Rárà: The Chanted Praise Genre
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.
intermediatehigh·
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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.
Rárà is the chanted praise genre: secular, professional, addressed to a patron who is present and expected to pay, and performed at courts, ceremonies and gatherings wherever there is someone worth praising. It is the genre most people mean when they picture a Yoruba praise singer, and it is the one that has travelled furthest into contemporary Nigerian life, since the party and event "hype" performance of today is its direct commercial descendant.
Rárà stands to oríkì roughly as ìjálá does: it is a mode of chanting that takes oríkì as its raw material. The praise names, epithets and lineage attributions treated in yoruba-oriki are what a rárà singer chants. What makes it rárà rather than something else is the manner of delivery, and the classification of the genres by vocal expression described in yoruba-oral-genre-system applies here as everywhere.
Rárà is classed among the originally secular forms, alongside oríkì orílẹ̀, ẹkún ìyàwó and etíyerí the satirical chant, as against the transitional forms like ìjálá and ẹ̀sà that began in worship, and the frozen forms like ọfọ̀ and ìyẹ̀rẹ̀ Ifá . It has no religious affiliation and it absorbs modern influence without difficulty . Where a genre has a sacred counterpart, rárà's is Ṣàngó pípè, the invocatory chant of Ṣàngó, and the two are formally related.
It is also thoroughly malleable. Rárà belongs to the forms in which the artist creates relatively independently, and the text as actually delivered is shaped by the audience in front of the performer and by his own invention . Two performances are not the same text, and neither is the authoritative version.
Regionally, rárà is particularly associated with Ọ̀yọ́, and the bridal genre ẹkún ìyàwó is described as an offshoot of it, which is why ẹkún ìyàwó is predominant in the Ọ̀yọ́-speaking area . Barber records that in some usage the bride's chant is called rárà ìyàwó rather than ẹkún ìyàwó . The two genres share their material and much of their manner.
The performer is called onírárà, one who does rárà, and in the wider vocabulary of praise performance also akéwì and, for the court chroniclers attached to royal households, arọ́kin. The corpus file yoruba-oriki treats those titles and Crowther's 1852 record of the ológbò as a royal counsellor who also acted as chronicler.
Onírárà are typically professional or semi-professional, frequently itinerant, and the genre is chanted for kings, for the wealthy, and for guests at ceremonies. The economic relationship is not incidental to the art. The performer is rewarded by the person praised, and this shapes what gets said, how long it goes on, and who gets praised next when someone more important walks in. Barber's description of the oríkì performer switching subjects when a more significant personality enters the performance space is an account of the same economics .
Gender in this genre is not simple and the sources do not fully agree. Barber's Òkukù finding is that oríkì performance is mainly by women . Rárà chanting for kings and the wealthy is often described as a male occupation, while the bridal offshoot ẹkún ìyàwó is exclusively female. The safest statement is that the material is shared across genders while particular performance roles are gendered by occasion and locality, and the question is treated at length in file 13.
The naive account of praise poetry is that it flatters, and payment corrupts it. That account does not survive contact with the texts.
Praise chanting in this tradition is closer to accurate naming than to compliment. The performer of oríkì orílẹ̀ is regarded as the custodian of the history of the lineage he is chanting, and performance of a lineage's praise elicits a strong emotional response in descendants who are present . And what is chanted is not filtered for comfort. The best documented case is the praise poetry of the Ẹ̀ṣọ́ Ìkòyí, the Ìkòyí warriors.
Ẹni tí kò mọ̀kan mọ̀kan A ní Onílkòyí rèé kólé A ní Onílkòyí rèé jalè Ìkòyí ò jalè rí Ìkòyí ò kólé Bí wọ́n bá rógun Tí ẹ̀gbọ́n bá mérú Àbúrò á sì mèrù
The one who knows nothing will say the Ìkòyí have gone out to burgle, will say the Ìkòyí have gone out to steal. Ìkòyí has never stolen. Ìkòyí does not burgle. When they meet with war, as the elder brother takes the captives, the younger takes the property.
Translator: Gboyega Kolawole
Yoruba text and English translation as printed by Kolawole, attributed to Duroriike; the literal gloss is by the compiler of this corpus .
The whole point of the passage is in the last three lines, and it is a joke with a blade in it. The chant vehemently denies that the Ìkòyí steal, and then describes precisely how they take everything, on the ground that taking it in war is not stealing. Kolawole reads this as an oxymoronic structure in which the lineage's honour is rooted in dishonour, and notes that the Ìkòyí were soldiers of fortune who would start a war when none was available, for the spoils .
The device the last two lines turn on is tonal contrast. Mérú and mèrù are written almost identically and differ in tone, one meaning to take slaves and the other to take property . The parallel lines are therefore near-homophones with different meanings, and the chant gets its rhythm and its wit from the pairing. English cannot do this at all: the translation has to use two unrelated words where the Yoruba uses what sounds like the same word twice. This is the single clearest example in this section of what yoruba-phonology-and-tone means when it says that tone is lexical.
Notes on the source text. The Yoruba as printed in the source carries inconsistent tone marking and some evident typesetting corruption, and the diacritics above are the compiler's normalisation of the printed text. The forms mérú and mèrù are given here as the source's own explanation of the tonal contrast requires them.
The critical point for understanding rárà: the performer cannot leave these lines out. They are part of the established repertoire and he must not deviate from it, and the audience does not take them as an offence precisely because they belong to the corpus . A genre that gets paid to praise nonetheless obliges the praiser to say the unflattering thing, because the unflattering thing is part of who the lineage is.
Kolawole's account of the performer-audience relation is the most useful available. In some contexts the artist is like a puppet on the strings of the audience, because the audience is versed in the customs and will find a performance out of place if he deviates unnecessarily, and he is at their mercy . The audience is both respondent and judge .
That produces the genre's central difficulty. The text is already familiar to everyone present, so there is nothing new in the content, and yet a great degree of originality is required of the artist . What he can vary is selection, sequence, expansion, and rhetorical handling. His ability to make the familiar corpus fresh in performance is what distinguishes him . This is the same insight as Barber's, from the other side: the fragments are fixed and quotable, and that is exactly what makes a fluid performance possible .
Rárà did not die, it monetised further. Contemporary Nigerian hype performance at parties and events has been analysed as a direct commercial descendant of oríkì praise practice, hybridising the traditional aesthetics for economic purpose . The MC who chants a guest's lineage at a Lagos wedding, and the artist who name-checks a wealthy patron mid-song, are doing a recognisable version of what an onírárà did, under changed conditions of payment and publicity. File 14 follows the line into recorded music.
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.
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 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.
How proverbs behave when they are embedded in chanted and sung genres rather than used in conversation, and why a quoted proverb changes what a performance is doing.
The dùndún as a literary instrument rather than a technical curiosity: oríkì and proverbs delivered on the drum, what the drummer composes from, and how drummed, sung and spoken text relate in one performance.
How Yoruba verbal art is classified into named genres by vocal manner rather than subject, who performs each and on what occasion, and why the European category "oral literature" fits the material imperfectly.