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Abstract
The inevitable incursion of modernity and technology in post-colonial African Yoruba societies is rendering the nobility and royalty attached to drum poetry among the ancient Yoruba people irrelevant, as understanding the meaning of drum poetry marks the nobility and royal inclination of the decipherer. This article reviews previous studies on drum poetry/literature with participant observation/field investigation used in the collection of data. It taxonomizes drum poetry into sacred and secular. It also draws comparisons to and finds similarities with how humans and drums communicate. This paper arrives at the conclusion that tone and tonal marks within situational contexts are the hallmarks of the semantic interpretation of drum poetry

Yorùbá drum poetry has to date enjoyed an indigenous monopoly. However, its attributes as a unique cultural asset of Africans need to be further exploited for greater relevance to the sophistication and demands of the contemporary age. This essay contends that the resources of Yorùbá drum poetry are currently grossly under-utilized; it further asserts that for any art to thrive it must remain dynamic. Suggestions are therefore made concerning various current uses to which the valued resources of Yorùbá drum poetry can be put in order to achieve global relevance. Highlighted here are various means by which the mass media, the advertising and music industries, the government, NGOs, and international organizations can benefit from a more aggressive exploitation of the resources of drum poetry.

AbstractIt is an anthropological truism that ethnic identity is "other"-oriented, such that who wearerests on who we arenot. Within this vein, the development of Yoruba identity in the late nineteenth century is attributed to Fulani perspectives on their Oyo neighbors, Christian missionaries and the politics of conversion, as well as Yoruba descendants in diaspora reconnecting with their West African homeland. In this essay, my aim is to both complement and destabilize these externalist perspectives by focusing on Yoruba concepts of "home" and "house" (ilé), relating residence, genealogy and regional identities to their reconstituted ritual frameworks in Cuba and Brazil. Following Barber's analysis of Yoruba praise-poetry (oríkì) and Verran's work on Yoruba quantification, I reexamine the semantics of the categoryiléin the emergence of Lucumí and Nagô houses in order to explain their sociopolitical impact and illuminate transpositions of racial "cleansing" and ritual purity in Candomblé and Santería. More broadly, the essay shows how culturally specific or "internal" epistemological orientations play an important if neglected role in shaping Atlantic ethnicities and their historical trajectories.

Non-conventional meanings associated with some forms used in a class of anthroponyms (Yorùbá personal-names, henceforth Y P N s) can only be understood in the context of a metaphoric system. This claim is based on the fact that the corpus involved is wholly mono-morphemic and thus belong to the semantic category of connotative meaning. But YPNs also maintain a system of lexico-semantic idiosyncracy on the morphological and semantic levels (i.e. lexical formation and interpretation), and it is only through the interpretations adduced from them that they can be relevant as anthroponyms. This study, therefore, not only reports the strange sense-relation of form and meaning as attested to in a set of YPNs, it also illustrates a number of sociocultural indices which underlie their formulations and usages. The study concludes by positing that the semantic values of YPNs transcend mere identification labels and are found to communicate arrays of information about Yorùbá folk-psychology and sociocultural realities.