Product Description: Orature and Yorùbá Riddles takes readers into the hitherto unexplored undercurrents of riddles in Africa. Because of its oral and all too often ephemeral nature, riddles have escaped close scrutiny from scholars. The strength of the Yorùbá as the focus of this study is impressive indeed: a major ethnic group in Africa, with established connections with the black diaspora in North America and the Caribean; a rich oral and written culture; a large and diverse population; and an integrated rural-urban society...read more

Product Description: Long, long ago, when the earth was new, the great river goddess Yemoya sent her daughter Aje to marry a handsome earth chief in the Land of Shining Day. At first Aje was happy, but soon she started to pine for the cool shadows of her mother's realm...read more

Product Description: Large Print Edition. The charming, traditional folk tales and legends of the Yoruba people of East Africa. The Yoruba people inhabit a large area of East Africa, primarily in southern Nigeria, Benin and Togo. They are united by language and religious tradition.

When Wind, Fire, and Rain meet in the land of the Yoruba to decide which of them is the greatest, Wind and Fire make great shows of strength, but Rain demonstrates the power of gentleness.

When the daughter of the river goddess Yemoya goes to the Land of Shining Day to marry a handsome earth chief, her longing for the cool darkness of her former home causes Night to be brought to the world

When Mosquito tries to marry Ear, she is rudely refused and sets off to marry another part of the body, but no one will have her, and in the end, she turns to biting to show them she simply will not go away.

A collection of twenty-three tales involving Aj'ap'a, a tortoise with human traits who has relationships with an assortment of animal and human characters (view table of contents)

Retells the Yoruba creation myth in which the deity Obatala descends from the sky to create the world

Product Description: A fascinating collection of the oral literature of an ancient people. This book is an important and delightful contribution to mythology, folklore, history, African culture and black studies. Included in the appendix are some Yoruba songs and tales known among African-Americans communites in the West Indies and Brazil...read more

Product Description: Of all the different sub-genres of oral prose fiction developed by the Yoruba of Nigeria, the trickster tale is the most popular, especially among the nonruling stratum of society. Sekoni describes and explains literally what makes the trickster tale a trickster tale...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

When the terrifying Iroko-man tries to take a woodcarver's first-born child as partial payment for bringing fertility to his village, the father must find a clever solution

Yoruba peoples of southwestern Nigeria conceive of rituals as journeys sometimes actual, sometimes virtual. Performed as a parade or a procession, a pilgrimage, a masking display, or possession trance, the journey evokes the reflexive, progressive, transformative experience of ritual participation. "Yoruba Ritual" is an original and provocative study of these practices. Using a performance paradigm, Margaret Thompson Drewal forges a new theoretical and methodological approach to the study of ritual that is thoroughly grounded in close analysis of the thoughts and actions of the participants. Challenging traditional notions of ritual as rigid, stereotypic, and invariant, Drewal reveals ritual to be progressive, transformative, generative, and reflexive and replete with simultaneity, multifocality, contingency, indeterminacy, and intertextuality. Throughout the book prominence is given to the intentionality of actors as knowledgeable agents who transform ritual itself through play and improvisation. Integral to the narrative are interpolations about performances and their meanings by Kolawole Ositola, a scholar of Yoruba oral tradition, ritual practitioner, diviner, and master performer. Rich descriptions of rituals relating to birth, death, reincarnation, divination, and constructions of gender are rendered all the more vivid by a generous selection of field photos of actual performances.

Product Description: This collection of myths - some of them simple, strong pieces of narrative, others mysterious, poetic and often amusing - illustrate the religion and thought of the West African Yoruba People. Interspersed with drawings by Georgina Beier of Yoruba motifs and collected and translated by authors and artists long-familiar with Yoruba culture, the myths are compiled and introduced here by Ulli Beier, who himself holds two Yoruba chieftaincy titles...read more

Product Description: Some account of the religious beliefs of the West African Negroes, particularly of the Yoruba tribes of Southern Nigeria.