Suchergebnisse

A study of oriki, or oral praise poetry, which is a major part of both traditional performance and daily Yoruba life.

"Lorelle D. Semley explores the historical and political meanings of motherhood in West Africa and beyond, showing that the roles of women were far more complicated than previously thought. While in Kétou, Benin, Semley discovered that women were treasurers, advisors, ritual specialists, and colonial agents in addition to their more familiar roles as queens, wives, and sisters. These women with special influence made it difficult for the French and others to enforce an ideal of subordinate women. As she traces how women gained prominence, Semley makes clear why powerful mother figures still exist in the symbols and rituals of everyday practices"--Provided by publisher.

Lorelle D. Semley explores the historical and political meanings of motherhood in West Africa and beyond, showing that the roles of women were far more complicated than previously thought. While in Kétu, Bénin, Semley discovered that women were treasurers, advisors, ritual specialists, and colonial agents in addition to their more familiar roles as queens, wives, and sisters. These women with special influence made it difficult for the French and others to enforce an ideal of subordinate women. As she traces how women gained prominence, Semley makes clear why powerful mother figures still exist in the symbols and rituals of everyday practices.

This fascinating ethnographic study investigates gendered power in contemporary Nigeria in order to provide an understanding of The Ondo Women's War of 1985. Sanctioned by Ondo's female chiefs in the name of their female king, this tax protest escalated into rebellion when ordinary women threatened the use of their ultimate weapon -their own nakedness. Focusing on a specific Yoruba case history, this book challenges many western feminist assumptions about women's lack of status in Africa.

A randomly selected clinic population of 400 pregnant women in Ile-Ife, Nigeria, were interviewed for complaints of psychological disorders during the last trimester of pregnancy and the post-partum period. The study shows a considerable degree of psychological disturbances during pregnancy which later decreased significantly dur ing the post-partum. While the complaints of worrying, guilt-feeling, nausea and vomiting and "heat in-the-head", were significantly more common in younger women, insomnia and anorexia were more common in older women. The incidence of psychological complaints among the women decreased with increasing parity. There was no significant difference in the incidence between women with monogamous and polygamous marriages.

This paper explores a narrative path towards foregrounding what it calls a gender-relative morality as a core dimension of female subordination. It takes a feministapproach to ethics, which stresses specifically the political enterprise of eradicating systems and structures of male domination and female subordination in both the public and the private domains. The theoretical implications of Feminist narrative ethics is then applied to the philosophical imports of Yorùbá proverbs about women as a way to tease out how female subordination is grounded in Yorùbá ontology and ethics. Spe[1]cifically, the essay interrogates the ethical and aesthetical trajectory that leads from ìwà l'ẹwà (character is beauty), a Yoruba moral dictum, to ìwà l'ẹwà obìnrin ([good moral] character is a woman's beauty). Within this transition, there is the possibility that the woman is excluded from the category of those properly referred to as ọmọlúwàbí.

Cover -- Dedication -- About the Series -- Board Members -- Published in this series -- Title page -- Copyright page -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Foreword -- Preface -- Fieldwork -- Some notes on the study area -- Epistemological challenges in developing this work -- Notes -- 1. Yoruba interconnections, colonial encounters, and epistemological crises -- Interconnections in the Yoruba epistemologies -- The dynamics of 'unequal encounters' -- Posthumous paternity, levirate and widow inheritance -- Between identity and identification -- Organisation of this book -- Notes -- 2. The fated grass: Self-representation and identity construction -- (Un)veiling the posthumous offspring -- Being 'born from another man's hands' -- Ethnographic vignettes: Posthumous offspring and self-presentation -- Picking up the pieces of a broken self -- Notes -- 3. Posthumous offspring and the politics of legitimacy -- Borders of legitimacy -- Legitimacy and the identity of power -- Posthumous paternity: Where the church stands -- Notes -- 4. Endogenous values, spatial delineation and cultural authenticity -- Posthumous paternity and Yoruba cultural authenticity -- Levirate or widow inheritance -- Revisiting the Yoruba concept of (il)legitimacy -- Notes -- 5. Neo-repugnancy: Assisted reproduction as an obscenity -- When innovation is negotiated -- Children made by doctors -- Two faces/phases of the repugnancy doctrine -- Help, donation, and making women pregnant -- 'ART' and the cultural construction of adultery -- Notes -- 6. Beyond 'epistemicide': (Re)claiming humanity for Africa -- Bibliography -- Index -- Back cover.

SummaryData were analysed from the 1973 surveys of the Nigerian segment of the Changing African Family (CAFN) Project which covered Yoruba women and men in Ibadan and the western state of Nigeria. The Yoruba women in monogamous unions and those in polygynous unions show slightly varying levels of fertility, measured as mean number of children ever born. Most of this variation can be attributed to other variables; type of union of the women does not significantly affect their fertility level.

The youths of any nation are the bedrock of her development, through viable socio-political and economic contributions. They are the indispensable agents of change that can turn the table round for better, especially in developing nations. The natural psycho-biological development of youths and young adults, living in a nation going through socio-political economic and security challenges, coupled with their being nurtured in some cases through faulty parenting, have manifested in the typology of Nigerian youths. The nation now has a high number of misguided youths who portray demeaning image about Nigeria. This study, hinged on Elkind's (1967) constructionists' perspective of adolescents' cognitive development and womanists' theory as opined by Hudson-Weems (1993) and Kolawole (1997), to the effect that the desire of the agitating African women is complementarity with men in all aspects of life. With these views; exemplified with excerpts from randomly selected Yoruba dramatic, prosaic, and poetic texts, this essay submits that improper parenting, peer group pressure, excessive drive for material wealth, unemployment, poverty, inaccessibility to social and financial aids as experienced by the youths, are some of the reasons why the future appears bleak for Nigeria. The study recommends collective responsibility by parents, to become positive role models for their children by spending undivided and qualitative time with them, thus creating a good and safe environment for their children to be free to express themselves. Corporate organizations and religious bodies should pay back to the society by organizing workshops and low-capital focused entrepreneurial seminars for the youths. Government should as a matter of urgency, put massive employment generation on priority list, ensure a drastic reduction in the years of working experience required before youths' employment and ensure desirable remuneration for employed youths by individual and corporate bodies.