Oshun, or Ọ̀ṣun in Yorùbá, is an Òrìṣà goddess associated with rivers and the marketplace. Medicines for fertility, wealth, love and intimacy are often attributed to her.
Brass and parrot feathers
on a velvet skin.
Oral Poetry from Africa
Filed Under: Poems of Gods & Ancestors
Oshun, or Ọ̀ṣun in Yorùbá, is an Òrìṣà goddess associated with rivers and the marketplace. Medicines for fertility, wealth, love and intimacy are often attributed to her.
Brass and parrot feathers
on a velvet skin.
Filed Under: Poems of Gods & Ancestors
In the pantheistic religion of the Yorùbá people there exists a supreme God, Olodumare, who is considered almighty and eternal. However, no prayers or shrines are kept for Olodumare because the nature of such a being is regarded as beyond human comprehension. Olodumare creates various Orisha, who are manifestations of certain aspects of the supreme God and with whom humans can interact.
He is patient.
He is silent.
Filed Under: Praise-Poems
This Shona Praise-Poem from Zimbabwe praises two women, the speaker’s mother-in-law and his wife, and criticises a third woman, his friend’s wife, for her laziness and unattractiveness. It belongs to the context of a beer party at which two friends, joined in the special joking relationship of ushamwari, are having a mock argument, each trying to outdo the other in eloquence.
The mother of my wife has guardian spirits like to mine.
On seeing me, she will give me her whole barn.
Filed Under: Praise-Poems
An extract from a Shona Praise-Poem from Zimbabwe, the clan praise of Chihota’s clan. For Chilota’s people the zebra is a symbol, and the sparkling description of the zebra is a metaphor for the qualities of the clan.
Thank you, Zebra,
Adorned with your own stripes
Filed Under: Pleasure Poems
Kakomana kanoridza mumhanzi kakafenegera
The little boy blows his trumpet with his chest thrown out.
Filed Under: Protest & Satirical Poems
A Lomwe song, from the early days of the Lugella Company, which in 1915 opened a Sisal plantation in north-central Mozambique. The word ‘machila’ means cloth, and became by extension the word for the hammock in which Europeans used to be carried.
You weep, you sleep stiffly, when you are old!
O — o,
You weep, you sleep stiffly, when you are old!
O — o,
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