granted by Asuni’s
informants that any man or any woman could appear anywhere in the range of
1976). |
personality types.
14. From the egungun vigil chant led by Ere-Osun, discussed in Section 2.
15. From an Ifa song performed by Adewale, Baba Olosun, one of the babalawo of
Okuku, on the occasion of Araba’s feast during the annual Ifa festival (August
16. In their brilliant analyses of Yoruba masquerade art, H. J. Drewal (1978) and H.
J. and M. T. Drewal (1983) have used the term ‘seriality’ to describe the
fundamental organising principle of Yoruba arts, which produces a structure ‘in
which the units of the whole are discrete and share equal value and importance
with the other units and in which the autonomous segments evoke, and often
invoke and activate, diverse forces’ (Drewal and Drewal, 1983, p. 7). Though
their focus is on the visual arts, they themselves indicate that “seriality’ 1s also the
underlying principle of ‘praise poetry, invocations, incantations’ (zbid.).
17. From a performance of rara tyawo by Susannah Faramade, wife of ile Arogun,
February 1976.
18. Henrietta Moore’s discussion of Marakwet representations of space is helpful
here. She argues that rather than having an alternative, autonomous model
outside the dominant male culture, Marakwet women have a different location >
within a shared system of representations. There is a ‘negotiability of meaning’
which ‘permits the expression of the female perspective within the spatial medium’
(Moore, 1986, p. 186). Yoruba culture, like Marakwet culture, is biased towards
the male; but as the foregoing discussion will have made clear, Yoruba culture
offers women much greater scope to choose and make their own position within
arange of alternatives. Women in Yoruba towns are far from ‘invisible’, and male/
female cultural dichotomies are, as we have argued above, porous and malleable.
19, One man said that it was not uncommon for women to become babalawo ‘up towards
Ogbomoso and Oyo’, but knew of no other examples by name. The existing
literature on Ifa gives the overwhelming impression that it is an exclusively male
cult. However, one documented example of a female babalawo is the Iyanifa
Mopelola Fawenda Amoke of Oyo, now 80 years old, whose photograph appears
328 NOTES TO PP. 248-291
in Gonzalez-Wippler (1989). According to Bayo Ogundijo of the University of Ife,
the Iyanifa was initiated into the Ifa cult 45-50 years ago, after learning Ifa by the
same system as male diviners. Like them, she travelled to other towns to extend
her knowledge, gave consultations, and attended meetings of the association of
babalawo until old age prevented her (personal communication).
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GLOSSARY
aaba staple (used in magical charm)

aafin palace
aba farm hut
abaja type of facial mark
abata type of red kola nut with 2-4 cotyledons
abiku “‘born-to-die’ child
abiso see oruko
adé crown
adie chicken
adie idajé ‘date-setting’ chicken given during betrothal
adost initiated member of cult [one who has applied dsz]
agbara strength
agbe Blue Touraco bird
agbégijo see eléégun o7é
agbo ram
ago temporary camp
aguntan sheep
aja dudu black dog
ajelé representative of a ruling power
akalamagbo hornbill
akara fried bean cakes
akéwi performer of 27 (egungun chant)
akija provocative epithet
akikanju obinrin formidable/courageous woman
akuko cock
aladaa ‘cutlass-carriers’ [junior grade of chiefs]
Alaafin king of Oyo
alamo type of oriki-based chant from Ekiti
alarinjo see eléégun o7é
alaseku ancestors
ald riddle, folk-tale
aluko type of bird, with red plumage
amo mud [emblem of an orilé]
amutorunwa see oruko
ankoo ‘& co.’: when a group of people all wear the same cloth to show
their solidarity
apidan see eléégun oje
ara oko ‘bushman’, uncivilised person
aran velvet [emblem of an orilé]
aro indigo dye
aro type of chain-sequence narrative
GLOSSARY 337
arugba ritual bearer of calabash
asingba part-time bondsman
atin-in type of mat characteristic of ljésa area
ayé the world; ill-disposed people
ayé atijd the old days
ayé Ode oni nowadays
baalé head of a household/compound
babalawo divination priest
balégun ilé head of young men within a compound
banté shorts
bata type of drum
borokinni person of note
dukia moveable property
ebdld Gynura Cernua: herb used in stews, has blue flowers (for
illustration see Abraham, 1962, p. 721)
éburé type of leafy vegetable used in stews
égbé (1) chorus
égbeé (2) type of bead
egbo mashed boiled maize
eégun alagbo egungun masquerade empowered with charms
eégun nla ‘great’ egungun masquerade
eéguin rere ‘good’ egungun masquerade
egungun/eégun ancestral masquerade
eléégun ojé entertainment masqueraders of egungun cult [also known as
agbégiyé, alarinjé and ajidan).
eniyaya type of plant with broad pinnate leaves
epo palm
erin oil
elephant
ewureé she-goat
ewuuyan rewarmed pounded yam
ebu place where dye or palm oil are manufactured
efun chalk
egbé association, club, age-mate, companion
éko solid or liquid food made from corn-starch
ekun iyaw6 brides’ oriki-based lament [standard Yoruba]
elu indigo plant
erila small humpless breed of cow
eranko (wild) animal
eru slave
ese Ifa verse of Ifa
ewa boiled beans
ewe type of bean
faaji iyawo the ‘bride’s day of enjoyment’ before her marriage
farajo family meeting (held monthly)
furd arse
gberan-gbéran _ stealer of livestock
338 GLOSSARY
gbéye-gbéye poultry-thief
idabo small plot cultivated by young boys in spare time
idan eégun stunts or magic pertaining to egungun
idilé ‘lineage’
igbakéji oba second-in-command to oba [i.e. most senior chief]
igbo forest, bush
igbé dudu virgin forest
igbo ilé domestic forest [round the town]
igun vulture
iho ikin ‘thick clump of palm trees’ [rare expression, used in narrative of
Okuku history]
ala oriki-based hunters’ chant
ijinlé oro ‘deep words’
iokun plant giving dark green dye
ikan egg plant
ikoro type of fish
ila okro
ilari royal messenger
ilé house, compound, family, lineage
ilé iya the mother’s z/é
ilée baba the father’s 2é
iléelé a one-storey house
inaw6 spending of money
irémojé type of oriki-based hunters’ dirge
iroko African teak tree
isakole money paid for use of royal land
isoko lineage segment defined by descent from a common male
ancestor
itan narrative, history
itufd formal announcement of a death
iwefa méfa the ‘kingmakers’ [top six chiefs] |
iwi oriki-based egungun chant
iwofa bondsman whose labour constitutes interest on a loan
iwure chant asking for blessings and good luck
iya mother
iya ipééré head of the younger wives in a compound
iyaalélé head of all the wives in a compound
iyére Ifa type of Ifa chant, performed for an audience, rather than during
1y0 salt divination sessions
juju magic, ‘medicine’; modern style of popular music

ké [iwi] to chant [227]
kijipa type of coarse cotton cloth
kowéé type of bird whose cry is thought to be an omen of death
k6bo penny [unit of Nigerian modern currency]
lékeléke cattle egret
lilé solo part in a performance
| GLOSSARY 339
moin-m6in steamed bean cake
obinrin woman “
obi Olékuku type of kola introduced to Okuki by Oba Oyinlola
obinrin ilé wife of a household/compound ,
odideré parrot
odu figure in Ifa divination system
Ofi type of valuable indigenous woven cloth
ofo emptiness
ogbodo type of yam
oju oori grave shrine
oko farm
okun sea
oko iwaju ‘far farm’, cocoa farms made at a distance from Okuku
oko 6wo place where trade or business is conducted
oko ona place where carving is done
olele type of oriki-based chant, found in Tjésa
olédodyd type of herb
olorisa devotee of an drisad
oldyé chief, title-holder
ondé [=dodédé] corridors, premises
oogun medicine, charms
opd post [an orilé emblem]
ore type of mat
ori head, luck, destiny, lot
origun ‘corner’, lineage segment defined by descent from a common
female ancestor
oriki appellations, attributions, epithets :
oriki bordkinni —oriki of notable individuals
oriki orilé ortki of a place of origin
orilé ancient place of origin
orisa god, goddess
orisa pipe ortki chant addressed to drisa
ord ilé family ceremony/ritual
orogun co-wife (wives of same man or same compound)
oruko name
oruko abiso name ‘given after the child is born’, i.e. reflecting circumstances
or feelings of family at time of birth
oruko name ‘brought from heaven’, i.e. relating to birth-order or
amutorunwa manner of birth
ostn camwood
osu ritual substance applied to initiand’s scalp in certain cults [see
adésu|
owe proverb
ow6 ile money paid to oba for permission to build a house
ow6 isihun money paid during marriage transactions for ‘opening
discussion’
oyinboé agba ‘senior European’
oyinbo kékeré ‘junior European’
oba ‘king’, head of town
ofaasu bundle of 120 yams
340 GLOSSARY
ofé free of charge
ofd incantation
oga alternative term for osu
okin king crane [emblem of orilé]
ola honour, high standing, esteem
olaju ‘enlightenment’, ‘civilisation’
olola someone of high standing
olopaa ‘staff-carriers’ [senior grade of chiefs]
omo child, offspring, descendant
omoo baba children of the same father
omoba child of the oba, or of the royal family
omo bibi inu ‘true-born child’ [poetic idiom]
omo iya children of the same mother
omo o0l60ku child of the deceased [at a funeral]
omo-osu daughters of a compound [married and unmarried]
orédebi ‘friends become family’
osa lagoon
ostn type of herb used in stew
ote plotting, intrigue
oti-oyinbo European liquor
owa palm-leaf rib [emblem of orilé]
owe communal labour service
pakaa type of egungun masquerade
parapo ceremony ‘uniting people’ in marriage negotiations
pe [orisa] to perform the ortki of an orisa
pelé type of facial mark
petéesi house of two storeys or more
rara royal bards’ oriki chant
rara iyawo bride’s lament (local name: see ekuin tyaw6)
Sang6 pipé oriki chant addressed to Sango
ségi valuable type of blue tubular bead
sun [rara] to perform [rarda/rara tyawo]
INDEX
English alphabetical order is followed with the additional Yoruba letters e, 9 and s
appearing in separate sections, after e, o and s respectively.
Aasa (ilé Balogun), 194, 205, 278 __ as town of origin, 58

Abéokuta, 66, 218, 308 Ajayi, Jacob (2/é Arodgun), 185, 217,
Abimbola, W., 305, 313, 316 224-5, 236, 278
Abiddun,
Abraham,Aldafin
R. C.,of315
Oyd, 26 Ajayi,
Ajayi ff F, Ade, Balégun
Ogbori-efon, 310, 317, of
319.
Ibadan,
Abrahams, Roger D., 305 186, 205, 317
Abu-Lughod, Lila, 2 ajélé (political representatives of
Action Group, 104 overlord town), 50, 309
Adébisi, Samson (i/é Ojomu), 170, Ajibadé (ié Jagun), 224
216-18, 235 Ajibadé (2lé O16k0) see Saiwod
Adedeji, J. A., 305, 312 Ayjiboye (2/é Oba: teller of history), 51,
Adégboyé, oba of Ofa, 61 52, 58-60, 63, 65, 145, 223-4,
Adégboyé (ié Oba), 231 255, 309, 318, 323
Adéoba, oba of Okukut, 52, 60, 62,65, §Ajuwon, Bade, 305, 306, 307
66, 94, 199-203, 204, 230, akija see oriki
272-4, 308-9 Akindélé, G. A. (alé Oluode), 170
see also Arinké, wife of Adéoba Mrs, wife of, 44
Adédosun, Michael see Sébaldju Akinjogbin, I. A., 310
Adeoye, C. L., 30, 311, 312 Akintoye, S. A., 309, 310, 317, 319
Adepoju, Larewaju, 246 Akéda (ilé Ojomu), 171
Aderibigbe, A. B., 305 Akogun (chief, 7/é Oluode), 196
Adéwalé baba Oldsun (ié O16k0), Akunyun, 150
206-7, 309, 320, 326 Alaafin (oba of Oy6) see Abiédun,
adie idéjo (fowl for date-fixing), 107 Ajaka, Oyé
adésu (initiated cult member), 123 aladaa chiefs, 156, 187-8, 194
Afonja of Ilorin, 26, 60 Aladwuira Church see Church
Agadarigbé, Oké Agadarigbo (area/ Alala (chief, é Balogun), 205
street in Okuka), 39, 44, 153 alamo (type of oriki-based chant), 80
Agbaa, 265 Alapepesilé see Eleémona
Agbéye, 310 258
Agbamudoyin river, 59 Alapinni (egiingin title), 161, 216, 253,
Ajaka, Alaafin of Oyé, 316 see also egungun
Ajala Oyeéléye (teller of history) see Alawe (chief, dé Alawé), 193
Oyeéléye see also lé Alawé
Ajanaku, Fagbemi, 311 Alé-Oyun (town of origin), 87, 91, 92,
Ajasé Ipo, 58, 274 129
342 INDEX
ald (folktale), 10, 246, 305 and Fadérera), 103, 161, 289:
Altibata see ié Alubata oriki of, 168
ancestor(s), 12, 46, 75-6, 99, 102, 118, see also Bolakanmi; Fadérera; 1/é
145, 148, 153-4, 157, 161, 198, Awoyemi
250, 252, 254, 259 Ayantayo (Big Woman), 232-6, 289
apical/founding, 51-2, 62, 145, 154,
157, 159 badlé (household head),.48, 107,
Anilé river, 59, 197-8 155-6, 162, 165, 191, 214, 222,
anthropology, in relation to literary 224
texts, 2 Baaleé (chief), 194
Apa (town of origin), 58, 64 see also ilé Baalé
Ara, Aramoko, 51-2, 58-9, 63, 65, 145, babaldwo see Ifa
309-10 Babalola (/é Elémos6 Awo), 29-31, 74,
Araba (Ifa title), 161-2 216, 234, 258
Aran (emblem: ‘velvet’), 18, 19, 274 Babalola, S. A. [Adeboye], 19, 26, 27,
Aran-Orin, town of origin, 18, 58, 30, 166, 305, 306, 307, 311,
145-6, 152 312, 314
present-day town, 149 Babayemi, S. O., 304, 305, 307, 312,
Araromi see dé Araromi 315, 316
Arinké (ilé Aré-Isalé, wife of Adéoba), Bakhtin, Mikhail, 2, 25, 35, 36, 37, 85,
, Aristotle,272-4 28 260,
see 284, VoloSinov
also 287, 288, 303, 325
ard (chain-sequence narrative poems), Balégun, chief, 205
84-5, 262, 282 egbé Balégun, 204-7 ©
Aré-isalé see ilé Aré-isalé in compound organisation, 155, 163
Ardébaté (egungtun), 197 see also lé Balégun
Arogun (chief, 7/é Arogun/Oluawo), 44 #$Bamgbdyé (/é Oba), 232
Aw6oléye, chief Arégun, 224 Bank6olé see Gbotifayo
see also 1lé Barber, Karin, 24, 27, 193, 210, 246,
Oyo), 310 319, 320
arékin (praise singers of Alaafin of 249, 277, 284, 304, 305, 312,
Asaba, 310 Barnes, Sandra T., 242, 304
Asapawo (Ifa cult title-holder), 250, Barthes, Roland, 306 -
254, 314, 323 Bascom, W. R. 304, 305, 312
see also Ifa Bauman, Richard, 304, 305
Assistant District Officer, Osogbo, 50, beaded crowns see crowns
222-3, 237-8 beads (image in oriki), 201-2
Asuni, J. B., 326 Beidelman, T. O., 2
Atanda, J. A., 310 Beier, Ulli, 34, 45, 52, 59, 237, 308,
Austin, J. L., 303-4 309, 318, 319, 324
Awe, Bolanle, 25, 309, 319 Belasco, Bernard, 324
Awégidé (ilé Ojomu), 170-1 Belsey, Catherine, 306
Awoléye see Arégun Ben-Amos, Dan, 305
Aword Otin (Otin cult title), 154,205 Berger, Peter, 286
see also ilé Aword Otin Berry, Sara S., 308, 322
Awéroka (daughter of Ikiuméwiuyi), Big Men, 4-5, 8, 51, 183-4
169-70, 274-6 bases of position, 184, 195, 212-20,
Awéotutt (daughter of Ikimowiyi), 240-3, 277-8
169-70 nineteenth-century Big Men, 27, 62,
Awoyemi, Adéléké (babalawo, brother 65-6, 195-212
of Fadérera), #61 role of ortki in creation of see
Akanbi (babaldwo, father of Adéléké personal oriki
INDEX 343
twentieth century Big Men, 212-47 Aladuura, 100
values associated with, 82, 197-203, Anglican (CMS), 39, 46, 225
204-6, 208-12, 238-41, 243 Roman Catholic, 39
see also personal oriki and specific Church associations, 49, 225, 245
Big Men, e.g. Elémona; Faléhin; Clark, Katerina, 303
Fawandé; Olugbede; Omikunleé; Clarke, R. J. M., 305
Omonijé; Pakoyi; Téyinbé; clients, 33
Winyomi see also patron-client relations;
Biobaku, S. O., 25, 324 ‘people’
blacksmiths, 44, 58, 128, 135, 140, closure, poetic, 22-3, 78
142, 182, 277, 313 cloth, as attribute of old, 202
see also iron manufacture as mark of civilisation, 140-1
Bloch, R. Howard, 304 as poetic image, 84, 130, 202
Bolakanmi (founder, #/é Awéyemi), oft cloth, 50
160-1, 210 cocoa farming see farms
bondsman see iwofa Coleridge, 22
Bonte, Pierre, 26, 303 colonial administration, 67, 187
boundaries, of farmland, 214 authorities, 45, 222-4, 229, 237-41,
of Okuku against neighbouring 243, 245, 322-3: indigenous view
towns, 50, 224 of, 223-4
Bourdieu, Pierre, 105, 269, 286, 288, interventions, 10
306, 326 regime, 213
Bower, Capt., 61 rule, 11, 243
Brooks, Cleanth, 79 colonialism, 66
Buckley, Anthony D., 316 compounds, 154-65, and passim
see also households; houses; 2/é;
carvers, 58, 116, 135, 141-3, 220 lineage
cash crops see farms Cope, Trevor, 262, 307
chiefs, 5, 11, 16, 46, 48, 62, 66, 183, Cosentino, Donald, 21, 24
192, 221 CO-Wives see orogun
access to titles, 155-6, 193 Cox, C. B., 306
chieftaincy disputes, 222, 238, 323, criticism see literary criticism
325: in itdn, 52, 58, 63, 149 crowns, 34, 45-6, 223, 319
chieftaincy titles, 58, 154-7, 159-61, Culler, Jonathan, 306
165, 167, 193-5, 325: inheritance cults see drisd
of, 252-4 Cunnison, Ian, 26, 303, 309
effects of colonial rule on, 222-3
kingmakers (iwéfa méfa), 318 Damane, M., 262, 307
male chiefs, list of, 188 De Man, Paul, 304
palace chiefs see palace chiefs death
rank order of, 46, 58, 63, 156, announcement of, 118-9
187-8, 193-4: in itdn, 60 attitudes to, 118, 120-8, 130-3,
role in political intrigue, 224 268-9
women chiefs, 46, 187 invocation of the dead, 12, 75-6,
see also lyaléde 100, 116, 134, 248
Chieftaincy Declaration, 192, 238, 322 see also egungun; funerals
Christianity, 47, 66-7, 100, 127, 236, deconstructive criticism, 24
239, 243, 245, 289, 322 Derrida, Jacques, 304, 306
see also Church; education; progress; Drewal, H. J., 312, 324, 326
traditional devotees Drewal, M. T., 312, 324, 326
Christians see Christianity drummers, 11, 12, 20, 73, 77, 84, 115,
Church, 49 123, 128, 134, 154, 173, 277
344 INDEX
Durddola (lyaléde), 272 exegesis of literary texts, 2-4, 7, 17
Eades, J. S., 156-8, 163-4 of ortki, 3-4, 27-33, 64 and passim
Eagleton, Terry, 306 exogamy, 157, 159, 163-4
Echard, Nicole, 26, 303
education, 67, 239-41 Edun, nineteenth-century oba of
educated sons and daughters of Okuku, 62, 64, 161, 171, 192,
Okuku, 49, 67, 243 204
Eésa (chief of Inisa), 58, 63, 64, 311 Efon, 20, 151.
(chief of Oyan), 161 Efunsetan, of Ibadan, 324
EKésade (hunters’ title), 18, 19, 34 Efantohun Arinké (funeral of), 119-27,
egungun (masquerades) 172, 268-9
ancestral, 77, 78, 97, 161, 133, 196, Ekosin, 52, 223, 310
197, 204, 248, 313 ekun tyawoe see rara tyawo
cult, 80, 133-4 Elégbédé see ilé Flégbédé
eégiin aldgbo, 77, 311 Elékédé (ié Ar6-Oké), 207
eégun rere, 133, 311 Elémona, 187 |
entertainers (eléégun djé), 1, 11, 12, Alapepesilé, chief Elémona, 220-1,
81, 84, 96-7, 100, 135, 227, 267, 240, 278 |
274, 285-6, 305, 320: lineages Elémoso see t/é Elémoso:
associated with, 18, 30, 31, 85, Elémos6 Awo, 43, 167 ©
258, 267-8, 274, 279-80, 281 see also lé Elémos6 Awo
festival, 45, 47, 49, 77, 102-4, Ere-Osun, 104, 167, 170, 274-6, 285,
252-3, 254, 285, 308, 316 312, 325, 326
grove, 64 Brin-ilé, 150, 151
in poetic imagery, 267-8, 287
priest, 77, 104, 133-4 faapi tyawé (‘bride’s enjoyment’),
titles, 193, 216, 253, 258 106-8, 110 |
types of egungun, 311, 314, 319 Fabiyi (2/é Baalé), 207
vigil chant, 104, 256-60, 284-6 Fadare (#/é Oluode), 224-5
see also Alapinni; Ardbaté; Pajé Fadérera, 101-4, 160-1, 167, 210, 234,
Ejigbo, 58 266-8, 289, 290, 311, 316
Ekiti, 6, 319 Fadipe, N. A., 154, 156, 312, 317,
Ekitiparapo, 61 318, 319
Eko-Endéé, 63, 310 Fayji, 310
Ekusa, 308, 310 Fakémidé (mother of Sangéwémi),
eléégun Ojé see egungun 288-9
Elgee, Capt., 50 Falohun, Tio (é Baalé), 241, 245
Enigboori, 29, 32, 73, 253, 279-80, Faniyi, Dejo, 305, 312, 313
286 fardjo (family meeting), 109, 161
Erin (emblem: ‘elephant’), 166 farms, celebrated in ortki, 69, 198, 265
Erinlé (6risd), 109, 274, 276, 308 cocoa farms, 10: local, 48, 66, 214;
Esilé (orisa), 308 ‘far farms’, 48-9, 67, 148-9, 164,
Est (6rtsa), 127 219-20, 230, 242-3
etiology, 4, 180 constraints on expansion of, 214
etymology, 4, 29, 64 domestic organisation of labour for,
European(s) 214-17
cloth, 199 in relation to forest and town see
drinks, 231, 233 , towns
in Sangéwemi’s career, 104 in wartime, 61, 207
oba’s friendship with, 223-4, 239, kola farms, local, 41, 66-7, 214,
323 232: in ‘far farms’, 48, 232,
presence in Okuku, 26 236-7
INDEX 345
of Elémona, 220 Gédotrick, Kacke, 305
palm tree cultivation, 232-3, 234-5 Grice, H. P., 304
relation to wealth, 220-1, 242 Gutkind, Peter C. W., 242
royal farms, 190 Guyer, Jane I, 305
yam cultivation, 10, 66, 207, 214,
230-1, 242, 265, 323 | Hegel, 36
see also boundaries, land, towns Henige, David, 307, 309, 310
Fatoki (1/é O16k0), 207 Hinchliffe, Arnold P., 306
Fatélu (nineteenth-century chief historiography, oral, 2, 25-6, 63, 303
Baalé), 203-4 see also Okuku
Fawandé (2é Baalé), 66, 224-5, 227-9, Hoch-Smith, Judith, 324
278 Hockett, C. F., 306
Fernandez, James W., 2 Holquist, Michael, 303
festivals (general), 10-11, 46-8, 49,97, | Houlberg, Marilyn H., 312
100, 117, 155 households: decline in importance of
see also egungun; orisa great households, 240, 242-3
Finnegan, Ruth, 304, 305, 306 early great households, 195, 198,
firearms, 197, 199, 319 206-7, 214, 242
Folayan, Elijah (son of Awétutu), 170 established by women, 232, 234
folklore, 2, 25, 303 in ortki; 70, 202
folktales see ald modern, 231
followers, see ‘people’ relations of authority within, 155,
Foémiké see Mofémiké 213-15
formulas (literary), 23, 96, 99 scattered in war, 207
. Fowler, Roger, 306 see also, 11é; compounds
Francis, Paul A., 305 houses, appearance of, 39, 41
funerals, 11, 35, 45, 48-9, 81, 88, 97, celebrated in ortki, 14-15, 202
99, 100, 117-34, 172, 176, 271, iléelé (‘bungalows’), 154
314 importance of building, 49, 67, 231,
Furniss, Graham, 304 241
pétéést (storeyed houses), 39, 41, 49,
Gbadamosi, Bakare, 312 154, 231
Gbangbadeé (2é Oldko), 154, 207 ruined in war, 61, 212
Gbhédégbédeé festival, 47, 308 see also 1lé
Gbotifayo (Bankdlé, é Aré-Isalé), 66, horses, 153, 177, 206, 212, 231, 233
83, 208, 264, 288, 320 hunters, 12, 18, 19, 33, 79, 81, 115,
Geertz, Clifford, 303 197-9, 204, 212, 277
gender classification, 277, 326 as performers of did, 1, 11
genealogy, 34, 51, 63, 101, 145, 157-9, as pioneers, 58
184-6, 196, 252, 254, 316, 317, Head of the Hunters see Oluode
322
genres of oral art, 5, 10, 85 Iba, 50, 63, 64, 224, 277, 310, 311,
based on oriki, 1, 7, 11-12, 80-1, 85, 320
87, 99, 113 Ibadan, 25, 27, 50, 60, 61, 149, 183,
oriki as genre in itself, 79-81 223, 233, 305, 309, 319, 320
see also alamo; tala; iwi; olele; rara ; 323 ;
tyawo; Sango pipe Idowu (lé Ojomu), 224-5, 277
Ghana (Gold Coast), 66, 213, 217-19, Ifa
236, 308, 322 babalawo (Ifa priests), 10, 44, 69,
Godogbo river, 59, 197-8 73, 79, 96, 101-3, 107, 161-2,
Goldstein, Kenneth, S., 305 167, 208-9, 216, 219, 264, 277,
Gonzalez-Wippler, Migene, 327 320: see also Awoyemi; Fakémideé;
346 INDEX
Gbotifayo; Toyinbo itan (histories) of see itan
ese Ifa (divination verses), 5, 10, 11, structure and boundaries of, 156-65
80, 96, 150, 180, 246, 280, 312 ué Ago, 154
female babalawo, 103, 288-9, 326-7 wé Alawé, 163, 193
festival, 10, 46, 49, 308 wé Alubata, 115, 154, 164, 172
tyéré Ifa (Ifa chant), 10, 46, 287, dé Araromi, 154, 163
289 ilé Ardé-Isalé, 66, 82-5, 272, 274
meeting house, 47 dé Arogun (1lé Oluawo), 154, 162, 163,
role in foundation of Kookin, 52, 59 _ 170, 185, 191, 320
role in kingmaking, 51, 192, 318 ilé Aworo Otin see i/é Balogun
role in political intrigue, 217, 224-7 dé Awdyemi, 160-2, 168, 171, 315
Ifé, 26, 48, 149, 219, 305, 309 ié Baale, 66, 84, 97, 119-23, 152-4,
Igbayé, 79, 170, 310 163, 172, 224, 233, 274
Igbéti, 138, 151 ilé Balogun, 58, 66, 152, 154, 158,
igbé dudu (virgin forest), 48 162, 171, 187, 194, 211, 274
igbo ulé (domestic forest), 50, 59 ilé Blégbédé, 163
Igbo Olugbégbé (Olugbégbé’s forest), ilé Elémosd, 167, 220
64 dé Elémosd Awo, 20, 29, 161, 167,
Igbo ita, 64 170, 253, 258
Igbori, 151, 316 é Jagun, 162, 163, 171, 214
see also Enigboori ilé Nla, 154
Ijabé, 152, 308, 310, 317 ilé Ogintayo, 164
Ijagbo, 274 #é Oluawo see i/é Arogun
ala (hunters’ chant), 1, 11, 12, 19,80, dé Oluawo Onifa, 164, 167, 172
81, 96, 305, 307, 314 ié Oluode, 58, 154, 165, 170, 187,
Tjebu, 6, 216, 218, 315 196, 197, 215, 319, 320, 321
Tjésa, 80, 309 #é Oludkun, 162-3
as culture area, 5, 95 dé Oba, 139, 143, 145, 154, 161-2,
as place of origin, 20-1, 138, 151 171, 222, 263
as ‘Yoruba sub-group’, 6 ilé Odofin, 60, 115, 154, 170, 316
farmland, 48, 219 ilé Ojomu, 72, 151, 154, 167, 170-1,
Ijésa Arara see wars 193, 216-17
ljésaland, 317 dé OlOkO, 58, 87, 91, 115, 129, 130,
people, 10, 59 146, 154, 164, 166, 185, 206,
Ikirun, 44, 50, 52, 60, 61, 119, 120, 224, 320
149, 162, 172, 186, 197, 203, dé Oloyan, 152, 163
_ 205, 207, 308, 323 ilé Osold, 152, 163
Ikotun, 146-7, 152 ué Saiwo see 1lé O16k0O
Ikoyi, 13, 119, 120, 129, 138, 150, see also 291-302
151, 164, 172-4, 313 Ilésa, 59, 95, 310
Ikumowuyi (Oluawo Oniséégun, 2/é Ilo6buu, 149
___ Arégun), 170 Ilorin, 50, 183
Ila, 59 Imési,
tla-odo, 52, 58,
310 Imuléke, 31094
ilari (royal messengers), 190, 193, 318 incantations, 10, 11, 76, 80, 280
ilé (house/compound/lineage), 13, 51, indigo, 14, 32, 179, 281
60-3, 107, 116, 128, 154 and inheritance, 155
passim Inisa, 44, 63-4, 223, 227, 308, 310,
as principal political/social unit, 48, 311, 317
58, 135-6, 153-5 Intelligence Reports, 50, 308
demarcation of by oriki orilé, 165-8 Tragbiji, 52, 170
internal organisation, 155, 191 Iregba, 59
INDEX 347
Irémogun, 139 283-4, 320
307 318, 319, 324
trémojé (type of ortki-based chant), 305, Johnson, Samuel, 146, 150, 310, 317,
Iresa, 59, 138, 151, 204 juju see medicine
iron manufacture, 58-9 Fuju music, 246
isdkolé (payment to oba for use of
land), 191 Kenyo, E. Alademomi, 309
isthin (‘opening negotiations’) Kermode, Frank, 22
ceremony, 107 Kiriji war see wars
Islam, Islamic, 47, 66, 322 Kookin, 52, 54-5, 58-60, 62-5, 146,
doctors, 218 149-50, 152, 161, 192, 196, 308,
priests, 219 310, 311, 316
Isola, Akinwumi, 305, 306, 313, 324 kola, 20, 47, 76, 107-8, 226-7, 259
Isundunrin, 58 | see also farms
itan (historical narratives), 4, 8, 10, Krapf-Askari, E., 315-16
194, 195, 210, 305, 210, 305, Kunene, Daniel, 261, 307
307, 310, 320, 325
itan 1lé, 51, 62, 135-6, 149, 172, labour
196-7, 309 communal labour service, see dwe;
of towns, 51, 52, 145-6 control over, 190-2, 207, 213-20
relationship to oriki, 5, 19, 28-33, of wives, 108, 195
35, 52 on cocoa farms, 220, 242
Iwata (town of origin), 140, 166, 175, on yam farms, 220
313 labourers, 231, 241
Iwé (participant in Efantéhiin’s Ladilé see Oladilé
funeral), 120, 316 Lagos, 66, 214, 230, 231, 233
iwéfa méfa (kingmakers), 187, 222,322 Lalubi, 58
twi (egungun chant), 11, 12, 80, 81, land, 155, 157, 159
286, 305, 307, 320, 325 control over, 190-1, 214-16
iwdfa (bondsmen), 51, 142-4, 187, disputes, 310 )
189-92, 206-8, 214, 216, 220-1, ué djoyébd, 162, 191
230-2, 234, 317 inheritance, 316
in oriki, 142-4, 179, 278, 283-4, 315 on return from Ikirun, 213-4
twure (good-luck chants), 11, 150, 180, women’s access to, 233
210 LaPin, Deirdre, 305, 312, 317
lya Ipéeré (head of younger wives in Law, R. C. C., 25, 60, 308, 310, 317,
household), 155, 163 319
ly4 Reke, 235 law courts, 46, 67, 217, 224, 237, 240
lydalélé (head of all wives in lexical sets, 99, 142-4, 178-82, 189,
household), 155 278, 282
lyaléde, 31-2, 187, 322 lineages, 48, 51-2, 62, 96, 98, 101,
_ see also Durdédola 106, 108, 109, 112, 115, 117-30
Iyéku, 310 passim, 156-65, and passim
tzibongo see Zulu praise poetry attached, 101, 157, 159, 160-2,
164-7
Jackson, Michael, 2, 21 competition between, 5
Jagun (chief), 162, 171 lineage histories, see itan ieé
62 156-8
see also ilé Jagun royal, 46, 52, 161, 187, 192
Jala Okin (oba of Kookin/Okuka), 59, segmentary lineage model, 138,
‘Jalumi war’ see wars see also compounds; genealogy; 2/é
Jayéola (father of Gbotifayo), 264-6, linguistic criticism see literary criticism
348 INDEX
literary criticism, 21-5, 67, 74, 79 217-18
European, 8: consonances of, with Moore, Henrietta, 303, 326
oriki, 35-8 Morton-Williams, Peter, 127, 305, 324
indigenous, embedded in ortki texts, mothers, 248, 264 :
4, 38, 78-9, 85, 131 importance of motherhood, 109,
linguistic criticism, 22 111, 169-71, 271
New Criticism, 22, 25, 79 Murray, K. C., 325
} post-structuralist criticism, 24-5 Muslims see Islam
Romantic criticism, 22
use in anthropology, 2 N.N.D.P. (Nigerian National
see also Bakhtin; VoloSinov Democratic Party), 241
literature, as ‘way in’ to study of names, naming, 19, 67-71, 73-5, 85,
society, 2-4, 7-8 101, 184-6, 254, 282, 311
in anthropological scholarship, 1, 2 New Criticism see literary criticism
lithoko see Sotho oral poetry Norris, Christopher, 306
Lloyd, P. C., 6, 68, 149, 150, 154,
156, 157, 159, 163, 164, 171, Obukt river, 60
193, 242, 304, 305, 309, 310, occupations
318, 320, 325 of men, 44, 218-19,:240
Lord Albert, 25, 104, 105, 264, 306, of women, 44, 47, 109, 232
. 326 see also Big Men; education; farms;
Lowie, Robert, 307 wage labour; women
Lucas, Revd. J. O., 304 Odigb6o, 48, 219, 305
Luckmann, Thomas, 286 Od6-Otin District/area, 1, 45, 46, 52,
Léogun-éde (drisd), 71 60, 150, 183, 283, 308
Ogbin (town of origin), 151, 316
Macherey, Pierre, 304 Ogbémés6, 144, 323
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 2 Ogbéni cult, 127, 131, 204, 225, 308
- - markets, 41, 44, 45, 47, 59, 77, 97, Ogun (drisd), 80, 212, 308, 313
234 _ festival of, 87
155, 157, 163, 216-18 320 |
marriage, 11, 47, 48, 88, 98, 105-16, Ogundairo, Joseph (2/é O16k6), 207,
significance of, for men, 109, 216 Ogundijo, Bayo, 327
significance of, for women, 109-113 Odguingbilé (ié O16k0), 94
see also rdra iydwé (bride’s chants); Ogunladé (7/é O16k9), 224
weddings; women Ogunsola (son of Winyomi), 197, 319
: McCaskie, T. C., 307 Oguntayo see ilé Oguntayd
McClelland, E. M., 305 Oguinténléwd (é O16kd), 92-5
medicine, 18, 19, 43, 51, 60, 77, 204, Oke Agadarighé see Agddarigbo
212, 224-9, 235-6, 240 Oko, 13, 144-5, 151, 175
metaphor, 202-3, 249, 263-4, 267-8 Okua, 223, 310, 317, 325
migrant labour see wage labour Okukt
Miller, Joseph, 26, 310 hierarchy in, 183, 187-95
Miller, J. Hillis, 306 history of, 10, 50-67
Mofémiké (/é Balégun), 17-19, 33 in nineteenth-century wars, 10,
Mol6m6é see Ojomu 60-2, 150, 203
money, available in Okuku, 50, 216, location of, 1
230 present-day character, 39-49
for performance of oriki, 11, 75, reasons for study, 5-6
100, 101, 106 relations to neighbouring towns, 45,
in funerals, 117, 119, 131, 231 183, 237-8
in marriage transactions, 107, 195, sense of the past in, 49ff
INDEX 349
social structure see Big Men; chiefs; oral narrative, African, 23-4
farms; ilé; iwofd; lineages; Ore, 310
women 209-10, 281
lineages, attached; oba; slaves; ori (head, destiny, fortune), 12, 75-7,
Welfare Association, 49 Ori Oké (risa), 151-2, 182, 308
see also towns oriki
Okunadé, 237 accumulation of corpus, 20-1, 26-7,
olele (type of ortki-based chant), 80 68-70
Olégboj6, 80 addressed to women see women
Olongbé (founder, i/é Ojomu), 193, anti-ortki (akija), 13-14
253 as naming, 67-75
Olorigbo, Adébisi (son of Alapepesile, as way to understand society, 2, 4-5,
Chief Elémona), 240 7
Olo6oku (erisad), 65 capacity to transcend boundaries,
cult, 46, 52, 63 14, 16, 78, 85, 248, 261
festival, 16, 46, 49, 60, 63, 64, 119, categories of subjects, 13
190, 221, 239, 308 changes in style over time, 27
priest, 46, 65 conditions for creation of, 243-7
Oluawo see ilé Arégun dialogic character of, 36-7, 75, 249
Oluawo Onifa, 161, 167 disjunctiveness of, 16-21, 22, 35,
see also ilé Oluawo Onifa 248-9, 261-70, 283
Oluawo Oniséégun see [kamoéwuyi effectuality of, 75-8
Olugbede, 18, 19, 33, 211-12, 278 embeddedness in context of
Ohigbégbé (oba of Kookin/Okuka), 59, performance, 7, 8, 12, 35, 85-8,
60, 63-5, 192, 199, 308, 309 105-6, 118ff, 249
Olukoju, Ebenezer O., 80 incorporativeness of, 79, 81-5, 249,
Olukotun (chief), 194 282-3
Oluode (Head of the Hunters), 79, 87, obscurity of, 7, 16, 18, 72-3, 94
94, 154, 197 performance modes, 1, 7, 11, 12,
see also, tlé OlQode 80-1
Oluokun see #é Oludkun | polyvocality of, 24, 37, 254-61,
Olurénké (oba of Kookin/Okuku), 282-6
58-9, 62-3, 199, 308 position among other oral genres, 1,
see also Otinkanre ; 5, 10-12
Omikunlé (#/é Aword Otin/Balogun), relation to the past, 4, 10, 14-16,
205-6, 243, 277 25-34, 49, 52, 62-7, 78
Omiléké (son of Omikunlé), 205 subjects of, 1, 12, 13, 75, 250-4
Omiléye (nephew of Omikunlé), 205 units offitems in, 21, 22, 26-7, 74-5,
Omi (town of origin), 147-8, 176-7, 78, 80, 91, 261-9
262 textual (stylistic) properties, 7-8,
Omu Aran (present-day town), 204 12-13, 16-21, 22-5, 67, 78-96,
Ondo, 48, 219, 315 248-9, 254-61, 288ff :
Ong, Walter J., 4, 304 oriki orilé, 8, 13, 68, 70, 74, 91, 96, 98,
Oni (daughter of Awéroka), 170 99, 101, 115, 119-21, 129-30,
Onifadé, Johnson (i#/é Oluode), 196, 135-53, 165-82, 244 and passim
198, 312, 320 accumulation of, 20-1
odgun see medicine alterations over time, 151-3, 244
166, 175 172-82
Opé (emblem: ‘post’), 93-5, 129-31, emblematic function of, 65, 144-5,
Opémulérd (oriki), 129-30, 140-1, 166, of the mother, 168-72, 271, 282
175 relation to personal ortki, 13, 29,
Opland, Jeff, 306 136-7, 153, 249-50
350 INDEX
style of, 21, 74, 79, 172-82, 269 Oyelaran, O. O., 325
subject matter of, 13, 138-45 Oyinlola (oba of Okukw), 45, 64, 66-7,
use in chants, 13, 18-19 103, 187, 190, 194, 201, 214,
value placed on, 13, 136-7 221, 232, 235-40, 278, 322, 324
see also Alé-Oyun; Aran-Orin;
Enigbdéri; Erin-ilé; Ijésa; Ikotun; Oba, 5, 16, 17, 32, 48, 49, 75, 155,
tramogun; Oko; Omt; 156, 253, 319 and passim
Opémiulérd; Ofa; Ojé; OkOmi; accession, 192
personal ortki as focus of town identity, 10, 51,
Orisa (deities), 4, 50, 135, 139, 160, 139, 148,150
264, 274, 281, 287, 308, 315 as founder of town, 43, 52
cults, 46-7, 50-1 ceremonial and religious
festivals of, 11, 46-7, 48, 99, 107 importance, 45-7
invocation of, 11, 12, 13, 76-9, in town history, 51-67, 135
99-101, 180, 210, 248-9 local influence, 5, 44-6
274-7 12, 51
women’s role in cults, 99-100, 271, oral performers associated with, 11,
see also Erinlé; Esilé; Est; Ifa; ortki of, 26-7, 43
Léégun-éde; Ogun; O166ku; Ori powers, 187, 190, 192-4
Oke; Orisaala; Orisa Oko; Osun; privileges, 190
Otin; Oya; Sangd; Soponnén specific obas see under names €.g.
Orisaala, 308, 314 Abiédun, Alaafin:of Oy6;
Orisa Oko, 127, 131, 308 Adégbéyé, Oba of Ofa; Adéoba;
oré ilé (family ritual/ceremony), 128-31, Ajaka, Aléafin of Oy6; Edun; Jala
172-6, 254, 313 Okin; Olugbégbé; Oluronké;
Oroge, E. Adeniyi, 203, 317, 318, 324 Oyéékanbi; Oyéékunlé; Oyééléye;
orogun (co-wives), 51, 91, 109, 112, Oluronke II; Oyééwisi I; an
117, 131, 175, 271 Oyééwusi II; Oyinlola; Oladitan; *
Osogbo, 39, 44, 52, 60, 104, 149, 154, Oladilé; Otinkanre
309, 323 see also chiefs; crowns, cults,
battle of, 62 genealogy; iari; é Oba; Kookin;
Osoli (chief), 194, 205 lineage, royal; O166ku, festival;
Ottenberg, Simon, 313 omo-oba; palace .
Oyéékanbi (nineteenth-century oba of Obaalé (chief), 187 |
Okuku), 62, 64, 192-3, 203-5, Obalokun (Aldéafin of Oyé), 310
208, 246, 309, 310, 318 Obara, 150 }
Oyéékunlé (twentieth-century oba of Obatald see Orisadla
Okuku), 32, 45, 51, 64, 66,150, Odéladé (é Oltiode), 165
323 Otébolajé, 58
208, 221-8, 233, 237, 250, 322, Odofin (chief), 192-4 —
Oyééléké, Emmanuel (son of Fadare, 224-5

Ayantayd), 232-3 see also, iléOdofin —
Oyééléye
65,(teller
207,of308,
history),
309 58-60,
see63,also,
Odogun
11é(chieQ 194 |
Odogun
Oyééléye Olurénké I, oba of Okuku, Ofa, 39, 44, 60, 61, 150, 274, 308, 309
45 fall of, 61, 62, 195, 203
Oyééléye candidates to throne, 223, Ofa war see wars
225, 323 town of origin, 58, 136, 151-2, 175,
Oyééwusi I (oba of Okuki), 19, 59, 64, 178-9, 196, 316
150,
Oyééwisi 213,
II (oba 220-145,f°64,see
of Okukd), incantations
jé (town of origin), 58,:141-3, 151,
194, 309, 318 178, 220, 316
INDEX 35]
Oj See egungun priest of see Aword Otin
Oiomu (chief), 193, 253 river, 61, 65, 143, 263, 320
Molémé, 224 Otinkanre, 58, 59, 62, 65, 199, 308
see also ilé Ojomu see also Oluroénké
Okomi, 260 owe (co-operative labour), 48, 107,
ola (honour, high standing), 33, 34, 155, 162, 189, 191, 321
203, 212, 236, 249 Oya (orisd), 103, 127, 131, 274, 277,
gléla (people of high standing), 15. 287, 308
Ola (town of origin), 138, 144, 151, Oyan, 161, 310
160-1, 315 Oyatundun (daughter of Aworoka),
Oladilé, oba of Kookin, 17, 52, 58, 62, 170
65, 199, 308 Oyawalé (/é Nla), 131-3, 181
Oladitan see Oladilé Oyd, as culture area, 5
Olafimihan, J. B., 316, 317 as ‘sub-group’, 6
Olajubu, Oludare, 305, 306, 307 as overlord, 50, 60, 183, 308
Olanigbagbé Olowo6na, 207 as town of origin, 20, 58, 91, 92, 95,
Olatunji, Olatunde, 71, 80, 306 115, 130-1, 138, 146, 166
Oldjeé see Ojé city (Old Oy6), 10, 60, 142, 151
Oldjowon (orile), 115-6 oba of (Alaafin), 60, 129, 142, 151,
O16k6 see lé O16k6 175-6
olla see old State, 1
Olomi (chief), 197, 319
olépdd chiefs (senior town chiefs), 159, Pajé (egungiin), 77, 161, 204, 319
187-8, 193-4, 203 Pakoyi (dé Nla), 230-1, 323
Oloyan see é Oloyan palace (building), 41, 44-6, 49, 73, 97,
omo tyd (uterine siblings), 170, 215 101, 274
omo-osu (daughters of same lineage), Palace Chiefs, 187, 188, 205, 221
109, 117, 119, 122, 123, 125, palm products
127 oil, 47, 38-9, 145, 179, 182, 232,
omoba (members of royal lineage), 192 235, 281
Omolola, 234-6, 289 kernels, 235
Omonijé (dé Oba), 245-6 nuts, 49, 154, 214, 232
Omotunwa (dé Baalé: performer in palm trees, 12, 52, 60, 138, 191, 214,
Efuntéhun’s funeral), 121-2 234, 320
Opeté, 310 Pankéré river, 59
Oré, 48 107
Oponda, 310 paradpo (‘uniting people’) ceremony,
Osanyin (drisd), 46, 308 Parry, Milman, 25, 104, 105, 264, 306,
Osayomi (i/é Baalé), 233 326
Osol6 see ilé Osold patron-client relations, 4-5, 241, 242,
Osun area, 5, 265 244
Division, 104, 213 Peace, Adrian, 242, 304
Orisa, 71, 274, 308 Peel, J. D. Y., 6, 15, 26, 305, 309, 310,
Ostindina (i/é Ojomu), 170 319, 323, 325
Ora, 218 Pemberton, John, 312
Otan, 61, 149, 196-7, 237 ‘people’, as constituent in Big Man’s
group of 7é, 163, 212 success, 155, 183-6, 194-5,
oté (political intrigue), 221, 224-30 200-3, 231, 235, 242, 243-4, 290
Orébolajé see Odofin as enemies, 209-11, 225-30
Otin cult, 143, 201, 312 in oriki, 249-50, 290
festival, 47, 49, 143, 201, 308 women in relation to, 234, 235
drisad, 52, 58, 205, 281, 308, 310 performance theory, 7, 25, 305
352 INDEX
personal ortk1, 5, 13, 79, 99, 101, 119ff, of men, 184, 194, 235, 243, 244
148, 220, 252 of women, 235-6, 276-7
accumulation of, 20, 68-70 swelled by ortki, 3, 244
arrest in growth of, 66-7, 242-7 Richards, Alan, 319
attributed to Adéoba, 200-3; Arinké _ riddles, 4, 10, 31, 84
(wife of Adéoba), 272-3; road, 43-4, 49, 50, 66
Aworoka, 274-6; Bolakanmi, Romantic criticism see literary criticism
210; Durddola, 272; Fawandé,
228-9; Gbotifayo, 209; Sahlins, Marshall, 26, 309
Olugbede, 211; Omikunlé, 206; Sanders, P. B., 262, 307
Oyéékanbi, 204; Oyeékunlé, Sartre, 36
223-4; Oyinlola, 238-9; Toyinb6, Schapera, Isaac, 307
250-1; Winyomi, 196-9 Scheub, Harold, 21, 24
changes in content and style, 27, Schiltz, Marc, 305, 312, 324
204, 210-12 Schofield, I. F. W., 50, 59, 187, 309,
of women see women 310, 321
role in creation of Big Men’s Schwab, William B., 154, 156, 158,
reputation, 5, 184-6, 243-5, 250 305, 309, 312, 316
style of, 21, 201-3, 211-12, 269 Searle, John R., 304
use of names in, 19, 184-6, 243-4 semiotics, 2
values embodied in, 13, 70, 81-2, Sherzer, Joel, 305
246, 272 slaves, 33, 62, 142-4, 206-7, 309
see also Big Men in ortki 17-18, 116, 142-4, 179, 187,
police, 67, 240, 241, 243 189-92, 266, 278, 315, 317, 319
political intrigue see oté slave-raiding, 62, 203-4, 207-8
post-structuralist criticism see literary Smith, Abdullahi, 310
criticism Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 22
Poynor, Robin, 312 Smith, Robert, 309, 310, 317, 319
praise poetry, African, 13, 21, 37 social action: literary utterance as, 2-3,
singers (professional), 11, 12, 16 7, 20
Pratt, Mary Louise, 304 social differentiation, 142-5, 248,
prayers, 19, 76 277-82
see also, iwtre songs, 10-11, 23, 97, 119, 131, 133,
progress, 44, 49, 237, 239, 241, 247 180, 232
proverbs (dwe), 17, 80-2, 141, 180 Sotho oral poetry, 261-2, 307
proverb-like formulations, 264, 267, | Speech Act Theory, 3, 25, 303-4
268 Stenning, Derrick J., 326
Public Works Department, 66, 213, Structuralism, 2, 25
217,218 Sudarkasa, N., 156, 305
Sunmibare, 48, 148-9, 219
railway, 12, 66, 213, 214, 216, 218,
220, 223, 230-1 Saba (chief), 194, 321
station, 233 Sagamu, 213
Ranger, Terence, 138, 314 Saiwo (chief) Adédéyji, 215
rara (oral genre), 80 Ajibadé, 224-5
rara tyawo (‘bride’s lament’), 11, 78, dé Saiwo see 1lé OlOkO
80-1, 87-99, 104-5, 110-17, 143, Sango (risa), 208, 308, 310, 313, 326
175, 182, 248, 263, 270, 305, cult, 120, 122-7, 131
312, 326 festival, 77
reputation, conditions for growth of, priest (Baalé Sango), 123, 127
243 priestess, 104, 119, 268
in relation to names, 282 Sango pipe (chant invoking Sango) 103,
INDEX 353
123, 305, 306
Sangowémi, 16, 17, 21, 33, 34, 82,84, wage labour, 50 66, 213, 216-19, 242,
87, 92-6, 100-1, 103-4, 131-3, 322
166, 185, 208, 250-2, 254-5, wards in Okuku, 155
264-6, 270, 283-4, 288-91, 290, Baalé ward, 241
322 149-51
312, 314, 320, 323, 325, 326 warfare
Sébald6ju (chief), 19, 187, 205, 224, before nineteenth century, 146,
Adéosun, Michael, 225, 274, 289, defence of Okuku, 61, 204-5
309, 318, 320, 322, 325 warriors, 75, 203-7: in ortk?, 120,
Toyinbo, 66, 217, 224-7, 235, 250, 154
252, 325 slave-raiding, 203, 206-8
Soponnon (drisa), 208, 308 values in wartime Okuku, 208-12
Sowande, Fela, 311 nineteenth-century wars, 60-1, 150,
164, 203-8
Tapa (Nupe), 14, 150, 316 see also Big Men; egbé Balogun;
taxation, 48, 50, 155, 213, 222 firearms; Omikunlé
Tedlock, Dennis, 38, 305, 308 wars
Tinubu, Madam, 324 Ijésa Arara war, 59, 63, 150
titles see chiefs llorin-Ibadan wars, 52, 60, 61, 197,
toughness, as attribute of Big Men, 203-12, 308, 309
239-41 ‘Jalumi’ war, 50, 61, 205
town(s) Kiriji war, 51
as principal political unit, 43, 146 Ofa wars, 60-2, 195, 203
as object of study, 5-6 Second World War, 240
formation and dissolution, 43, 146, Waste Land, The, 260, 306
148-51 wealth, as factor in rise of Big Men,
in contrast with forest and farm, 43, 194-5, 220, 235, 240, 242
44, 140-1, 315 celebrated in oriki, 33, 70, 138,
itan of see itan 202-3, 227, 249
membership of, as source of gained by women, 232-6
identity, 4, 13, 43 weaving, 142, 154, 277
of origin, 13, 68, 135-53, 167: see weddings, 49, 87, 91, 98, 100, 104,
also oriki orilé 105, 107-17, 217
social/political structure of, 6, 13, see also marriage; rara tydwo
48, 58, 137-8: see also 1lé Winyomi (founder, dé Oluode), 58,
Toyinbo (dé Aworo Otin) see Sobaldju 154, 196-9, 204-5, 208, 230,
traditional devotees: in eyes of 272, 278, 319
Christians and Muslims, 47, 49 witches, 210, 233-6, 289, 324
in own eyes, 132 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 6
trumpeter of oba, 11, 12 woodcarvers see carvers
Tunbosun Oladapo, 246 Wolff, Hans, 16
Turner, Victor, 303 women
| Big Women, 51, 186, 231-6, 271,
unity, of literary texts, 22-5 288-90
chiefs see chiefs
Van Zyl, H. J., 307 in marriage transactions, 106-114
Vansina, Jan, 26, 27, 63 mastery of oriki chanting, 96-105
Vidal, Tunji, 80 mother’s ortki orilé, 168-72
Vologinov, V. N., 2, 3, 25, 35, 36, 37, personal ortki of, 236, 271-7: see also
85, 303 Arinké (wife of Adéoba);
see also Bakhtin Aworoka; Durdédola
354 INDEX
position in lineage, 109-10, 123, Ffantohun; Ere-Osun; Fadérera;
157, 159, 162, 168-72, 248 Fakémideé; Iya ReKke; Omolola;
role as oral performers, 1, 7, 12, Sangowémi
276-7
role in cults, 99-100, 274-7 Yai, O. B., 23, 38, 306:
role in funerals, 117ff and passim yam farming see farms |
voice of in oriki, 284-6 Yooyé, funeral of, 313-14
see also Arinké (wife of Adéoba);
Aworoka; Ayantayo; Durddola; Zulu oral poetry, 261-2, 307

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International African Library 7

General editors: J. D. Y. Peel and David Parkin

. JTCOULD SPEAK UNTIL TOMORROW

The International African Library is a major monograph

Oriki, Women, and the Past

| EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS

I could speak until tomorrow: Oriki, women >

Maps, Diagrams and Tables Vil

MAPS, DIAGRAMS AND TABLES

Map 3: Okuku and neighbouring towns 42

It would be impossible to thank individually all the people who did me

MAP 1: NIGERIA Showing Position of Okuku

ANTHROPOLOGY, TEXT AND TOWN

2. ORIKI, DEFINITION AND THE TRANSCENDENCE OF TIME

density and sensuous weight. An ortki can be a brief inscrutable phrase or an

He uses dark green dye to paint the rafters

canons of formal unity depend, similarly, on the audience’s expectation that

(2) Unit 2 (line 3):

first instance — not in relation to the units adjacent to it in the performance,

neither can an insider. :

A social history that attempted to use ork to recover patterns of personal

MAP 2: OKUKU c. 1975

To Osogbo . . AR, Ada

MAP 3: OKUKU AND NEIGHBOURING TOWNS

Sogb6 dilé sogbé digboro

Ogbin & @ Horin

Other episodes are inscribed in permanent features of the landscape.

Parord wa, 0 waa jeewo |

Iwo lomo ‘Béngbé 6 gbé

dress to come out?

1. THE VARIETY OF STYLES

Oyo is our home |

I made a little farm

A little tiny farm at Ale-Oyun

Money and children, I say they should go with me

Akotipopo greetings for the festival

The bananas that are at Ale-Oyun, he said the children |

function of the performance as entertainment has receded to the background.

Child of Awoyemi, who knows anyone’s house more than the

living among them.° |

Aré eléwe won 0 su mii se

hardly take place. |

Aiiwo Oisa Mogba

Solo: Arinké waa daiiwo6, a-wé-bi-abéré

She was not an untried member of the Sango cult

What about egbinrin cloth? It’s your post’s cloth.

Yooye has gone to Oyo to be a princess.

Omo Oyawalé, gbogboo yin ni 60 réré omo je ,

fe ner Hoee eee SS es Be .

zSerer one. SE OS SS Bagg RE SEE 7rere eee

SeyBo F Bee ys Seer

THE ORIKI OF ORIGIN

bring them home. |

Conceptions of social differentiation and specialisation are thus indivisible

They say the Ikotun people have no river

Who has water that gushes like the river of Ipakun?

Preferences in food, similarly, would seem peculiar only to outsiders. The