Death as natural presence and as a monster: The elegy in African textual traditions with a focus on Swahili verbal art

According to Ruth Finnegan (2012), Africanists have always paid little attention to elegiac
poetry. This paper is a contribution to the exploration of modern African elegy in
African verbal art. Comparing various texts from different contexts and periods, it will
argue, in line with Charamba’s work (2014), that two different conceptions of death
are traceable in the continent—one sees death as a fulfillment of the existence and as
something that gives meaning to life; and the dead are seen as reconnecting themselves
with the ancestors, who are not far from life. On the other hand, the other conception
sees death as an unnatural element, even as something monstrous. These apparently
antithetical ideas have influenced the production of elegiac verbal arts in Africa, even
the modern one, and coexist not only in the multiplicity of textual praxis and relationship
with death, but sometimes also within the same poetic corpus, like in the work
of the late Swahili poet and philosopher Euphrase Kezilahabi. This paper will analyse
a body of poems which may be categorised as part of the first conception. It will do
so by comparing one of the most famous poems of Negritude, Souffles (Breaths, 1948)
by Birago Diop, to its Swahili-language rewriting, Mpenzi wangu hakufa (My love is not
dead, 1974) by M.M. Mulokozi, and to Kezilahabi’s elegiac poems (1974) and his last collection
Dhifa (Banquet, 2008). The lyrical I of the latter engages a poetic travel through
death, not only in the underworld where a dialogue with Death occurs, but also around
the very concept of death, which in some poems is accepted as an essential part of life,
while in others is refuted. Thus, in Dhifa death emerges also as something unnatural—
which reflects the second conception. Also belonging to the second conception are
the lyrics of songwriter Remmy Ongala, analysed in this essay. This paper will make a
case for the need to study contemporary forms of orality in order to further investigate
modern elegiac African poetry.