Art historians like @moyokdg have talked about the mono-identification assigned to African arts, in spite of the variations in interpretations and appropriations that are organic in African Arts not only in terms of tribes but also in terms of the artists that curated the works
No singular interpretation and meaning and language can be assigned to African Arts....From #Timbuktu to #Casablanca, #Ife to #Kishasha... can be assigned to the stories of Africa...... Arts can be used to understand Africa but it has been used to distort the stories of Africa
This reminds us Deirdre La Pin's 'Tale and Trickster in Yoruba Verbal Art'. Deirdre with deep reflections on Aristotle’s and other western ideations, points out how identical acts accrue different meanings when they are performed by characters with unlike motives
By using Ibadan storytellers as a prototype for the different variants of storytelling among the Yoruba, Deirdre identifies four distinct modal types: alo (non-true), itan (true accounts), owe (parable or proverb), and aro (narrative wish).
Critically, Deirdre gleans through Yoruba narrative criticism within the frameworks of oral tales and storytelling particularly in the appropriations of tortoise’s (Ijapa) hero's innate qualities and conforming it to the design and the ethos of tales telling or storytelling (alo) 
tortoise is often praised as Alabahun (Miser), Ologbon-wewe (One Endowed with Piecemeal Wisdom), Olofofo (Scandalmonger), etc. His field of action is the alo, a fictional narrative mode that uses negative images of human conduct to inculcate social and moral truths.
Thus, tortoise and alo when combined give us a picture of a marginal man in a marginal world. It is common to paint a picture of deviance, of release from social control, and, finally, of danger to society and themselves.
As a fictional mode, alo creates an image- timeless, impersonal, philosophical-that reflects everyday human action by shaping it and commenting upon it. Designed to instruct young people as its dramas provide a foundation for teaching wisdom needed for social survival
Deirdre highlights the paradoxes and corollaries inherent in the appropriation of alo in storytelling within the frameworks of using falsehood to instill social justice and integrity in the society – a case of "is truth and falsehood twisted together
alo falls into the categories of falsehood yet its utility in correcting the ills of the society could not be denied. Same, with its acceptability by the storyteller and the audience.
As a performative art often attended with songs, ambiguity, imaginations and imageries; alo is a fiction and a genre of oral traditions of the Yoruba people.
Deirdre La Pin, Tale and Trickster in Yoruba Verbal Art, Research in African Literatures, Vol. 11, No. 3, Special Issue on Genre and Classification in African Folklore: Indiana University Press, (Autumn, 1980), pp. 327-341,
