Oral Poetry from Africa
Ten separate love songs from Somalia. Balwo means ‘sorrow’, and the subject of this type of song is invariably unhappy love which is described briefly in striking and unusual images. These songs are immensely popular in Somalia and are regarded by some as blasphemous.
Woman, lovely as lightning at dawn,
Speak to me once even.
A Swahili poem, well known along the East Coast of Africa. The poem is a husband’s praise of his wife Mwananazi.
Give me a chair that I may sit down
And serenade my Mwananazi,
A Swahili love-song from the East African coast, and probably the best known and most widely admired of all Swahili poems in translation. Like Mwananazi, it is associated with Liyongo, the Swahili national hero.
O lady, be calm and cry not but sing to your suitors.
Sing to those who guide you and to the discerning passers-by
The poems in this section are chosen for their range of feeling about human relationships. They are about courtship, marriage, parenthood and bereavement. They deal with different kinds of love and different kinds of grief.
A hunters’ poem from Lesotho. Throughout this poem, the description shifts to the first person singular to give the hyena’s own words.
The hyena is the greedy one among the wild beasts,
The one that drops a bone is a small one.
