Oral Poetry from Africa
A poem praising the bravery of a Swazi king, Mavuso, who fought unsuccessfully against the Afrikaaners. The land of the Ngwane kingdom was taken over by Afrikaners, who then had renamed the land the Transvaal and used it for commercial farming in the 1840s.
Mavuso of Ngwane,
Dangazela of Ngwane of Sobhusa.
News of war eats the child still in the womb.
If a person can walk he would have run away…
As South Africa’s Heritage Day is on upon us, I thought it would be topical to take a glimpse at a small fraction of the poetry that has arisen from South Africa’s vast oral poetry traditions.
With 24th September having been previously celebrated in SA to mark the death of Shaka, the Zulu King, it seems appropriate to begin with one of the poems praising his military genius and catalogue of victories. Shaka is a martial poem of amazing force and energy, full of imagery of lions, leopards, fires, furnaces, axes, spears, hawks and vipers. The Zulu Warrior virtues of bravery, ferocity, agility and strength are praised and the tone is confident and aggressive, Shaka setting his own stamp on the nation.
This can be balanced by a short poem that presents the aftermath of Shaka’s conquests from the perspective of those who suffered from them. The Dirge of the Warriors Widows is a lament by Sotho women that is said to date from the time of Shaka’s wars.
I am grateful to the South African poet, Vusi Mchunu, for the following elegy dedicated to the Afro-German poet, educator and activist May Ayim.
It is a long fall from the concrete heights of Kreuzberg
It is a long way to the hill of Alt St. Matthaeus Cemetery…
This is the second part of S.E.K. Mqhayi’s poem “The Grave of the King”, which was originally published in the Xhosa newspaper, Izwi Labantu on December 8th 1908.
We have a river,
A river of great strength…
The following poem by the Xhosa imbongi, David Livingston Phakamile Yali-Manisi (1926–1999), was performed at a conference hosted by the University of Natal Oral Documentation and Research Centre (South Africa) in 1985.
The forest bird grows restless
one who always goes when sent…
