Yoruba Cosmology Research Articles

Cityscapes of Hunting and Fishing: Yoruba Place-Making and Cultural Heritage for a Sustainable Urban Vision

Literature on African urbanism has generally lacked insight into the significant roles of hunters and fishers as city founders. This has resulted in a knowledge gap regarding the cultural foundation of the cities that could enhance policy frameworks for sustainable urban governance. This article examines corollaries related to the complementarities of hunting and urbanism with case studies from the ethno-linguistic Yoruba region in southwestern Nigeria. Through qualitative methodologies involving ethnography and the (oral) history of landscapes of hunting from the pre-colonial and (British) colonial periods, as well as tracing the current cultural significance of hunting in selected Yoruba cities, the article reveals data that identify hunters and fishers as city founders. It shows that hunting, as a lived heritage, continues to be interlaced with cultural urban practices and Yoruba cosmology and that within this cultural imagery and belief, hunters remain key actors in nature conservation, contributing to socio-cultural capital, economic sustainability, and urban security structures. The article concludes with recommendations for strategies to reconnect with these value systems in rapidly westernizing urban Africa. These reconnections include the re-sacralization of desacralized landscapes of hunting, revival of cultural ideologies, decolonization from occidental conceptions, and re-definition of urbanism and place-making in light of African perspectives despite globalization. In doing so, the article contributes to a deeper understanding of the interconnections between the environmental and societal components of sustainability theory, agenda, and practice in urban contexts; underscores the societal value of lived heritage, cultural heritage, and cultural capital within the growing literature on urban social sustainability; and sheds more light on southern geographies within the social sustainability discourse, a field of study that still disproportionately reflects the global northwest.

Taboos and Medicine in Yoruba Medicine: The Unexplored Aspects of Bioethics

Taboo and bioethics constitute two major fundamental elements of the practice of traditional Yoruba medicine (TYM) that are intricately linked yet largely unexplored. However, their importance can be truly exemplified in the sustenance and maintenance of the ontological harmony between man and its environment, which in an apt sense is basic to averting unforeseen dangers to human life. This paper is therefore an attempt to bring to limelight, the indispensable aspect of taboos especially in relation to the study of bioethics in traditional Yoruba Medicine. It vehemently argues that taboo and its implications, in Africa and Yoruba cosmology, go beyond mere natural social relevance or social ethical implications; rather, its philosophical underpinning is also entrenched in bioethics ˗ an aspect of traditional medicine that greatly deals with the preservation of human life.

Dramatic Dissent in Wole Soyinka’s Metaphysical Play Death and the King’s Horseman (1975) and Biyi Bandele’s Netflix Adaptation Elesin Oba: The King’s Horseman (2022)

Abstract Approaching the theme of this special issue as a dramatic structure, the contribution investigates the representation of dissenting practices in Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman and Biyi Bandele’s Elesin Oba: The King’s Horseman. First published in 1975, Soyinka’s metaphysical play dramatises the events surrounding the eponymous protagonist Elesin Oba who, according to Yoruba cosmology, must follow the king in death to ensure harmony between this world and the next. Questioning both metaphysical and Marxist readings of the play, I argue that its employment of ritual as a dramaturgical device functions to explore the intricate reasons for failed leadership in post-independence Nigeria. This re-reading of Soyinka’s classic is informed by its recent screen adaptation, Elesin Oba: The King’s Horseman, which was co-produced by Ebonylife Films and Netflix and directed by the late Nigerian playwright and filmmaker Biyi Bandele. Reinforcing new Nollywood’s budding relationship with Netflix and its accompanying globalisation, Bandele’s movie appropriates the play’s dramatic structure of dissent on the levels of cinematography and editing, mise-en-scène and sound, inviting its transnational viewers to consider past and present manifestations of dissent as a means of managing and envisioning possible solutions to contemporary conflicts. The conclusion stresses that the ritual form presents a flexible device to interrogate historically specific power relations and encourage distinct generations of audiences to imagine their forms, causes, and alternatives; whereas Soyinka’s play suggests that these alternatives rest on the capabilities of the educated middle classes, Bandele’s movie constructs more diversified audiences which may settle for its consoling or dissenting aesthetics, respectively.

Frobenius unbound

Whatever one thinks of his controversial reputation as a provocative gadfly among pioneering African ethnologists, Leo Frobenius contributed signifi-cantly to African studies, not only during his prodigious documentary expeditions throughout the continent but also via his productive imagination in perceiving pat-terns, regional affinities, and even hidden historicities within African cosmologies and their material forms. In this article, I return to Frobenius’s theory of Atlantis as the absent ‘origin’ of Yoruba culture and civilization. At worst, his theory can be read as a contrived variation of the Hamitic hypothesis applied to a Yoruba civili-zation predicated on Phoenician origins. On a deeper structural level, however, it mirrors the fundamental poetics of displacement at the core of Yoruba kingship and ritual renewal. I argue that this sanctified ground of originary surrogation in Yoruba cosmology – a figural ‘Atlantis’ that lies beyond recovery – not only shaped the changing political topology of Yorubaland in West Africa, but also informed the Yoruba diaspora and its historical trajectories in the Americas. Critically refor-mulated, Frobenius’s problematic ‘road to Atlantis’ charts a course for rethinking the Yoruba-Atlantic.

"One foot on the other side": Towards a Periodization of West African Spiritual Surrealism

Abstract: For both writers and scholars of African and diaspora literature, genre is a fraught concept. Western institutions, especially departments of English literature, have used the tool of genre to discipline Africana literatures and the people who create them, at once reducing conventional realism to a source of anthropological information and mischaracterizing realism with an indigenous or Nonwestern worldview as fantasy or "Magical Realism." "West African spiritual surrealism," as defined in this essay, offers a generic rubric that both attends to the literalization of Igbo and Yoruba cosmology in fiction as well as the ways these cosmologies can give rise to literary devices that resist hegemonic, Anglo-American centric literary interpretation. Through close readings of Helen Oyeyemi's The Icarus Girl (2005) and Akwaeke Emezi's Freshwater (2018), this article historicizes West African spiritual surrealism as a geographically and ideologically diasporic genre that cannot be properly understood through frameworks of globalization alone. This genre and its writers require critics to read both deeply and widely in order to understand how West African spiritual surrealism places African cosmologies and people always already at the center of literary production.

Practs of Deliberate Conceptual Mappings in Ahmed Yerima’s Abobaku

Ahmed Yerima’s Abobaku is a drama that explains Yoruba cosmological belief in the concept of a scape-goat who dies to accompany Alaafin and other Yoruba Kings to the ancestral world.Despite its significance to Yoruba cosmology, Yerima’s Abobaku has not been given a full-blown pragmatic study. This paper therefore attempts to fill this existing gap by examining the practs of metaphor in it. Modified model of Mey’s (2001) pragmeme and Steen’s(2008) deliberate metaphor theory were used as the theoretical base of this study. The findings revealed that there are deliberate conceptual mappings of a human as a beast, a sacrificial lamb, and a saviour ; human’s life as a journey, a light, and a cracked cooking pot; death as a container/vehicle and a journey; life as a journey and a light; and love as a two-edged sword . Participants rode on the shared socio-cultural, cognitive and linguistic common grounds to pract lamenting, warning, informing, condemning, stating, reminding and boasting in the text.

Constructing Identities: Amos Tutuola and the Ibadan Literary Elite in the wake of Nigerian Independence

Constructing Identities: Amos Tutuola and the Ibadan Literary Elite in the wake of Nigerian Independence

Yoruba Cosmology and Mythology in Wole Soyinka’s The Road

Yoruba Cosmology and Mythology in Wole Soyinka’s The Road

Beyoncé's Super Bowl Spectacles and Choreographies of Black Power in the Movement 4 Black Lives

AbstractIn this article, I argue that the spectacle of American football, and the performance practices of HBCU dance lines birthed within it and seasoned in queer nightclubs, propelled Black “femme-inintiy” from the sidelines to the center of choreographic and discursive practices of Black liberation. I wed queer Black feminism with Yoruba cosmology to analyze three protests instigated during three NFL events in 2016: Beyoncé's Super Bowl performance, the direct actions of Black Lives Matter activists at the Super Bowl, and Assata's Daughters’ protest at the NFL Draft. Ultimately, I theorize the generative potential of spectacle and uplift the organizing and labor of queer Black femmes and gender nonconforming people in the Movement 4 Black Lives.

Fabric of Immortality: Ancestral Power, Performance, and Agency in Egungun Artistry, By Bolaji Campbell

Reviewed by: Fabric of Immortality: Ancestral Power, Performance, and Agency in Egungun Artistry by Bolaji Campbell Cheryl Sterling Fabric of Immortality: Ancestral Power, Performance, and Agency in Egungun Artistry BY BOLAJI CAMPBELL Africa World Press, 2019. vii + 211 pp. ISBN 9781569026274 paper. In Fabric of Immortality: Ancestral Power, Performance, and Agency in Egungun Artistry, Bolaji Campbell gives a comprehensive analysis of Egungun traditions in relation to Yoruba beliefs about death and ancestry. He grounds his analysis in Yoruba cosmology and history, situates such knowledge within the performance contexts of Egungun festivals, its transit and rearticulation in the African diaspora, and its modern-day influence and adaptation by contemporary artists. Such a multitiered approach to the subject succeeds in both elaborating on and decoding our understanding of Egungun in all of its manifestations. The term Egungun, itself, has many different meanings; it may be the ancestors, bones, a mask, a masquerader, or the masquerade. In general, however, it refers to concealed powers. Campbell, from the beginning of the text, reveals that the Egungun are ara orun, spiritual dwellers who are emissaries to our material realm and who have multiple potentialities and powers to aid humanity. Using a combination of oral sources, such as oriki (praise poetry, Ifa divination poetry, Egungun chants, legends and stories), as well as eyewitness accounts by African and European scholars in chapter one of the book, Campbell further excavates their mythical origins, but also locates the beginning of the tradition in the expansionist warfare of the Oyo Empire (late 1700s). In particular, he focuses on Oyo's war with Ibadan to set the stage for his detailed interrogation of Egungun festivals in that city. While Egunguns usually belong to a family line, they are not always the ancestors within a family, and Campbell's research in Ibadan shows how they function as markers and a balance to state power. He further intertwines their functioning as an association, with their performances within popular cultural festivals, reinforcing their roles as protectors of the community. Campbell is an art historian with over twenty years of experience researching Egungun masquerades, and a standout in the text is his focus on the ubiquity in which women participate in the tradition. Even though other scholars have written about female participation in Egungun celebrations, John Willis, in Masquerading Politics: Kinship, Gender, and Ethnicity in a Yoruba Town (2018), is the only one to centralize women's roles (Beier; Drewal and Drewal; Babayemi). Campbell takes this work one step further, by detailing and describing the roles of female participants in all aspects of Egungun celebrations. His work reframes the discourse through the lens of gender and opens our understanding of the tradition. Most concretely, he focuses on the roles of women in chapter two of the book and, while such roles are not at all limited to the materiality of Egungun representation, they are also intertwined with the fabrics that the Egungun wears, which by the way is their primary medium of engagement. Egungun costumes are complex, [End Page 257] tiered assemblages, composed of multiple layers of cloth lappets, made from the most expensive and prestigious textiles, which cover and hide the masker's identity, but also cover the plethora of medicines, protective substances, and objects that invoke the spirit of the ancestor manifesting through the masquerader. The roles women play are apparent even in the diaspora, and when Campbell focuses on his research in Oyotunji village in chapter four, he tells stories primarily of the women who commission Egunguns to invoke and celebrate their ancestors. This work is called Fabric of Immortality because, as Campbell states, he is borrowing the words of one of his mentors, Rowland Abiodun, in emphasizing "the deathlessness and timelessness of cloth" (4); that "fabrics, in essence, represent the cultural notions of immortality, of interconnectedness, and of the ultimate ideas of cohesion and filial devotion" (5). Cloth across the board in African societies reveal complex articulations about the political, social, cultural, and gendered map of the society. The colors, composition, patterns within, tell stories. They are symbolic texts that insiders understand and depending on cultural context, special fabrics are used by family members to mark liminal events from births to...

La rinascita della tragedia dallo spirito del blues nel teatro di August Wilson

Born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, August Wilson was the most prolific and represented African American playwright of the twentieth century. His Century Cycle, a series of ten plays that chronicle the lives of African Americans from the early 1900s to the late 1990s, is an expression of Wilson’s spiritual realism, a form of drama that, while adhering to some conventions of the Western realist tradition, also introduces elements of innovation inspired by blues music and Yoruba cosmology. This essay analyses the double cultural genealogy of Wilson’s work to show how, despite respecting the Aristotelian principle of mìmesis, his playwriting draws on a quintessentially black aesthetic. In conceiving of theatre as a ritualistic performative context where music and words intertwine, Wilson restored what Friedrich Nietzsche regarded as the authentic spirit of Greek tragedy – the harmony between Dionysian and Apollonian – while at the same time injecting an African American ethos into the Western theatrical canon.

African Modernity and the Philosophy of Culture in the Works of Femi Euba

Reviewed by: African Modernity and the Philosophy of Culture in the Works of Femi Euba by Iyunolu Osagie Kayode Odumboni African Modernity and the Philosophy of Culture in the Works of Femi Euba BY IYUNOLU OSAGIE Lexington Books, 2017. xxxii + 155 pp. ISBN 9781498545662 cloth. With her latest book, African Modernity and the Philosophy of Culture in the Works of Femi Euba, Iyunolu Osagie achieves two critical goals: she delivers an intricate study of the corpus of Euba's works and at the same time she offers an important perspective on the discourse of tradition and modernity from the prism of African metaphysics. Across five chapters, Osagie displays an intimate engagement with Euba's scholarly and creative productions. Euba's works to which Osagie offers detailed analytical exploration include the critical book Archetypes, Imprecators and Victims of Fate: Origins and Developments of Satire in Black Drama; his full-length plays Abiku, The Gulf, The Eye of Gabriel, and Dionysus of the Holocaust; his one-act plays A Riddle of the Palms, Crocodiles, and The Chameleon; and the novel Camwood at Crossroads. In each chapter, Osagie provides theoretical (and, where necessary, historical) contextualization to her close-reading of each of these texts by Femi Euba. African Modernity and the Philosophy of Culture enters the age-old scholarly conversation about tradition and modernity. Osagie builds on and extends the disparate ideas of scholars of African thought such as Anthony Appiah, V. Y. Mudimbe, Achille Mbembe, Kwame Gyeke, and Olufemi Taiwo, among others, to argue that the distinction often drawn between tradition and modernity is not as clear as it is sometimes construed in scholarship—rather, Osagie posits, tradition and modernity are intertwined in a dialogic relationship, and any distinction between the two is at best a tenuous one. To that end, African Modernity and the Philosophy of Culture demonstrates how Euba's plays and novel consistently subvert the rigid polarity that is often thought to exist between tradition and modernity. As Osagie points out, one of the key distinctions between tradition and modernity is that while the latter is believed to be defined by certitude, the former is marked by doubt and unpredictable change. But Euba's works, Osagie asserts, highlight "the inescapable reality of tradition in the very workings of modernity.. the longevity of tradition, not as a dying past but as the very core of modernity itself" (114). That is, tradition and modernity do not only coexist, they also inform and interpellate each other. Osagie anchors the core of her argument on the character of the Yoruba god Esu. She teases out the many ways in which Esu functions in Euba's ouvre as the "god of crossroads"—and more importantly, she extrapolates this ontological posture of Esu as representative of the relationship between tradition and modernity. In Osagie's analysis, tradition and modernity do not only meet at a crossroads, but they also function together as cosmic crossroads—and Esu functions in Euba's works as an extended metaphor, embodying this aesthetic liminality. African Modernity and the Philosophy of Culture highlights the significance of Euba's artistic deployment of Esu, in that it is a radical departure from how Wole Soyinka (a mentor to Femi Euba) deploys Ogun in his own art and philosophy. While Soyinka's [End Page 213] centering of Ogun in explaining African ontological identity has been criticized (notably by Anthony Appiah) as an imposition of Yoruba cosmology on the rest of Africa, Euba's deployment of Esu finds relevance not only among the Yoruba people nor just in Africa, but also across Africa's many diasporas. Esu is represented in the culture, history, and literatures of black people all over the globe. Osagie refers to Esu as a "boundary-crossing god, very much alive in the Black Atlantic world of the Caribbean, the United States, and other black diaspora spaces in Europe" (114). Hence, Euba's centering of Esu does not only lend a global resonance to his work, it also becomes a fruitful means of contemplating modernity through a global black consciousness. Osagie's core argument is clearly stated and lucidly explored throughout the book. But while she argues that tradition and modernity are...

Inundations, boundaries and intersections: flood as narration in Nigerian literature

ABSTRACT In this article, I explore the idea of flood as narration in selected Nigerian writings. In Niyi Osundare’s City Without People (poetry), I read how the poet recreates the Hurricane Katrina flood in overlap with diaspora, slave history and Yoruba cosmology. Wale Okediran’s After the Flood (novel) fictionalises the Ogunpa River floods and provides a text for examining how flooding intersects with the domains of family, community and nation, thereby questioning the concept of ‘natural disaster’. In Iyayi’s Violence, I explore how flooding is imagined as a form of slow violence in relation to exploitative capitalism. Both the views of narration as succession and as multilinear are employed for the purpose of delving into the ways in which flood-narrations tell multiple stories that overlap the domain of nature with those of human politics, culture and history.

The Sacrificial Foundation of Modernity in Wole Soyinka's <em>Death and the King's Horseman</em>

Critics largely interpret Death and the King's Horseman as a representation of a particular cultural trauma: African secularization under colonial modernity. If, however, the nation-state presupposes a political theology, then colonization is not secularization, but a transition into a new order of the sacred. I argue that Horseman stages this process as a cosmological trauma emerging through a transfiguration of sacrifice. As an indigenous death rite transfigures into an imperial possession rite, incarnating the political theology of colonized life, the cyclic time of Yoruba cosmology assumed within the drama becomes entangled in the sequential time of colonial modernity. Beyond representing this trauma, Horseman ritualizes it, providing a passage into modernity by aesthetically mediating that which it laments and, moreover, offering a new vision of community. This process bears implications exceeding Horseman criticism, addressing the discourses of biopolitics, political theology, cultural trauma theory, postcolonial studies, and tragic theory.

Deity from a Python, Earth from a Hen, Humankind from Mystery: Narrative and Knowledge in Yorùbá Cosmology

0 0 1 135 773 UNC Asheville 6 1 907 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE Yoruba cosmology Represents a significant gap in Yoruba studies. Unfortunately, originary narratives Within this cosmology trend not to be Explicitly investigated at the level of epistemology. The concerns methodology, phenomenological studies of Yoruba cosmology are rare and Typically gain less traction than studies produced using preponderant social scientific approaches. In this essay, Entitled Deity from the Python Earth from the Hen, Humankind from Mystery: Narrative and Knowledge in Yoruba Cosmology, I argue que the phenomenological analysis of originary narratives in Yoruba cosmology illumines the presence of orienting concepts . que articulate the Yoruba epistemological perspective We find in some of these narratives five orienting concepts que convey this perspective: mystery, relationality materially-based, unpredictability, the permanency of existential conflict, and irresolution.

Cultural Criticism in Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman

ACADEMIC COMMENTARY ON THE NIGERIAN DRAMATIST and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka reveals a level of consensus with regard to the personal mythology he has developed for his artistic purposes. Returning to his native Yoruba cosmology and the rituals that derive from it, Soyinka elicits from ritual a drama of archetypes, developing in the process a vision of history, society, and tragic drama. A range of critical work has shown this vision to be based on a sociocultural passion, even as the playwright's oeuvre constitutes an attempt to work through the passion by means of art.' This understanding of Soyinka gives a sociological accent to his mythopoeic vision and aesthetic; that is, his refashioning of the traditional Yoruba worldview emerges as, on the one hand, a theory of historical being and the often brutal adventure of the social and, on the other, of art as witness to both. If there is one work that concisely bears out the validity of this critical consensus, it would be Death and the King's Horseman.2 But even as this play has emerged as a magnum opus of sorts, it has also been the site of an instructive controversy in African literary criticism. For if Soyinka elevates his mythopoeic vision to the status of a theory of being as well as the organizing principle of his craft, his choice has generated some ideological contestation. In the mid-seventies, he was taken to task by a generation of influential Marxist critics who attacked him for being romantic in his attitude to, and use of, Yoruba mythology. There are always lessons to be drawn from critical debates, and the one surrounding Horseman is no exception. From a metacritical perspective, there is a certain logic to the political heat the play draws (and drew). Indeed, this logic is so comprehensive that it transcends the specific context of African literary criticism and becomes intertextually relevant to theories of postcoloniality in current Anglo-American literary theory and cultural criticism. If one looks closely at the reasons Soyinka's work was a problem for Africanist-marxist criticism in the seventies, it is possible to draw analogies between the debates as they were conducted then and some of the issues at the heart of the Anglo-American discursive formation that has come to be known as postcolonial cultural studies. However, an in-depth exploration of such analogies is beyond the scope of this paper; principally, what I wish to do here is to examine Horseman in order to tease out the theoretical relevance it might be said to have for contemporary

Black Critics and Kings: The Hermeneutics of Power in Yoruba Society.

How can we account for the power of ritual? This is the guiding question of Black Critics and Kings, which examines how Yoruba forms of ritual and knowledge shape politics, history, and resistance against the state. Focusing on deep knowledge in Yoruba cosmology as an interpretive space for configuring difference, Andrew Apter analyzes ritual empowerment as an essentially critical practice, one that revises authoritative discourses of space, time, gender, and sovereignty to promote political--and even violent--change. Documenting the development of a Yoruba kingdom from its nineteenth-century genesis to Nigeria's 1983 elections and subsequent military coup, Apter identifies the central role of ritual in reconfiguring power relations both internally and in relation to wider political arenas. What emerges is an ethnography of an interpretive vision that has broadened the horizons of local knowledge to embrace Christianity, colonialism, class formation, and the contemporary Nigerian state. In this capacity, Yoruba orisa worship remains a critical site of response to hegemonic interventions. With sustained theoretical argument and empirical rigor, Apter answers critical anthropologists who interrogate the possibility of ethnography. He reveals how an indigenous hermeneutics of power is put into ritual practice--with multiple voices, self-reflexive awareness, and concrete political results. Black Critics and Kings eloquently illustrates the ethnographic value of listening to the voice of the other, with implications extending beyond anthropology to engage leading debates in black critical theory.

Yoruba Cosmology and Culture in Brazil

Considerable controversy has arisen over the extent to which the thought and actions of Blacks in the New World constitute persistence of African traits. A goodly number of scholars formerly contended that nothing existed in Africa that approached civilization and that there was, therefore, nothing for the Africans to bring with them. As evidence to the contrary began to pile up, that position was no longer tenable. Sociologists like E. B. Reuter and Robert E. Park have failed to see anything in Black American life today which can be traced to the African background; while historians and anthropologists like Carter G. Woodson and Melville J. Herskovits have insisted that the African culture heritage can still be seen in many aspects of American life today (Franklin, 1967: 39-42). Although the controversy con-