Oral Poetry from Africa
This Shona Praise-Poem from Zimbabwe praises two women, the speaker’s mother-in-law and his wife, and criticises a third woman, his friend’s wife, for her laziness and unattractiveness. It belongs to the context of a beer party at which two friends, joined in the special joking relationship of ushamwari, are having a mock argument, each trying to outdo the other in eloquence.
The mother of my wife has guardian spirits like to mine.
On seeing me, she will give me her whole barn.
An extract from a Shona Praise-Poem from Zimbabwe, the clan praise of Chihota’s clan. For Chilota’s people the zebra is a symbol, and the sparkling description of the zebra is a metaphor for the qualities of the clan.
Thank you, Zebra,
Adorned with your own stripes
Kakomana kanoridza mumhanzi kakafenegera
The little boy blows his trumpet with his chest thrown out.
A Lomwe song, from the early days of the Lugella Company, which in 1915 opened a Sisal plantation in north-central Mozambique. The word ‘machila’ means cloth, and became by extension the word for the hammock in which Europeans used to be carried.
You weep, you sleep stiffly, when you are old!
O — o,
You weep, you sleep stiffly, when you are old!
O — o,
The following songs were transcribed in the 1970’s and express the bitter hatred that many Mozambican Africans had towards the chiefs and headmen that had been appointed by the Portuguese during the colonial era.
The headman — ay ‑ay — ay
The headman harassed and seized one of my sons for Luabo…
A San prayer, recorded in the mid-nineteenth century, that reflects on how the moon appears to die and then be reborn over the course of it’s lunar cycle.
Young moon, take my face up yonder,
Give back to me your face up there, take away this pain.
