DISCOURSE AND ITS DISCLOSURES - YORUBA WOMEN AND THE SANCTITY OF ABUSE

If ritual songs of obscenity and abuse have become a familiar topic in Africanist ethnography since Evans-Pritchard's first discussion of th eir 'canalising' functions in 1929, few studies have paid sufficient a ttention to the socio-political and discursive contexts of the song te xts themselves. The present article moves in that direction by relocat ing abusive songs of the Oroyeye festival in an Ekiti Yoruba town with in the local forms of history and knowledge that motivate their interp retation and performative power. After reviewing the cult's historical interventions in local political affairs, the article examines the re pressed historical memory of a displaced ruling dynasty and its associ ated line of civil chiefs as invoked by the song texts in two festival contexts. In the first the Ajakadi wrestling match-which occurs at ni ght, male age mates from different 'sides' of the town fight to stand their ground and topple their opponents while young women praise the w inners and abuse the losers with sexual obscenities. In the second fes tival context, during the day, the elder 'grandmothers' of Oroyeye tar get malefactors and scoundrels by highlighting their misdeeds against a discursive background of homage and praise. In this fashion the fema le custodians of a displaced ruling line bring repressed sexual and po litical sub-texts to bear on male power competition, lineage fission, and antisocial behaviour. More generally, they mobilise the fertility and witchcraft of all Yoruba women to disclose hidden crimes and speak out with impunity.