Look Around

What oríkì are, the different kinds, who performs them and why, and how they carry history that written records do not.

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.

Oyeronke Oyewumi's argument that gender was not the primary organizing category of Yoruba society, the serious criticisms of it, and the documented record of women's authority.

The narrative of the Ifẹ̀ woman who let herself be captured to learn the raiders' secret and paid for it with her only son, the Ugbo counter-tradition in which she is a traitor, and the confusion of Ugbo with Igbo that has caused lasting trouble.

The most powerful women in nineteenth-century Yorubaland, both of them large-scale slave traders, one killed by the ruler she had armed and the other exiled by a British consul, and the political office that made their power constitutional.

Fúnmiláyọ̀ Ransome-Kuti and the Abẹ́òkúta tax revolt, HID Awólọ́wọ̀, Wúràọlá Ẹsan, Fọláké Ṣólánkẹ́, Bọ́lá Kuforiji-Olubi, the Ìyálóde and Ìyálọ́jà offices in the modern state, and the Yoruba women who were first in law, medicine and the university.

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.

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.

Guide to the ten files on women, gender constructs, political titles, economic institutions, ritual authority, kinship, and historical resistance across Yorùbá history.

An examination of Yoruba women's oral verbal arts, focusing on bridal laments, praise poetry custody, lullabies, and domestic work songs.

An examination of Yoruba women during nineteenth-century warfare as military financiers, logisticians, captives, slaveholders, and political leaders under changing militarized state structures.

An aetiological comedy in which a woman digs a pit to trap her enemy, falls into it herself, is pulled out by hair that stretches as they pull, and is envied into starting a fashion.

Karin Barber's finding that oríkì in Okuku is held and performed mainly by women, with texts showing what that custodianship does at a wedding, at a festival, and inside a marriage.