Èrò Ni Gbẹ̀gìrì

The occasion for this brief statement was my introduction of Professor Niyi Osundare as Keynoter at "Enchantings: Modernity, Culture, and the State in Postcolonial Africa," a conference organized by Professor Tejumola Olaniyan for University of Wisconsin's Institute for Research in the Humanities, April 26-28, 2012. Note to self: you have still not written that full length paper on the poetry of Níyì Ọ̀ṣúndáre. When I was given this task some months back, I told myself this should be an easy one. After all, how hard would it be to speak about the author of Village Voices , the book of poems which, in 1985, inspired my 9th grade students at Modakeke Islamic Grammar School to believe that they too could write poetry, and indeed wrote poems they sent to the Daily Times in Lagos. Sorry, Professor Osundare, my students, motivated by your book, beat you by nearly a decade to the wisdom of distributing poetry in the tabloid platform. But that is an...

Among the most often cited    evidence of sexism in Yorùbá society are the following lines from the anthology of divination poems (ẹsẹ ifá), Ìjìnlẹ̀ Ohùn Ẹnu Ifá: Apá Kejì (Glasgow: William Collins, 1969, p. 30) edited by Wande Abimbola.   Obìnrin lèké, Obìnrin lọ̀dàlẹ̀, Kéèyàn mọ́ finú han fóbìnrin. The female is the liar The female is treacherous No person should confide in the female Scholars quote these lines as if they were some oracular pronouncements from a divinity that is in a position to assert self-evident, truly Yorùbá, cultural certainties. This is sheer intellectual bunk and misuse of "evidence." First, these words were recited by a particular divination priest who performed (perhaps composed) the lines as part of an illustrative story about how to avert death. These are not divine pronouncements from any god or goddess.   Second, the lines refer to one precise individual named Olójòǹgbòdú, the one married to I...

Thoughts in Progress. Do Not Quote.  1: We may designate the four basic terms as:  ọ̀tọ̀; ẹ̀yà; ẹ̀ya; òmíràn/òmín-ìn . 2: For now, I want to separate the fourth term,  òmíràn/òmín-ìn , because I am not able to outline its phonological components. In English translation, the word typically serves as the equivalent of "another" set (entity), abstract or concrete, time or place. 3: Now to the other three: (i) ọ̀tọ̀ (being apart);  (ii) ẹ̀yà (being in/of a sort); (iii) ẹ̀ya (being in/of a derivation). *We could say these are the basic forms of differentiation in the language. 4: Phonologically, the root terms (or syllables): (i) tọ̀; (ii) yà; (ii) ya. Each word is transformed into a nominal phrase in 2 above with low toned, back vowel, prefixes: /ọ̀/ and /ẹ̀/ 5: English translations of the ideophonic root terms are: (i) tọ̀: pursue, trace, follow, urinate; (ii) yà: separate or turn (verb), draw (graphically), deviate, defecate;...

ÌJÚBÀ or ÌBÀ (noun); JÚBÀ (verb)   The initial gestures rendered to acknowledge authority figures, sacral or secular, to which a performance production owes its textual and institutional provenance constitute the ìjúbà (ìbà). The conventional words and motions thus presented demarcate the commencement of an iteration, pay homage to sources of influence and inspiration, praise past patronages, solicit audience support and understanding, wish failure for opposing will and interests, and outline the production’s goals. HISTORY Two paths stand out in the historical understanding of ìjúbà: one follows the older, text based line in translation manuals and dictionaries, and the other issues from scholarly studies of performance traditions. Although they are more recent and offer longer overviews that extend far back into mythical times, scholarly studies of ìjúbà lean heavily on old traditions recounted in explanations of contemporary enactments, mainly of egúngún and gẹ̀lẹ̀de...

The interrogative in the title of Professor  Oyèrónkẹ́  Oyěwùmí’s last book,  What Gender is Motherhood?   Ideals of Power, Procreation, and Identity in the Age of Modernity (Palgrage 2016) , is an unanswerable, rhetorical, question ( ẹ̀ràn ) that is meant to  challenge the belief that motherhood defines woman-being universally. (In southwestern Nigeria, discerning people do not speak in such tropes to the unwise [ a kìí ran ẹni tí ò gbọ́n , is the formulaic expression]). Oyěwùmí argues that social life—kinship organization, for example—in parts of southwestern Nigeria decouples motherhood from sex, and she criticizes the methods by which social science accounts of Yorùbá communities impoverish second order reflections on the organization and regulation of life as they are embedded in oral and traditional institutions of knowing. For example, philosophers and literary critics that represent divination texts as sources of governing statements...