This book traces Dàdàkúàdá’s history and artistic vision and discusses its vibrancy as the most popular traditional Yoruba oral art form in Islamic Africa. Foregrounding the role of Dàdàkúàdá in Ilorin, and of Ilorin in Dàdàkúàdá the book covers the history, cultural identity, performance techniques, language, social life and relationship with Islam of the oral genre. The author examines Dàdàkúàdá’s relationship with Islam and discusses how the Dàdàkúàdá singers, through their songs and performances, are able to accommodate Islam in ways that have ensured their continued survival as a traditional African genre in a predominantly Muslim community. This book will be of interest to scholars of traditional African culture, African art history, performance studies and Islam in Africa.

African Oral Literature: Its Philosophical Thoughts Conveyed in Yuruba Society explores the ways that the Yoruba people of Nigeria have made remarkable contributions to the world’s civilization. Yoruba philosophical, religious tenets, artistic tenets, ideas, and icons have helped to transform religious beliefs and practices and the arts. When considering the study of Yoruba oral traditions, one learns how its philosophical concepts are the bases for an interpretation of what constitutes their aesthetic performance in art forms. This book introduces distinguished Yoruba cultural historians documenting the full spectrum, which extends beyond the visual art form. Through oral tradition, the effigy with its ako naturalism is not judged for its photographic realism, but for its efficacy within the context of the ako traditional ceremony, which is intended to make the end of this life and the beginning of the next one honorable and dignifying for one's parents where good will is needed by those still on earth. About the Author Howard James Jordan was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1948. He is a lifetime member of the following associations: The Buffalo Soldiers, 24th Infantry Regiment of New Jersey; The Buffalo Soldiers 9th & 10th Horse Cavalry Association of Baltimore, MD and Los Angeles, CA; Disabled American Veterans (DVA) and Veterans of Foreign Wars, Dept. of New Jersey. Howard’s hobbies include writing, reading history, dancing, roller skating, horseback riding, traveling, wood carving, and painting. He also taught art in Nigeria Secondary Schools, was a research assistant at Nigerian University, and taught special education in Philadelphia Public Schools.

Yoruba peoples of southwestern Nigeria conceive of rituals as journeys -- sometimes actual, sometimes virtual. Performed as a parade or a procession, a pilgrimage, a masking display, or possession trance, the journey evokes the reflexive, progressive, transformative experience of ritual participation. Yoruba Ritual is an original and provocative study of these practices. Using a performance paradigm, Margaret Thompson Drewal forges a new theoretical and methodological approach to the study of ritual that is thoroughly grounded in close analysis of the thoughts and actions of the participants. Challenging traditional notions of ritual as rigid, stereotypic, and invariant, Drewal reveals ritual to be progressive, transformative, generative, and reflexive and replete with simultaneity, multifocality, contingency, indeterminacy, and intertextuality. Throughout the book prominence is given to the intentionality of actors as knowledgeable agents who transform ritual itself through play and improvisation. Integral to the narrative are interpolations about performances and their meanings by Kolawole Ositola, a scholar of Yoruba oral tradition, ritual practitioner, diviner, and master performer. Rich descriptions of rituals relating to birth, death, reincarnation, divination, and constructions of gender are rendered all the more vivid by a generous selection of field photos of actual performances.

The Yoruba: A New History is the first transdisciplinary study of the two-thousand-year journey of the Yoruba people, from their origins in a small corner of the Niger-Benue Confluence in present-day Nigeria to becoming one of the most populous cultural groups on the African continent. Weaving together archaeology with linguistics, environmental science with oral traditions, and material culture with mythology, Ogundiran examines the local, regional, and even global dimensions of Yoruba history. The Yoruba: A New History offers an intriguing cultural, political, economic, intellectual, and social history from ca. 300 BC to 1840. It accounts for the events, peoples, and practices, as well as the theories of knowledge, ways of being, and social valuations that shaped the Yoruba experience at different junctures of time. The result is a new framework for understanding the Yoruba past and present.

Through an engaged analysis of writers such as Wole Soyinka, Ola Rotimi, Niyi Osundare, and Tanure Ojaide and of African traditional oral poets like Omoekee Amao Ilorin and Mamman Shata Katsina, Abdul-Rasheed Na'Allah develops an African indigenous discourse paradigm for interpreting and understanding literary and cultural materials. Na'Allah argues for the need for cultural diversity in critical theorizing in the twenty-first century. He highlights the critical issues facing scholars and students involved in criticism and translation of marginalized texts. By returning the African knowledge system back to its roots and placing it side by side with Western paradigms, Na'Allah has produced a text that will be required reading for scholars and students of African culture and literature. It is an important contribution to scholarship in the domain of mobility of African oral tradition, and on African literary, cultural and performance discourse.