ABSTRACT
Yoruba was one of the earliest west African languages to be codified in the shape of a written gram m ar and a vocabulary (1843-9), and the credit for this goes to Samuel Crowther, a Yoruba who was sold as a slave in 1821, freed by the British, baptised and ordained to serve as a missionary in the Yoruba country. In 1859 a Yoruba news-sheet began to appear; in 1900 a complete translation of the Bible, initiated and, in part, carried out by Crowther, was published. Original Yoruba writing in both prose and verse dates from the 1920s, when literacy in Yoruba was spreading rapidly. The period 1945-60 produced the four very popular novels by D aniel Fagunwa, and since the 1950s there has been a steady flow of fiction, dram a, and verse. M ention should also be made of the Yoruba folk-opera, a genre primarily associated with religious festivals but one which readily lends itself to social criticism - e.g. in the satirical plays of H ubert Ogunde. The fertility of the Yoruba literary scene is matched by the keen critical interest taken by Yoruba scholars in both traditional and m odern writing. A lbert G erard (1981) speaks of a stupendous growth in what he calls ‘native scholarship’.
