A Postcolonial Approach to Abduction in Indigenous Folksongs

Abstract

Folklore in Africa harbours ample records of the forceful migration of folks from the continent to the new world. Two prominent Ifá verses record this untoward development. What may not be in the public domain, however, is the record of the scars, and the amount of tears, wailing and pains that the dislocation might have caused folks on account of their estrangement from their loved ones. Record of the moment and pains of forceful severance from siblings, parents and ancestral roots may have been captured in two oral records subsisting in relevant axioms and tales of the unforgettable onslaught. The first arising from the moment of despair was that the pain of a dead child would be easier to bear and forgotten than the anxiety surrounding the whereabouts of a missing child and the disappearance of two sisters in one fell swoop leaving traces of an unfinished piece of fried yam and another uneaten yam on fire that they were preparing for breakfast prelude to the onslaught as well as the soul searing songs they rendered while being captured by two different marauders. Using a combination of postcolonialism and semiotic, the paper sets out to unravel the pains and despair of estrangement and complement same with the history of slave trade, concluding that man’s inhumanity to man has been a recurring decimal in the record of time.