Socio-political language use and Yorùbá protest songs: a stylistic approach

Song is a universal phenomenon and significant aspect of Yorùbá literature usually constructed systematically using words that reflect either negative or positive linguistic connotation. Existing studies established their scope of usage in several areas of endeavors but have hardly addressed their negative implication for using them in socio-political scenario of Nigeria which sometimes seems to be counterproductive and having overbearing effect on peace and stability of the Nation. The paper adopts Marxist theory for its ability to explain reason for political and economic crisis in government and what the oppressed members of society must do to liberate themselves from such crisis. Eight protest songs were purposively selected from the Nigerian political scenario of the past for having sufficient usage of the Yorùbá protest songs imbued with curse, hate expressions, abuse, derision and ridicule/sarcasm. In order to strike a balance, four corrupt coinages of the Christian songs and the other four corrupt coinages of the Yorùbá traditional songs were eventually subjected to stylistic analysis. In all, politics, financial fraud and jubilation were expressed and contextualized in curse, ridicule/sarcasm, derision, hatred and abusive utterances all of which are capable of destabilizing peace and unity of the country. Yoruba protest songs in this paper are corrupt coinages of both Christian and Yorùbá traditional songs used to express sociopolitical issues in Nigeria and conveyed through curse, hate expressions, derision, sarcasm, abusive utterances and also reflect ingenuity-constrained stylistic choices.