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Showing posts from September 14, 2024

Who stole the Yoruba python skin? By Festus Adedayo

One of the thematic preoccupations of the book, What the forest told me: Yoruba hunter, culture and narrative performance, (2014) is that, inside the forest, there is a consistent superiority war, often fierce, between man and animals. Written by Ayo Adeduntan, Research Fellow at the University of Ibadan, the book averred that, while animals sometimes win this war, succeeding in crushing hunters for supper, many atimes, hunters vanquish these forest dwellers. They fell these notorious animals renowned for bathing in the blood of their human victims. In pursuit of this theme of a superiority duel in the wild, Adeduntan was in a forest called Ìgbẹ́ Alágogo. Hunting expeditions to the Ìgbẹ́ are seasonal excursions that take hunters to Ã’j̣é-̣Owódé in the Ã’kè Ã’gùn area of Oyo State. There, Adeduntan interviewed a hunter called Ã’jó Ã’gúnkúnlé of Agúnrege village. Ã’gúnkúnlé’s narration of how his hunter-master, named Ã’gúnòṣ̣un, a very powerful hunter, married a buffalo and was eventually d