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Dissertation
Urban Children's Action Songs
1994
Overview
1.1 ZULU ORAL TRADITIONSMusic-making is an integral part of African culture. Children pass their time singing and dancing. This they learn at an early age by listening to their brothers, sisters and elders and by watching them dance. In this way, children also learn to sing and dance.Singing and dancing form a large part of African traditional way of life. The songs reflect the customs, beliefs, values, manners, knowledge, art and aesthetics of rural people. These songs are orally transmitted. The oral traditions are not merely residual forms of an earlier culture, but have a dynamic emergent nature that allows them to be used within today's idiom to express present conflicts.The children's action songs studied reveal great transformation. According to Lord (1987 63), this is because 'tradition is not a thing of the past but a living and dynamic process which began in the past, flourishes in the present and looks forward into the future'. New songs, new forms of dances, text, have emerged.Songs are a large part of the oral traditions which include , praise-poems, riddles, proverbs and tales. These are oral forms that have been verbally transmitted from generation to generation. Literature forms part of the perpetual human communication system, and when the language is used with particular care in terms of images and words chosen, it can be said to represent an artistic expression.Much of the interest in oral forms has been their collection. In the study of folklore, analysts. have moved from an evolutionary and romantic model to performance situations in urban context. Dundes (1965 : 1-3) defines the term folklore in two separate parts. He says that'folk' can refer to any group of people wpo share at least one common- factor. It does not matter what the linking factor is ••. but what is important is that the group will have some traditions which it calls its own.Dundes then defines 'lore' as traditions which are orally transmitted. But he points out that the oral transmission criterion is not sufficient, as not everything that is orally transmitted can be called folklore, and not all folkloristic items are necessary orally transmitted.Since this is not a theoretical study, I simply call the songs under discussion oral because that is how they are composed and delivered.According to Abarry (1989 : 202), 'African children's oral verse seem to have attracted little systematic study from scholars' • It is this claim that has given rise to this work. It is so true that little has been done in this field. Finnegan Ruth in her Oral Literature in Africa (1970), provides some theoretical insights useful to the study of children's songs. Masiea (1973) did a descriptive study of traditional games of the BaSotho, white Weinberg in her Hlabelela Mntwanami (1984) provided text and music of different categories, from cradle songs to songs of ancestral spirits.Bill (1988) in her MA dissertation The Prosody of Tsonga Children's Oral Poetry has taken a performance-based approach to explore the prosody of the oral genre of children's traditional poetry in Tsonga.
