Description
The Rare Leaf: Yoruba Legends and Love Stories by Olabode Ogunlana is a hardback edition combining the two paperback editionsThe Quest for the Rare Leaf and Yoruba Love Stories. OlabodeOgunlana was brought up to value Yoruba indigenous culture, its language and its oral storytelling traditions at a time when they were undervalued in Nigeria. After a long and successful career in insurance, Ogunlana set out to share these traditions. This volume contains five traditional legends and six other more recent stories, together with five love stories set in 20th Century Nigeria.
He tells the traditional stories with an ear to the nuances of the language and he brings to life a world of noble farmers, women warriors and over-reaching kings checked by their subjects. The context of the love stories is Nigerian but the situations, the minor tragedies, the struggles and the power, joy and satisfaction of true love are universal themes. Love usually wins but Ogunlana’s vividly drawn characters suffer from separation, mistaken identity, ethnic conflict, self-doubt and jealousy.The lovers meet at school study overseas, and set up businesses. They are stories with a moral basis informed by faith and hark back to the traditions of Yoruba gods. In reality these stories could be set anywhere in Africa.
YEAR OF PUBLICATION April 2014
SIZE 234 x 156 mm
FORMAT Hard-Back
ISBN 978-0-9926863-6-9
PUBLISHERS Books of Africa
