Oral Literature in Africa (39 page)

These
ijala
poems are far removed from simple and more direct hunting songs. The Yoruba hunter is expected to possess intellectual skills beyond those to do with the hunt and to sing of other topics than his own bravery. Yet these poems are locally classed as the poetry of hunters and ultimately are connected with the same root idea as in other hunting poems—the idea of hunting as a heroic and memorable activity.
¹⁹

This cursory discussion of hunting poetry will be concluded by a somewhat fuller account of the hunting songs (
cinengwe
)
of the Ambo of Zambia, which have been treated in some detail by Stefaniszyn (1951).

For the Ambo the hunter—and above all the elephant hunter—is traditionally surrounded with a halo of romance and hero-worship. Though there seem to be no associations of the West African type, nevertheless, hunters are experts and have their own rituals, feasts, and songs. The Ambo hunter seems to be typically a solitary practitioner, but in certain respects he is helped and guided by other members of the community and has obligations to them when he kills meat. He usually receives his gun—the mark of a hunter—from one of his mother’s relations in accordance with the matrilineal inheritance pattern of the Ambo, and, both after his acquisition of the gun and before certain of the hunts, private and joint rituals are carried out to ensure success. A hunter also has a special relationship with the spirit of one of his dead kinsmen, often his father, who guards and guides him as a hunter. The emotional relationship with his father is of a much more personal nature than the legal bond with his matrilineal kin and comes out in several of the hunting songs. The son praises his father’s exploits as a hunter and mourns his loss:

I had a father,

The wailing is great.

Father, it’s dawn …

I remember the great hunter.

They are bursting into tears …

I, a poor fellow, I shall wail,

I, who had been dividing the meat.

(Stefaniszyn 1951: 6)

Or, again, he sets out delighting in his gun. Then his thoughts are drawn back sorrowfully to when his father was alive—but he brings himself back to the present, to look at the tracks of his quarry:

How fine is my gun,

How fine is my gun,

Ah, when my father was alive.

I mourn for Siliyolomona,

But I must see the tracks.

(Stefaniszyn 1951: 6)

When an Ambo hunter is wandering alone and unsuccessful he sometimes sings to cheer himself up. But by far the most frequent occasions for performing the hunting chants are communal ones. The hunting chants are sung with other songs at ordinary beer parties. A hunter also joins with others in singing on the night before a hunt, and at the sacrificial beer for a successful hunt. A special ‘hunting feast’ may also be prepared by a hunter who has killed, say, four animals. He invites his friends and feeds them from the meat he has killed. After the meal the men sing about the hunt. They reminisce, for example, about how the game is being cut up or how a canoe is called for after a hippopotamus has been killed:

Chop it, chop it, chop it,

Do take it and chop it;

Do take it and chop it yourself.1

Chipishya, bring the boat,

Have you killed it, hunter?

Chipishya bring the boat,

Chipishya bring the boat,

Have you killed it, hunter?

(Ibid.: 4)

Stefaniszyn states that the hunting songs sung on these occasions are all traditional ones, and that no new songs are composed. They are all relatively short and fairly directly involved with the actual process of hunting and its consequences. In other words, Ambo hunting poetry does not seem to have developed into a complex and flexible branch of poetry that can be turned to many subjects and occasions in the way we have seen in some of the Akan or Yoruba ‘hunting poems’. Nor are there lengthy narratives. ‘This is lyrical poetry. There are no long descriptions of events, but a short recalling of events of rather sentimental value, always very realistic’. (Stefaniszyn 1951: 11–12)

Their artistic conventions come out partly in the mode of delivery. Though they are sung antiphonally, the melody is not of great importance
and the main tone is recitando with strongly marked rhythm. The accompaniment consists of percussion (gourd drums, rattles, and axe-blades struck against stones), and sometimes the hunter himself dances with a gun, horns, and animal trophies. There are also stylistic and verbal conventions. A special poetic vocabulary is used in the songs, including borrowed and perhaps archaic words. This poetic effectiveness is heightened by the frequent use of ideophones and of what Stefaniszyn refers to as ‘Homeric epithets’—praise terms like ‘The uprooter of
mwenge
trees’ (of an elephant) or ‘The pursuer of game …. The pursuer of tails’ (the hunter). The use of various types of parallelism is also common, compared by Stefaniszyn to that in the Hebrew psalms. This may involve more repetition or the type of development through parallelism exemplified by

Off he went to the veld,

Off he went to the veld, the great hunter.

(Stefaniszyn 1952: 11)

Parallelism is also used to lead up to a climax at the very end of the piece—a marked tendency in these poems:

Heavens, my heart is throbbing,

While I see them standing.

Heavens, my heart is throbbing,

While I see them standing,

While I see the game standing.

Nafwa mutima kubamba,

Pakusanga silimakene
.

Nafwa mutima kubamba

Pakusanga silimakene,

Pakusanga silimakene noma
.

(Ibid.: 10)

This song, expressing the hunter’s thrill at the sight of game, leads up to an effective climax when the final word ‘game’ (
nama
) ‘is at last uttered as if with awe’. (Stefaniszyn 1952: 10)

Besides the conventional forms of delivery and verbal expression there are also stock themes, all directly concerned with hunting. Several of these have been illustrated already: the triumph and excitement of a successful kill and its aftermath; family feelings, especially the emotions of pride and grief felt by a son for his father; and the thrill of pursuit. But the hardships and dangers of hunting are not forgotten, and these too are
common subjects. The Ambo hunter’s grim tenacity and perseverance in face of hardship are often extolled:

Let the hunter take out the thorn,

Let the hunter take out the thorn,

Then cursing and roving.

You love it, you will die of the thorn.

Off he went to the veld.

Off he went to the veld, the great hunter.

(Stefaniszyn 1951: 4)

Worse than physical hardship is the disappointment when the hunter is unsuccessful, and this too is a frequent theme in song:

I shall taste the mark of the game,

When I find them where they lie.

Abundant is the spoor of game,

But the game has slipped away—

It is gone.

(Idem)

and

We are tired of this bush;

There are no shadows in it,

There are no shadows in it, mind you,

There are no shadows of game. (Idem)

Success is sometimes tinged with jealousy when the hunter compares his own achievements with those of others. One song, for instance, describes the success of a hunter’s companions:

It’s boiling and boiling,

The hunters are cooking in a big pot.

It’s boiling and boiling,

The hunters are cooking in a big pot.

Truly it’s boiling hard,

I’ll kill two head to-morrow.

(Ibid.: 9)

These Ambo hunting songs are more simple and direct than, for example, some of those from West Africa. Yet like them they involve the glorification of the hunter, the expression of his hopes and fears, the activities of the chase, and reminiscence and reflection at a time removed from the actual hunt. They are most frequently performed on public occasions—for in hunting, as in war all members of the community, and not just the individual hero, are involved in both its results and its poetic distillation.
²⁰

III

Songs to accompany rhythmic work seem to occur universally in African societies. They are extreme examples of ‘special purpose’ poetry in that they have a direct connection with a specific occasion and with action itself, to an extent not found in most hunting and war chants. The sort of work that these songs accompany usually consists of routine tasks such as paddling, threshing, or hauling—which are not in themselves regarded as glorious or romantic. Unlike hunting and military poetry the work thus provides the occasion rather than the subject-matter, and the song depends on the rhythm of the work rather than an audience for its point of departure.

The occasions for these work songs include almost all contexts in which monotonous labour is involved; though conventions as to their use vary in different societies.
²¹
There are co-operative songs for hoeing, weeding, mowing, launching a boat, sawing, hauling in fish-nets, pounding, floor-beating, throwing water up from deep wells in a human chain, carrying a chief in his hammock, hanging up beehives, or rubbing animal skins to make them soft; there are domestic and solitary songs for women grinding corn or pounding rice; there are gang songs for pulling trucks, for road work, for factory hands, and for miners.

It is well known that manual workers often sing such songs to accompany their hard physical labour. The dock hands at Beira have a song

Dawn—with freight,

Yes, Yes!

Dawn—with freight,

Look for the label.

(Curtis 1920: 32)

while the men pushing heavy truck-loads of hides down the Kilindini road in Mombasa used to sing in Swahili

(Werner 1927: 102)

Many other similar songs are popular among labouring gangs. There are, for instance, the songs by South African road workers and miners, by the men working on the Kariba dam, or by builders in Nigeria.

Figure 15. Limba work party spread out in the upland rice farm, inspired by Karanke’s drumming, Kakarima, 1961 (photo Ruth Finnegan).

In rural areas, agricultural work provides the occasion for work songs. For instance, in Southern Rhodesia, maize threshing is a popular time for songs. The men and boys do the singing while the women stay in the background, yodelling at intervals with a staccato effect. As often with work songs, the words themselves are simple, with many nonsense words to fill up the rhythm effectively, and there is alternation between leaders and chorus. This is evident in the following three Zezuru threshing songs from Southern Rhodesia:

Let the women dance in our honour, do not trouble me

My wife do not come to trouble me.

We love each other friend, is she not friend.

(Stead 1937)

The way such songs can at once lighten, co-ordinate, and embellish agricultural labour can be briefly illustrated from two types of work songs among the Limba. For them, songs accompany many of their agricultural activities. Two only are singled out here: hoeing the rice near the start of the farming year, and the threshing that follows harvesting.

One of the most demanding occasions of the Limba farming cycle is hoeing in the rice after it has been sown, and this, if undertaken by individuals, is regarded as involving wearisome and exhausting labour. The most common practice is to form special ‘companies’, each with a drummer, to go round to the farms to hoe. The occasion is turned into a festive one. The drummer stands in front, beating his drum and leading the song. Next follow those who are scattering the seed. And finally the hoers come, perhaps sixteen or twenty of them, sometimes fifty or more, stretched across the hillside in a long line singing in reply to the leader. The whole line raise their hoes simultaneously, then strike together at the ground three times before the up-stroke and pause as the hoes are raised once more—a marked rhythm of
dig,
dig, dig, up;
one,
two, three, pause, with strong emphasis on the first down-stroke. The beat and song keep the line exactly together, and there is a feeling of competition and excitement which keeps all in their places with no falling behind or faltering. In this way the huge farm gets hoed with incredible speed, and the Limba themselves point to the importance of the songs in adding both efficiency and pleasure. Their joy in the songs is very obvious (they even look forward to this season of exhausting work), and many of them make semi-dancing steps as they progress with their hoes up the hill.