New Wine in Old Cups: Postcolonial Performance of Christian Music in Yorùbá Land

Introduction

The Christianity that reached sub-Saharan Africa during the age of colonial missions had already experienced a long history of phased enculturation and reform. The early missionaries came to Yorùbá land with their own language and culture and they attempted, with varying degrees of success, to impose these thought forms and ideas on the Yorùbá. This history remains discernible even today in the music that is produced and used for various religious rituals.

Music has been defined as art concerned with combining vocal or instrumental sounds for beauty of form or emotional expression, usually in accord with cultural standards of rhythm, melody, and, in most Western music, harmony.¹ Musical ensemble cannot be separated from song (a musical composition with words) especially among the Yorùbá. The role of music as an accessory to words is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in the history of Christianity.² Music and religion in Yorùbá land function as a unified activity. Within these interconnected elements, there is no ultimate separation between sacred, secular, music, vocals, or instruments. Music stimulates the culture and reflects the beliefs of the community. Music is one of the means towards self-fulfilment, integration, self-actualisation, and aesthetics. Music demonstrates its potential in the way it facilitates the incongruent worldview of the people. This trait accounts for the adaptability of Yorùbá traditional music to suit the purpose of Christianity as one of the prominent religions in contemporary society. The 'power to move men has always been attributed to music; its ecstatic possibilities have been recognised in all cultures and have usually been admitted in practice under particular conditions, sometimes stringent ones.'³

Songs are an important component of the folklore of many African groups including the Yorùbá, and there is no mood that the Yorùbá people cannot express through song. Music is important in the traditional Yorùbá society and it forms a basic anchor in their religious practice prior the incursion of Islam and Christianity as domesticated religions. To the Yorùbá, music is an emotive and creative force and act.

This accounts for various types of songs that are present in their society. According to Euba (1993: 1) music can be divided into the following: Popular music, Music theatre, Christian religious music, Islamic religious music, Neo-traditional music (in which traditional elements are used to create new idioms with little or no Western influence), and Art music (which has greater or lesser degrees of Western influence). This classification is very broad and helpful but it cannot be regarded as all-embracing because it is difficult to distinguish the first three categories from the last two. Elements that could be found in one of these songs could be found in others. But his classification is informative in that it helps to know that there are elements of pluralism in the performance of Christian music.

Prior to the advent of Christianity in Nigerian communities, there were a number of traditional religious cults and each cult has its own rituals, music, oral literature (orature) and dances through which such a Deity was worshipped. Each traditional Deity has specific musical ensembles that accompany the orature used during the worship. For example, Bàtádrum is used for Sàngó and Dùndùn is used for Egúngún among the Yorùbá (Adeoye 1979: 123–7). At the dawn of colonialism, Africa was seen as a dark continent requiring illumination with European culture, and the oral literature of African people suffered greatly at the hands of the early ethnologists and linguists. They were mainly concerned with the presentation of texts that correlated with Christian ethics, as technology and Christianity were the two major arms of colonialism. The scholars and researchers in that period 'took the liberty to edit the texts so as to get rid of materials they considered 'unclean' by European standards' (Okpewo 1992: 8–9). The missionaries frowned upon music that was voluptuous or effeminate. In practice, this meant that...