The Utility of Poetry in Historical Writings

Historical writing, especially about local communities in Nigeria, had drawn a lot of insights from the literary culture of the affected peoples. More particularly, the core traditional African values of the people were preserved in the various forms of their poetic genres. Of the three literary genres of prose; poetry and drama, poetry has a peculiar characteristic of preserving deep and coded messages in the original or archaic languages of the local people. While the other two genres might be easily amenable to modernising their choice of languages; poetry often retained the older form of language use which preserved the messages they contained as closely as possible to the event in reference. Historians, as a result of this, have found it useful while seeking to gain insight into aspects of the traditional societies for which there were insufficient documentary evidence.
Illustrating this claim with the traditional Yoruba society, the use of poetry was reflected in many aspects of the peoples’ ways of life. About the commonest form of poetry in this regard was the use of panegyric among the Yoruba. Panegyric (words rendered in poetic form to praise an individual, family or community). Panegyrics are often loaded with historical information on the origins, identities and achievements of the recipients. Beginning from the family, each Yoruba family was conceived as unique in some ways and this uniqueness would be reflected in the praise poems they rendered to one another.
If a child from a family returned from a sojourn, either in the city or abroad, the first few minutes he or she arrived, the father, mother or grandmother would begin to recite their family panegyric and be praising the person till the head begins to swell in appreciation. The relevance of this praise poems to a historian was that it helped individuals and communities to trace their history and understand the peculiar events associated with their people. It also helped historian to identify similarities and difference among different groups of people in an area.
Another very common form of historical poetry was the poems recited during re-enactment ceremonies in the Yoruba societies. Re-enactment ceremonies were acts performed, often during annual festivals, wherein the actors physically dramatized actions believed to have been performed by their ancestors. For instance, during the Ogun festival in Ondo or Olojo festival in Ile-Ife, the priests and the worshippers would be re-enacting some actions believed to have been performed by Ogun or other deified individuals in the earliest period. During these ceremonies, the poems were often rendered in archaic form. These give historians deep insight into original settings from where such communities emerged. Re-enactment ceremonies also provided clues as to the timing and patterns of migration from one place to another. It was common, in Yorubaland, to find many poems rendered during such festivals tracing their descent from Ile-Ife or Oyo as the case might be.
There was also another specialised type of poetry with very deep and encrypted historical and religious messages decipherable only to the guild of initiates. A very good example of this form was Wande Abimbola’s: “Ifa Literary Corpus” and similar other such works loaded with messages on the past of the Yoruba society. When an Ifa Priest (diviner priest) is chanting the poem, often in form of incantation, vital information pertaining to the past societies were uttered here and there. Also, either in written of oral form, these kinds of poetry retained the archaic form and seldom deploy modern terms in expressing their messages.
Yet another common type of poetry was the hunters’ chant (ijala). This type of poetry was associated with the hunters’ guild, a group that doubled as the security apparatus in the traditional Yoruba society. An ijala would normally depict the accepted norms, the dislikes or taboos and the past exploits of the various communities in respect of which the poems were chanted. Given that the occupations or professions in the traditional societies were organised in guild forms, new entrants into each of them had to be initiated and be taken through a period of tutelage. The hunters’ guild was one of them and its members were usually versed in ijala and it was their common medium of communication.
Poetry has been showed above as one of the media by which the histories of the traditional peoples had been preserved over the years. A few of its numerous forms and types had also been briefly discussed. This goes to show that the history of a people can be found in virtually every aspect of their lives. Historians had, therefore, made use of poetry to gain insight into aspects of the past to enhance the writing of authentic and credible Nigerian histories.
R.F. Obinta, PhD
Department of History,
Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria.