Family oriki: Intangible cultural heritage and disappearing art form, By Bunmi Fatoye-Matory

Even if we feel we don’t need to know our oriki, it is not fair to deprive younger generations of this beautiful cultural asset. We should allow them to decide what they want to do with it. What we can do is to record it with the help of those who know it, when they are still alive. We can translate it and preserve it through our many technological devices, and then transfer it to the younger people in our families, wherever they may live in the world. What they will do with it is up to them.

Oriki, often defined as praise poem, is a Yoruba verbal art form. It exists across the Yoruba cultural spectrum. It includes special oriki for children born with certain characteristics. Examples are Ige, a child who came out with the feet at childbirth; Taiwo and Kehinde, who are twins; Aina, a female child born with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck; and Ojo, if a male child. All these children have their specific oriki. Every Yoruba family has its own oriki too and it is this form that is most endangered. While oriki is often generically called praise poetry,  some of it is hardly flattering, but it encodes the ancestral identity of a lineage, and what the members of that lineage share in common. Oriki is an intangible cultural heritage. UNESCO defined intangible cultural heritage as inclusive of folklores, customs, beliefs, traditions, knowledge, and language, which are part of a people’s or community’s cultural heritage. It is intellectual wealth.  Women have long been the inventors, performers and transmitters of this great poetic art form within the family. As new brides, women were required to memorise the long oriki of their husbands’ lineages, and they too made their own additions to this during their lifetimes as participants-observers in these families. It is an intergenerationally-layered and dynamic art form.

Every Yoruba person who grew up with women of a certain generation knows the beauty of Oriki. During my high school years, in a famous and excellent school I attended for some time in Ekiti, we had a  teacher whose nickname was Alagba, a teacher of Yoruba language and grammar in Class 3. Long before we got to Class 3, we heard of the fearsome reputation of this teacher from older students. One day, he gave us an assignment to read some of our family’s oriki in the next class. He only asked for a few lines. It was not difficult for me because hardly a day passed in my young life at home without hearing my oriki from our grandmothers, aunts, and other older women around me, as they greet me or console me during childhood crises. I never consciously memorised it, but its daily repetition and probably affective memory helped my retention. It was so easy to recall in my boarding school. I completed my assignment. Several of my classmates did not know their oriki. They seemed to be mostly children who lived in cities, and were not exposed to the daily infusion of cultural heritage we village children enjoyed. I remember one boy, desperate to produce something, wrote  “omo aja, omo eran.” Alagba, who was not known to spare the rod, gave him the treatment given to the the child of a dog and the son of a goat. He also asked us to go and investigate our family oriki when we got back home during the holidays. I did not know it then, but Alagba was doing us a favour. He could foresee the consequences of children not being exposed to one of the most important aspects of their heritage.  

Oriki tells us about the history and achievements of a lineage, their gods and goddesses, their trade and avocation, their behaviour, talents, shortcomings, challenges, and aspirations. Everyone born into a lineage is entitled to the oriki of that lineage. Its disappearance is steady because women no longer learn it when they become wives, and Western-educated women in particular have long stopped making this a part of their wifely responsibility. For women who learn it, they no longer use it as frequently as the generations before them, because the conditions of living are constantly changing. City people would occasionally hear it when they visit their ancestral villages and towns for festivals and ceremonies.     

While our situation may not be as dire as that of the Yagan tribe, whose descendants are now all socialised into the Spanish language, we need to take our cue from the wise and departed elder Calderon, who used modern technology to preserve their language. Our families’ oriki need to be documented this way. It is a cultural heritage we should not allow to perish because we are clamouring after “modern” ways…

I visited my mother a year before she passed. Being an educated woman in her generation, she did not master the oriki of my father’s lineage, but luckily we grew up with grandmothers who lavished us children with our oriki. By the time I visited, she herself was an elder. I needed to record our oriki. Armed with a video recorder, I went around to ask the wives and daughters of our lineage to help with the recording. I found five of them who graciously agreed to support this project. They all sat down in my mother’s living room reciting, while I recorded. Each one delivered as much as she could remember, but what was clear then was that much had been forgotten, because of disuse. Like all language, it is use it or lose it. They, too, are beginning to forget. Sadly, this great heritage is being denied to younger generations. Recently, I talked to a woman visiting her middle-aged son and teenage grandchildren here on the phone. She told me the only thing she shares with her American grandchildren is the Bible. What a terrible loss! But this is not inevitable.

Last week, Cristina Calderon died. She was 93 years old, a member of the Yagan indigenous people of Chile.  She was also the last speaker of Yamagana, the ancestral language of Yagan people. After her sister died years ago, she became the only speaker and realised that she had to do something about it before she joined her ancestors. She began to document their language, and also worked hard at translating it to Spanish, the national language of Chile. Cristina Calderon’s daughter, Lidia Gonzalez, twitted that a lot of ancestral memory is lost with her mother’s death. Lidia is an important member of Chilean society. She is one of the political leaders helping to draft a new constitution, yet she does not speak her ancestral language. No doubt, she is highly fluent in Spanish. 

While our situation may not be as dire as that of the Yagan tribe, whose descendants are now all socialised into the Spanish language, we need to take our cue from the wise and departed elder Calderon, who used modern technology to preserve their language. Our families’ oriki need to be documented this way. It is a cultural heritage we should not allow to perish because we are clamouring after “modern” ways, which usually means adopting the beliefs and norms of other people in the world, people who are smart enough and work hard daily to preserve their heritage through writing, films, proselytisation, cultural festivals and in the many ways that modern technology allows the imagination to flourish.

A part of my family’s oriki goes: “Omo alagbado orara, arimona gbe sinu agabado” – the child of the person whose corn farm is so large people get lost in it. This suggests to me that I had a very successful corn farmer ancestor. Or “Omo alayo orita ludogun”- the child in whose Idogun quarters forbids playing the game of ayo. Rather than being a mystical taboo, I suspect that some ancestor(s) with a bad temper did not enjoy losing at ayo game, and so it became a forbidden game in our quarter. 

Younger people will discover many things about their ancestors, good and not so good, but it will enrich their identity and humanity. A part of my family’s oriki goes: “Omo alagbado orara, arimona gbe sinu agabado” – the child of the person whose corn farm is so large people get lost in it. This suggests to me that I had a very successful corn farmer ancestor. Or “Omo alayo orita ludogun”- the child in whose Idogun quarters forbids playing the game of ayo. Rather than being a mystical taboo, I suspect that some ancestor(s) with a bad temper did not enjoy losing at ayo game, and so it became a forbidden game in our quarter. Nobody played ayo in our quarter when I was growing up. This may not be unconnected to another part of our oriki “omo aja moju titi luyi” – a person who does not lose his dignity, even when he carries the  fight to the streets. The line is also a period marker. Tarred road only came with colonisation.

The women who composed this “praise” did it  tongue-in-cheek to criticise this behaviour. It was subversive. Could it then be that that ancestral behaviour of not tolerating loss easily is a part of me during my Scrabble games with my husband? While I did not start a physical fight or carry it to the streets, my modern response to losses at Scrabble is to stop playing the game with him completely. A modern-day taboo. Another  part of our oriki that intrigues me goes, ”Omo Oludogun abejoye, oni kan be be be ke si joye aba re, ke i weo ufon” – the person who had to be begged to assume his family’s ancestral chieftaincy of Odogun; he asked for a bribe to do it. The Odogun chieftaincy is one of the most important chieftaincy titles in our town. It is rotated among several families in our quarter. Even now, it is highly coveted. However, this oriki indicated that at some point in our family history, one ancestor refused to take this prestigious Odogun chieftaincy. They had to beg him! Not only did they have to beg him, he asked to be bribed before he took it! Whether this ancestor ever assumed this chieftaincy, we would never know, but for me, he was unlike his modern descendants, who would fight each other tooth and nail to corner this title, even when it is not their turn. Chieftaincies have become prestige acquisitions that elites seek to pad their thin and questionable cultural pedigrees. 

Even if we feel we don’t need to know our oriki, it is not fair to deprive younger generations of this beautiful cultural asset. We should allow them to decide what they want to do with it. What we can do is to record it with the help of those who know it, when they are still alive. We can translate it and preserve it through our many technological devices, and then transfer it to the younger people in our families, wherever they may live in the world. What they will do with it is up to them. The creatives and the seekers among them may find it very useful. Identity has become even more important with modernity, as the sands are constantly shifting.   Oriki could only help those coming after us.   

Bunmi Fatoye-Matory lives in Durham, North Carolina. She can bereached at email: bunmimatory@gmail.com