Oral Literature in Africa (20 page)

These songs, involving the arts both of composition and of performance, are in fact usually soon forgotten after serving the purpose of the moment. Others, however, arise from more studied composition in preparation for the funeral. This is usually when the singer himself is deeply moved by the death or has some especially close link with the deceased. Here he creates a new song. He must consider and weigh up both the suitable melodic
patterns and also the words and names to go with them. The process takes time and concentration, but the tune itself sometimes comes to the singer at an inspired moment. After some trials on his lyre, he then, on the actual occasion, sings with so much intensity and meaning that large gifts are showered on him. Indeed the song may gain such favour that he is begged to sing it later by his fans—and, after the due deposit of a few coins on his plate, he agrees. By then ‘the song being freed from the solemnity of a funeral may rove from the fate of a particular individual to that of other people, and finally to the mystery of death itself’ (Anyumba 1964: 190).

If the
nyatiti
singer’s prime function is that of the lament, his art also extends to other spheres and occasions. He is called on to praise friends or relatives, to recount his personal experiences, to exalt kindness, hospitality, or courage, and to comment on current affairs. In all these he is judged by the degree to which he can unite the art of the musician/performer and that of the poet/composer; he is ‘judged as much by his skill on the instrument as by his ability to weave a story or meditate on human experience. In this lies the real fascination of the
nyatiti
player’ (Anyumba 1964: 187–8).

This account of the
nyatiti
singer illustrates the kind of role which the part-time poet/musician can play in a non-literate society. His art is practised partly to fulfil social obligations and to share in ceremonies which are also open to others, but also partly for direct material reward. Some of his performances arise out of the ceremonial occasion itself, with his audience directly involved in the occasion; but others, particularly those by the most skilled singers, are specifically given at the request of admirers who patronize him and reward his performance. Finally, there are some occasions (and for some singers these may be in the majority) when the song produced is uninspired and stale, in spite of cleverly introduced modifications; while on other occasions the song is the product, and recognized as such, of the truly creative imagination of the singer.

The position of the poet in many other African societies is unfortunately not often described in even the detail given in Anyumba’s short article.
¹⁸
But it seems that the position and conditions of many of the more expert (but non-professional) poets are not unlike those of the Luo
nyatiti
singer. We frequently meet the same kind of balance between the social and the profit motive, the more and the less specifically ‘artistic’ occasion, the greater and lesser personal inspiration of the poet.

Other African poets, however, have less general recognition than Luo singers. But there are still many specific occasions when they can exhibit their poetic skills. One frequent context is at meetings of the specialized associations characteristic of many parts of West Africa. The Yoruba, Akan, and others have hunters’ societies each with their own special hunting songs. These are performed on festive occasions, at funerals of members of the group, and at other meetings of the association. The poets are there in their capacity as hunters, but one aspect of their craft, for some members at least, is skill in poetic composition and performance. These very part-time poets, then, are patronized by fellow-hunters and also at times by the public at large, as when the Yoruba
ijala
poet is especially invited to perform as a general entertainer on non-hunting occasions. Similar connections between specialist association and a specific genre of poetry exist among the Akan military associations, cults of particular deities among the Yoruba and others, secret societies, local churches, and some of the more formally organized cooperative work groups. In all these cases the primary context is that of the association, and the poet is fulfilling his social obligations as a member (though he may acquire a material profit in addition); special performances to wider audiences or for more direct reward seem to be secondary and in many cases not to occur at all.

The various crucial points in the human life cycle also provide contexts for festivity and thus for artistic performance. Occasions such as initiations, weddings, or funerals provide fertile stimuli for poetic exhibition. Here again the range is wide—from occasions when those most intimately involved sing just as part of their general social obligations in the ceremony, to special appearances of famous artists or bands. Even within one society, different rituals may have different degrees of expertise considered appropriate to them. A good example of this can be seen in the contrast between the initiation ceremonies of boys and of girls among the Limba. An important part of the boys’ ceremony consists of the all-night session during which the boys must demonstrate their skill and endurance in the dance before hundreds of interested spectators. A number of singer-drummers must be present. Therefore the best (part-time) artists in the boys’ village or group of villages are called on to attend and are booked several weeks in advance. They receive numerous small monetary gifts during their performance, and the amount earned, when all the several contributions from the boys’ relatives and the audience are counted up, may come to as much as a fifth or quarter of the average labourer’s wage for a month. By contrast the girls’ ceremony is a less celebrated affair. The singers are merely those who are
in any case directly involved in the occasion, with no special reward due to them for their songs. Other Limba occasions provide yet another contrast. In their large-scale memorial rituals the most famous singers in the whole chiefdom area or beyond are begged to come to display their specialist art; they usually have no direct relationship to the principals in the ceremony—or if they have this is irrelevant—but take time off from their everyday pursuits to attend as specialists in return for the very large gifts their hosts undertake to provide.

In some areas weddings are occasions for much singing and dancing, sometimes by those directly involved, sometimes by especially invited expert teams. Thus Hausa weddings, elaborate and complex affairs, require the presence of specialist
maroka
teams. These are independent and unattached bands who gain their livelihood partly from their craft and partly from subsistence farming (Smith 1957: 30–31, 32). They attend weddings largely for profit, and they are the principal beneficiaries of the costly gifts that are made publicly on these occasions.

The kind of performance that can take place at funerals—another common context for poetry—has already been illustrated from the case of the Luo lament singer. A rather different type is provided by the Akan dirge singers. Every Akan woman is expected to have some competence in the dirge, and though some singers are considered more accomplished than others, nevertheless every woman mourner at a funeral is expected to sing—or run the risk of strong criticism, possibly even suspicion of complicity in the death (Nketia 1955: 18). Thus they perform as part of their general social responsibilities and their audiences hear and admire their performances as one aspect of the funeral rituals which they are attending, rather than as a specialist aesthetic occasion which demands direct recompense to the artist. Yet that even this relatively low degree of specialization can result in elaborate literary compositions, valued alike for their aesthetic merits and their social functions, should be clear from the detailed account of these dirges given by Nketia 1955 (summarized in Chapter 6).

Besides such occasional poetry at the crucial points in the life cycle, there are other contexts in which the element of entertainment is foremost. Sometimes these actually hinge on organized competitions by poets, as used to be the case in several areas of East Africa. In Tanganyika, for instance, two singers of the same type of song, each leading his own group of members, sometimes decide to compete on an agreed day. In the interval they teach their followers new songs of their own composition. Then on
the day the two groups sing in turn at a little distance from each other. The victor is the singer who draws the greatest number of spectators to his side. Sometimes these competitions are arranged by the Sultan who also acts as umpire between the two insulting sides—for insults are also in order, and as each side has taken the trouble to find out their opponents’ songs in advance, they have prepared suitably sarcastic replies to them (Koritschoner 1937: 57–59).
¹⁹
In other types of entertainment, the element of competition is absent and the emphasis is on the skill and expertise with which the artists make their specialized contribution to the occasion. At social gatherings among the Ila and Tonga of Zambia, for instance, a woman who is skilled in the special type of solo termed
impango
stands up and sings from her own personal repertoire. If she has close friends or relatives present, they too stand up to praise her song and present her with small gifts like tobacco or a sixpence (Jones 1943: 11). Some of the West African entertainments draw on more complex teams, with singer, drummers, and sometimes wind-instruments—like the Hausa teams who sometimes play for the young peoples’ recreational associations (Evans-Pritchard 1940: 46 ff; Lienhardt 1961: 13, 18f), or the Akan popular bands who perform for pure entertainment, often for dancing in the evenings. Their purpose is social and recreational, but they make some economic profit from their performances (Nketia 1963
b
: 157).

This discussion of the various occasions and forms of poetry finally brings us to the times when there is practically no degree of specialization at all. This is particularly true of certain general categories of song in any society—in work songs,
²⁰
children’s verse, lullabies, or the chorus parts of antiphonal songs. There are also the times when every member of a society (or every member who falls into a certain category) is expected to have some competence in certain types of verse. Sotho boys, for instance, were all required to demonstrate proficiency in praise poetry as part of their initiation ceremonies, and had to declaim the praises of their own achievements and expectations before the crowd gathered to welcome them after their seclusion (although even there the common African practice of
balancing soloist and chorus gives scope for a certain degree of expertise by the leader); among some of the Zambian peoples a young man had to sing a song of his own composition on the occasion of his marriage (Laydevant 1930: 524). Not all contexts are as formal as this. We hear of the Nuer youth leading his favourite ox round the kraal in the evenings, in pride and joy, leaping before it and singing its praises, or, again, of young Nuer or Dinka boys chanting their songs in the lonely pastures (Evans-Pritchard 1940: 46ff; Lienhardt 1961: 13, 18ff) the lullabies which mothers in numberless societies sing to their babies; the spontaneous outburst of song over a pot of palm wine or millet beer in a Ghanaian village; the lyrics sung by Somali lorry drivers to shorten the tedium of their long journeys (Andrzejewski 1967: 12) or the ability of the Congolese Mabale, or Rhodesian Shona, or West African Limba, or countless others to join in the choruses of songs led by their more expert fellows. In all these cases poetic facility has become no longer a specialist activity, but one which in some degree or other all individuals in the society are expected to have as a universal skill.

It would clearly be impossible to relate all the occasions and audiences that there are for poetry, or all the roles that can be played by the African poet. But enough has been said to show that it is not only in societies in which there is courtly, aristocratic, or religious patronage, or marked cleavages of wealth or power, that the poet finds opportunity to exercise his skills. There are many egalitarian societies too, often those with little specialism in any sphere of life, in which nevertheless poetry can flourish—like the Ibo, the Somali, the Nilotic peoples of the Sudan, and many others. It is true that it does seem to be in court poetry, and occasionally in religious poetry, that we find the highest degree of specialism, and the longest and, in a sense, most intellectual poems. But they do not necessarily reflect a more sensitive understanding of language and of experience than, say, a Dinka youth’s praise of his ox, which to him represents both his own role and ‘the whole world of beauty around him’ (Deng in Lienhardt 1963: 828) a lyric to accompany the dance, or the lullaby in which an Akan mother verbalizes her joy in her child in the world she knows:

Someone would like to have you for her child

But you are my own.

Someone wished she had you to nurse you on a good mat;

Someone wished you were hers: she would put you on a camel blanket;

But I have you to rear you on a torn mat.

Someone wished she had you, but I have you

(Nketia 1958
b
: 18)

V

We have assumed that there is a conjunction, characteristic of oral poetry, between the performer and the composer. It is often futile, therefore, to ask about the circulation of a
particular
piece—those who ‘circulate’ it are themselves poets of a kind and make their contributions and modifications. It may be that many of them are not particularly good or original poets even in terms of their own culture, and make more of a contribution to the performance than to the composition. But the fact remains that this too is an essential part of the poetic skill of the oral practitioner, and that poems cannot reach their public without the interposition of such artists.

There are, however, a few exceptions to the joint role of the poet which should be mentioned in conclusion. In some of the most highly specialized or technically complex poetry—Rwanda dynastic poetry, Yoruba Ifa literature, or Somali
gabay
—reciters may be distinguished from creative poets: the former are responsible for transmitting the poems of others, and for preserving the authoritative tradition for political or religious motives. Thus even if in fact the reciter does modify a poem, this aspect is played down and the poem is supposed to be merely transmitted by reciters in the traditional form. Thus certain poems may circulate in their own right, sometimes even with named authors (as in Ruanda or Somaliland).