The Trickster Figure in Yoruba Oral Literature and West African Fiction

The trickster is one of the most widespread and theoretically rich archetypes in world oral literature, and its specific manifestations in Yoruba oral tradition and their literary descendants in West African written fiction offer productive material for undergraduate study in Comparative Literature. This study examined the trickster figure as it appears in Yoruba oral narratives featuring Eshu-Elegba and traces its evolution in the fiction of writers including Amos Tutuola, Simi Bedford, and D.O. Fagunwa. A mythocritical comparative methodology drawing on archetype theory, Yoruba oral literary scholarship, and West African narrative theory was applied. Eshu-Elegba, the divine trickster and messenger of the Yoruba pantheon, embodies contradiction: he is both the opener of roads and the source of mischief, both a divine servant and an agent of chaos. The study examined how this cosmological ambiguity translates into the fictional worlds of West African prose narratives, where trickster logic disrupts both colonial rationalism and the authority of traditional hierarchies. The analysis showed that the trickster's function in Yoruba oral literature is primarily cosmological and ritual, while in written fiction the trickster's subversive energy is redirected toward social satire and narrative formal experimentation. The study recommends this pairing of oral and written trickster texts as a culturally grounded entry point for comparative mythology in Nigerian Comparative Literature programmes, particularly at universities in the South West geopolitical zone.

Keywords: trickster, Yoruba oral literature, West African fiction, mythology, Eshu-Elegba