Oral Poetry from Africa
A Yorùbá chant from Nigeria, consisting of a series of mock proverbs on the theme of vanity. Only by wearing ‘the appropriate dress’ can we recover a little of our dignity.
In blowing your nose, you must expose your teeth:
In stooping, one perforce exposes one’s seat…
A Zulu song about a young migrant worker who has left home to seek jobs in Johannesburg and the search made by his siblings to find him.
We were sent by our parents
To search for our father’s child…
Another attack on the damaging effects of labour migrancy to South Africa. In this extract from a Tswana Praise Poem, the poet appeals movingly to Chief Molefi Kgafela, who ruled 1929–1936, to bring home all the young men and women from Cape Town, Natal, Johannesburg and Rustenburg.
Seek the strays, child of the Makuka,
Bring home the human strays…
Oyewumi Alabi was a nineteenth century chief of Ibadan. He was preceded by two chiefs whose reigns were marked by prodigies — a stream breaking forth, a comet appearing. Under Oyewumi Alabi, the colonial hut tax was first imposed.
In Aburu’s reign,
A stream broke forth in the sacred grove…
Improvised by the imbongi Nelson Title Mabunu at Umtata, Transkei, December 17 1970, in the course of a long poem in praise of Chief George Matanzima, co-leader of the illegal Transkei Bantustan. Mabuno was Matanzima’s official imbongi. He was a bitter enemy of the Xhosa poet Melikhaya Mbutuma, who was imbongi to the Thembu paramount chief Sabata Dalindyebo.
What do you want me to say, child of Opland?
What do you want me to say, fair-skinned one?..
The following Sena song exists in many versions throughout the area of the lower Zambesi river in Mozambique, dominated from 1890 by an English company which came to be called Sena Sugar Estates. The original ‘Paiva’ was Ignacio Paiva Raposo, who in 1874 rented an estate (or ‘Prazo’) near the confluence of the Shire and Zambesi rivers.
Paiva,
Wo-o‑o, Wo…
