Discourses in Samburu oral animal praise poetry

Abstract

This study explores the ways in which the Samburu employ oral animal praise poetry. Through the songs we collected for the study we illustrate in this thesis how the community employs oral animal praise poetry as a means of interpreting and constructing its cosmos. The Samburu are pastoralists who inhabit arid and semi arid areas such as those found in Samburu County, part of Laikipia County and Isiolo County. The community’s oral tradition involves performing poetry centring on praise of and to (their) animals. Reviewed literature indicates that some attention has been given to praise poetry. However, an explanation on why the Samburu perform praises to animals has been wanting. Such knowledge as its content, performers, and situations of performance, structure and what the praises reveal about the Samburu is what this thesis set out to investigate. The thesis affirms the cultural diversity of the Kenyan people using the Samburu oral animal praise poetry as an example. To conceptualise how this poetry defines the Samburu, we treat it as a literary text. To obtain the texts we conducted fieldwork at Wamba Division in Samburu County. We collected praise songs and numerous accounts about the Samburu. Fourteen praise songs develop this thesis. The narratives, as well as, existing literature about the Samburu augmented our analysis. The study employed an eclectic approach based on a theoretical framework comprising of Michel Foucault’s ideas on the production of discourse. Mikhail Bakhtin’s argument on the distinction between language use in day-to-day transactions and in art directed our making sense of the diction of the praise songs. To read the meanings of discourses in the praise songs, we employed Norman Fairclough’s definition of a discourse and Philip Louis and Marianne Jørgensen’s thoughts regarding the function of discourse. The clarifications that our respondents provided on the Samburu acted as what John R. Searle term as reference and supplemented our interpretation of the poetry and its role in constituting the Samburu cosmos. In addition, we employed Stanley E. Fish’s argument regarding reference as speech acts to determine how the narratives on the Samburu aided our description of the discourses in this poetry. The study established that the classification, performance and structure of this poetry are geared toward perpetuating the Samburu nation. An overriding feature of the nation is its concern to nurture a consciousness that it is homogenous. Our analysis of the structure of this poetry reveals how the performer function, role of a given praise song and a target animal4 audience determine whether a genre sounds threatening or pleading. Thus, the structure of this poetry reveals the methods the community employs to survive. The survival of this nation is dependent on a determination to observe rules regarding power relations among the various members that comprise the Samburu and a collective concern to conserve its environment. We recommend further research on the concept of audience and its role in performances that involve non-human audience.