Troubadour, Griot and Evangelist: The Compelling Narrative Rhetoric of ‘Erujeje’

Abstract

AbstractThe power of narratives as didactic tools, the repository of history, cultural knowledge and cultural identity is well known. Walter Fisher depicts stories as the sum of rhetorical expressions and applications of the pre-existing values of a community. Narratives and its corollaries—narrator, receptor (audience)—form a tightly woven knit. To be effective, the receptor must be complicit in the narrator’s jeu (game) which is to persuade the receptor of the fidelity and plausibility of the story. Numerous agents exploit the digital age as a new medium which has appropriated them a special niche in the arena of communication. In evangelism, Michael Fasina, also known as Erujeje, is at the heart of such a movement. This article is a treatment of Fisherian narrative and Aristotelian syllogism in an attempt to suggest that Erujeje, the Nigerian dramatist extraordinaire, combines those elements coupled with topoi familiar to his audience in order to proselytize.1