Yoruba Wedding Songs

Yoruba people are an ethnic group of around 30 million individuals spread throughout West Africa, the most predominantly living in Nigeria, all of them speaking the Yoruba language. This people religion and mythology plays an important role in West Africa, especially in Nigeria laying at the same time at the origin of several religions belonging to New World, such as Voudoun religion in Haiti, the Candomble religion in Brazil and Santeria in Puerto Rico and Cuba. All of the Yoruba songs, myths, histories are comprised in the term Itan. Due to the fact that plenty of Yoruba people were enslaved and taken by the European traders to regions like Brazil, Haiti, Cuba, Trinidad, Cuba, they carried their religious beliefs with them combining these ones with the religions already existing in the territories: Christianity, Kardecist Spiritism.

The mythology and the beliefs emerged from it are important in the life of Yoruba people considering that every human being has its individual deity of fate, this one being called “Ori” which has taken the form of a sculpture decorated with cowry shells. In Yoruba tradition is believed that the dead people are the ones to have the power to protect their living descendants. This traditional belief is venerated and expressed through the Egungun festival, one filled with colorful costumes and men wearing masks to represent the ancestral spirits. Nowadays, the modern Yoruba are known to belong to Christian and Muslim religions, but there are as such Yoruba people, especially the ones living in rural areas who still preserve the concepts of the pagan traditions.

The celebration of a Yoruba wedding follows most of the times the traditions that have been inherited throughout the years although many of the Yoruba people prefer to live more and more by the locations that ease up their lives.



This is why inside a wedding festivity we can see the expression of old traditions, run in places that are chosen to host the wedding festivity, with band of musicians and group of dancers to move on the rhythms of Yoruba wedding songs. The customs of an African wedding follow the beliefs that the specific people has inherited, thus many ways of manifestation are to be seen throughout an African wedding celebration.



As an outsider, one may think that primarily these African weddings, look alike, and indeed they have some patterns that are similar to one another, as it is the custom of broom jumping, or the displaying of music using instruments that most of them are identical, as it is for instance the presence of bata – a traditional drum with many tones, sakara – a percussive drum which uses goat kin stretched over a clay ring. The lyrics inside the Yoruba wedding songs differ due to the fact that Yoruba has its own independency as a language per se as many other people residing in African continent have.



The tunes and the lyrics of Yoruba songs are the ones related to their traditional beliefs, to the cultural assets this people has inherited, therefore the presence of mythology, of religious beliefs emerged from it, are important elements to decorate the wedding songs lyrics, all of these elements bringing in the life of the married couple the fortune, the prosperity of a good, long lasting marriage sealed with the fertility brought in by the incantations of these specific lyrics.