3 - Songs of the King’s Wives: Gendered and Social Identities in Yorùbá Vocal Performance

Summary

Resonating strongly in my discussions in chapters 1 and 2 is the notion that men dominate Yorùbá drumming. There is an equally strong notion that women are the masters of song and chant performance. As in many cultures around the world, female musicians perform a range of functions, from cultural preservation,

and performing for wealthy patrons to complicated functions such as inter-gender “mediation of antagonism” and the performance of catharsis in a patriarchal society.

As has been clearly demonstrated by Karin Barber, women are the most adept performers of the Yorùbá oríkì, or praise-chants. They are the principal musical orators in the traditional Yorùbá public sphere, especially at annual festivals, where they function as historians and pundits, mobilizing support for traditional institutions by praising royalty, tracing genealogical lines, and providing insights into the body politic of their communities. But while it is true that Yorùbá women are the masters of vocal traditions, they may also provide drum accompaniment for their performances. The idea that Yorùbá women are forbidden to play the drum and rarely play other musical instruments has been reiterated in studies that focus on drumming traditions from the Òyó region (the area in which most studies of Yorùbá music have been done); but evidence from the Èkìtì region suggests that this is not universally true in Yorùbáland. My discussions in this chapter and the next focus on two all-female musical traditions, both of which, in different ways, deconstruct the assumption that the drum is a symbol of male superiority in Yorùbáland. Focusing on these two examples, I examine how music is performed to articulate the identity of women as powerful players in the social and political life of a remote Yorùbá community in Èkìtì.

Kelly Askew's study of Tanzanian Taarab music provides a good model for investigating African performance traditions in terms of their content and form, and how they speak to the social conditions of the people who perform them. In that study, Askew harmonizes a wide range of analytical perspectives that draw on Victor Turner's “agonistic paradigm of social drama,” the processual dimension of performance, the “concern for form and politics of context,” and the significance of performance as “text.”