A Hausa song from northern Nigeria, unusually for a war song performed by women. The song was recorded by the Hausa scholar C.G.B. Gidley in 1964.
Great Visitor, Son of Abdu,
Water it is that drowns whoever goes against it…
Hold Back the Sun
An Akan song from the Ashanti region of Ghana, sung by women at work on their farms. See also Farming Song.
Where is the owner of the bush farm?
Hold back the sun!..
Baboon
Another Ìjálá or hunter’s poem from the Yoruba of Nigeria. It lists, with a great deal of humour, the baboon’s main characteristics. At the end of the Ìjálá the poet breaks into song and the audience responds.
Laare.
Opomu, who teaches a dog how to hunt successfully…
What about the White Clothes and my Pen?
A Dinka song from South Sudan. The young men singing this song consider themselves as a special age-set, using their education to ‘change the land’. Their mothers must learn that, in the modern world, clothes and pens are more important than cattle as wealth.
Our junior age-set in white gathers at Abyei,
The school is convened…
A Salute to Fabunmi
Another Ìjálá or hunter’s poem from the Yoruba of Nigeria (see also the poems Elephant, Buffalo, Five Creatures and Hunters’ Salutes). This one is a salute to Fabunmi, celebrating both his skills as a hunter and his generosity towards others.
Oolo of Iware Forest,
why is it we no longer see Fabunmi…
Pounding Beer
An Embu pounding song from north eastern Kenya, close to Mount Kenya. Pounding songs are sung by women using mortar and pestle to pound grain to flour, the thud of the pestle providing the songs’ rhythm (see also these poems). In this poem the singer pounds malted-millet grain to be made into millet beer for her husband, Mwaniki.
Let me pound beer, pound it for Mwaniki:
He is the one who drinks dilute beer…
