The overwhelming use of the oral mode in the African cultural expressiveness earned the continent the attribute of being the “oral continent par excellence” (Irele and Gikandi 2004). Although there had been some “literacy traditions”, in the form of epigraphs (“text artefacts”) and sacred inscriptions (hieroglyphs), Ge’ez, Tifnag (Touareg), etc, the tradition of a formal skill and practice of writing in Sudanic Africa (south of the Sahara) is to be ultimately attributed to Islam through Arabic. The Yoruba (southwest Nigeria) came in contact with Islam in the 16th C, and their earliest documented history which was traceable to the 17thC was in Yoruba language using the Arabic characters (Ade Ajayi 2006). The modified form of the Arabic script for all languages whose speakers have come in contact with Islam is generally known as Ajami, and the tradition is widely cultivated in many African languages, (Cf. Ngom 2006; Mumin and Versteegh 2014).
Vernacular, oral/literate Islamic verse (waka) had its roots in the Fulfulde/Hausa Islamic proselytism and didacticism of the Usman Dan Fodio 18th/19th century Jihad tradition, and it was this that the Yoruba took as a model. The oldest, extant Yoruba Islamic verse in writing is to be attributed to one Badamasi b. Musa Agbaji (d. circa 1891) (Hunwick 1995; Reichmuth 1998). The surviving fragmentary bequest of Agbaji (some now salvaged in aural/and or digitized form) indicate the creativity of native poets under the Islamic dispensation, in creating new prosodic meters, themes, and rhyming patterns. Thus literate Yoruba Islamic waka came to be used in the treatment of history, social narratives, political pamphleteering, and economic promotion, in addition to religious and moral subjects which had hitherto been its traditional themes. My presentation, using a rare exemplar from the repertoire of Agbaji, will examine the peculiarities of this new medium of generating and enhancing the narratives on African knowledge and epistemology in both the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’.