Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

To praise or not to praise the king: the Akan apae in the context of referential poetry

1983; Indiana University Press; Volume: 14; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

1527-2044

Kwesi Yankah,

Multilingual Education and Policy

The dilemma of choosing between cross-cultural typologies and indigenous taxons in the study of African oral art has received ampie coverage in genre scholarship.1 Where the scholar has even? tually given preference to cross-cultural categories, the impiied rationale has been to provide a frame of reference conducive to comparative scholarship and, as a corollary, to expose the ab? sence of adequate discriminatory signals in certain indigenous taxonomic labels.2 The eloquence of such scholarly testimonies, however, often tends to drive into oblivion the misleading traits, of so-called cross-cultural tags. The label poetry or panegyric in the African context is a case in point.3 Praise poetry highlights a theme that, on one hand, has been inadequately identified and, on the other hand, is known to pervade nearly the entire realm of oral poetry in Africa. It is, indeed, yet to be known if there is a restricted genre in any African culture which is locally acknowledged to hold a monopoly over praise. The intergeneric use in Africa of what is often called is largely attributable to the tremendous role strong appellations, often called praise names, play in African oral discourse in general and in poetry in particular. A recommendation that clearly emerges here then is to regard poetry, or a more appropriate label, as an analytical megagenre that embraces all forms of poetry in which names constitute a key structural feature. The very fact that not all strong appellations are laudatory, however, would clearly betray poetry as a misnomer. To this, however, the attitudes of various scholars have not been uniform. A few scholars do not seem to be perturbed by the label poetry. G. P. Lestrade,4 for instance, refers to Bantu performances as including a recital of laudatory epithets applied to (one) as either a member of a group, or as an individual and known as his names.5 Schapera, writing on the royal poems of the Tswana, sticks to Lestrade's use of poem.6 Torn between the terms heroic and praise, Daniel Kunene opts for heroic, even though there is no very strong reason for preferring one term to the other.7 Kunene coins the term eulogue to refer to different kinds of reference: names such as deverbative nouns . . . metaphorical names . . . by association of the hero with some other person, whether himself (or herself) praiseworthy or not.8 At the latter part of this definition of eulogue, Kunene leaves a slight hint of the possibility of uncomplimentary