FOOD-RELATED FOLK SONGS AS ARCHIVE AND TOOL FOR CULTURE TRANSMISSION AMONG THE YORUBA OF SOUTH-WEST NIGERIA

Abstract

Considered the three musketeers of gatherings or communal activity, food, music and language have been known to play a central role in the social fabric of Yoruba society in South-West Nigeria. While studies have paid attention to the roles of food and music choices as well as categorisation and social significance of food and music types in Yoruba parties, there is a dearth of studies on the linguistic dimension of the songs and food vis-à-vis the role which language plays in the mix. Rooted in Cultural Pragmatics and Ethnomusicology, this paper examines the manipulation of the resource of language in Yoruba food-related folksongs to archive and transmit cultural knowledge. Its data were ten (10) popular Yoruba folksongs purposively selected for their food content and short length to make for in-depth analysis. The analysis relied on a complementarity adaptation of the Sapir-Whorfian Hypothesis, Linguistic Relativism and Ethnomusicology to cater for the musicality. It found among other things that lexico-semantic resources of the Yoruba language are exploited to transmit cultural ethos. Food names, crop names and seasonal variations are enacted to ingrain spiritual, moral and cultural codes of the Yoruba into the songs. Agriculture is found to be primal in the Yoruba philosophy while values of personal hygiene, nutritional correctness, discipline and Western education are woven into its cyclical routine musically and metaphorically. It concludes that songs about food are a veritable resource used by the Yoruba to both conserve language and culture and transmit them sufficiently to posterity to ensure cultural survival and perpetuity.