The satirical song traditions of the masquerade societies, especially the all-night Ẹfẹ̀ performance in which named individuals are held to account, and the wider Yoruba institution of licensed abuse.
The Yoruba masquerade societies operate a system in which named people are publicly criticised, in song, by a performer nobody can retaliate against. The fullest form is the Ẹfẹ̀ night, the all-night concert that opens a Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ festival, at which a masked singer works through the community's misconduct until dawn. This is not an incidental feature of the festival. It is one of the things the institution is for.
The corpus treats Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ as an institution in yoruba-gelede, including Ìyá Nlá and the concept of "our mothers", the mask typology, the offices and the UNESCO inscription; and Egúngún as an institution in yoruba-egungun. The chanted poetry of the masquerade, ìwì and ẹ̀sà, is file 03. This file is about the songs and what they do socially.
Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ divides into a night and a day. The night performance, Ẹfẹ̀, precedes the daytime spectacle and lasts until dawn, running through a series of masked characters and culminating in the appearance of the Ọrọ̀ Ẹfẹ̀ mask, whose name means the voice or word of Ẹfẹ̀, and who speaks with the authority of the Great Mother [S2]. The day belongs to the paired Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ dancers in the marketplace; the night belongs to the singer .
The division is functional rather than scheduling. The night uses song, poetry and satire to entertain the Mothers, the female elders, ancestors and deities, and the community, while underneath it runs the serious business of prayer and the invocation of spiritual forces, whose nearness is increased by the mystery of night . The night is also when the community's own conduct is dealt with.
What is voiced at night and what is shown by day is the organising question of the Drewals' study of the tradition [S3].
The Ọrọ̀ Ẹfẹ̀ delivers a long poetic chant, using satire, praise and proverbs, addressing both sacred and secular matters and criticising antisocial behaviour [S2][S4]. Within a single performance he may praise a generous chief, lampoon a corrupt official, warn a gossip, and advise young wives [S4].
The critical mechanism is naming. Songs may be sympathetic or may be pure satire directed at the social failings of a group or an individual, and such persons may be satirised by name, or by a series of suggestive images and metaphors that make their identity unmistakable to the audience [S4]. Both options are used, and the choice between them is itself a calibration of severity.
The purpose is stated consistently in the scholarship: satirical songs are intended for moralistic purposes, and only rarely are they meant to hurt their subjects [S4]. Given the Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ society's concern with peace and social stability, didactic themes recur in Ẹfẹ̀ songs . The annual festivals of cleansing provide the occasion on which the society expresses its anger at, and berates, individuals who have infringed the community's code of conduct [S5].
Three features make this work as a system of accountability rather than as ordinary gossip.
The singer is not a person. He is masked, and he speaks with the Great Mother's authority . The same principle applies as with the Egúngún's altered voice described in file 03: an utterance from outside the ordinary social order can say what no member of that order could say to someone's face.
The occasion is annual and expected. Everyone knows the night is coming, which gives the institution a preventive function. Behaviour is disciplined through the year by the prospect of the song.
The audience is everyone. The sanction is not private disapproval but universal knowledge, delivered in a memorable form that people will repeat afterwards. A song is a durable sanction in a way a rebuke is not.
Ẹfẹ̀ is the best known instance of something more general in Yoruba practice, and the sharpest scholarly treatment of it is Andrew Apter's study of the Oroyeye festival in an Ekiti town [S6].
Apter documents ritual abuse songs performed by women in two settings. At night, during Àjàkadì wrestling matches, young women deploy sexual obscenity to praise the victors and mock the defeated. By day, elder women who are custodians of the Oroyeye cult target wrongdoers, setting out their misdeeds against a background of homage and praise, and in doing so mobilising female reproductive and supernatural power [S6].
His argument is that these performances are far more than entertainment or catharsis, and that the obscene festival song has to be relocated in the local historical and political context that gives it meaning and power [S6]. The women invoke repressed sexual and political subtexts in order to intervene in contests over male authority and in community misconduct, channelling the historical memory of a displaced ruling dynasty while claiming a social authority that lets them speak out with impunity about hidden crimes and social disorder [S6]. The ritual frame does not sanction abuse; it converts verbal aggression into a mechanism of accountability and of female political agency [S6].
Three things follow for reading Ẹfẹ̀ and the related genres.
Obscenity is a technical resource. Sexual explicitness in these songs is not a lapse in decorum or a survival of something primitive. It is the register that marks the utterance as licensed, and thereby marks the occasion as one on which normal restraint is suspended.
Women hold this authority. It is worth stating against the general impression that Yoruba public speech is male. The Oroyeye custodians are elder women, and Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ itself honours Ìyá Nlá and, in the UNESCO description, is a masked society governed by women [S7]. 18-women and yoruba-gelede treat this.
The songs are historical documents. Apter's point about a displaced ruling dynasty means that a satirical song can carry a political grievance decades or centuries old, encoded in what sounds like personal abuse [S6]. This is the same evidentiary problem oríkì presents, treated in yoruba-oriki.
The Ẹfẹ̀ song corpus is substantial and it is published, and this compiler could not verify it.
Babatunde Lawal, The Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ Spectacle: Art, Gender, and Social Harmony in an African Culture (University of Washington Press, 1996) prints more than sixty Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ song texts, proverbs and divination verses, each in the original Yoruba with translation, drawn from more than two decades of field research . It is the single best source of Ẹfẹ̀ and Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ text in existence.
Henry John Drewal and Margaret Thompson Drewal, Gẹlẹdẹ: Art and Female Power among the Yoruba (Indiana University Press, 1983) includes chapters on Ẹfẹ̀ songs and on the masks and costumes of Ẹfẹ̀ night, based on fieldwork in Nigeria, Ghana and Togo across 1967 to 1986 [S3]. Henry Drewal also produced a videorecording of Ẹfẹ̀ and Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ ceremonies among the western Yoruba, catalogued at the Smithsonian .
Both are lending-restricted on the Internet Archive and neither was obtainable here. No Ẹfẹ̀ text is presented in this file because presenting one would require either the Yoruba original as Lawal or the Drewals transcribed it, which this compiler has not seen, or a paraphrase or re-translation, which would breach the corpus translation rule and manufacture a primary source. The corpus file yoruba-gelede reached the same conclusion and deferred the texts to this section; this section reports that the deferral cannot yet be discharged.
This is a real and locatable gap rather than an absence of material. A reader with library access to Lawal has the texts.
The same function operates in the Egúngún complex, in a different form.
An Egúngún uses its altered voice to bless, to pronounce, to name family members, and often to say things a living person could not say to a person's face, which is satire and correction delivered from outside the ordinary social order . Where Ẹfẹ̀ concentrates the function into one all-night performance by a designated singer, Egúngún distributes it: a masquerade encountering someone in the street may address their conduct directly.
The Egúngún Aláré or Apidan, the entertainer masquerades, carry the comic and mimetic side of this, and their descent into the Aláàrìnjò travelling theatre is traced in file 03 . Mimicry of identifiable social types, and sometimes of identifiable individuals, is one of their standard resources, and it is the ancestor of the satirical sketch in Yoruba popular theatre and film treated in file 14.
Read together, Ẹfẹ̀ night, Oroyeye abuse songs and Egúngún pronouncement describe a society with a scheduled, ritually protected mechanism for public criticism, in which the critic is masked or ritually licensed, the target is named or unmistakably indicated, the medium is memorable verbal art, and the sanction is the community's knowledge.
Two cautions against over-reading it. The mechanism is not equally available to everyone: it belongs to specific societies with membership, offices and their own politics, and being able to deploy it is itself a form of power. And it is not a court. It produces shame rather than a judgement, it can be wrong, and Apter's analysis shows it being used inside factional contests rather than above them [S6].
Set against the missionary and colonial description of masquerade as heathen spectacle, treated in 01-foundations, the more accurate description is that a Yoruba town had an annual institution for saying out loud what everybody knew, with the speaker protected, and that the colonial encounter had nothing to put in its place.
yoruba-gelede. [S2] Efe headdress and Ọrọ̀ Ẹfẹ̀ documentation from museum catalogues, including the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, https://www.mbam.qc.ca/en/works/22825/, the Carlos Museum at Emory, https://collections.carlos.emory.edu/objects/14377/efegelede-headdress-apasa, and the Seattle Art Museum, https://art.seattleartmuseum.org/objects/9580/. (Ọrọ̀ Ẹfẹ̀, "the voice of Ẹfẹ̀", also called Elefe, as the central singing masquerade of the Kétu-region Ẹfẹ̀ ceremony, whose chants address sacred and secular subjects and use satire to criticise antisocial behaviour; the ceremony held the night before the Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ festival to appease Ìyá Nlá.) [S3] Drewal, Henry John, and Margaret Thompson Drewal, Gẹlẹdẹ: Art and Female Power among the Yoruba, Traditional Arts of Africa series (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), xxi + 306 pp. ISBN 0-253-32569-2. https://archive.org/details/geledeartfemalep0000drew (Lending-restricted; not obtained by this compiler. Contains chapters on Ẹfẹ̀ songs and on the masks and costumes of Ẹfẹ̀ night, and the relationship between what is voiced at night and what is shown by day. Fieldwork in Nigeria, Ghana and Togo, 1967-1986.) [S4] "Discourse on Ẹfẹ̀ and Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ Spectacles in Contemporary Communities in Yorùbá Nigeria," 2022. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358566334_Discourse_on_EFE_and_GELEDE_Spectacles_in_Contemporary_Communities_in_Yoruba_Nigeria (Full text not retrieved by this compiler; the following are from the published abstract and summary: Ẹfẹ̀ songs as sympathetic or as pure satire against the social failings of a group or individual; targets satirised by name or by suggestive images and metaphors that reveal their identity to the audience; satirical songs intended for moralistic purposes and only rarely meant to hurt their subjects; the Ẹfẹ̀ singer's use of satire, praise and proverbs to praise a generous chief, lampoon a corrupt politician, warn a gossip or advise young wives.) [S5] Journal of Language, Theatre and Literary Studies 1.1 (Lead City University), on the Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ and Ẹfẹ̀ annual festivals of cleansing as occasions on which the society expresses anger against and berates individuals who have infringed the community's code of conduct. https://www.lcu.edu.ng/images/JOLATALS/jolatals-vol-1.pdf (The publisher's PDF was returning a server error at the time of writing and the full text was not retrieved; the point above is from the indexed summary.) [S6] Apter, Andrew, "Discourse and its disclosures: Yoruba women and the sanctity of abuse," Africa 68.1 (1998), pp. 68-97. DOI 10.2307/1161148. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/africa/article/abs/discourse-and-its-disclosures-yoruba-women-and-the-sanctity-of-abuse/6700938A95DD42AC2843F363E189BBFF (Abstract and summary consulted; full text paywalled. Ritual abuse songs at the Oroyeye festival in an Ekiti town; young women's sexual obscenity praising victors and mocking the defeated at Àjàkadì wrestling; elder female custodians of the Oroyeye cult targeting wrongdoers against a backdrop of homage and praise while mobilising female reproductive and supernatural power; the argument that these performances are more than entertainment or catharsis and must be relocated in local historical and political context; the invocation of repressed sexual and political subtexts to intervene in contests of male authority; the channelling of historical memory of a displaced ruling dynasty; the claim to authority that permits speaking out with impunity about hidden crimes; the ritual frame transforming verbal aggression into social accountability and female political agency.) Apter is also the author of Black Critics and Kings, cited in yoruba-gelede. [S7] UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage, "The Gèlèdé oral heritage," inscribed 2008, proclaimed a Masterpiece 2001. https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/the-gelede-oral-heritage-00002 (The honouring of Ìyá Nlá and of women's role in social organisation; the identification of Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ as the only known masked society also governed by women. Treated in yoruba-gelede, where the nomination file's "former matriarchal order" claim is flagged as interpretation rather than finding.) [S8] Lawal, Babatunde, The Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ Spectacle: Art, Gender, and Social Harmony in an African Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996). ISBN 978-0-295-97599-3. https://archive.org/details/geledespectacle00lawa (Lending-restricted; not obtained by this compiler. Contains more than sixty Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ song texts, proverbs and divination verses in Yoruba with translation, from more than two decades of field research. The place to go for Ẹfẹ̀ and Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ song texts.)yoruba-egungun in 06-orisa, on the altered voice as the voice of ara ọ̀run and its use to say things a living person could not say to a person's face, described there as satire and correction delivered from outside the ordinary social order.The chanted poetry of the Egúngún masquerade, its lengthened-vowel vocal signature, the altered voice that marks it as the speech of the dead, and its descent into the Aláàrìnjò travelling theatre.
The Efe and Gelede masked spectacle of the western Yoruba, what it says about women's spiritual power, why it is one of the most conceptually sophisticated things in the tradition, and its UNESCO inscription.
What Egúngún actually is, why it is a lineage institution rather than an orisa cult, how the costume and the taboo on touching it work, and how the tradition has been misrepresented.
Yoruba song across work, ritual, nursing, children's play and social comment, with texts, and the problem of translating a song so that it can still be sung.
How Yoruba oral artists are trained, which genres are open to whom, how gender divides the field, how performers are paid, and the named artists the scholarship documents.
The chant a Yoruba bride performs in the days before she leaves her father's house, its three-part structure, the social situation that produces it, and what she actually says about the marriage ahead of her.