African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African Americans 111
formulae, which may occur in concatenations, are proverblike statements that are concise
and impossible to interpret out of context. Among the Lega, all men receive their own
drum-name when reaching social adulthood. Since the number of such periphrastic
expressions is limited, the drumnames of one’s father, even one’s grandfather, are
frequently added. For women there exists only a single standard formula that is
differentiated by the addition of the father’s or husband’s drum names. Animals (e.g.,
eagle, pangolin, elephant), activities (e.g., hunt) and other events of vital importance
(e.g., death) are also the subject of periphrastic name giving.
Praise prose and poetry (the musenjo category among the Nyanga) are prevalent in
societies having centralized political systems like the Shi and Hunde of eastern Congo. In
Rwanda and Burundi, these elaborate, poetic, and repetitive praises entail much
improvisation and address not just kings and chiefs but even highly prized cattle. The
kasàlà of the western Luba are also a form of panegyrics often of clan groups. They
feature lofty, sometimes even hyperbolic, imagery.
Divination, healing, oath-taking systems, cults, and blood-brotherhood pacts are
widespread throughout Central Africa. These institutions are crucial to the activities of
the society and feature specialized texts, sung and/or recited. The texts include
standardized, sometimes rigidly formulated, invocations and prayers (the mubikiriro
category among the Nyanga), exhortations, imprecations, incantations, and spells
(ihamuriro among the Nyanga). These difficult, formulaic genres, well documented for
the Kongo, Yaka, Songye, Mongo, are often ignored in discussions of African oral
literature.
Many of the preceding texts are sung, if only in part. Nevertheless it is necessary to
distinguish a category of songs per se (the nyimbo category among the Nyanga) that
involve special, often heavily improvised, texts and are appropriately produced only on
special occasions. First, these song texts relate to the celebration of events in the life
cycle of individuals and families, like the births of children in general and those of twins
in particular. Other examples comprise lullabies, matrimonial and mortuary songs,
hypocoristic and love songs, dirges, elegies, and lamentations. The Nyanga and others
sometimes talk about “day songs” and “night songs,” referring to joyful performances of
song at these times involving young people. These are songs of few words with largely
improvised short texts that include personal reflections, remembrances, and succinct
anecdotes.
The sung texts that accompany masked dances in areas like the Pende deserve special
attention. There, a parade of masks engage in elaborate performances, which in their
totality of text, music, gesture, dance, costume, and paraphernalia, constitute a
pantomime or character drama involving fun, mockery, critique, praise, authority, awe,
and “terror religiosus.”
Among the Nyanga (who developed specialized terminology around these forms of
speech), other forms of standardized discourse exist that probably could not be classified
as literary, although the population concerned considers them distinct from ordinary
verbal communication. An example is what the Nyanga call nganuriro, literally “true
stories”: men tend to sit together in the men’s house to listen to accounts of what
happened, what was seen, experienced, or achieved after hunting or trapping, or after a
visit to a remote place. Recounting dreams also falls in this category. The style in which