Performing the News: Yorùbá Oral Traditions on the Radio

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Yorùbá language radio programme Kókó Inú Ìwé Ìròyìn, which translates as “Newspaper Headlines News”, began airing in 1999 and starts broadcasting at 6 am daily on the Lagos local languages radio network Bond FM 92.9. I argue that the news presenters do not use the usual radio journalism conventions, but instead lean towards a performative mode that makes use of various traditional oral devices, including proverbs, puns, extemporisation and fictional exaggeration. In this way, they borrow from other Yorùbá performance traditions, thus creating a news format that reinforces a Yorùbá cultural sphere and which creates a particular aural community. The deployment of Yorùbá figurative texts in the parsing of news stories signals an attempt to localise their journalistic work in a Yorùbá discursive tradition whose mode of verbal communication privileges textual inventiveness and dynamic recapitulations. The radio news show is an example of the changing context and continual reinvention of Yorùbá oral performance in modern society.