A stylistic study of Igbo folktales in musical rendition

Abstract

Folktales form part of the Igbo oral tradition. They are meant for teaching and entertainment. This study sets out to examine some stylistic use of language in the trickster folktale Mbe na Enyi (The Tortoise and the Elephant), which was rendered into music by the minstrel, Gentleman Mike Ejeagha. The purpose is to bring to the fore the artiste’s creativity to show that the language of folktales derives from every day speech of human life. The whole story was transcribed from Ejeagha’s recorded CD containing different Igbo folktales. The transcription constituted the data from which excerpts were extracted to illustrate stylistic devices like personification, iteration, repetition, proverb, onomatopoeia, sarcasm, enumeration, sound symbolism and ‘character contrast’, among others. Our findings show that Gentleman Mike Ejeagha employed Igbo language use to showcase the richness and closeness of folkloric language to speech in daily life. Similarly, he creatively weaved the stylistic devices into the folktale to achieve maximal stylistic effect; and importantly, to show how animal activities are personified to teach and entertain mostly children and the youth. Seeing that the folktale Mbe na Enyi has been revitalized and popularized through music, the researchers, therefore, suggest that minstrels should endeavour to render folktales and possibly other oral genres, into music to make them accessible and interesting to the modern Igbo and non-Igbo alike.