I Could Speak Until Tomorrow
Through oriki, then, the essential attributes of all entities are affirmed, and people's connections with each other, with the spiritual universe, and with their past are kept alive and remade. In this fundamental sense, oriki are a master discourse. But they are also one that is extremely hard for outsiders to read. Hans Wolffin a seminal article (Wolff, 1962) has called oriki 'disjointed discourse'. They appear to be composed of fragments. They are labile, elliptical, allusive, and often deliberately obscure or incomplete. An oriki chant is a form that aims at high impact, high intensity, which it achieves through juxtaposing apparent opposites.
1. BIG MEN, REPUTATION AND ORIKI
Consciousness of relative seniority is acute, in some situations even overriding gender distinctions. 'You are a small boy to me', 'I had given birth even before you married', 'I was walking before you were born' are comments that are heard continually as the hierarchy of seniority is reproduced in daily life.
In the past this hierarchy was animated by a dynamic, competitive struggle for self-aggrandisement which permeated the society from top to bottom. There was scope for people to create a place for themselves and expand it by their own efforts. Like the 'Big Men' of New Guinea, they did it through the recruitment of supporters. A Yoruba proverb, often written up as a motto on parlour walls and the sides of lorries, says 'Mo lowo, mo tem'yan, ki lo tun ku ti mi otii ni?': 'I have money, I have people, what else is there that I have not got?' Money was one of the principal ways of gaining public acknowledgement as a big man; but 'having people' constituted that acknowledgement itself. Wives and children, visiting matrilateral relatives, attached 'stranger' segments in long-term residence, bondsmen, labourers, visitors, friends and adherents of all kinds, from the most permanent to the most casual - all were the 'people' on whose acknowledgement the ambitious man's standing depended. If their recognition were withdrawn - if they left, or transferred their loyalty to another patron, or chose another house to drop in on for gossip and advice - the man would lose his public standing. His position depended on public recognition: and recognition ofcourse bred more recognition, for a man with a great reputation would attract great numbers of adherents whose regard would in tum boost his reputation still further.