Oríkì in Contemporary Life
Oríkì composed and performed today, for a doctor, for a masked pop musician, and for the Christian God, showing the form still generating new texts rather than only preserving old ones.
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Oríkì composed and performed today, for a doctor, for a masked pop musician, and for the Christian God, showing the form still generating new texts rather than only preserving old ones.
13-oral-literature/14-continuity-into-the-present.md is this corpus's full account of how the oral genres, oríkì included, feed juju, fuji, ewì and Afrobeats, and what film, theatre and the hype-performance economy have done with them. This file does not restate that account. It presents four specific oríkì texts documented in contemporary settings, an àríyá party praise for a physician, an Ògún oríkì performed at a university voice event, an anti-elitist oríkì built for a masked popular musician, and a gospel-worship oríkì addressed to the Christian God, all four drawn from a single dedicated study and showing what contemporary composition actually looks like rather than only asserting that it happens.
Ṣèhìndèmí, doctor tó mọ̀ye B'álàìsàn bá lọ sọ́dọ̀ rẹ̀, á sàn kíá, Ṣèhìndèmí, doctor tó mọ̀ye Ẹ̀yin oníṣàìsàn, ẹ jẹ́ lọ fún 'wòsàn kíá, Ṣèhìndèmí Doctor Ṣèhìndèmí Doctor, mo gbà fún ọ Ṣèhìndèmí Doctor o.
Shehindemi is a brilliant doctor. Sick people treated by him get well quickly, Shehindemi is a brilliant doctor. Whoever is sick should hurry to him for treatment. Shehindemi Doctor, Shehindemi Doctor, I congratulate you, Shehindemi Doctor O.
Translated by Aaron Carter-Ényì .
What it says. A short praise built entirely on one claim, the doctor's competence, repeated and intensified across the lines rather than developed. Structurally this is the same accretive method oriki-poetics-and-untranslatability describes for older material, applied to a subject the classical corpus never anticipated.
Significance. Carter-Ényì's study documents this as an example of how oríkì praise forms are adapted in contemporary Nigerian social life, àríyá parties, jùjú and fújì settings, to celebrate modern achievements and professions, in exchange for the monetary "spraying" patrons offer performers on the spot . The praise-for-payment economics 13-oral-literature/13-the-performers.md and yoruba-rara document for rárà chanters operate identically here; what has changed is the subject matter, from lineage and military distinction to a medical degree.
Performed. At contemporary àríyá social parties, nightclub performances and popular jùjú band sets, by jùjú praise singers .
Ògún, onírè, ọkọ̀ ọ mi. Ọlásọ n'ílé fímọ̀bímọ̀ bora Aṣọ iná ló múbora, Èwù ẹ̀jẹ̀ ló wọ̀ sọ́rùn o.
Ogun, god of iron, my husband. He has clothes but wears palm fronds. He uses robes of fire as his cover, a shirt of blood is what he puts on.
Translated by Aaron Carter-Ényì, from a performance by Máyọ̀wá Adéyẹmọ at the University of Lagos's World Voice Day, 2013 .
What it says. A classical Ògún oríkì register, the fire and blood imagery consistent with the palace and hunters'-chant material this section's Ògún file presents, unchanged in content from the older corpus.
Significance. What is contemporary here is not the text but the setting: a sacred òrìṣà oríkì recited at a staged university cultural event rather than at a shrine or a hunters' gathering. This documents the survival of unaltered sacred oríkì material inside secular institutional and artistic spaces, distinct from the popular-music adaptation the other three texts in this file show .
Performed. At cultural concerts, university voice exhibitions and dramatic theatre, by named performer Máyọ̀wá Adéyẹmọ .
Lágbájá... ìyá rẹ̀ jẹ́ ẹni tí ó ń ta pọ̀nmọ́.
Lagbaja ("somebody, anybody, nobody")... his mother is the one who sells cowskin.
Translated by Aaron Carter-Ényì .
What it says. The word lágbájá is itself a placeholder, roughly "so-and-so," used in Yoruba speech to stand in for an unnamed person, and the Nigerian musician performing under that name wears a mask on stage, refusing individual identification. The oríkì composed for him inverts the genre's usual function.
Significance. Classical oríkì ìnagijẹ and oríkì orílẹ̀ assert distinguished lineage, as oriki-typology and the orílẹ̀ files in this section show at length; this text does the deliberate opposite, attributing to a masked performer's mother the ordinary trade of selling cowskin (pọ̀nmọ́, a common cheap Nigerian food item), a working-class rather than aristocratic origin. Carter-Ényì reads this as contemporary popular music using oríkì's own praise structure to critique the genre's traditional hierarchy and postcolonial inequality, while still operating recognisably as oríkì .
Performed. In contemporary music video production and popular musical concerts, credited to Asùn'jálá Kojo Àyánwọlá and Lágbájá .
Notes. This is the clearest documented case in this harvest of oríkì being composed as parody of its own conventions rather than in earnest use of them, and it is worth reading beside 13-oral-literature/00-index.md's general point that oríkì is the raw material other genres draw on: here a popular musician draws on the oríkì form specifically to make a point about form and hierarchy, not only to be praised by it.
Kábíyèsí Olódùmarè... Àtàbàtúbú Olódùmarè... Ọba tó ń gbénú wúndíá ṣọ̀lá, tó ń gbénú adélébọ̀ ṣògo, Ẹlẹ́rù n'ìyìn, ọ̀gá ògo!
Almighty God who no one dares to question, the King who rules in Heaven and on earth... Almighty God who works wonders, holy God who does holy things... Fearful and mighty God... King who dwells in the virgin in majesty, who dwells in the married woman in glory, Fearful in praises, most high in glory!
Translated by Faustina Daniels Aboagye and the Makolad Praise transcription team, from the recorded gospel performance "Kosoba" .
What it says. Traditional royal Yoruba epithets, Kábíyèsí ("your majesty, unquestionable"), ọba ("king"), applied to the Christian God, fused with explicitly Christian theological content (the virgin birth) inside a single praise structure.
Significance. This documents what the source calls the inculturation of oríkì into Yoruba gospel music, diaspora worship and social media, where the subject of praise shifts from the deities and ancestors of the indigenous tradition to the Abrahamic God, while the formal machinery, accretive royal epithet, direct address, invocation of fearsomeness alongside benevolence, remains recognisably that of oríkì . This is the single clearest example in this section's harvest of the genre's structure outliving a complete change of religious content, distinct from the survival of unaltered content in a new setting the Ògún/World Voice Day text above shows.
Performed. During Christian church services, online gospel livestreams and praise concerts, credited to Makolad Praise featuring TeePraize, 2024 .
Notes. The source for this text is a social media video posting rather than a scholarly transcription, and no individual named translator beyond the compiled attribution above is given; the analytical framing (inculturation of oríkì into Christian worship) is corroborated in the broader scholarship this corpus's other files cite .
Read as a set, these texts document three distinct and separable things contemporary Yoruba culture does with oríkì, which should not be collapsed into one claim of "survival." The doctor's praise shows the economic transaction continuing unchanged into new professions. The World Voice Day performance shows sacred content preserved unaltered in a secular staged setting. The Lágbájá text shows the form used against its own convention, for parody and social critique. The gospel text shows the form outliving its original religious content entirely. 13-oral-literature/14-continuity-into-the-present.md treats the musical and broadcast history behind all four; this file exists to show the actual texts that history produced.
How the oral genres feed juju, fuji, ewi and Afrobeats, how film and theatre use them, what is actually being lost, and what archives and projects exist to hear the material.
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.
Six documented Ògún oríkì texts from four different scholarly sources, showing the deity's seven manifestations, his contradictions, and a chanter's personal claim on him.
The occasions on which oríkì is actually chanted, the royal awakening and market-day forms, and how payment shapes what a performer says, illustrated with texts the genre files in this section do not carry.
The complete classification of oríkì by subject, orílẹ̀ through eranko, with a worked text for each kind and the boundary cases that show the categories are not airtight.
How oríkì is built from independent units rather than narrative sequence, and the specific mechanisms, tonal, structural, and referential, that make it resist translation.