Neo-Tarzanism: The Poetics of Pseudo-Tradition

Pretenders to the crown of Pontifex Maximus of African poetics must learn to mind the thorns. For a start, especially when their credentials are declared to be a love and espousal of the virtues of traditional African poetry, they must penetrate into what constitutes poetry in traditional art or be contradicted by their own limitations and superficial understanding of this activity of the imagination. Traditional African poetry is not merely those verses which, being easiest to translate, have found their way into anthologies and school texts; it is not merely those lyrics which, because they are favourites at Festivals of the Arts haunted by ethnologists with tape-recorders, supply the readiest source-material for uprooted academics; nor is it restricted solely to the praises of yams and gods, invocations of blessings and evocations of the pristine. Traditional poetry is all of this; it is however also to be found in the very technique of riddles, in the pharmacology of healers, in the utterance of the possessed medium, in the enigmas of diviners, in the liturgy of divine and cultic Mysteries (in addition to the language of their public address systems), in the unique temper of world comprehension that permeates language for the truly immersed-from the Ifa priest to the haggler in the market, inspired perhaps by economic frustration! The critic who would arrogate to himself the task of formulating an African poetics-a typical preoccupation of the European critical tradition by the way -had better understand this from the start or confine himself to extolling the virtues of European nursery rhymes-a field which appears more suited to the analytical capacity of our critical troika.