THE VOICE OF THE WOMAN IN THE WILDNESS OF INEQUALITY FROM YORUBA CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE AND THEOLOGICAL REELECTIONS ALLEN OLATUNDE 1. INTRODUCTION Every community is blessed with women for maternal increase and societal social development. However, the marginal lines of operations in some communities that are governed by cultures and religions have created an ugly threat on the humanity of women and visible oppression of their rights. The motive of this paper is to review the position of the culture on the muteness of women for their rights and gender oppression. Inequality of gender and bias in communal roles met on wives and women have caused generational muteness on the girl child in Africa - Yoruba Nation as a case. The Yoruba people predominantly belong to the Oyo, Ogun, Ondo, Osun, Ekiti and Lagos States. 1 The Yoruba constitute one of the major ethnic and cultural groups in South West Nigeria, West Africa. The Yoruba are dispersed throughout the world as they are found in sizeable populations in the Republic of Benin, Togo, Ivory Coast and Ghana in West Africa. Each of the Yoruba cultural groups in the Diaspora still traces their ancestral roots to Oduduwa in Ile-Ife, South West Nigeria. 2 Yoruba people live in communities and women take major roles of keeping it alive in terms of procreation, farming and home making. Adagbada also notes that many African women have excelled in various fields, their portraits in most Yoruba written literary genres are still that of the 'weaker vessels', 'weaker sex', 'beings who are of lesser 1 Awolalu, J. O. and Dopamu, P. A. West African Traditional Religion, Ibadan: Onibonoje Press and Books Limited, 2004. 2 Balogun, Oladele Abiodun. Proverbial Oppression of Women in Yoruba African Culture: A Philosophical Overview. Thought and Practice: A Journal of the Philosophical Association of Kenya (PAK) Department of Philosophy, New Series, Vol.2 No.1, June 2010, pp.22.