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.
Ẹ̀sà, also called ìwì, is the chanted poetry of the Egúngún masquerade. It is performed by members of the Egúngún lineages during ancestral festivals and funerals, and it is the verbal half of an event whose other half is the masked figure itself. Where ìjálá is the hunters' voice, ẹ̀sà is the voice of ara ọ̀run, the dwellers of the otherworld, addressed by and speaking to the living community that has called them back.
One terminological point first. Ìwì here is the masquerade genre and should not be confused with ewì, which is the general Yoruba term for poetry and which in the twentieth century became the name of a modern recorded genre treated in file 14. The two words are distinct and the confusion is common.
Ẹ̀sà is defined, like every Yoruba chanted genre, by how it is voiced rather than by what it says. Its marker is vowel insertion and lengthening, and specifically a triply long vowel [ooo] at the end of the first poetic line, which recurs regardless of subject matter . This feature was established in Olajubu's studies of the genre and in Adedeji's work on the masque theatre .
Set against ìjálá, the contrast is exact. Ìjálá is chanted in vibrato and ẹ̀sà is not; ẹ̀sà instead uses the lengthening pattern . Acoustic measurement found ẹ̀sà higher in fundamental frequency than ìjálá across all three Yoruba tones, and both poetic modes higher and louder than ordinary speech . So the two genres can carry identical words and remain unmistakably distinct to a listener, which is exactly the point argued in yoruba-oral-genre-system.
Ẹ̀sà must be distinguished from the masquerade's speaking voice, because they are different phenomena and are constantly conflated.
Egúngún speak in a deliberately altered voice, produced with a device or a technique that renders it non-human and hard to place, and within the tradition this is not a disguise in the sense of a trick: it is the voice of ara ọ̀run, and the masquerade is not a man wearing cloth but a being from the otherworld . The corpus file yoruba-egungun treats the institution, the costume and the taboo on touching.
Two consequences for the verbal art.
The altered voice licenses speech that no living person could make. Because the speaker is not a person present in the ordinary social order, an Egúngún can name family members, pronounce on their conduct, bless, and say to someone's face what nobody else could . Satire and correction delivered from outside the social order is a real function rather than an accident of the form.
Chanting and speaking are separate registers within one performance. The ẹ̀sà is chanted, in the lengthened-vowel mode; the pronouncements are spoken, in the altered voice. A performance moves between them.
The traditional content of ẹ̀sà, like ìjálá, is eulogy and epithet: oríkì material, addressed to the ancestors, to the lineage, to the town, and to people present . Praise singers chant the genealogies of the lineage, reciting ancestral names in measured poetry.
Structurally, ìwì egúngún characteristically opens with ìwúre, prayer, and dwells relatively little on oríkì orílẹ̀, the lineage praise material . That is a useful contrast: ìjálá is marked by ìbà and ìkíni, homage and salutation, with minimal oríkì, while ẹkún ìyàwó combines prayer, salutation and lineage praise all in one performance . Each genre has its own proportions of the same components.
Ẹ̀sà is classed among the transitional forms, once sacred and now substantially secular in much of its performance . It is chanted exclusively by members of the Egúngún society, so the performer restriction survives even where the occasion has become entertainment.
The most consequential thing about ẹ̀sà historically is what grew out of it.
Joel Adedeji's study of the Yoruba masque theatre traces the Aláàrìnjò travelling theatre to the Egúngún masque tradition of Ọ̀yọ́, through two named figures. Ológbìn Ológbojo led a quasi-professional masque troupe that entertained the court. Ẹ̀sà Ògbìn took it further, opening membership beyond a single lineage and taking the theatre out of the palace to a general audience, with a troupe and repertoire that surpassed his predecessor's . The performers became known as Ọ̀jẹ̀ or Egúngún Apidan, masquerades noted for acrobatic and magical display .
Adedeji's model of the development runs through three phases, ritual to festival to theatre, showing the same Egúngún being used for both ritual and secular occasions . The genre name and the theatre-founder's name are the same word, which is the clearest indication of where the tradition understood the theatre to have come from.
That lineage matters for reading the rest of this section. The Aláàrìnjò travelling masque theatre, the twentieth-century Yoruba travelling theatre of Ogunde, Ogunmola and Ladipo, and the Yoruba film industry stand in a documented line of descent from masquerade performance. The corpus treats the theatre history in yoruba-dance-and-theatre and the film question in file 14 here.
Ẹ̀sà has been much less well served by publication than ìjálá. There is no ẹ̀sà equivalent of Babalola's bilingual anthology in open circulation, and Olajubu's work on the genre, which is the foundational study, is not accessible here . The consequence is stated plainly: this compiler could not verify a substantial ẹ̀sà text in a published transcription with the Yoruba original. Readers who want ẹ̀sà proper should go to Olajubu.
What follows are two masquerade song texts from the Adamu Òrìṣà play of Lagos, published with Yoruba and English, which show the verbal register of a masquerade festival even though they are songs rather than ẹ̀sà chant.
Eyo o, e! eyo o, Eyo baba ń t'awa T'ó ń fi góòlù ṣeré, Àwa ò le san owó onibodè. Ó dilé.
Eyo, hail Eyo, Eyo our father, who plays with gold. We cannot pay the gatekeeper's toll. It has come home.
Translator: Ìpilẹ̀ṣẹ̀ editorial rendering, unreviewed
Yoruba as printed by Asaolu ; the literal gloss and idiomatic rendering are by the compiler of this corpus. Confidence medium.
The source prints the Yoruba without full tone marking, so the diacritics above are the compiler's reconstruction of a text whose words are secure but whose tones are not marked in the source. That is stated rather than hidden, because an undiacriticised Yoruba text is systematically ambiguous and supplying tone marks is supplying a reading. Onibodè is the keeper of a town gate or toll point, and the line about being unable to pay is a boast rather than a complaint: this procession passes without paying. Ó dilé, literally "it has reached home", is the formula of a return, which is what a masquerade outing is.
Kà á bọ̀ o, kà á bọ̀ (twice) Ọmọ a bílẹ̀ sọ̀rọ̀, Ọmọ a bílẹ̀ sọ̀rọ̀ kílẹ̀ lánu. Kà á bọ̀ o.
Welcome back, welcome back. Child of the one who speaks with the ground, who speaks with the ground and the ground opens its mouth. Welcome back.
Translator: Ìpilẹ̀ṣẹ̀ editorial rendering, unreviewed
Yoruba as printed by Asaolu, whose own English rendering of the middle line is "She, whose voice the ground obeys" Gloss and the fuller idiomatic rendering by the compiler. Confidence medium, with the same caution about tone marking as above.
The published English compresses two lines into one and turns the image into obedience. The Yoruba is more specific and stranger: the ground is addressed, and the ground opens its mouth in reply. That figure, of the earth answering when spoken to, is the language of ọfọ̀ and of masquerade authority rather than of ordinary praise, and Asaolu's smoothing loses it. This is a small instance of the general problem treated in yoruba-translation-and-bias: a translation that reads well can quietly replace a concrete cosmological claim with an abstraction. The song is described as Adimu's anthem, sung on every return from an outing .
The satirical song texts of the masquerade tradition, and above all the Ẹfẹ̀ night songs of the Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ complex, are treated separately in file 12, because their social function is distinct and because the best texts for them are in Lawal and in the Drewals. The reader wanting masquerade verbal art in quantity should read file 12 alongside this one.
yoruba-egungun in 06-orisa, on the altered voice as the voice of ara ọ̀run, its use to bless, to pronounce, to name family members, to recite oríkì, and to say what a living person could not say to someone's face.The hunters' chant associated with Ògún, its vocal manner, the ìjálá artist and how he is judged, the contest setting, and what the chant does as self-portrait and as praise of animals.
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.
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.
What oríkì are, the different kinds, who performs them and why, and how they carry history that written records do not.
The secular chanting genre of praise, who the rárà singer is and how the performance is shaped by the audience paying for it, and the accuracy that makes rárà more than flattery.
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.