Oral Poetry from Africa
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…
Another Ìjálá or hunter’s poem from the Yorùbá 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…
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 Pounding Songs). 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…
A Hadendoa poem from northern Sudan. The Handendoa live in northern Sudan, bordering the Red Sea. They supplied the majority of the supporters of Muhammed Ahmed el Mahdi (‘The Mad Mullah’) in his revolt against the British (see also the poem The Mahdi’s Boast). Like the poem Why Do We Grumble, it accepts that ‘wealth has a coat of many colours’.
I have good cultivable land sown and watered,
I have men who load my camels with trade goods…
A popular Zulu song about the sinking of SS Mendi in February 1917 as it carried African Battalions belonging to the South African Native Labour Corps on their way to World War 1 in France. The ship collided in fog off the Isle of Wight with an empty merchant vessel bound for Argentina. 646 men were drowned, in one of the worst ever marine disasters.
The ship Mendi went down at sea
And sank there with the sons of Africa…
