Oral Literature in Africa (18 page)

A court poet was known as
umusizi w’Umwami
(dynastic poet of the king). This category included a number of poets, both those with the inspiration and skill to compose original works, and those (the bards) who confined themselves to learning and reciting the compositions of others. The court poets have always had their own association—the
Umutwe w’Abasizi
, ‘band of dynastic poets’—comprising those families officially recognized as poetic. The office of president of this band, the
Intebe y’Abasizi
, was previously restricted to a member of the clan that was first traditionally associated with the profession of poet. More recently the president has been the most conspicuous of the royal poets, a role that has tended over the last few generations to become a hereditary one. The president had the responsibility of organizing the poetry officially needed by the royal court for any particular occasion, including both ceremonial affairs and discussions on points of tradition. This he was in a position to do because of the attachment of a number of official poets to the court. Each of the recognized families of the poetic association had to be permanently represented there, if not by a creative poet, at least by a bard capable of reciting the poems particularly known by that group. In the reign of Yuhi V Musinga, for example, there were nine royal poets holding such official positions, each on duty for a month. In addition there were a number of unofficial bards, also members of poetic families, who gathered in large numbers around the court and could be called on if necessary.

Both the poets themselves and the recognized poetic families had a privileged position in Rwanda society. They held hereditary rights like exemption from the jurisdiction of the civil chiefs and from certain servile duties. This applied even to ordinary bards and individual amateurs—so long as they were able to recite certain poems by heart, they were automatically regarded as direct servants of the crown. The exact economic position of the official court poets is not fully described; but the presentation of a poem to the king normally earned the gift of a cow—perhaps more—and in a society in which economic, social, even political worth was measured in terms of cattle, this was no mean reward.

The poems themselves were exceedingly elaborate and sophisticated, with a specialized mode of expression mastered only by the corporation of poets and the intelligentsia of the society. The style was full of archaisms, obscure language, and highly figurative forms of expression.
⁶
The sort of sentiments and phraseology involved, elevating the king as the centre and ideal of Rwanda society, can be glimpsed from a few lines extracted from a long dynastic praise poem of the
impakanizi
genre:

Il me vient a l’esprit une autre parole du Roi,

Lui Source intarissable, fils de la Souveraine,

Je me suis rappelé que ce Refuge devait introniser un Roi,

Leguel deviendrait l’objet de mes hommages dès qu’investi.

Il n’y a pas d’époque où le Rwanda n’éprouve des perplexités,

O Artisan-des-lances, souche du Chef des Armées:

Personne ne jugera à l’encontre de ta décision.

En ce jour-là des préparatifs minutieux,

O Empoigneur-d’arc, descendance du Svelte,

Ta marche a brûlé les étapes accoutumées.

Un conflit armé dans le palais même s’était déclanché,

L’Irréprochable seul luttant en personne,

Nous, hommes, la terre faillit nous engloutir vivants.

(Kagame 1951
b
: 117–8)

The poems are clearly the conscious product of a learned and specialist intellectual tradition.

The skilled and separate nature of this poetry is further evident from the existence of specialist training, particularly in the skill of recitation. Among the Rwanda, somewhat unusually, part of the production of their oral literature was through memorization of received versions of the poems, and the attribution of personal authorship was the rule rather than the exception. The praise poems were often repeated by bards with little change from one occasion to the next, and there seems to have been a conscious effort to preserve the exact words of the text. From an early age, children of the recognized poetic families had to learn poems by heart. Though this took place within the family, at first at least, it was under the general supervision of the president of the association of poets who was ultimately responsible. Local representatives of the president called frequent gatherings in the open air at which the youths of the privileged poets’ families exhibited their art in recitation. Those who showed themselves to good advantage were given a reward by their family, perhaps even a cow as ‘récompense
de félicitation’: In this way future court poets and reciters underwent a long and rigorous apprenticeship, one necessary both for the mastery of the actual poems already extant and for acquiring the vocabulary, imagery, and subject-matter which formed the traditional basis of any future composition.

In Ruanda then we see the development of a strikingly specialized class of court poetry, one designed not for everyday recitation to the people at large, but for performance among other members of this specialist group, and, above all, for the king himself. The royal court was the centre of patronage—in fact in most important genres of Rwanda poetry the court held a near monopoly—and the Rwanda assumed it to be basic to the production of specialist poetry, being both its central stimulus and its most valued context.

Clearly not all African court poetry took so highly specialized and restricted a form. But it can serve as an extreme instance of one important type of patronage for the poet in traditional Africa. It must be added, however, that this particular patronage—the royal court—is in many areas increasingly a thing of the past. This is not because of any decline of interest in poetry or in praise, for both continue to flourish in different contexts and with new patrons. Praise poems crop up as flattery of political leaders or party candidates, and can be heard on the radio or at political meetings; they can be seen in written form in newspapers; and they even appear under the auspices of commercial recording companies. But often the older royal courts with their official retinues and monopoly of the most highly professionalized poetry have become less attractive as political and economic centres, and many of the traditional court poets have either abandoned their art or turned to other more lucrative patrons.

II

Unlike court patronage, religious patronage in Africa is relatively limited. Islam, it is true, has in certain areas played a potent role in the stimulation of verse on religious and historical topics. But this has not been through the direct patronage of an organized church so much as through the historical association of Islam with Arabic culture in general, so that Islamic scholars were also sometimes engaged in the transmission within their own societies of local compositions based on Arabic models.
⁷
These
were primarily designed for the academic few, qualified by learning to produce or appreciate such pieces, and were often written down, though wider dissemination in other spheres of society sometimes took place orally. Among such peoples as the Swahili, Fulani, or Hausa it appears that such composers held honoured positions (and presumably also economic resources) primarily because of their Koranic learning, their association with royal courts, or, in some cases their noble birth.
⁸

Ethiopia is one important exception. Here there is a long history of patronage of the arts by the Coptic Christian Church. This includes a vast amount of literature which, being in every sense a written one, falls outside the scope of this book. There was also, however, a certain amount of oral ecclesiastical poetry by the
dabteras
or professional religious poets. Besides long written poems their work also included oral compositions like extemporized hymns at church festivals and similar occasions. Their most famous product was the
qene
, a short witty poem, highly artificial, of which there were said to be at least ten different types. These were marked by great obscurity of style, extreme condensation, delight in the use of puns, and an abundance of metaphors and religious allusions. In keeping with their highly specialized nature the
qene
demanded prolonged intellectual training for their mastery, and we hear of schools of rhetoric designed to train poets in the art of
qene
composition. We may also suppose that their audiences were correspondingly restricted. Indeed it seems to be the other important class of professional Ethiopian poets, the non-religious
azmaris
, who were found among all classes of society and thus reached wider audiences (Chadwicks iii 1940: 524 ff) while the
dabteras
preserved their specialist and intellectual type of versification.

More recently, Christian missions have made their contribution to the encouragement of oral literature. As yet, this seems mainly to be of the more or less extempore type—a worshipper declaiming or leading the singing in the course of a service—and has probably not produced any highly specialized poets.
⁹
But much more may yet come of this type of religious patronage, and it is possible that this might be one of the growing points in the further development of oral literature in Africa.

Apart from the patronage of these larger religious movements, we also find poetry evoked by more localized cults. This is particularly marked in the non-Islamic parts of West Africa where there are specialized cults to the deities of the various West African pantheons. Priests of some of the gods among, say, the Yoruba of Nigeria or Fon of Dahomey seem to be fully professional, sometimes to have undergone many years of training. This is true in particular of the priests of Ifa (described in Chapter 7) who spend at least three years as apprentices learning the lengthy verses and stories pertaining to this oracle-god. The gods each have their own lengthy and allusive praises which must be mastered by their priests, who are, it seems, responsible for both their recitation and, ultimately, their composition. Such professional priests receive direct or indirect recompense in virtue of their religious office and in this way have a certain amount of leisure to devote to the practice of poetry. However, fully professional priests are by no means the rule in these societies; they seem to be more typical of the highly organized and wealthy kingdoms, like those of the Akan, Fon, or Yoruba. But even in these areas priests are often only part-time experts who also rely on other means of subsistence. Their relationship to their public is more like that discussed in section iv below: they are experts who only appear on particular occasions when they display their art in return for direct reward.

In spite of some exceptions, one cannot really speak of religion as having the same outstanding connection with the arts in Africa as it has sometimes held elsewhere. In terms of specialization of the poet’s role or of the complexity of the verse itself, it does not seem to be anything like as important as royal and courtly patronage. The interpretation of poetry which connects it directly with the religious role of the seer would not, therefore, in its obvious sense at least, derive much support from the data on oral literature in Africa.

III

Another large category among oral poets in Africa is that of the freelance specialist, a poet who moves from place to place according to where he can find a wealthy patron or audience prepared to reward him in return for his poems. This type of poet may shade into the official court poet, but even if he spends a certain amount of time at the courts he does not hold an official and exclusive position. He relies on occasional rather than permanent employment.
Such independent professional poets are particularly common in West Africa, the coastal areas of East Africa, and Ethiopia, where both the degree of specialization and the existence of relatively large quantities of movable wealth from which poets can be subsidized make it feasible for them to gain a livelihood in this manner. The existence of court poets may actually facilitate the development of this type of freelance professional tradition. Court poetry is what local chieflets or wealthy commoners would like to hear declaimed around them; and many of those wondering singers and poets have found lucrative patrons in men who wish to hear addressed to themselves some semblance of the praises ultimately due to the rulers. It is not surprising then to find frequent instances of the coexistence in one society of both official poets at courts, and roving poets in other spheres of the kingdom. This is true, for instance, of the Hausa roaming singers, the counterparts of the royal praise bands already mentioned. Among the Nzakara of the Sudan the trained professional poet, a singer accompanying his words on the harp, gains his livelihood either at the court of the prince or, alternatively, by moving from village to village, ready to vilify a chief who does not entertain him up to the standard of his expectations, or singing the glorious ancestry of one who does de Dampierre 1963: 17). Such singers can exploit the hierarchy of political power without an official permanent attachment to any one individual.