Literature in Yorùbá: poetry and prose; traveling theater and modern drama

Abstract

Yoruba verbal art is one of Africa’s most remarkable fields of creativity, both in its variety and its extent. Oral traditions, some of them of great antiquity, continue to flourish and evolve; written literature constitutes one of the largest, longest-established, and liveliest traditions in Africa; there are also numerous new popular genres on the interface between written and oral modes. Supported by a public of about 30 million Yoruba-speakers, mostly in south western Nigeria, Yoruba literature plays a central role in many dimensions of ordinary life, ranging from lessons in school to life cycle ceremonies such as naming, marriage, and burial; from contact with ancestors to commentary on the contemporary national situation. Yoruba literary culture is also one of the few in Africa to be supported by an extensive, long-standing, and sophisticated local critical scholarship in the same language as the literature itself. Oral genres Oral genres constitute a vast field of expression with much intertextuality and cross-genre borrowing. Terminology for genres varies. Some genres are widely recognized, their key features agreed upon. But there is also much local specificity and much contextual variation in the use of terms even within a single locality.