In Praise of the Word

In Praise of the Word

In many traditional African cultures, oral arts are professionalized: the most accomplished storytellers and praise singers are initiates (griots or bards), who have mastered many complex verbal, musical, and memory skills after years of specialized training. This training often includes a strong spiritual and ethical dimension required to control the special forces believed to be released by the spoken/sung word in oral performances. These occult powers and primal energies of creation and destruction are called nyama by Mande peoples of Western Africa, for example, and their jeli, or griots, are a subgroup of the artisan professions that the Mande designate nyamakalaw, or “nyama-handlers.” Following a traditional griot performance of a spiritually-charged oral epic like Sundjiata, a Malian audience might ritualistically chant, “!Ka nyama bo!”— which could be translated something like, “May the powers of nyama safely disperse!” This power of the spoken word is expressed in the following praise poem of the West African Bamara (AKA: Bambara) peoples:

Praise of the Word

The word is total:
it cuts, excoriates
forms, modulates
perturbs, maddens
cures or directly kills
amplifies or reduces
According to intention
It excites or calms souls.

— Praise song of a bard of the Bamara Komo society

However, this sense of the spoken word’s awesome power has largely been lost in writing-based societies of the West.

Orality and Literacy: Different Ways of Knowing

Human culture encompasses all that is learned, and language is a primary means for learning and transmitting one’s culture, as most Western anthropologists would maintain. Furthermore, linguistic theorists like Walter Ong maintain that a culture’s dominant means of communication shape its people’s consciousness and ways of knowing the world. Ong ascribes fundamental differences among cultures—and the arts and technologies they create and value—to whether those cultures are oral or literate (writing-based).

Ancient writing traditions do exist on the African continent, but many Africans (today as in the past) are primarily oral peoples, and their art forms are oral (and usually meant to be shared/performed with others) rather than literary (written down for reading often silently and alone by another individual). In contrast to written literature, “orature” (a term coined by esteemed Kenyan novelist and critic Ngugi wa Thiong’o) is orally composed and transmitted, and African oral arts are often created to be communally performed as an integral part of dance and music. The Oral Arts of Africa are rich and varied, developing with the beginnings of African cultures, and remaining living traditions that continue to evolve and flourish today.

”…Oral cultures produce powerful and beautiful verbal performances of high artistic and human worth which are impossible once writing has taken possession of the psyche.”

— Walter Ong

A Twi Proverb

One important oral art form of African cultures is the proverb. Study of African proverbs (which Achebe uses frequently in Things Fall Apart) can give us important clues to rich wisdom traditions and cultural values. In a Twi language, mmebuo is proverb-making (a proverb is called ebe in the singular, and mme in the plural form.) Here is a Twi proverb, first given in Twi language and then followed by a literal translation into English by Kwame Anthony Appiah:

Asem a ehia Akanfoo no na Ntafoo de goro brekete

A matter which troubles the Akan people, the people of Gonja take to play the brekete drum.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, a multi-linguist and philosopher now teaching in the U.S., grew up in Kumasi, Ghana, where one dialect of Twi language, often called “Akan,” is the major language spoken. (Akan refers to a cluster of Twi languages spoken by peoples of southern Ghana and adjacent Côte d’Ivoire.) Appiah selected the above proverb from “the 7000-odd proverbs that my mother has collected over roughly the period of my lifetime, and she and some friends have been trying to understand them for the last decade or so; latterly I have joined them in setting out to prepare a manuscript that (as we say) reduces many of these sayings for the first time to writing, that glosses them in English, and that offers also, in each case, what I have offered you: what we call a literal translation."

"A translation aims to produce a new text that matters to one community the way another text matters to another,” states Appiah, but literal translation cannot begin to give us the full sense a proverb’s “rich cultural and linguistic context.” Given only the above literal translation in English, we would also miss the interplay of sound-rhythm-meaning [try saying the Twi proverb aloud], since a “whole class of proverbs … depend on playing with similar-sounding names of dissimilar objects” (Appiah, n. 2). Appiah explains that brekete “is the (Akan) name of one of the main Dagomba drums, which accompanies dancing” (n. 1), of the “people of Gonja.” A “typical use” of the above Twi (Akan) proverb, Appiah explains, might arise in a situation like this:

I might utter it [the proverb “Asem a ehia Akanfoo no na Ntafoo de goro brekete”] in the midst of an argument with my father about whether it matters that I do not want to go to church with him one Sunday; our contrasting attitudes, he will infer, are being likened to the contrasting attitudes of Dagomba [“people of Gonja”] and Akan peoples—for the brekete drum is one they play for entertainment at dances, and represents fun.

Ikemefuna’s Song

African writers like Chinua Achebe often introduce into literature, stories from their culture’s oral traditions—e.g., narrative proverbs, song-tales, myths, folktales, fairy tales, animal fables, anecdotes, ballads. One example is this proverb-song given in untranslated Igbo in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Ch. 7, p. 42:

Eze elina, elina!

Sala

Eze ilikwa ya
lkwaba akwa oligholi
Ebe Danda nechi eze
Ebe Uzuzu nete egwu

Sala

Call and Response

Call-and-response forms, found everywhere in Africa, entail a caller or soloist who “raises the song”—as the Kpelle say—and the community chorus who respond, or “agree underneath the song.” In the case of the Igbo stories, the storyteller “calls” out the story in lines; the audience “responds” at regular intervals with a “sala” (Igbo for the chorus’ response). One common Igbo “sala” is “amanye,” roughly equivalent to American English expressions of agreement like “amen,” “indeed,” “it is true,” or “right on!” Traditional African storytelling is a communal participatory experience. Everyone in most traditional African societies participate in formal and informal storytelling as interactive oral performance—such participation is an essential part of traditional African social life.

Below is a literal translation into English of Ikemefuna’s song, offered by Igbo scholar Emmanuel Obiechina. But even with the English translation—which Achebe does not give in Things Fall Apart—it is difficult for U.S. readers to make sense of this song-proverb without learning more about the cultural context of Igbo beliefs and the folktale on which Ikemefuna’s song is based.

[Singer’s Call]:

King, do not eat [it], do not eat!

Sala [Chorus response]

King, if you eat it
You will weep for the abomination
Where Danda [White Ant] installs king
Where Uzuzu [Dust] dances to the drums

Sala [Chorus response]

This Igbo proverb-story sung by the character Ikemefuna is based on an Igbo wisdom story of a perverse, headstrong king who breaks a sacred taboo by eating roast yam, from the first fruits of the harvest, which is reserved for and offered in sacrifice to the gods.

The song speaks in the communal voice of the elders’ collective wisdom and carries serious social and ethical weight. It warns the king not to break a taboo that would compromise himself, his high office, and the continued prosperity of his people.

A dishonorable death without proper burial rites is predicted by the last two lines: only white ants and dust will claim this headstrong king after his human death. Thus, he will be denied reunion with ancestors and clan and be forever alienated from his community, believed to encompass the dead, the living, and the yet-to-be-born.

Breaking this sacred taboo could seriously unbalance of the Igbo world—the kind of “abomination” for which the Igbo gods could deny future good harvests and bring devastation to Igboland.

In the context of Ch. 7 of Things Fall Apart, Ikemefuna’s song offers a weighty parallel warning to the protagonist Okonkwo. Like the headstrong king, Okonkwo is on the verge of committing a serious “abomination”—the “kind of action for which the goddess Ani wipes out whole families,” as his friend Obierika points out (Ch. 8, p. 46).

African Music and Culture

Some generalizations about African musical cultures can be hazarded even amid the continent’s rich and dizzying diversity, according to scholars J. H. Kwabena Nketia and Ruth M. Stone.

• African music is woven into the fabric of daily life, performed often inseparably with games, words, drama, ceremony, visual art, and dance in both special and everyday activity.

  A.M. Ipoku, director of the Ghana Dance Ensemble, tries to achieve the performance ideal of dance and music so interlocked that one “can see the music and hear the dance.” The Western idea of music as a thing of beauty to be admired in isolation is a foreign concept to many Africans. Music promotes group participation, strengthens social cohesion, and infuses collective activity--spiritual rite, prayer, ceremony, festival; the work of building new hourses or putting out fires, the games and entertainment of leisure and recreational hours. Individuals sing songs of praise and criticism, well-wishing and war, cradle rocking and food preparation, grinding and pounding tasks. Call-and-response forms, found everywhere in Africa, entail a caller or soloist who “raises the song,” as the Kpelle say, and the community chorus who respond, or “agree underneath the song.”

• Many African oral traditions include accounts of how music originated.

  For example, the Kpelle people of Liberia maintain that, in the distant past, a hunter got the idea to make a goblet drum from a chimpanzee beating his chest, and the chimpanzees then showed the hunter how to hollow out a log for the body of the first drum. To be a fully adult person in many traditional African societies means learning to perform music, song, and dance proficiently: to be a social person is to be a musical person. In much of Africa, musical notation is heard--conveyed and learned in mnemonic phrases and vocalizations--rather than written. Akan master drummers may teach children the talking drum by tapping the rhythms into the children’s shoulder blades and having them chant sentences of nonsense syllables in the same rhythm. Acquiring music, like acquiring a first language rises from early and regular exposure and participation in musical situations; further training may come through apprenticeship systems for the young, individual tutelage for the especially talented, and/or special spiritual training in music for initiates into secret societies and caste professions.

• Many Africans are more sensitive to timber and pitch than most Westerners, and African instruments are characterized as human “voices,” not just sounds or rhythms.

  The Shona of Zimbabwe call the lower register of the instrument mbira (a hand piano) “old men’s voices,” the middle register “young men’s voices,” and the highest register “women’s voices”; and keys are given names like “mad person,” “swaying of a person going into a trance,” and “to stir up” to show how the key works in the music. The Yoruba speak a tone language (the pitch of a spoken syllable determines its meaning, a change in pitch can drastically change its meaning), and they have reproduced speech in their “talking drums,” the special example of musical signaling that has long fascinated Westerners. Africa’s rich variety of drums, as well as many other types of instruments less familiar to non-Africans, are understood to sound as “voices” of interpenetrating tone colors and pitches--not simply as rhythms. Musical sounds are typically organized against each other in conflicting and sophisticated ways, interlocked and balanced in a kind of interactive tug of war binding performers to each other and their instruments, creating togetherness out of the segmentation and fragmentation of musical elements.

• Sound is everywhere noticed, admired, and shaped--e.g., postal workers in Ghana cancel stamps in deliberate rhythm. Everything is subject to portrayal in sound, and African music may imitate many things, including nature, bird, and spirit sounds.

  Music may be symbolic and representational: the Akan etivie specialize in imitating the snarl of the lion. Even if very different, African musical performance demands and aesthetic criteria are no less exacting than those of Western musical cultures. Performance criteria for a Dagomba hour-glass drummer of Ghana include knowledge of innumerable chants and traditional history--especially chronicles of chiefs and their praise names--demands on the oral memory unfathomable to Westerns shaped by literate-based cultures. So too must the Dagomba performer have a sweet voice and the supple wrist needed to perform the tones and dynamics of the hourglass drum skillfully. Members of nindo vocal groups of the Gogo people (Tanzania) must be skilled at “interlining” (feeding singers the first few words of stanzas). Lead singers and master drummers of the Akan (Ghana) must have a formidable command of language and memory, in addition to fine strong voices and the kind of “good ear” that will not be distracted from their specific musical roles by other performing parts of the chorus--called gofomma (or “the children”).

• Performers--singers, dancers, storytellers, actors, instrumentalists--are vital to ceremony, individual and communal life.

  Their participatory audience may also count ancestors and spirits among these exacting judges of performance -- dangerously so, for example, if a virtuoso musician’s tutelary spirit ultimately requires the performer’s life in exchange for the spirit’s aid in achieving especially fine playing. The player may offer sacrifices to his instrument to please and bond with instruments considered part-human, part-spirit nature. The kora (harp-lute) is considered a personal extension of the Western African griot--itinerant praise singer, historian, and social commentators of Mali, Senegal, and Mande-speaking traditions stretching back at least to the time of Sundjata (1230-1255 A.D.), the first emperor of Mali. (We’ll be studying this topic in connection with the film Keita: Heritage of the Griot.) Contemporary Africans’ search for identity and awareness of past cultural achievements has given new urgency to promoting, preserving, and re-creating African musical traditions.

• Music is expressed in a dazzling variety of instruments, creative forms, and performance styles in Africa today, as in the past.

  And the forms of African music continue to evolve and multiply as cross-cultural influences within and outside Africa meet and combine. For example, modern mergers of indigenous and Western musical forms have produced such uniquely African styles as East African beni and West African “highlife” drawing on brass band music; soukous, which echoes soul and disco music, of Zaire; the early forms of Nigerian juju and fuji which incorporated electric guitar and banjo; and South African makwaya which fuses Xhosa rhythms, European vocal harmonies, and ragtime. Growing international audiences count themselves enthusiastic admirers of the “African World Beat.” The township jive chorals of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the juju beat of King Sunny Ade, the Afro-funk of Angelique Kidjo of Benin, the Algerian rai syle of Chaba Fadela, the soukous of Tabu Ley Rochereau (Zaire), the Caribbean-Parisian zouk band Kassav, and the South African anthology Indestructible Beat of Soweto are only a few tributaries feeding the vital new river of musical inspiration and influence flowing out of the rich talent and diverse cultures of Africa.

Adapted from (1) The Music of Africa by J. H. Kwabena Nketia (NY: Norton, 1974), and (2) “African Music Performed” by Ruth M. Stone (in Africa, 3rd ed., ed. by Phyllis M. Martin and Patrick O’Meara [Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1995], 257-272).

About the Source

The preceding text was taken from the online course pack for Cora Agatucci’s class HUM 211: Culture & Literature in Africa (including African Orature & Film) at Central Oregon Community College. Cora Agatucci leads introductory study of representative oral arts, literature, film & related creative arts, in English or in translation, of sub-Saharan African peoples, examined in context of their histories and cultural traditions.

Read the text online at cocc.edu

View the HUM 211 course page at cocc.edu