Oral Literature: What This Section Covers
A map of the Yoruba oral genres treated in this section, what each file holds, and where the neighbouring sections carry the material this one does not duplicate.
Yoruba verbal art is not one thing. It is a set of distinct named genres, each with its own performers, its own occasion, its own vocal manner, and its own rules about what may be said and by whom. A hunter chanting ìjálá at a festival and a bride chanting ẹkún ìyàwó on the night she leaves her father's house are doing formally different things, and Yoruba classification recognises the difference precisely. This section describes that system and presents the texts.
The organising claim of the section, argued in the first file and assumed everywhere after it, is that these genres are distinguished primarily by how they are voiced rather than by what they are about. The same material can appear in ìjálá and in ẹ̀sà; what makes a performance one or the other is the mode of vocalisation .
What is here
01. The genre system. How Yoruba oral genres are classified, who performs each, on what occasion, in what vocal manner, and why the European category "oral literature" fits imperfectly. Karin Barber's argument about text, performance and audience.
02. Ìjálá. The hunters' chant, its Ògún association, the ìjálá artist, contest performance.
03. Ìwì and ẹ̀sà egúngún. Masquerade poetry, the ancestral voice, vocal disguise.
04. Rárà. The chanted praise genre and the rárà singer.
05. Ẹkún ìyàwó. The bride's lament, its tripartite structure, and the social situation that produces it.
06. Ìrèmọ̀jé. Hunters' funeral poetry and Bade Ajuwon's work on it.
07. Ọfọ̀ and àyájọ́. Incantation and its verbal theory: naming, tone, etymological play. Described and analysed as a genre, not supplied as a manual.
08. Àlọ́. Folktales and riddles, the Ìjàpá cycle, narrative convention, the call-and-response opening.
09. Orin. Song across work, play, ritual, lullaby, children's games and satire.
10. Ọwe in performance. How proverbs behave inside other genres.
11. Drum poetry. How the dùndún renders speech, and drummed text beside its spoken equivalent.
12. Egúngún, Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ and Ẹfẹ̀ song texts. The satirical and social-control function of Ẹfẹ̀ night especially.
13. The performers. Training, gender, patronage, payment, and the named artists the scholarship documents.
14. Continuity into the present. Juju, fuji, Afrobeats, film and theatre, and what is being lost and recorded.
What is deliberately elsewhere
This section owns the genre system and the performance dimension. It does not duplicate:
The main proverb collection is in yoruba-owe-proverbs in 02-language, which holds over forty ọwe with full three-layer treatment. File 10 here treats only how proverbs behave inside performance.
The main oríkì treatment is in yoruba-oriki in 02-language, covering the kinds of oríkì, oríkì as historical evidence, and the Awe and Barber scholarship. Oríkì recur constantly in this section because they are the raw material of most other genres, but the genre-level account is there.
Ẹsẹ Ifá, the verses of the Ifá corpus, are in 05-ifa. Ifá poetry is an oral genre and belongs to any complete list, but it has its own section because the corpus, the divination procedure and the training are inseparable from the verses.
Instruments and music history are in 07-arts, specifically yoruba-drum-language for the dùndún and bàtá families and the mechanics of drum speech, and the popular music lineage file for sákárà through Afrobeats. File 11 here treats drummed text as literature; the organology is there. File 14 treats the lyric continuity; the musical history is there.
Egúngún and Gẹ̀lẹ̀dẹ́ as institutions are in 06-orisa. Files 03 and 12 here treat their verbal art.
A note on the texts
Every Yoruba text in this section is presented in the three layers this corpus requires: original with diacritics, literal gloss, idiomatic English with the translator named, and notes on what the translation loses. Where a published source prints the original without full tone marking, that is stated rather than silently corrected, because an undiacriticised Yoruba text is ambiguous and inventing tone marks would be inventing a reading.
Where the best texts for a genre exist only in printed scholarship this compiler cannot verify page by page, the file says so and sends the reader to the book. That happens most in file 12. Presenting a re-translation or a paraphrase as though it were a transcription would breach the translation rule, and a stated gap is more useful than a confident fabrication.