African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African folklore 722
states, the performer “could have lent rhythm to his delivery, thus creating an anticipatory
structure into which his listeners could then have fitted each new section to ensure
coherence, even if a line or two had escaped them” (Brown 1998, 65–66). Repetition also
gives these forms the circularity that is commonly found in the oral forms of the other
groups in the region. It has a wider philosophical significance in that it can be viewed as
one way in which the San are saying “even the seasons turn-turn”—things will come full
circle. That is to say, their conquerors will one day have to account for their dislocation
of San society.
Some of those who have studied the foregoing types and functions of praise poetry
have not paid much attention to the others, which some would say, are even more
important, particularly those for the ordinary individual. Even private people achieve,
suffer setbacks, and have hopes and ambitions. Further, they yearn to be recognized as
people who occupy space in the scheme of things. This poetry thus has an
autobiographical function. The very adaptability of praise poetry allows such persons to
compose or to have others compose poems in their praise. There are thus both official
public praises and private individual ones. Once a praise has been given to the individual,
it sticks such that the subject has no control over its use. It survives the subject’s physical
death and may be inherited by his or her offspring, thereby serving as an instrument of
social control for the latter.
Praises for the Young and for Women
Among the Sotho-Tswana there are praises composed for and by graduates of the
initiation school, the ritual after which the young are admitted into adulthood. These
youngsters adopt new praise names, both coined and borrowed from traditional heroes
and chiefs. The source of inspiration may be the individual’s difficult childhood, or it
could be the initiates’ view of themselves as the custodians of cultural values, which their
peers who have become Christians have abandoned. So their praises will incorporate
lines that pillory the modernists. There are also praises for women, such as one recently
recorded in Lesotho, that praises the woman for the munificence of her heart: “Her back
is wide enough to take those who are lonely; She collects all those who have lost hope,
Elders and orphans.” She is also praised for her beauty: “Her beauty cannot be measured;
As if God had created her on the first day of the week; When people come back from the
weekend with their minds alert. It was not a hurried work” (recorded at my request in
Maseru, Lesotho, by Julia Tsoenyo in 1996). Among the Nguni, women’s praises are
generally confined to the mundane concerns of daily survival, avoiding the robust and
violent epithets that men earn in war. They are about economic progress and hardships,
the imprisonment of loved ones in distant jails, and so on.
Among the Shona there are praises for young men and women. Because they have not
crossed the rite of passage into marriage, they have not lived long enough to deserve clan
praise for whatever commendable deeds they may perform. So they are praised by the
recitation of their totem, which is theirs by virtue of having been born into a particular
family, and not by the praise poem.
These contrast with those praises for the traditional Shona woman, which are recited
for her only when she demonstrates her knowledge of how to reciprocate her husband’s