Oral Literature in Africa (30 page)

Footnotes

1
   I know of only two analyses in any detail, (Nketia 1955 and Anyumba 1964) though there are many brief accounts and passing references.

2
   It is not mentioned, for instance, in Bascom’s bibliographic survey of African oral literature, 1964.

3
   Further references to elegiac poetry include Anyumba 1964 (Luo); Beaton 1935–6 (Bari); Tescaroli 1961, part 2 (Sudan); Gutmann 1927; Stappers 1950; Hulstaert 1961; Littmann 1949. See also Moore 1968 (mainly but not exclusively on written forms).

4
   In addition to the dirges described here the Akan also have choral laments sung by groups of women in solo and chorus form (not discussed here).

5
   Salt in the past was a very precious and scarce commodity.

6
   Many other examples of such conventional collocations are given in Nketia as part of his detailed picture of linguistic conventions in dirges (Nketia 1955: 86–93).

7.  Religious Poetry

Introductory. Didactic and narrative religious poetry and the Islamic tradition; the Swahili
tenzi.
Hymns, prayers, and incantations: general survey; the Fante Methodist lyric. Mantic poetry: Sotho divining praises;
odu
Ifa (Yoruba)
.

There is a great variety of religious poetry in Africa. There are hymns, prayers, praises, possession songs, and oracular poetry, all with their varying conventions, content, and function in different cultures. They range from the simple one- or two-line songs of Senegalese women in spirit possession rituals
¹
or the mystical songs of Southern Rhodesia with their many nonsense words (Tracey 1929: 99). to the specialized hymns to West African deities or the elaborate corpus of Ifa oracular literature which is so striking a phenomenon among the Yoruba of Southern Nigeria. We should also take account of the prevalence in certain areas of the religious literature associated with the influence of the world religions in Africa. There is the Arabic-influenced poetry of the Swahili in East Africa and of Islamized peoples such as the Fulani or Hausa in the northern portions of West Africa; the ecclesiastical poetry, associated with the Coptic Church, of the
dabteras
of Ethiopia; and, from less ancient origins, hymns and lyrics arising from the recent impact of Christian missions in many parts of the continent.
²
In these cases it is common for a written tradition of religious literature to coexist, and to some extent overlap, with an oral tradition.
³

There are three main ways in which poetry can be regarded as being religious. Firstly, the content may be religious, as in verse about mythical actions of gods or direct religious instruction or invocation. Secondly, the
poetry may be recited by those who are regarded as religious specialists. Thirdly, it may be performed on occasions which are generally agreed to be religious ones. These three criteria do not always coincide. Hymns, for example, may have definite religious content and be sung on religious occasions, but they may or may not be performed by religious experts; oracular poetry may be recited by priests (as in Yoruba divination) but neither the content nor the occasion be markedly religious; and didactic verse, like that of the Swahili, may have a theological content and be recited by specialists but not, it seems, be performed on particularly religious occasions. I do not want to propose any strict definition of religion here; the reader may exclude any examples that seem to him to be only marginally religious or include certain types of poetry such as ‘lyric’ or ‘dirges’ that have been treated in other chapters. However, I am not including here poetry that is religious
only
in the sense that it is performed on ‘ritual’ occasions such as the ceremonies to do with initiation,
⁴
marriage, or death.
⁵

Figure 13. Limba girls’ initiation: ‘Coming Out’. The young girls line up with whitened faces to show off their new singing and dancing skills; all spectators join in the choruses. Biriwa, Sierra Leone, 1961 (photo Ruth Finnegan).

I

Though didactic and narrative elements are sometimes found in a rudimentary form in the invocations and divination literature that will be discussed later, they do not typically appear in Africa as developed poetic forms. ‘Myths’ tend to appear in prose rather than verse
⁶
and the songs embedded in them are not usually independent enough to count as narrative religious poems in themselves. Histories sometimes appear in verse with certain religious overtones—as, for instance, the Akan drum history quoted in Chapter 17—and praise and elegy for dead ancestors may in a sense be both religious and narrative; but the religious aspect does seem to be somewhat secondary in terms of content, occasion, and performer. The same is true for the poems associated with initiation and other rituals—when these are religious in content they are more concerned with invocation or praise than any explicitly didactic interest.

Islamic verse is the exception. In the areas where Arabic models have been influential through the tradition of Islam, religious poetry, often in written form, occurs with a pronounced homiletic and sometimes narrative emphasis. Such religious poetry occurs, for instance, among the Hausa and others in West Africa. Although written in the local language, it is often directly influenced by the Arabic models and contains many Arabic words and sentiments.
⁷
These poems typically open with some such invocation as

In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful; and may the peace of God be upon him after whom there is no prophet

and continue in a didactic fashion about, for example, the deceitfulness of this life, Heaven, Hell, pilgrimage to Mecca, exhortations to follow Mohammed, or prayers for divine assistance. This religious literature is a specialist form, often with named authors learned in Islam, and for its composition and propagation it relies primarily on the written word. Nevertheless, it is not totally divorced from the oral tradition, and there are instances of these religious poems being transmitted both orally and
through writing; it is not always clear how they began. An example is ‘The song of Bagauda’. This is a long Hausa poem said to be of great antiquity which runs to over twenty pages in the Hausa text. It includes a prelude (doxology and eulogy of Mohammed), a list of Hausa kings, and a long homily on the frailty of this world, expressed in a form typical of Islamic tradition with eschatological material from the Koran and the conventional stock of images; it closes with rulings on points of Muslim law. The whole is set in a free form of a classical Arabic metre and rhyme system (
qasida
form,
wafir
metre and rhyme throughout in
zva
)
. In spite of its length and form, this primarily religious poem seems to have flourished in both oral and literate forms. Hiskett, its recent editor, was able to collect a text from an old Hausa woman and reports that it is also sung by beggars.
⁸

The same sort of phenomenon appears in Swahili in East Africa. Here too there is a strong written tradition which includes religious poetry. It can be traced directly to Arabic models.
⁹
This literary tradition goes back something like three hundred years and was a medium of expression which had its origin in the Muslim religion, although it was later used for secular verse. Both Islam and the Arabian models used for its expression may have had their origin outside the area: but the tradition came to be a national Swahili one, influenced and moulded by the genius of the Swahili language and culture. ‘Verse composition after the Arabian pattern involved the question of pride in Swahili origins; it revealed knowledge of Arabian life and of Islam, a sure guarantee for the highest prestige among the Swahili people’ (Harries 1962: 2).

There are many different types of Swahili verse, but they can roughly be divided into the shorter lyric forms and the much longer didactic or narrative poems called
tenzi
(
sing. utenzi;
northern dialect
tendi/utendi
)
. The first form is closely related to oral traditions and appears sometimes in written, sometimes in oral form: it is ‘not easy to classify definitely into “literary” and “popular” sections’ (Werner 1917–20: 119). The
tenzi,
however,
depend much more on a written form; sometimes indeed they are said to be written as much for the eye as for the ear, and there seems to be less of an overlap between the written and oral forms of such Swahili poems than with the corresponding forms in Hausa. Nevertheless, though in the first instance the
tenzi
were written, they were designed for public performance; they were chanted aloud, sometimes by the composer himself, to musical accompaniment (Harries 1962: 24). And it seems clear that the existence of such a wide-spread and valued tradition must have had a profound effect on the whole Swahili literary tradition, oral as well as written.
¹⁰

Swahili
tenzi
¹¹
are long religious poems containing either homiletic material or a narrative treatment of the deeds of Muslim heroes, including the deeds of war. More recently other secular material has also been included, but the main emphasis is still strongly Islamic. The poems are marked by deep religious inspiration, and the conventional opening, whatever the subject, is a praise of God and his prophet. The narratives are based, more or less closely, on Arabian traditions; however, the models do not seem to have been followed exactly, and in the case of
tenzi
based on the general prose accounts of events relating to the Prophet, the poets were free to treat this material as they wished. To mention just a few, such narrative
tenzi
include accounts of the deeds of Job, Miqdad, or Joseph, a dispute between Moses and Mohammed as to which is the greater, the ‘epic of Heraclios’ depicting the legend of a Holy War against the Byzantine Christians, and a popular version of the death of the Prophet.

A typical example of the way in which a religious tone pervades the narrative can be seen in the
Utendi wa Ras al- Ghuli,
the story of Ras al-ghul. This deals with the adventures of the Prophet’s Companions when they were avenging a Muslim woman whose children had been killed by a pagan king. The events are set in Arabia and the poem opens in characteristic form with praise of God and a description of the copyist’s materials and methods. It continues:

Take down the beginning of the story / One day, we understand, / there appeared the Beloved / Our Prophet the Bringer of News.

At his coming forth, the Trusted One / went to the mosque / there inside the building / at the time of dawn.

After he had arrived / He called for Bilali / He called for him to call the people to prayer quickly / for the time had come.

And Bilali called them to prayer / sending out the cry / and the people heard / from the elders to the children.

And the Companions met together / all of them together / both Ali and Othman / as well as Shaikh Umar.

The leading Helpers / they were all present / with no one absent / and so Abu Bakr was there also.

When all had arrived / the Prophet came forward / to lead the people in prayer / with a high voice.

After they had prayed / giving thanks to the Glorious God / the Companions with Shaikh Ali / and the congregation of the Helpers.

They were inside the mosque / studying the holy books / when almost at once / they discerned a cloud of dust.

The Companions watched / and saw people coming / all riding camels / the number of them being ten.

They were coming in a hurry / and on arriving at the mosque / they proceeded to dismount / watering the camels.

And the leader of the party / a woman of distinction / giving greeting / and asking for the Prophet.

She spoke straightway / saying, Where is the Prophet / the Beloved of the Glorious God? / Show me without delay.

She said, Where is the Prophet / the beloved of the Beloved / our Prophet Muhammad / who sets at nought the infidels?

Show me the Exalted One / the Prophet of the Bountiful God / I have come an oppressed person / that I may give him my news (Harries 1962: 29–31)

The woman gives a long account of her suffering, then the miraculous events of the story are recounted, ending with the victory of the Prophet and his friends over the pagans.

Popular epics of this kind were intended for public performance. They ‘were meant to amuse and elevate the uneducated masses who liked to see their religious, social, and political ideals realized in the history of former times’, and ‘occasionally it is still possible to find a
utendi
being intoned in public on the veranda of a house. Public recital ensured that at least the gist of the story would reach the ears of the ordinary man’ (Harries 1962: 27, 24).

The shorter homiletic
tenzi
were intended for a more limited audience and were often directed at younger members of the community as instruction in religious and social behaviour. The most famous of these is the seventy-nine-line
Inkishafi,
‘Revelation’, a poem composed in the early nineteenth century on the theme that all men must die, the glory of this world passes away, and we await judgement in the next world. The poet
meditates on the transitoriness of life and the danger of eternal damnation, and looks into his own heart—for the title really implies the revealing or uncovering of his own heart and soul. Another well-known didactic poem is
Utendi wa Mwana Kupona
, a mother’s instructions to her daughter about her wifely duties. Even such household instructions are permeated with religious sentiments:

Attend to me my daughter / unworthy as I am of God’s award / Heed my last instructions / for it may be that you will apply yourself to them.

Sickness has seized upon me / and has now lasted a whole year / I have not had a chance to utter / a word of good advice to you.

Come forward and set yourself / with ink and paper / I have matters at heart / that I have longed to tell you.