Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Africa and orality
- 2 The folktale and its extensions
- 3 Festivals, ritual, and drama in Africa
- 4 Arab and Berber oral traditions in North Africa
- 5 Heroic and praise poetry in South Africa
- 6 African oral epics
- 7 The oral tradition in the African diaspora
- 8 Carnival and the folk origins of West Indian drama
- 9 Africa and writing
- 10 Ethiopian literature
- 11 African literature in Arabic
- 12 The Swahili literary tradition: an intercultural heritage
- 13 Africa and the European Renaissance
- 14 The literature of slavery and abolition
- 15 Discourses of empire
- 16 African-language literatures of southern Africa
- 17 Gikuyu literature: development from early Christian writings to Ngũgĩ’s later novels
- 18 The emergence of written Hausa literature
- 19 Literature in Yorùbá: poetry and prose; traveling theater and modern drama
- 20 African literature and the colonial factor
- 21 The formative journals and institutions
- 22 Literature in Afrikaans
- References
6 - African oral epics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
- Frontmatter
- 1 Africa and orality
- 2 The folktale and its extensions
- 3 Festivals, ritual, and drama in Africa
- 4 Arab and Berber oral traditions in North Africa
- 5 Heroic and praise poetry in South Africa
- 6 African oral epics
- 7 The oral tradition in the African diaspora
- 8 Carnival and the folk origins of West Indian drama
- 9 Africa and writing
- 10 Ethiopian literature
- 11 African literature in Arabic
- 12 The Swahili literary tradition: an intercultural heritage
- 13 Africa and the European Renaissance
- 14 The literature of slavery and abolition
- 15 Discourses of empire
- 16 African-language literatures of southern Africa
- 17 Gikuyu literature: development from early Christian writings to Ngũgĩ’s later novels
- 18 The emergence of written Hausa literature
- 19 Literature in Yorùbá: poetry and prose; traveling theater and modern drama
- 20 African literature and the colonial factor
- 21 The formative journals and institutions
- 22 Literature in Afrikaans
- References
Summary
The study of the African epic was born in denial. In the third volume (1940) of their classic Growth of Literature, H. Munro and N. Kershaw Chadwick, discussing the “distribution of literary types” across the world, conclude there is no “narrative poetry … at all in Biblical Hebrew or anywhere in Africa.” Assuming a difference between such poetry and “saga,” by which they mean a narrative form with an admixture of prose and verse, they conclude the latter is found in “several African languages” (1940: 706).
In his equally epochal book, Heroic Poetry (1952), C. M. Bowra also has difficulty in recognizing the existence of epic or “heroic” poetry in Africa. Adopting an evolutionist approach in his discussion of “the development of primitive narrative poetry” across nations, he concludes, on the one hand, that, in cultures like Africa, heroic poetry had not quite graduated from a tradition of predominantly panegyric forms to one of sustained heroic narratives, and, on the other, that such narratives of heroic pretensions as might be found on the continent were centered around figures who achieved their feats more by magic than by force of sheer physical might. Bowra’s language is particularly alarming: in discussing pieces of historical panegyric and lament songs from Uganda and “Abyssinia,” he observes that in spirit they are “close … to a heroic outlook” but that “the intellectual effort required” to advance such texts to the level of heroic poetry “seems to have been beyond their powers” (1952: 10–11)!
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature , pp. 98 - 116Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000