The Leaf & the Soap (‘Bí ewé bá pẹ́. l'ara ọṣẹ, á di ọṣẹ ’)

Summary

Introduction

I am

because of memory

The period between 1850 and 1950 was characterized by rapid socio-political transformation in the area that was to be known as Yorùbáland, particularly with the consolidation and expansion of the colonial endeavour. As with many other sectors of life, this had momentous consequences for Yorùbá traditions of performance. The encounter with the colonial power led to the dislocation of Yorùbá cultural and artistic manifestations from their historical and sociocultural frames of reference. It decentred them. Colonial paradigms silenced and marginalized them. They channelled their development and reception, predetermining the way we read back into their history even today. This becomes most evident also with the kind of performances, new to Yorùbáland, which began to appear on stage in towns like Lagos, Abé.òkúta and Ìbàdàn in the second half of the nineteenth century. These performances could be defined as the initial phase of a new tradition, or rather of a ‘new stage’ that came to enrich the wide range of Yorùbá classic performance traditions. Significantly though, they have been considered most often in terms of the way they have imitated of the western format, obscuring the issue of agency on the one side, and reinforcing the centrality of western canons in the performing arts on the other.

The focus of the present paper is to consider the central decades of the period, approximately 1860 to 1920, and the development of this ‘new stage’, turning attention to the issue of agency and highlighting the process of appropriation and the transformations the performances went through from their inception.