Folklorising Religious Poetry among the Yoruba

By Amidu Olalekan SANNI who is a Professor of Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies with the Lagos State University-Nigeria. His current areas of research interest include social anthropology and West African Arabic manuscript and archival traditions as sources of cultural history.

The extensive swathe of land west of River Niger which constitutes the southwestern part of Nigeria is known as Yorubaland. The word Yoruba is said to be a corrupted form of the Semitic Ya‘rub b.Qahtan, the putative ancestral father of this ethnic group, thus supporting the postulation of a Middle Eastern origin. They have a history of some 1000 years behind them. It is not known exactly when Islam came here, but a mosque was reported to have been built in the old Oyo Empire, the heartland of Yorubaland, around 1550. Hitherto, the people worshipped a plethora of gods; animism and euhemerism were the underlying features of their religious systems. Oral religious poetry has been part of the myth, ritual, ceremonies, and other cultural indices and modes of expression among the Yoruba before Islam.

Historically, literacy often sprang from a religious source (Krätli & Lydon 2010), and this was not different with the Yoruba to whom literacy was introduced at the instance of Islam. The oldest documentary history of the Yoruba, albeit now lost, was written in the 17th century in the Yoruba language using Arabic letters, ajami, a script that had been used to transcribe the different sound systems of many sub-Saharan African languages before European colonialism. Oral ‘literature’ was the standard genre in societies without writing (Goody 2010), and this was exactly the case with the Yoruba before Islam. The coming of Islam inspired the evolution of a new folk poetry with strong Islamic character in form and content, and indeed with a strong affinity to the classical Arabic prototype (qasida). The new form known as waka is modeled on the similar genre in Hausa (northern Nigeria) and was the main oral mode for the dissemination of Islamic principles, rites, and ethics among the natives since their sustained contact with the Islamic faith. The consignment of waka into the written form did not take place until the middle of the 19th century as clerics developed a class of disciples who would go from place to place with the ‘literized’ poetry. This was intended to supplement the oral mode in so far as only those who could read Arabic or at least decode the ajami would be able to access the poetry in the first place; restrictive literacy precluded the illiterate majority from the written texts. In any case, the ‘literized’ form would be learnt and chanted from the public recitations of them.

The passionate attachment of the Yoruba people, and this is reasonably true of other communities of Sudanic Africa, to anything written in Arabic inspires them to confer some exceptional attention to the preservation of Arabic manuscripts, whatever the content or subject matter. So where manuscript holdings are not allowed to be kept by literate members of the family, and this was rarely allowed to happen, a single manuscript could have its folios shared out among heirs who believe in their inherent blessings which should also be allowed to go round. This has led to the loss or incompleteness of many manuscripts available today.

The oldest, documentary and folkorized Islamic verse is to be attributed to Badamasi bin Musa Agbaji (d. circa 1891) (Reichmuth 1998; Hunwick 1995). Future compositions of the genre in folkorized and written forms continued but in a wider perspective. Glosses and interlineal comments, often in macaronic Arabic, started to be added by heirs and disciples of the original authors. In regard to waka manuscripts, disciples of original authors and interested aficionados often made personal copies from the stemma, which served as aides memoires, , and many of such copies have been known to have remained poorly accessible. A classic case is that related in respect of Sheikh Adam Abdullah al-Ilori (1907-92), the most celebrated polymath and bibliophile of the Yoruba country in the 20th century. Many of the documentary waka materials he collected, and these are said to be substantial, have remained locked up in the family vault till today as long as internal feuding among his heirs over his material and intellectual property remained, and this is quite discomfiting. Several others of such materials for which no accurate number or volume is known still await some intervention of providence for them to be unearthed. In any case, modern utilizers of the waka genre among the Yoruba Muslims have relied more on the oral mode, which serves the significantly illiterate auditors and audience better as a folk religious genre.  Besides, evidence of oral creativity is demonstrable in the ‘versions’ of the written text where idiomatic variants (variae lectione) and emendations constitute critical apparatus for methodological and analytical purposes in folkorized Islamic verse. Waka has also inspired the evolution of other folkorized subgenres with strong Islamic features among the Yoruba, and these include seli, madahi, were, fuji, and senwele, the last being currently appropriated by Christian gospel musicians and wrap artists such that we now have a subgenre called senwele Jesu (Jesus senwele music). All these are now being circulated in digital forms, namely, audio cassettes, CDs and DVDs. This should not be surprising. Religious traditions in Africa, and even in its diasporic sites at the Afro-Atlantic world, have a strong nexus with the tradition of music, song, and dance which is appropriated within and across belief systems (Diouf and Nwankwo 2010).
A new development is the use of ajami to record family history, folktales, and promotional materials, especially of proselytism, and this is a fertile area awaiting avid explorers.

Select Bibliography

Diouf, M. & Nwankwo, I. K. (2010). Rhythms of the Afro-Atlantic World. Rituals and Remembrances, Michigan: University of Michigan Press
Goody, Jack (2010). Myth, Ritual and the Oral, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hunwick, J. O. (1995). Arabic Literature of Africa, Volume 2, Leiden etc: Brill.
Krätli, G. & Lydon, G. (2010). The Trans-Saharan Book Trade, Manuscript Culture,
Arabic Literacy and Intellectual History in Muslim Africa, Leiden: Brill

Originally published on the Archival Platform website.