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The Yorùbá are one of the major ethnic groups in West Africa, with Nigeria being the homeland for the majority. The Yorùbá poet Niyi Osundare's work is influenced by the Yorùbá animist worldview, which venerates the spoken word. Such influence is evident in his depiction of the spoken word as an extraordinary sort of person, a superperson. One central artistic feature of his poetry is the adaptation of devices of Yorùbá oral literature. Therefore, most studies of his poetry privilege its link to Yorùbá oral poetry. However, the use of devices found in Yorùbá folktales in his verse has not been subjected to detailed study. One implication of this is that, despite magical realism being a major artistic feature of Osundare's poetry, critics have largely overlooked the fact that he is a magical realist poet. In his collection The Word Is an Egg (Ibadan: Kraft, 2000), Osundare relies substantially on the folktale as a model to frame his message on the personhood of the spoken word. In this article, I use the lens of magical realism to explore how he uses an adapted Yorùbá folktale to depict the message that the spoken word is a superperson who deserves to be treated with respect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay proposes a theoretical framework, based in the philosophy and aesthetics of Yoruba people (Nigeria), for interpreting urban photographic series. To do so I look at oriki, a form of Yoruba oral literature, and the ways in which it resonates and intersects with Western philosophical conceptualizations of place and urban and literary theory to engender a rich and complex sense of place. I argue this by exploring two series of cityscapes: Akinbode Akinbiyi's "Lagos: All Roads" which depicts Lagos Nigeria, and Mouna Karray's "Murmurer" depicting Sfax, Tunisia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]