Oral Literature in Africa (46 page)

Even without the extra appeal of unaccustomed obscenity as in these derisive Ibo songs, this enjoyment may be just as significant as social control. Thus the Hottentots sing satirically but with humour of a childless couple:

We love each other as the goats that have no kids love

We love each other as the goats that have no kids love.

(Stopa 1938: 110)

and in Tanganyika the Asu
nyimbo za kugana,
songs sung in huts just before sleep, provide an opportunity for improvisation and humour as well as attack. One man starts up the song, then others reply in solo or chorus—for example, in address to a grumbler:

Ndi-ndi! Ndi-ndi! [expletives used in complaining]

Grandfather of Mruma,

He hasn’t a cow,

He hasn’t a goat,

He hasn’t a chicken,

No not (even) a rat (in his house).

(Bull 1933: 326–7)

—and so on, continued at great length, with plenty of scope for humour, until almost every conceivable possession has been named, while the chorus reply in unison
ndi-ndi!
after each line. Similar enjoyment is evident in the public dances and singing in Abomey (Dahomey) witnessed by Herskovits, when unpopular individuals are ridiculed and attacked in songs. Though no names are mentioned, everyone knows who is meant and rejoices in the occasion. For example:

Woman, thy soul is misshapen.

In haste was it made, in haste.

So fleshless a face speaks, telling

Thy soul was formed without care.

The ancestral clay for thy making

Was moulded in haste, in haste. A thing of no beauty art thou,

Thy face unsuited to be a face,

Thy feet unsuited for feet.

(Herskovits 1934: 78)

These derisive songs directed against specified individuals or groups shade into topical and satirical songs in general. Thus the Tiv, among many others, sing about the events of the year: they comment on the present position of chiefs or express their reactions to a recent deposition or this season’s road work. They also improvise about recent incidents and people—like the song about selling their soya beans to only one of the rival firms:

We are not going to sell our soya beans to Mallam Dama

we are going to sell them to Alhaji Sali.

(Lane 1954: 14; see also Phillips 1936)

Domestic affairs also come into such songs. The Ndau dancer comments ruefully on his father’s new wife:

My father, he married

A crocodile wife,

That bites, that bites.

-ya, I-ya-wo-ye!

(Curtis 1920: 39)

While a Baule woman sings lightly:

Je commettrai volontiers l’adultère. Les maris de mes camarades seront tour à tour mes amants. Mais qui d’entre elles aura l’audace de se plaindre?

(Effimbra 1952: 297)

These topical songs often give a vivid personal picture of a general situation and the attitude to it, as well as of the specific events they comment on. Thus in Malawi, in the late 1950s, the wives of men detained for opposition to government showed their pride in their ‘Prison Graduate’ husbands, and used to sing as they pounded their maize:

My husband is a man:

He’s away in Kanjedza.

The men who are here

Are women like us.

(Sanger 1960: 320)

Again an Acholi girl married to a soldier sings effectively of their separation: they can write letters—but what can letters do?

Writing writing writing so many letters.

Those letters can they be changed into a child?

Wives of soldiers are barren [have to wait for years before they get a child].

Wives of soldiers are truly barren.

(Okot 1963: 312)

Or a Chewa woman thinks about her husband who is away working in the copper mines:

When I get a letter from Masula

I read it with all my heart. (Tracey 1953: 19)

The same experience—from the man’s viewpoint—is touched on in a Sotho dance song in the country areas:

Basutoland is my fatherland,

At Bushman’s Nek, near Machacha, in the mountains.

I joined up for work on the mines,

But when I arrived I found myself in trouble.

I was with Molelekoa, son of Smith.

So I crossed the Vaal very early in the morning

That was when I was nearly swept down with the river.

Perhaps it was because I was running away,

Running away and leaving my passes on the veld.

I left mine in the western Transvaal,

I left both my pass and my tax receipt!

(
Afr. Music
2. 2, 1959: 72–3)

The urban experiences of Africans in the towns of South Africa are commented on in many of the Zulu songs about police and passes recorded by Tracey.
³
These can be illustrated from three of his examples. In the first, the scene is the pass office where all male Africans had to go to get their Registration Certificates, involving a wait of hours, even days, before being interviewed:

Take off your hat.

What is your home name?

Who is your father?

Who is your chief?

Where do you pay your tax?

What river do you drink?

We mourn for our country.

(Tracey 1963: 53)

Arrest by the police for not having the correct papers, and imprisonment in ‘Blue Sky’, the popular name of the gaol at Boksburg near Johannesburg, are the themes of the next two songs:

There comes the big van.

All over the country

They call it the Pick-up Van.

There is the Pick-up. There, there is the big van.

‘Where’s your pass?’

‘Where’s your tax?’

(Tracey 1948
b
: 55)

They caught him!

They caught him and handcuffed him!

They sent him to ‘Blue Sky’.

(Tracey 1948
b
: 54)

The last type of topical song to be mentioned here comprises those that particularly express the aspirations and self-appreciation of groups, songs that often have at least some political relevance. These merge into the songs already discussed, and also recall some of the military poems that reflect and reinforce the militant unity of a given group. An example would be the Akan hunting song which asserts the power of the hunter’s group against that of the chief:

Does the chief say he is greater than the hunter?

Arrogance! Hunter? Arrogance!

(Nketia 1963
b
: 76; see full song in Ch. 8 above)

and the trade union and
kalela
dance, songs could be seen to be fulfilling something of the same function. So too in the Congo the followers of the prophet Matswa expressed their protest and their allegiance in song:

Nous autres qui n’avons pas de soutien.

Nous autres qui n’avons pas de défenseur.

Dieu le Père-tout-puissant, veille sur nous.

Père Congo, Père, qui pensera à nous?

A nous autres, qui y pensera?

Matswa, Père-tout-puissant, veille sur nous.

Matswa, Père-tout-puissant, envoie-nous un défenseur.

(Balandier 1955: 1557).

Even in South Africa a certain amount of fairly explicit political protest seems to be expressed through song if we can assume that certain of the ‘South African freedom songs’
⁵
were of wide circulation. In one, for instance, the singers appeal to Chief Luthuli (President of the African National Congress) in conjunction with Dr. G. M. Naicker (President of the Indian Congress):

God, save the volunteers,

God, save Africans.

God, save the volunteers,

God, save Africans.

We say yes, yes, Chief Lut’huli,

And you, Doctor Naicker, liberate us.

(Bass voices)
Daliga chek
.

We say yes, yes, Chief Lut’huli,

And you, Doctor Naicker, liberate us.

(Bass voices)
Daliga chek
.

(Rhodes 1962: 18–19)

In certain circumstances hymns can have similar overtones. Some of the religious verses of the South African separatist churches founded by Shembe express political aspirations and ideals that are difficult to communicate through more formal political channels—the idea of Africa for the Africans, or of the value, despite the contemporary political situation, of African customs and leadership:

Africa, rise!

and seek thy Saviour.

Today our sons and daughters

are slaves.

(Sundkler 1961: 196)

More explicitly political are some of the performances of the originally Methodist-inspired hymn
Nkosi Sikele’ iAfrica
… (‘God bless Africa …’), which is used as a political song in meetings of the African National Congress and other political contexts (Rhodes 1962: 16–17), the Mau May ‘hymns’ discussed in the next section, and the way in which, during Nkrumah’s imprisonment by the colonial authorities, political protest was expressed by the singing of Christian hymns like ‘Lead kindly light, amid the encircling gloom’ (Ibid.: 16).

Figure 18. New and old in Africa
. ‘
Funky Freddy’ of The Jungle Leaders, playing hip-hop political songs and banned from Radio Sierra Leone for their protest lyrics (
http://www.myspace.com/jungleleaders/photos
) with the expert Yoruba
oriki
(praise) singer Sangowemi in the background (photo courtesy Karin Barber).

The social functions of the various types of songs mentioned here are particularly obvious, more strikingly so than most of those discussed in earlier chapters. They can be a way of exerting pressure on others, whether equals or superiors; of expressing often indirectly or in a limited and conventional manner, what could not be said directly, or through a different medium, or on just any occasion; of upholding or suggesting certain values and interests that cannot be expressed in other ways, particularly when there is no direct access to political activity. Like Dogon villagers of
kalela
dancers, the singers may both assert the solidarity of their own group and at the same time recognize their close relationship with others. The songs may even—as Herskovits and his followers remind us—provide a means for the psychological release of otherwise repressed enmities and tensions through a socially permissible form. But besides these obvious social functions we can point equally to the related literary roles of these songs—to the way in which such socially sanctioned occasions are used for artistic purposes, to the humour and enjoyment expressed, to the satirical, meditative, or resigned comment on the circumstances of life, and, finally, to the way in which even enmity or social pressure can be viewed with a certain detachment through the artistic and conventional medium of the song.
⁶

II

It is perhaps not generally recognized how widely political songs are used in Africa. Songs are now accepted by African political parties as a vehicle for communication, propaganda, political pressure, and political education. Their exact nature and purpose vary, but they have in common the fact of being
oral
rather than visual propaganda. It is true that some of these songs at times appear in writing, even print, and written collections of party songs circulate in some areas; nonetheless their propagation among the largely non-literate masses is almost purely oral. As such they are a powerful and flexible weapon in many types of political activity.

One of the advantages songs may have as vehicles of political expression is their apparently innocuous nature. This is particularly true of those songs used at a relatively early stage in African nationalist movements when concealment of organized political activity was felt desirable. In a colonial
situation in which political power was ultimately in the hands of foreigners, many of whom could not speak the local language, songs and poems had the double advantage of being ostensibly nothing to do with politics at all (unlike, say, newspapers) and of being unintelligible to many of those in authority. Rhodes cites an early example of this from West Africa, in a drum poem used by the Ashanti after their submission to British rule in 1900. When the Governor appeared at a public gathering, he was ceremonially, and apparently honorifically, greeted with drum music; what the drums were repeating, however, were the words of an old war song, ‘slowly but surely we shall kill Adinkra’; while the local audience understood quite clearly that by ‘Adinkra’ the drums meant the British, it is doubtful if the Governor was aware of any political significance at all, let alone a hostile one (Rhodes 1962: 14–15, based on a personal communication by J.H. Nketia). Somali love poems, or apparent love poems, have been used in the same way. They could safely be performed in public or even on the government-controlled radio, the obscurity of their language concealing their meaning for the independence struggle, except from their intended audiences (the people in the independence movement) (Andrzejewski 1967: 13). Again, there was the occasion of the Queen’s Birthday Festivities in Nyasaland (as it was then called) in the early 1950s, when official policy was to encourage the idea of federation against local opposition. The schoolchildren marched innocently past the presiding District Commissioner singing anti-federation songs taught them by their schoolteacher—and the District Commissioner did not understand a word (Tracey 1954
a
: 237).