Zambezia (1981), IX (i).ESSAY REVIEWSHONA ORAL POETRY*IN HER MAGISTERIAL survey of Oral Literature in Africa, published in 1970,Ruth Finnegan concluded the section on Panegyric with the following observation:Praise poetry, and in particular the Southern Bantu form, is among thebest-documented types of African oral poetry. Nevertheless, muchremains to be studied , . . Though many texts have been collected,particularly from South Africa, full discussions of these are lesscommon, and further detailed accounts are now needed of specificforms in particular areas.1Shona Praise Poetry by Aaron Hodza and George Fortune is just such a detailedaccount of the traditional poetry of the Shona-speaking peoples of Zimbabwe, andlives up to the high standards of scholarship and production established by itspredecessors in the Oxford Library of African Literature. It is welcome not onlybecause of its manifest achievement in the collection and preservation of Shonatradition, not only because this study of Shona poetry contributes significantly toour understanding of the Southern Bantu traditions of oral poetry and to thecomparative study of oral poetry in general, but also because studies by Fortuneand Hodza on Shona traditional poetry have established this field as peculiarlytheir own and their full-length treatment of the tradition raises scholarly expecta-tions accordingly. Those with high expectations will find them abundantly fulfilledin Shona Praise Poetry; all readers must lay the volume down impressed by itsdetailed historical, ethnographic, and linguistic commentary, by the range of textspresented for discussion, and by the intimate insight that the texts afford into thetraditional life of the Shona peoples.The first issue of Zambezia in 1969 was graced by an article contributed byFortune, the first editor of the journal, on the history of writing in Shona. In hisconclusion he wrote:There is a great need at this stage to compile anthologies of the oralliterature in order to make available authentic collections of thetraditional praises, myths, stories with their songs, proverbs, children'sword games and nursery rhymes. These are rapidly disappearing fromuse and memory, especially in the towns where radio, television, sportsand other forms of entertainment are taking the place and time given tothe traditional arts and where the traditional oral 'classics' no longerfigure in the education of the young in a living, effectual way.2Shona written poetry has had a very short history, dating back only some thirty*A. C. Hodza (comp.) and G. Fortune (trans, and ed), Shona Praise Poetry (Oxford, ClarendonPress, The Oxford Library of African Literature, 1979), 401 pp., £16,00.1 R. Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa (Oxford, Clarendon Press, The Oxford Library ofAfrican Literature, 1970), 146.2 G. Fortune, '75 years of writing in Shona', Zambezia (1969), I, i, 66.5960 ESSAY REVIEWyears. The first anthologies were dominated by poetry of Western inspiration, butcontained some poetry written in traditional style. In 1971 Fortune contributedanother article to Zambezia with the aim of setting the new poetry in a traditionalcontext: 'Informed criticism and appreciation of the work of modem poets,particularly when they continue the past, is only possible in the light of anunderstanding of the oral, pre-iiterate tradition out of which it has grown'.3 By 1971Fortune had been joined at the Department of African Languages at the Universityof Rhodesia by Hodza, who had volunteered his assistance in the collection andpreservation of Shona traditions; the 1971 article cited a number of poemscollected by Hodza In 1974 Hodza published a book on the culture of Shona dans,4and in an article In Zambezia5 on two genres of Shona oral poetry Fortune madeextensive use of extracts from a manuscript of Shona traditional poetry assembledby Hodza. It is necessary to refer to some of these forerunners of Shona PraisePoetry since, although the book does cite other articles by Fortune on Shonahistory and linguistics (where his work on speech register in particular has beennoteworthy), nowhere in the book are the earlier publications on Shona literarytradition mentioned. Perhaps this reticence may be attributed to an excess ofmodesty; nonetheless, the sixteen-Item bibliography (p. 395), which includes itemsthat are not referred to in the text and omits many items that are, is quite inadequateand stands as an unfortunate deficiency.In 1971 Fortune offered the following six-part typology for Shona spoken orintoned (as distinct from sung) poetry: praise poetry of clans (nhetembo); praisepoetry of people (madetembedzo); didactic poetry (nhango); critical or 'blame'poetry (nheketerwaf, funeral elegies (nhembo); and entertaining narrative poetry(ndyaringo). In his 1974 article, Fortune treated nhango (didactic) and ndyaringo(entertaining) as complementary poetic genres; nhetembo and nheketerwa formedanother complementary pair, as did nhembo and the madetembedzo producedduring courtship. As other forms of praise poetry contrasting with the clan praises(nhetembo), Fortune mentioned praises of others {madetembedzo), and auto-biographical 'boasts', Shona Praise Poetry presents the poems in a three-partclassification, first proposed by Fortune and Hodza in 1974:6 clan praises, praisesof persons, and boasts. The comparatist especially will welcome the ascendingprominence given in this sequence to the boasts.The texts themselves are prefaced with an introduction by Fortune, divided intothree sections. In the first section (pp. 1-27), the poetry is set in a social andcultural context There are brief references to the history of the tradition, briefcomparisons with the Zulu tradition ofizibongo and notes on surviving traditionsconcerning the Rozvi kings, the waning of whose power may have led to thedisappearance of court poetry similar to that found among the Zulu. Also in thesepages are detailed notes on Shona clans, especially on their totemic structure, onthe office of the mbonga and on kinship, and a brief note on social roles and social3G. Fortune, 'Shona traditional poetry', Zambezia (1971), II, i, 41,4 A. C. Hodza, Ugo hwamadzinza avaShona (Salisbury, Longman, 1974).5 G. Fortune, "Nhango and ndvaringo: Two complementary poetic genres', Zambezia (1974),III, ii, 27-49,6 G. Fortune and A. C. Hodza, 'Shona praise poetry', Bulletin of the School of Oriental andAfrican Studies, University of London (1974), XXXVII, 65-75.J. OPLAND 61registers. The second section, on the types of praise poetry (pp. 27-42), presentsFortune's justification for the tripartite classification of the texts, with notes on eachtype. The traditional clan praisesŠno new clan praises are now composed(p. 31)Šrefer to the clan totems, to ancestors of the clans, to significant events inclan history and to qualities exemplified by clan members, and are used to thank orexpress pride in a member of the clan. Praises of persons are original compositionsproduced during courtship in honour of the loved one or produced as a tribute tosomeone performing a valued social function; after marriage, the poem composedand memorized during courtship may be retained and offered as a tribute to thespouse. The third group of Shona poems, boasts, are composed about themselvesby young men to intimidate rivals or by older men in some social or professionalcapacity, The third section of the introduction (pp. 43-116), on the form of poetry,is twice as long as the preceding two sections, and offers detailed notes onphonology and morphology, and on certain structural features such as parallelismand linking.The main body of the book (pp. 119-394) comprises an edition and annotatedtranslation of sixty-four Shona poems. The poems were assembled by Hodza; theintroductory notes and annotations are the work of Fortune, who includes valuablepassages on the traditions of each of the clans whose poetry is included (mainlyTembo, Soko and Moyo, but there are also nhetembo of the Zvimba, Chasura,Gutu, Nyandoro, Matope and Mhari clans). Each poem is preceded by anindividual note that usually includes reference to the kind of occasion on which itmight have been produced and a literary comment, and there are copious footnotesaccompanying each text. The literary comment is usually confined to structuralmatters, which Fortune sees as the key to Shona poetic aesthetics (of one poemFortune remarks, 'This poem is a fine composition showing a mastery of thedevices on which the best Shona poetry is built, viz. linking and the use ofparallelism in controlled imagery. The structural side of parallelism is oftenexpressed by the use of structures of a very abstract kind' (p. 328)), and which hehas treated in a separate article in Limi1 and the footnotes usually supplyethnographic, linguistic and clarificatory data. Particularly impressive in thispresentation of Shona texts is the wealth of ethnographic material offered tosupplement them, the range of the selection and the intimacy of some of theexamples. The range deserves special comment Predecessors of this volume in theOxford Library of African Literature that treated Southern African traditions8present or consider almost exclusively praises of chiefs or prominent figures. Thesemay well constitute an important body of poems, may indeed dominate theirtraditions, but they are by no means the only form of poetry in the tradition. Sincethe appearance, in 1968, of Cope's book on Zulu oral poetry (izibongo), forexample, Douglas Mzolo9 has contributed significantly to our knowledge of Zulu7 G. Fortune, 'Frames for comparison and contrast in Shona poetry', Limi (1977), V, 67-74.8 See, on Tswana, I. Schapera (ed.), Praise-Poems ofTswana Chiefs (Oxford, Clarendon Press,The Oxford Library of African Literature, 1965); on Zulu, T. Cope (ed.), Izibongo: Zulu Praise Poems(Oxford, Clarendon Press, The Oxford Library of African Literature, 1968); on Sotho, D. P. Kunene(ed), Heroic Poetry- of the Basotho (Oxford, Clarendon Press, The Oxford Library of AfricanLiterature, 1971), andM. Damane andP. B. Sanders (trans.), Lithoko: Sotho Praise-Poems (Oxford,Clarendon Press, The Oxford Library of African Literature, 1974).9D. Mzolo, 'Zulu clan praises', in J. Argyle and E. Preston-Whyte (eds), Social System and62ESSAY REVIEWclan praises, and Elizabeth Gunner10 has published an important article onizibongo produced by Zulu women. Shona Praise Poetry offers us greater insightthan any of its predecessors into the varieties of oral poetry current in thecommunity. It also offers us the poetry not of specialists but of ordinary people inthe course of their daily lives: a mother thanking her daughter, or a man praising hiswife in the act of lovemaking. Not since Guma11 afforded us texts of secret Sothoinitiation traditions have we been presented with Southern Bantu folklore on such alevel of intimacy.A major problem confronting an editor of traditional texts is the number ofdisciplines he finds impinging on his material and demanding attention. Significantaspects of oral poetic traditions Me within the domains of disciplines such asanthropology, comparative literature, ethnology, folklore, history, linguistics,psychology or sociology, and no editor can be expected to command so wide arange of disciplines; his work will be satisfactory to some, perhaps to most scholars,but inevitably disappointing to others. The commentary in Shona Praise Poetry,reflecting the editors' scholarly interests, is strongest on linguistics and ethnology,offering much to interest the anthropologist and the historian; it is less satisfactory,however, for the folklorist and for the student of comparative literature. Thefolklorist will wince when he reads thatMr. A. C. Hodza has collected and compiled all the poems in thisvolume. They have all been drawn from the people to which hebelongs, sometimes as poems almost entire, more often as fragments ofpoems which have been forgotten, and which have been assembled byextensive field-work. Occasionally he has contributed original lines ofhis owe, composed within the tradition (p. vii).It may well be that praise poems in this tradition consist of discrete lines or groupsof lines which occur in no fixed order in oral variants, so that one can assemblethese 'praises' from a number of informants and put them together to form the mostcomplete version of'the praises of a clan'; it may well be that this or a similarpractice was followed by Zulu poets or by Elias Lonnrot in compiling the Finnishepic Kalevala, published in 1849;12 it may well be that Hodza followed thispractice consciously in an effort to preserve the dying traditions of his people; itmay well be that Hodza is himself a traditional poet and that his additions areaccordingly wholly traditional; it may well be that sometimesŠby no meansalwaysŠ his informants are cited (e.g. pp. 132, 153). But the folklorist will not besatisfied with the names of Chikomba, Mandeya II, Zindi and Muparatsa asHodza's informants for the text he produces as 'The clan praises of the people ofMutasa's clan' (pp. 130 ff); he wants to know what Muparatsa actually said whenhe thanked Chikomba (say) by reciting his clan praises on 17 March 1972 (say) inthe presence of specific members of the community. If necessary, the collectorTradition in Southern Africa: Essays in Honour of Eileen Krige (Cape Town, Oxford University Press,1978), 206-21.10 E, Gunner, 'Songs of innocence and experience; Women as composers and performers ofizibongo, Zulu praise poetry*, Research in African Literatures (1979), X, 239-67.11 S. M. Guma, The Form, Content and Technique of Traditional Literature in Southern Sotho(Pretoria, Van Schaik, 1967).12 E. Lonnrot (ed.), Kalevala (Helsinki, Suomaiaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 1849).J, OPLAND63should present variants of the same text (as Damane and Sanders sometimes do).The contemporary folklorist no longer wants to read that 'the likely contexf for apublished text 'would be a beer party and such a recital part of the entertainment'(p. 327); he wants the actual text produced during a specific beer party asentertainment Only rarely do Fortune and Hodza supply information aboutspecific performers and contexts (e.g. p. 352).Both the folklorist and the comparatist might well be interested in an issue suchas the role of improvisation in the Shona tradition. It would appear from thecommentary and from the manner in which the texts are presented that the textsare held to be memorized. When a lover composes a poem, he adds to the fixedpraises of his beloved's clan specific lines he has himself deliberately composed(p. 291); in context, does the Shona performer ever add to the fixed praisesimprovised lines referring to the occasion? Only once in the commentary (p. 346)does Fortune allow for this possibility, but a few of the texts contain lines that seemto refer to the unique context of their performance: a man praising his wife to hisintimate friend (sahwira) startsThis one of mine, my friend, stands quite apart,Not to be compared with others we see here.This one of mine blesses all she touches, a woman beyondcompare ... (p. 336).How would this text differ from the poem produced by the same man about his wifeif his sahwira, or other wives, were not present? Would a wife who praises herblacksmith husband at work in the presence of customers who participate in herperformance use the same words on another occasion?Today, this place is full of noise and jollity.The guiding spirit that enables my husband to forge makes him dowonders.All those who lack hoes for weeding, come and buy!Hoes and choppers are here in plenty.My husband is a craftsman in iron,Truly a wizard at forging hoes.Ah, here they are! They have come eager to find hoes.Ah, the iron itself is aglow, it is molten red with heat,And the ore is ruddy and incandescent. . .(pp. 352 ff).It seems as though there might well be an element of improvisation in Shona oralpoetry, which enables the performer not only to repeat a memorized text but also tocomment on the situation confronting him at the moment of performance, and thisis of critical interest, not only to the folklorist and comparatist The Tswana, Sotho,ZuluŠand now ShonaŠtraditions have always been presented as if the poetrywere memorized; Xhosa poetry produced by the imbongi, on the other hand, isprimarily improvised. Is the Xhosa tradition unusual in this respect, orŠas Isuspect-Šis the element of improvisation in the neighbouring traditions moresignificant than has been allowed for by collectors and editors?With the appearance of this study of Shona oral poetry, we are now in a betterposition to propose hypotheses aboutthe South-E astern Bantu tradition in general:points of difference and of congraence become more readily apparent, and they canprovide the stimulus for the posing of leading questions. What is the relation64ESSAY REVIEWbetween the poetry of the traditions of those peoples (like the Shona and the Sotho)who support totemic systems and those (like the Zulu and the Xhosa) who do notbut who might once have done? Is the prominence of animals in the poetic imageryof the latter two traditions merely for metaphoric purposes or did it originate in atotemic system? Is the geographic imagery in Xhosa poetry in any way related tothe Shona penchant for reference to the burial places of ancestors? If the Shona,Sotho and Zulu traditions are primarily memorial, why did the poetry of the Xhosaimbongi become primarily improvisational? If the Sotho, Xhosa and Zulutraditions still retain poets associated with the chiefs (liroki, iimbongi, izimbongi),why did such a figure (rombe) disappear from the Shona tradition? We are betterequipped to deal with problems such as these as pieces are added to the mosaic oftraditions in southern Africa.Perhaps the greatest contribution that can be made in the field of comparativestudies of the Southern Bantu poetic traditions is to our understanding of the natureof the poetry itself and of its function in society. The clan praises that are soprominent a feature of the Shona traditionŠwhich can readily be seen to generatethe other forms, even the praises of chiefsŠconsist of statements on the characterof the totem both flattering and unflattering, citations of chiefs' names and burialsites, allusions to the qualities of the clan members (usually in terms of qualities ofthe totem), allusions to history. The mixture of praise and blame is a characteristicof all the southern traditions where the poet often also enjoys the licence to useribald language with impunity, as in the Shona tradition (pp. 262-3); the praisepoetry of the southern traditions usually places the subject in a genealogicalcontext, refers frankly to his physical and moral attributes, and alludes ellipticallyto significant events in his career. One is dealing here with praise poetry (nhetemhoor madetembedzo) as distinct from narrative (ndyaringo). One is dealing here witha genre common in Africa,13 also known as panegyric or eulogy, and a genrecommon elsewhere in the world (compare some of the biblical psalms, for example,or modern Cretan funeral laments recently described by Alexiou14); GregoryNagy15 has argued persuasively that such a form predates the classical Greek epic.Eulogy is emerging as a significant genre in the literary and cultural history ofdiverse peoples, yet we know less about it than we know about epic. We need morestudies like that of Fortune and Hodza on living traditions of eulogy so that we maybetter understand the form of poetry in civilizations distant in place and time, andthe function of that poetry in society. The clear location of Shona eulogy within aritual system of ancestor veneration, evident also in the Zulu tradition, makes sucha connection plausible for the Xhosa tradition and for other ancient traditions suchas the Anglo-Saxon, the Old Norse, the Celtic, and indeed the whole Indo-European complex. The connection between Shona clan praises and the autobio-graphical 'boasts' has implications for our understanding of the practice of ritualboasting common in the traditions of early medieval Europe. Thus the living-ŁŁŁ13 See S. A. Babalpla (ed.), The Context and Form ofYoruba Ijala (Oxford, Clarendon Press,The Oxford Library of African Literature, 1966), andH. F. Morris (ed.), The Heroic Recitations of theBahima ofAnkote (Oxford, Clarendon Press, The Oxford Library of African Literature, 1964).14 M. Alexiou, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Press,1974).15 G. Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry(Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1979).J. OPLAND65traditions of Africa have significance far beyond the continent in the twentiethcentury.Shona Praise Poetry stands as a major contribution in the preservation ofShona tradition. It is also a detailed and scholarly study of the oral poetry of theShona-speaking peoples of Zimbabwe that offers material of critical relevance toour understanding of the genre of eulogy, of poetry in the South-Eastern Bantutraditions, and ultimately of the development of literature.Rhodes UniversityGrahamstownJEFF OPLAND