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Discourse and its disclosures: Yoruba women and the sanctity of abuse

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2011

Andrew Apter
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Extract

If ritual songs of obscenity and abuse have become a familiar topic in Africanist ethnography since Evans-Pritchard's first discussion of their ‘canalising’ functions in 1929, few studies have paid sufficient attention to the socio-political and discursive contexts of the song texts themselves. The present article moves in that direction by relocating abusive songs of the Oroyeye festival in an Ekiti Yoruba town within the local forms of history and knowledge that motivate their interpretation and performative power. After reviewing the cult's historical interventions in local political affairs, the article examines the repressed historical memory of a displaced ruling dynasty and its associated line of civil chiefs as invoked by the song texts in two festival contexts. In the first—the Àjàkadì wrestling match—which occurs at night, male age mates from different ‘sides’ of the town fight to stand their ground and topple their opponents while young women praise the winners and abuse the losers with sexual obscenities. In the second festival context, during the day, the elder ‘grandmothers’ of Oroyeye target malefactors and scoundrels by highlighting their misdeeds against a discursive background of homage and praise. In this fashion the female custodians of a displaced ruling line bring repressed sexual and political sub-texts to bear on male power competition, lineage fission, and antisocial behaviour. More generally, they mobilise the fertility and witchcraft of all Yoruba women to disclose hidden crimes and speak out with impunity.

Résumé

Si les chants rituels d'obscénités et d'insultes sont devenus un sujet populaire dans le domaine de l'ethnographie africaniste depuis le premier débat de Evans-Pritchard sur leur rôle de “canalisateurs” en 1929, peu d'études se sont suffisamment penchées sur les contextes sociopolitiques et discursifs des textes de ces chants. Cet article va dans ce sens en replaçant les chants injurieux du festival d'Oroyeye, ville Ekiti Yoruba, dans les formes locales d'histoire et de connaissance qui motivent leur interprétation et leur pouvoir performatif. Après avoir passé en revue les interventions historiques de ce culte dans les affaires politiques locales, l'article examine la mémoire historique réprimée d'une dynastie dirigeante destitutée et sa lignée de chefs civils, comme l'évoquent les textes de chants dans deux contextes du festival. Dans le premier, à savoir le match de lutte nocturne Ajakadi, les hommes jeunes de la même classe d'âge et originaires de différents quartiers. de la ville se battent pour faire tomber leur adversaire et rester debout pendant que de jeunes femmes font l'éloge des vainqueurs et insultent les perdants à grand renfort d'obscénités sexuelles. Dans le second contexte du festival, pendant la journée, les “grand-mères” d'Oroyeye prennent pour cible les malfaiteurs et les gredins en mettant en lumière leurs méfaits sur fond discursif d'hommage et d'éloge. De cette façon, les gardiennes d'une ligneé dirigeante destitutée infligent des sous-textes politiques et sexuels réprimés sur la lutte pour le pouvoir que se livrent les hommes, la fission de la lignée et le comportement antisocial. De manière plus générale, elles mobilisent la fertilité et la sorcellerie de toutes les femmes Yoruba pour dévoiler des crimes cachés et s'exprimer franchement en toute impunité.

Type
Decoding cults in contemporary Yorubaland
Information
Africa , Volume 68 , Issue 1 , January 1998 , pp. 68 - 97
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 1998

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