Oral Poetry from Africa
The following epic poem was transcribed by Dr Alice Werner, who was the professor of Swahili and Bantu languages at London’s School of Oriental Studies between 1917–1930. Dr Werner first encoutered the story of Miqdad and Mayasa during her visit to the village of Bomani, a village in Kenya’s Kilifi County, in 1913.
I begin with the name of the Compassionate,
and pray for the faithful one…
Liyongo, the national hero of the Swahili people, lived in the area of the delta of the Tana River, north of Mombasa. Many of the poems praising him are said to have been composed by him, so that he is also celebrated as a poet.
Oh my child, be silent, do not cry;
Listen to the tale of the King of Bauri,
Three extracts from different versions of the Sundjata epic, which is as yet the best known and most widely admired of African epics. Sundjata is a historical figure (he died in 1255), and the Sundjata legend comes down to us from a period of turmoil in West African history when the ancient empire of Ghana was in decline.
After it had happened
That Sundjata’s mother had become pregnant,
No anthology of African oral poetry would be complete without some extracts from African epics. Yet no epic can properly be represented by an extract. The epic is by far the most ambitious of literary forms. It attempts, through the form of a long story usually concerned with a single but very special hero, to give a complete account of existence.
