From Shakais Court to the Trade Union Rally: Praises in a Usable Past

Any delineation of literature from southern Africa could make a case for the centrality of praise poetry. Praising is our original and distinctive form. It is also highly adaptable to changing circumstances, an adaptability summarized in the title of this paper. A more problematic consideration is what it is we should continue to value in praise poetry. To treat the texts, formally, as structures of style fixed in printed versions is to ignore the character of their occasions. To follow the scholar's approach and understand praises as expressions of another time and place is to risk anachronism, and to deny the element of adaptability I have just mentioned. With topical modifications, for example, the "Praises to King Shaka," ¹ have traveled beyond the 1820s to play a potent role in an ongoing political process, whether at the Battle of Isandlwana where in 1879 Zulu military might crushed the British or, more recently in KwaZulu-Natal, in struggles for resources, political power, and Zulu "authenticity." Yet despite contemporaneous marshalings of the Zulu heroic memory, Shaka's praises obviously find their motor energy in another time and place; they do not simply transcend their pastness, and, in consequence, one may be caught in something of a moral dilemma. To appreciate praises that glorify the war-like ethos of another age could sit awkwardly, in South Africa, alongside a desire for reconciliation and healing. Yet to avoid attending to the expression because it does not reinforce one's own modern, democratic preferences is to signal the demise of any historical perspective on our human understandings.

In their study of the praise poem, Leroy Vale and Landeg White recognize the limits of both the anthropological theories that monopolized earlier investigations of oral expression and a subsequent emphasis on internal structure, or the conventions of the text. The former is seen to reinforce evolutionist evaluations from the primitive to the sophisticated on the European model; the latter, to detract from pertinent questions about the content of the expression in its social milieu. Turning to the royal praises of the great Zulu kings, Vale and White identify praising with the power of chieftaincy. While their approach has the advantage of tying the past to historical interpretation it remains, in my view, too narrowly focused on the moment of the poem's production in the past. What is required is greater attention to its moment of reception: specifically, to how we recover the past significance of the voice in the context of current demands. In reaching beyond its own attachments and updating itself in changing conditions, praising places the critic under an obligation to interpret oral tradition as retaining a contentious capacity: that of a usable past. While royal praising is certainly about the power of chieftaincy it is also—I wish to argue here—about the insecurities and mobilities of change.

The key question is: how do purposes and forms that may strike us today as backward-looking engage the contemporary moral and literary sensibility? As a start, we need to remind ourselves that in confining the praise poem to the eulogies of powerful kings, we limit its manifold social significance. Besides entrenching the rule of the leader and proclaiming his excellence, praises provided and continue to provide a focus of communal identity and solidarity, and range from encouraging the warrior in battle to acknowledging cattle for their milk as part of the necessities of everyday life. In religious service, the praise poet may act as a medium of communication between the living and the ancestors. Even the praises of past kings may not be simply commemorative, but perform purposes of invocation. The bard in his oratory, for example, can be seen to wield a mysterious creative power that conjures up the presence of exemplary past figures: "Speak him forth!, Musho!," the Zulu audience will cry in encouragement and admiration...