Ogumefu 1929 as a Source for Yorùbá Folktale
What M. I. Ogumefu's 1929 collection offers, and the disqualifying caveat she states in her own preface: the songs of these tales have been deliberately left out.
Four tales in this section come from M. I. Ogumefu, Yoruba Legends, published by the Sheldon Press in London in 1929 . It is the largest body of non-Ìjàpá Yorùbá narrative that this compiler could obtain in open access: thirty-one tales before the tortoise section begins, covering leopards, twins, hunters, kings, magicians and a range of aetiologies.
It also carries a caveat that the author states herself, in her own preface, and that governs everything this corpus does with it .
The stated caveat
Most of them include very old songs, but these cannot here be given in full .
That sentence disqualifies the volume as a record of àlọ́ àpagbè performance while leaving it usable as a record of plot . The genre is named for its songs; yoruba-alo sets out that àpagbè means the audience joins in, and the joining-in is the sung chorus. A collection that prints the tales and removes the songs has removed the mechanism.
The effect is visible in the text. In alo-the-leopard-man, Ogumefu describes three separate song moments and transcribes none of them: the leopard "began to sing a melancholy song, in which he told her" what he was, and during the chase "he sang that he would tear her in small pieces, and she in another song replied that he would never overtake her." The reader is told a song happened and given its content in reported speech. Whatever those words were, in Yorùbá or in English, they are not in the book.
There are two exceptions in the material used here. alo-oluronbi-and-the-iroko prints a four-line song in English, and alo-how-leopard-got-his-spots prints a rhymed three-line couplet in English. Both are English verse with no Yorùbá behind them.
What else is missing
No Yorùbá anywhere. The volume contains no Yorùbá text of any kind, in any tale. Names appear (Olúrónbí, Akiti, Ajaka, Isokun, Dekun, Ole), generally without diacritics.
No informants, no places, no dates. Ogumefu names no teller, no town, no region and no date of collection for any tale, and gives no account of how the tales reached her.
No indication of method. Whether she recorded from performance, worked from memory, translated from Yorùbá-language print sources, or reworked existing English collections is not stated. The preface describes folklore in general terms and does not describe her own procedure.
Against Parkinson, who names a region and an interpreter (alo-parkinson-1909-as-a-source), and Omolaye, who tabulates informants with ages, towns and dates (alo-omolaye-2023-as-a-source), this is the thinnest provenance of any source used in this section , . Every file drawing on Ogumefu is marked confidence medium for that reason.
The period framing
The preface is written for a British schoolroom readership and carries the assumptions of that setting :
We must not think that the stories are scientifically true; they grew out of the imagination of the people, and for actual, proven facts we must look in our text-books. We read these folk-tales for their quaintness and humour, for their sympathy with Nature, and because we find in them the ideas and ideals, not just of one man, but of the race .
The phrase "the legends express primitive notions" follows shortly after . This is the standard idiom of 1929 popular ethnography and the corpus records it as such rather than adopting it. It is worth noting that the framing is not incidental to the editorial decision about the songs: a volume that presents these tales as quaint reading matter for children has no reason to preserve a performance apparatus, and the songs were cut because the book was not trying to be a record.
The corpus does not know Ogumefu's own background. The volume gives her initials and a B.A. and nothing else, and this compiler has not established whether she was Yorùbá, which would bear on how the volume should be read. That gap is recorded rather than guessed at.
What it is good for
Three things, and they are real.
Plot inventory. Thirty-one non-tortoise tales with a printed contents list is a map of what the non-Ìjàpá material contains, and there is no comparable open-access English list. The contents include several aetiologies this compiler could not source elsewhere.
Variant evidence. Ogumefu's "The Head" is the same tale-type as Ellis's Adun, recorded 35 years apart by different hands with different endings, which makes it the best-documented variant pair available in this section. See alo-the-head-who-borrowed-a-body and alo-adun-and-the-borrowed-body.
Documented competing aetiologies. She prints two consecutive explanations for the leopard's spots and marks the second explicitly as "another story," which is the same phenomenon Parkinson's three shell-origin tales demonstrate and which alo-why-the-tortoise-shell-is-marked treats as evidence about how the genre handles competing explanations.
What it is not good for
Quoting as performance. No text from Ogumefu is presented in this corpus as a transcription of a telling, no song from it is presented as an àlọ́ àpagbè chorus, and nothing in it supports a claim about Yorùbá-language wording. Where this section retells an Ogumefu tale, it says plainly that the tale exists in English only and that the songs are absent from the record.
The same caution the corpus applies to the modern retelling site yorubatales.com applies here, with one difference in Ogumefu's favour: she declares the omission herself, in the preface, rather than leaving the reader to discover it .
Where the tales are treated
alo-the-leopard-man, alo-how-leopard-got-his-spots, alo-oluronbi-and-the-iroko, alo-the-head-who-borrowed-a-body .