Journal
SOUTH AFRICAN JOURNAL OF AFRICAN LANGUAGES
Volume 40, Issue 1, Pages 11-18Publisher
ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD
DOI: 10.1080/02572117.2020.1733819
Keywords
-
Categories
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The past happenings of societies are brought together in a celebratory manner in most African praise poems. The present article seeks to look at praise poetry in two Ghanaian societies - the Akan and the Dagbamba (also known as Dagombas). In their descriptive traditions, bards use ornamented language to describe their patrons. It is the objective of this article to look at the ornamentations that these practitioners use in the poetry, and how the poems encode narrated history and offer commentaries on political figures. An ethnographic approach is used to look into this aspect with the aim of establishing how the genre encodes past historical happenings. Two principal written texts, one each from the two cultures, are used as the skeleton around which the essay is fleshed out, and then further amplified with material from participatory ethnographic enquiry among praise-singing practitioners.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available