Vision of Ancestorhood and Apotheosis in Alternative Yoruba Music

Abstract

The Yoruba world is the totality of the tripartite connection of the worlds of the dead, the living, and the unborn. These three spheres and phases also correspond to the past, the present and the future, respectively. The living are always in awe of the dead and revere them, while the dead are believed to possess the ability to (re)visit the world of the living through reincarnation. The present study is based on the claim that, while aspects of the indigenous Yoruba belief system such as ancestorhood and apotheosis are getting lost on the millennial generation of Yoruba persons, the alter-native Yoruba music genre provides a viable evidence of how elements of Yoruba folk culture are being preserved by culturally and ideologically conscious members of the same generation. Using the Cultural Theory framework, the study demonstrates the possibility of mainstreaming Yoruba cultural studies into the larger corpus of canonical theories in global cultural studies.