Orality in Writing: Its Cultural and Political Significance in Wole Soyinka's Ogun Abibiman
In “New Trends In Modern African Poetry,” Tanure Ojaide observes that “poetry in Africa is [. . .] currently enjoying an unprecedented creative outburst and popularity” (4). This popularity, according to him, seems to arise from “some aesthetic strength hitherto unrealized in written African poetry which has successfully adapted oral poetry technique into the written form” (4). Though written in English, the poetry carries the African sensibility, culture, and worldview, as well as the rhythms, structures, and techniques of oral tradition, resulting in what Wole Soyinka calls “double writing,” or interweaving of various ethnic, geographic, personal, and peculiar African oral features into the European-derived written form (“Neo-Tarzanism” 319). Such oral features include ceremonial chants, tonal lyricism, poetry of the primal drum and flute, proverbs, riddles, myths, songs, folktales, the antiphonal call-and-response styles, and the rhythmic, repetitive, digressive, and formulaic modes of language use. This use of African oral tradition is abundantly evident in the works of major African writers. To the Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo, the artist’s vocation is a priestly office charged with maintaining the culture of his/her society as a whole. Heavensgate, Distances, and Limits, make this claim evident. Like Okigbo, Ghanaian poet Kofi Awoonor is preoccupied with African folk traditions, as well as the damaging effects of the European presence in Africa. As suggested by the title of his collection Rediscovery and Other Poems, the poetry is chiefly concerned with the plight of a contemporary Africa uprooted from its traditional past by contact with an uncomprehending Europe and the poet’s attempts to regain this past. Use of traditional African oral discourse is also discernible in the poetry of Southern Africa, especially poetry against apartheid. David B. Copland’s analysis of Basotho sefela (songs of the inveterate travelers) elucidates the oral content of this poetry, and it shows that sefela springs from traditional praise poems common throughout Southern Africa (qtd. in White 7). Nor is the oral emphasis restricted to Western and Southern Africa. In East Africa, the two major poets, Jared Angira and Okot p’Bitek, use oral textual features to reflect African culture. Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino, for instance, relies heavily on traditional oral literature in its use of Acoli proverbs and songs. The most obvious markers of orality in the text are the acknowledged borrowings, indented quotations, that Lawino uses to illustrate kit Acoli in many respects. That a new literary orientation exists in contemporary African Literature cannot be doubted. Though the long list of African writers using and expanding features of oral discourse is enormous, I focus on Wole Soyinka’s Ogun Abibiman because not much work on orality in Soyinka’s poetry has been done. Moreover, Wole Soyinka has often been
Making the Case for Popular Songs in East Africa: Samba Mapangala and Shaaban Robert
The relative exclusion of popular song vis-à-vis other forms of expression in scholarship on African literature and oral verbal art is a serious oversight that needs to be reconsidered and rectified. This article constitutes a comparative analysis of two wordsmiths from East Africa whose works embody the salient relationships and overlapping tendencies of works considered "high" literary art and popular songs, which are thought to constitute a different type of artistic productivity. A consideration of the poetry and prose of Shaaban Robert, one of the giants of Swahili literature, in conjunction with the songs of Samba Mapangala, a popular singer who has become a household name in East Africa, reveals that there are significant points of contact between both popular songs and other forms of verbal art in the region.
Medieval Modal Theories and Modal Logic Handbook of the History of Logic. Volume 2: Mediaeval and Renaissance Logic
1The translation of the Categories is edited by L. Minio-Paluello in Aristoteles Latinus 1.1-5 (Bruges-Paris: Descl~e de Brouwer, 1961) and the translation of the De interpretatione by L. Minio-Paluello in Aristoteles Latinus II.1-2 (Bruges-Paris: Descl~e de Brouwer, 1965). The translation of Porphyry's Isagoge is edited by L. Minio-Paluello and B.G. Dod in Aristoteles Latinus 1.6-7 (Bruges-Paris: Descl~e de Brouwer, 1966). Boethius's commentary on Aristotle's Categories is found in Patrologia Latina (ed. J.-P. Migne), 64, 159-294, De syllogismis categoricis in Patrologia Latina 64, 793-832, In Ciceronis Topica in Patrologia Latina 64, 1039-1169; an English translation with notes and an introduction by E. Stump, and De differentiis topicis in Patrologia Latina 64, 1174-1216; an English translation with notes and essays by E. Stump, Boethius's De topicis differentiis (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1978), Boethius's In Ciceronis Topica (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988). Boethius's two commentaries on De interpretatione are edited by C. Meiser (Leipzig: Teubner, 1877-1880), his two commentaries on Porphyry's Isagoge by S. Brandt, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 48 (Leipzig: G. Freytag, Vienna: F.Tempsky, 1906), De hypotheticis syllogismis by L. Obertello (Brescia: Paideia, 1969) and De divisione by J. Magee, with a translation and commentary (Leiden: Brill, 1998). Some other ancient works were also used, such as Apuleius's Peri hermeneias (ed. C. Moreschini in Opera III (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1991), Augustine's Dialectica, trans, with notes by B.D. Jackson from the text edited by J. Pinborg, Synthese Historical Library 16 (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1975), and pseudo-Augustinean De decern categoriis, ed. L. Minio-Paluello, in Aristoteles Latinus 1.1-5, 133-75. For the sources of eleventh and twelfth century logic, see J. Marenbon, 'Medieval Latin Commentaries and Glosses on Aristotelian Logical Texts, Before c. 1150 AD' in Ch. Burnett (ed.), Glosses and Commentaries on Aristotelian Logical Tezts (Warburg Institute Surveys and Texts 23), (London: Warburg Institute, 1993), 77-127, republished and revised in J. Marenbon, Aristotelian Logic, Platonism, and the Contezt of Early Medieval Philosophy in the West, Variorum Collected Studies Series (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). 2Analytica priora, ed. L. Minio-Paluello, Aristoteles Latinus III.l-4 (Bruges-Paris: Descl~e de Brouwer, 1962), Analytica posteriora, ed. L. Minio-Paluello and B.G. Dod, Aristoteles Latinns IV.l-4 (Bruges-Paris: Descl~e de Brouwer, 1968), Topica, ed. L. Minio-Paluello and B.G.