JOURNAL OF THE YORUBA STUDIES ASSOCIATION OF NIGERIA
VOL. 5 NO 2 JUNE 2008
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UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY
Yoruba?
Journal of Yoruba Studies Association of
Nigeria
Vol. 5 No.2 June 2008 ISSN 1595-1324
UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN LIBRARY
Yoruba: Journal of Yoruba Studies Association of Nigeria 5(2)
© Yoruba Studies Association of Nigeria 2008
(Eg e Onimo- ide Yoruba NamnsO
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may be reproduced or transmitted in any form 
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First published June 2008.
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Department of Linguistics and African Languages
University of Ibadan
Ibadan
Printed in Nigeria by Agoro Publicity Company, Ibadan
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Yoruba: Journal of Yoruba Studies Association of Nigeria 5(2)
AKOONU
(CONTENTS)
Dele Layiwola: Globalization and th5 future of yoruba theatre
traditions: an assessment 1
Micheal A. Abiodun: Re-denasalization in Yoruba 9
Duro A. Adeleke: The saturnalian echoes in Afolabi Olabimtan’s
Bo ti gba 20
Temitp'pe Olumuyiwa: isesi awon atoka itenumo ati silebu
olohun oke ninu awon eka-ede Ekiti 41
Fu nmilo la Aje le ti : lymo y iys yeyguyn iyto ju 
ayiysayn ara ni iylaynay iybi le y Yoruyba 52
Aderonke Adesola Adesanya: Indigenous Yoruba aso oke
as heritage, history and memory: the paradigm of the 
vintage-types in the collection of Adetowun Ogunsheye 62
Yomi Daramola: The context of proverbs in songs of some
Yoruba popular music 81
Adesanya, Ahmed O.: Onomastics and class in Yoruba protest
plays 92
Mathew Umukoro: Amulumala ede 104
IV
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Yoruba: Journal of Yoruba Sfudies Association of Nigeria 5 (2)
GLOBALIZATION AND THE FUTURE OF YORUBA THEATRE 
TRADITIONS: AN ASSESSMENT
Dele Layiwola*
The task of inviting me to speak on Globalisation and Yoruba 
Studies is a daunting as well as a complex one. Daunting because 
the particular specie of the Nigerian public constantly referred to by- 
the name ‘Yoruba’ has become a complex and intriguing website 
for genuine historians and scholars; orators and politicians as well 
as for charlatans and speculators. It therefore becomes imperative 
that to have been so privileged and topical, the same group of 
people who are often referred to as 'the Greeks of West Africa’ 
must have had an intriguing history and a Byzantine civilization. 
Consequently, it is the rump of this civilization that is responsible for 
the enormous creative and intellectual output that, I believe, is 
largely responsible for the fame and credit that have fallen on this 
stock during the last and one quarter centuries that internecine 
wars have stopped and a new phase of nationalism instigated and 
re-invented by colonialism.
But the point must be made outright that the Yoruba have 
been either famous or notorious because they have never been 
kept apart from controversy. From the viewpoint of cultural 
enthusiasts, they either talk too much or they are talked about too 
much! Whichever is the case, they must keep talking to constantly 
stoke the fire of creativity and controversy and to keep their place in 
history from being discounted as newfangled historians have 
attempted. I believe that this is the singular reason why Yoruba 
language dramas of the 70s exploit crowd aesthetics and 
rowdiness and allow too many persons to express themselves all at 
the same time!
But who are the Yoruba? Are they merely a stock or a 
linguistic group? Does the etymology of the name come from 
outside or is it an autochthonous derivative? Perhaps if we try to 
situate the name in virtual space, we can reasonably navigate the 
localization and auto-globalization of the intellectual and cultural 
industry of the same people. But the easiest thing to do, not being a 
philologist or a philosopher, is to simply ignore the provenance of 
the name-script and go on to the business of the day. However, I
Institute of African Studies University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria
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Dele Layiwola: Globalization and the future of Yoruba theatre traditions: an
assessment
am afraid I cannot, given the caliber of those whose privilege 
audience the present podium has afforded me.
Precisely on Tuesday, 17th April, 2001, Dr Yusufu Bala Usman of 
Ahmadu Bello University, Zaira in a symposium in Mambayya 
House, Bayero University, Kano which was subsequently published 
on the website of the Centre for Democratic Development and 
Training averred as follows:
The fact is that, the earliest record we have of the use 
of very name "Yoruba” was in the Hausa language 
and it seems to have applied to the people of the 
Alafinate of Oyo. This came from the writings of the 
seventeenth century Kastina scholar, Dan Masani 
(1595-1667), who wrote a book on the Muslim 
scholars of the ‘Yarriba’. But it was from a book of the 
Sarkin Muslim Bello, written in the early nineteenth 
century, that the name became more widely used.
The Bishop Ajayi Crowther, the Reverend Samuel 
Johnson, and his brother Obadiah Johnson, among 
others, came, in the nineteenth century, to widely 
spread this Hausa name to the people who now bear 
it, in their writings, [p.26]
Now, the claim of Dr Bala Usman is that the Hausa people 
‘invented’ the identity of the Yoruba, or perhaps worse still, invented 
the Yoruba themselves and named them into being! An even worse 
scenario is that I have myself heard it from some Yoruba scholars 
that the name of their ethnic nationality probably derived from the 
Hausa word ‘Yarriba’, meaning a slippery terrain; an intractable 
phenomenon. The real danger of this is that if the real owners of 
the name and the culture peddle a false premise, everyone else will 
believe it to be so because it is natural to believe that they should 
know better. The truth is also unassailable that when an 
ethnocentric or primordialist scholar invents a wheel, he/she tends 
to do so through the monocle of his own image. In other words, 
either large or small, human being tends to create others from, and 
in, their own image. In such instances, the rest of the world is the 
inadvertent loser.
Being a younger scholar, I cannot afford to bandy words with 
Bala Usman of blessed memory but I beg to put the records 
straight. It is proven by other established scholars that the earliest 
orthography of word ‘Yoruba’ came neither from the Hausa 
language nor from the writing of the 17th century Kastina scholar
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Yoruba: Journal of Yoruba Studies Association of Nigeria 5 (2)
Dan Masani. Rather a Timbucktu scholar and theologian, Ahmad 
Baba [1556-1627], who wrote in the Arabic language, reported in a 
document written about 1622 on the range of ethnic groups in the 
southern Sudan who are traditionalists and non believers in Islamic 
doctrines [Baba c.1622: 1937; Ekeh, 2001:4]
Now having been done with the issue of anthropomorpMc or 
conceptual province as well as the location of our primordial or 
political space in the world, there is still the nagging concept of 
etymological provenance. That is, we know who the Yoruba are but 
how did they come to be known by that name and what is the 
ideological root of the word in regard to their chosen place in the 
world. I have heard Yoruba ancients in the field say that the present 
form of the word is a corruption of the phrase Yi oo ba or Yooba; 
that is to say ‘it will do, it will be enough or it will certainly meet up’. 
This in itself has a history behind it. It is connected with the story of 
migration and sufficiency even in the context of scarce resources.
I have gone into this extended foray because the concept of 
globalization is that of an imagined world located in collective, 
pluralized imagination in which we either seek to localize or 
aggregate our individual as well as perceived spaces. There is the 
global in the local and vice versa, the local in the conceptually 
global. Years ago, my communication and media students have 
always referred to the newfangled terms as ‘globalocalizatiori or 
simply ‘glocalization’! This simply confirms what Arjun Appadurai 
refers to when the suggests that owing to the technological 
changes of the last century, certain conceptual, and paradigmatic, 
shifts have compelled imagination to becoming a collective, social 
fact. He affirms that this development ‘is the basis of the plurality of 
imagined worlds’ [1996:5],
Yoruba Studies in the 20th century was a field of study that 
engendered worlds of spectacular imagination and the 
archaeological imaginary Fagunwa’s adventures in the world of 
alternative beings and elements; the supra-technological world of 
magical realism in Amos Tutuola’s works; the nationalizing stories 
of T.A.A. Ladele; Adebayo Faleti and Akinwumi Isola; the moral and 
historical recreation of J.F. Qdunjo and Lawuyi Ogunniran and the 
folk stories of Yemiitan and Adegoke Durojaiye; The nationalist 
dramas of Hubert Ogunde, A.B. Layeni and G.T. Onimole; the 
folkloric repertoire of Kola Ogunmola, Duro Ladipo and Wale 
Ogunyemi; the contemporary dramas of Wole Soyinka, Ola Rotimi, 
Femi Osofisan and Bode Sowande amongst a myriad constellation
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Dele Layiwola: Globalization and the future of Yoruba theatre traditions: an
assessment
of poets, story tellers and imaginers or imagines. These are artists 
who imagine and create worlds as much as that world recreates 
them. On the brow of the 21st century, we can see the frantic efforts 
of scholars, students and commentators anxiously preserving the 
corpus both as a body of knowledge and as a method by which that 
knowledge is apprehended or modified; a mode of activity; a way of 
doing things with words in a world that is both expansive and 
convergent. This, I ■ must assert, has become the fate of what 
anthropologists used to refer to as Area Studies. In today’s 
globalizing world, it behooves every discipline to not merely 
navigate our place in the world and its potential to determine us in 
regard to others. After all, the world in which we live is defined by 
partaking of multitudes. The fundamental of this burden has fallen 
on the pivotal index of culture- Language.
In our understanding of language as a world, both the 
phenomenologist Martin Heidegger and the French come to the 
closest approximation of this ramifying index of culture. Heidegger 
says that Language constitutes the embryonic world in which we 
live and express our being:
Language is: language, speech. Language speaks. If 
we let ourselves fall Into the abyss denoted by this 
sentence, we do not go tumbling into emptiness. We 
fall upward, to a height. Its loftiness opens up a depth.
The two span a realm in which we would like to 
become at home, so as to find a residence, a dwelling 
place for the life of man [Martin Heidegger, 1971:191- 
21
For Heidegger, globalization represents the expanse as well as the 
collapse of language in all its ramifications. The French have been 
able to philosophically delimit language in their attempt to control 
the world. This is how the denotative and the connotative 
expression of the term language roughly aggregate among French:
Langage- Manner of speech; use of Language.
Langue- Tongue; a linguistic system; native tongue;
political cant; mother tongue; constructive system. 
Parole - Words, lyric; speech as a faculty.
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Yoruba: Journal of Yoruba Studies Association of Nigeria 5 (2)
In the works of all the Yoruba artists I listed above within the broad 
genre of poetry, narrative and Drama, the subdivisions of the 
French conception of language is fully represented. It means that 
the Yoruba conceive of language not only as a linguistic tool but as 
a way of creating a memory or an internal world that replicate their 
external environment. Language constitutes both an artistic as well 
as an historical tool. For Yoruba Studies, therefore, the beauty of 
language is' ancillary to a philosophical system, an ontology; a 
cosmic system; an incantatory tool that constructs and subverts in 
the same breath. I believe that most accomplished traditional 
civilizations such as those of the Greeks and Romans share this 
inherent attribute. This invariably explains the prolificity of these 
societies in the urban-based arts of oratory and theatre. It is the 
instrument of elite formation and empire building in the context of 
enlightened audiences; cultivators of artistic tastes and consumers 
of literary production. This is the legacy that Yoruba civilization has 
brought to the diversity of Nigeria’s culture.
It is generally believed that language developed in East Africa more 
than 150,000 years ago and thereafter dispersed around the globe 
in several other variants and dialects. Today we are all of the 
opinion that these languages have shrunken to a total of about 
6,700 and are diminishing in the face of cultural and economic 
domination of the more powerful nation-states of the world. The 
threat has been grossly aggravated in recent decades by the onset 
of globalization and modernization. It is heartwarming to find that 
UNESCO considers language a significant portion of the world’s 
intangible heritage and believes that since a considerable amount 
of world culture is trapped in these language system that are 
lodged in them. It is useful to quote from the Intangible Heritage 
Messenger:
As humankinds’ principal means of communication, 
languages do not merely convey messages; they also 
express emotions, intentions and values, confirm 
social' relations and transmit cultural and social 
expressions and practices. In spoken or written form, 
or through gesture, languages are the vehicle of 
memories, traditions, knowledge and skills. 
Consequently, language constitutes a determining 
factor of identity for individuals and groups. The 
preservation of the linguistic diversity of the world’s
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Dele Layiwola: Globalization and the future of Yoruba theatre traditions, an
assessment
societies contributes to cultural diversity, which 
UNESCO considers a universal ethical imperative and 
essential for sustainable development in today’s 
evermore globalizing world.
It then means that for globalization to be a world phenomenon, it 
must be sufficiently expansive, comprehensive and elastic to 
accommodate the pluralizing sensibilities of the world’s total 
heritage. As a world shrinks, another sympathetically expands to 
ensure that there is no vacuum left in tits place. If language would 
truly speak for us and for itself as Heidegger affirms, then its 
speaking becomes a purposive, performative, programmatic act, a 
world appropriating and reaffirming cultural phenomenon. In the 
words of Wittgenstein, the limit of the word is the limit of the world.
If
The origins of the performative arts in most traditional, or emergent 
societies, are strikingly similar. It is also established that the state, 
and some ancient monarchies, were very early patrons of drama. 
The connection between the state and theatrical traditions is 
usually dated to 534BC when Athens instituted both a prize and a 
contest for the best tragedy presented in the city Dionysia, a great 
religious festival. Some early accounts relate that Thespis, being 
the earliest winner of the contest, is also the inventor of drama 
whilst other accounts say that he is probably the sixteenth in line of 
tragic poets [Brockett and Hildy, 2003:13]. Aristotle had averred in 
his Poetics that tragedy emerged from the improvisation of the 
leaders of the dithyramb. The Greek God of wine, revelry and 
fertility. The form of the dithyramb consists of an improvised story 
sung by the choral leader and a refrain song sung by the chorus. 
This pattern is equally evident in the Alarinjo performances of the 
Yoruba. Oscar Brockett further relates that Arion [625-585BC] was 
the first to give literary documentation to the dithyramb in heroic 
episodes and assigning titles to them and making them into 
chapters. The fact that the Dorian Greeks considered Arion to be a 
tragedian would seem to explain why, in their own accounts, they 
placed Thespis much further down than the first position in the line 
of tragic poets.
It is difficult to conjecture how long in history it took the 
dithyrambic song to evolve into tragic plays but the tragic form had 
always been attributed to Thespis, it is clear that his innovations
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YcrObs: Journal of Yoruba Studies Association of Nigeria 5 (2)
were not unconnected with the prologue and spoken lines by an 
actor who impersonated another character. It is obvious that this 
has improved the form of an art which was purely narrative and 
usually laced with dances. That prologue became the salute or 
ijuba [also known as the opening glee] in 19lh and 20th century 
Yoruba performances. The fact that Aeschylus added a second 
actor and, therefore, dialogue to Greek drama around 490BC made 
performances more robust and of a greater magnitude. This 
enhanced competition and conflict on stage and on the 
performance arena; and thereby led to greater development of 
Athenian drama. On this very foundation Euripides and Sophocles 
built and improved on the form of dramatic enactments as they 
have been with us today.
I have traced the development of Greek Drama so that I can 
elucidate the striking, comparative and parallel element in the 
development and evolution of Yoruba drama, especially as 
document by Lawuyi Ogunniran in his classic Eegun Alare [1975], 
The very interesting poetic interrogations of this book trace the 
earliest origins of the performance guild and craft among the 
Yoruba. The story of Oje Larinnaka corresponds with the period of 
Thespis among the Greeks when the performer was a lone ranger 
moving from town to town with his guild and performing to 
acclamation. Besides a few historical narratives relived through 
action, his performances were discrete and episodic. The 
competition between Ojelade and Duduyemi corresponds to the 
period when Aeschylus added a second actor to the craft to boost 
dialogue and competition. This was at the instance of the Alaafin, 
the royal Patron and ceremonial impresario, who felt that the craft 
would benefit from an immense and vibrant competitive spirit. It is 
this competition that has enabled the theatre historian to establish 
that in Yorubaland, under the Suzerainty of the Alaafin, Olojowon 
owned the mask whilst Ologbojo was the primal mask-dramaturge. 
They also revealed that Kujenra provided the fabric and garment 
that was first used to costume the actor.
There is a sense in the fact that there was a peculiar division of 
labour in which Olojowon was a carver whilst Ologbojo was the 
gifted dancer and the third estate of the realm was owned by the 
scenic designer.
Today the influence of Yoruba drama and popular culture is 
so well known beyond the shores of Nigeria itself. The forces of 
globalization will continue to call for the redefinition of this art which
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Dele Layiwola: Globalization and the future of Yoruba theatre traditions: an
assessment
Yoruba Studies has contributed to the cultural development of a 
postcolonial nation. I do hope that this legacy can be interrogated 
more closely so as to make it fundamentally relevant to the 
epigenesist of progress and democracy in the land of our birth.
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