Kofi Anyidoho
To fully appreciate the significance of Tade Ipadeola’s The Sahara Testaments as a text that takes us to a new frontier for African Heroic Saga, it is important that we establish a brief update for studies on African epic traditions and various core epic texts that came into prominence prior to the publication of Ipadeola’s work. Perhaps a good place to start is Ruth Finnegan’s statement in Oral Literature in Africa (1970) expressing doubt about the existence of the epic in Africa. The statement came as a surprise to scholars and students of African oral literature, especially when we note that Finnegan’s work is such a major scholarly work, widely praised as one of the most important books on oral literature in Africa, based on several years of fieldwork and archival research. It is however important to note that Finnegan’s statement was based on the fact that, although she was aware of the existence of various texts referred to as epic, almost all of them failed to meet the most basic defining feature of epic. An epic is first and foremost poetry, whether orally performed or composed as a written text. The most readily available text of the Sundiata narrative, Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali, published by historian D. T. Niane in French (1960) and translated into English (1965) by G. D. Pickett, was presented as a prose narrative. We could say the same thing about anthropologist Daniel Biebuyck’s presentation of the Mwindo epic (See Okpewho 1980). Fortunately, it did not take too long for researchers with competence and interest in the technical and aesthetic dimensions of these oral texts to reveal the poetic nature of, say, the Sundiata and other epics in performance, especially with attention to the interface between the bard’s narration and the defining regulative function of the musical accompaniment:
Ultimately, the expected definitive comparative work will have to wait for many more reliable studies of individual traditions. A few of these are already available, among them The Songs of Seydou Camara Vol 1: The Kambili (Bird et al. 1974) and Sunjara: Three Mandinka Versions (Innes 1974). (Anyidoho 1985, 157).
Charles Bird, as linguist and literary scholar with extensive field research experience on the epic tradition among the Mande, was especially helpful in his analysis of the complex role of the musical timeline of the accompanying instrument in establishing the complex poetic nature of the Kambili epic text in performance. There was also much to learn from Bird’s review of Sunjara: Three Mandinkan Versions (1974) and from John William Johnson’s published text in English translation of The Epic of Son-Jara (Johnson 1986). It is of special significance that Bird, Innes and Johnson all give due credit and acknowledgement to well-known individual bards as the real oral poet-composers and authors of the texts they collected and translated. Unfortunately, we may not say the same thing for D. T. Niane, whose name appears on the cover and title page of ‘his version’ of Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali. This, in spite of the fact that the text opens with an emphatic declaration of the true identity of the griot whose work he so efficiently presents:
I am a griot. It is I, Djeli Mamoudou Kouyate, son of Bintou Kouyate and Djeli Kedian Kouyate, master in the art of eloquence. Since time immemorial, the Kouyates have been in the service of the Keita princes of Mali; we are vessels of speech, we are the repositories which harbor secrets many centuries old. The art of eloquence has no secrets for us; without us the names of kings would vanish into oblivion, we are the memory of mankind; by the spoken word we bring to life the deeds and exploits of kings for younger generations. (1).
Beyond this opening statement, the whole of the first page, and half of the second, reads and sounds as a certified curriculum vitae of the griot Mamoudou Kouyate, author of the original text. Indeed, we note that Niane’s Preface to the French Edition, republished in the English Edition, acknowledges this fact of original authorship:
This book is primarily the work of an obscure griot from the village of Djelibu Koro in the circumscription of Siguiri in Guinea. I owe everything to him. My acquaintance with Mandingo country has allowed me greatly to appreciate the knowledge and talent of Mandingo griots in matters of history. (vii)
Despite this acknowledgement, however, the published text as we have it credits D. T. Niane as the author, rather than translator, of Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali, and he appears as such in almost all bibliographic listings, such as we find in the following:
The Sunjata epic – You Tube (
www.youtube.com): African Storytelling:
SUNDIATA (An epic of old Mali) Part 1. Book by Guinea’s Djibril Tamsir Niane. YouTube·British Library·2016 E-O 18.
One other point of special significance in the development of African poetics we need to consider is transformations in written African poetry as extensions of primary oral traditions:
Kunene (1980), for instance, laments how the ‘modern’ African writer has lost the epic dimension typical of major traditional poetic compositions celebrating long-term national and social goals. To make amends for this loss, he has provided us with two major written epics, Emperor Shaka the Great and Anthem of the Decades (Anyidoho 1985, 158).
As far as I am aware, Mazisi Kunene’s challenge to the ‘modern’ African writer has remained largely unanswered since the publication of his two great written epics. It is against this background that we must measure the unique achievement of Tade Ipadeola’s The Sahara Testaments. The epic dimension Kunene talks about is not only fully established in Ipadeola’s text but goes beyond ‘a celebration of long-term national and social goals’. The epic grandeur we encounter in The Sahara Testaments is not limited to any one African nation or empire. It is anchored in a pan-African global vision, from the dawn of history into the far future, with Africa herself as the epic heroic figure at the centre of the narrative. As readers, we may be challenged by the breathtaking expanse of the world and knowledge covered by the ‘Testaments’. Perhaps, we can take inspiration from Mamoudou Kouyate in his teasing closing statements in his version of the Sundiata epic:
Men of today, how small you are besides your ancestors, and small in mind too, for you have trouble in grasping the meaning of my words… To acquire my knowledge, I have journeyed all around Mali. At Kita, I saw the mountain where the lake of holy water sleeps; at Segu, I learnt the history of the kings of Do and Kri; at Fadama in Hamana, I heard the Konde griot relate how the Keitas, Kondes and Kamaras conquered Wouroula. At Keyla, the village of the great masters, I learnt the origins of Mali and the art of speaking. Everywhere I was able to see and understand what my masters were teaching me, but between their hands, I took an oath to teach only what is to be taught and to conceal what is to be kept concealed. (84).
The knowledge contained in the Sundiata is indeed encyclopaedic, a key defining feature of an epic. It is knowledge that can only be acquired through an extended period of careful education. This is the impression we get as we read The Sahara Testaments also. But what about the griot’s oath to keep some of that knowledge concealed? What about his warning not to even go seeking to acquire some of such knowledge, especially in matters of the ancestral spirits: ‘Do not ever go and disturb the spirits in their eternal rest. Do not ever go into the dead cities to question the past, for the spirits never forgive. Do not seek to know what is not to be known.’ (154)?
This is where the poet behind The Sahara Testaments parts company with the lessons of the ancestral griots. Any knowledge, however sacred, that carries the seeds of hope and is of value for the reconstruction of our fragmented history must not only be sought, but made accessible to guide us into a fruitful future. This is the primary motivation of the poet as he leads us into and through the long trail of The Sahara Testaments and invites us to ponder over the last three quatrains of his epic narration:
Lengthy work, if it yields nothing beyond sand, let it be
Far from me. Likewise meditation, aspiration and prayer
If they beget but barrenness, let them not tent near me
But if these sprout within a desert but an oasis, let me dare
Let me hope, wielding weary hands and iron pick
To strike spring in a rite of renewal amidst thorn bush,
Arid seasons, dearth. Let me find water and quick
Surcease from floundering in the harsh sun of Kush-
Find me songlines, the ancient paths, the word spoken.
Find me gardeners, keepers, planters who sing and tend,
Nurturers made sensitive to spirit and the unspoken.
And afterwards, let the grace begin that never end. (180).
Tade Ipadeola has proven to be one of the last flag bearers of the old guard who still insist on keeping poetry as an art for only the strong-hearted. Those are the very few who know what it is to wait upon the Muse to drop on their souls words that merge into phrases and grow into lines and stanzas until they read like chants by the oracles of Delphi. With The Sahara Testaments […] Tade Ipadeola […] has in no small way renewed the faith of many who had contemplated giving up on poetry since after the band of cavaliers broke through the gates and hijacked the stage. (Ekweremadu, 2015)
I have chosen this concluding paragraph of a short review of The Sahara Testaments as my entry point into my reading and assessment of Tade Ipadeola’s epic, despite Ekweremadu’s bold confession that ‘Even as I write this review, I still have not been able to read the book from front page to back page not minding that I have had it for over two years now.’ I would agree with this reviewer’s view that ‘The Sahara Testament is not the type of book that is come by every day.’
The Sahara Testaments divides into three parts or movements: FIRST BREATH, INFINITE LONGINGS and REMNANT MUSIC. The first two movements, separated by a brief section titled ‘The Atlantic Interval’, carry the main narrative – Testaments, a heroic saga of the lands and the peoples of the Sahara, from the dawn of creation and of human history through a turbulent but still hopeful present into a visionary future reclaimed from the travails of history and geography.
Tade Ipadeola’s The Sahara Testaments is cast in the true tradition of epic poetry, collapsing large chunks and landmarks of history into a narrative flow of grandeur and lofty imaginings. Myth, legend and history blend into a complex, multilayered narrative carefully located in time. Time itself is anchored in a geography of shifting and lost landmarks and in imagination’s boundless stretch over the universe.
The reader, even an intelligent reader, is likely to experience an initial difficulty with the narration. As the poem opens, we encounter too many high-sounding words, too many cryptic expressions, too many special terms calling for privileged initiation into the clarity of full comprehension. Perhaps, this is only a symbolic rumbling of poetry’s supersonic jet engines as they try to shake the mind free, to break away from gravity’s reluctant release, through the turbulence of dense clouds into the reassuring embrace of an endless sky, so the imagination can soar into a universe of new possibilities. Throughout the rest of this grand narrative, we cannot say that we are always in close step with the poet. He has been privy to too many sacred rituals, too many ancient systems of knowledge, too many coded thoughts, visited too many places beyond our known world. Every now and again, complete understanding of his words eludes us, his song’s hidden meaning leaves us a few steps behind. But he always pauses for us to catch up, he turns round to guide our minds back or forward into familiar landscapes of geography, history, contemporary experience, even into daring leaps across time into the far future.
Movement One, FIRST BREATH, the longest, runs to five chapters, each chapter made up of several sections. The opening section recalls primeval times when today’s Sahara Desert was a busy fertile land with ‘echoes from the Amazon Rainforest… Habitat of Thermidor, feast-prawn of Avalon’, where all manner of ‘Flora breathed the nascent Levan air’. The gradual, sometimes rapid degradation of this original paradise into a desert of pitiless aridity is the main burden of the rest of this first movement and indeed of much of the second movement as well. The process of degradation, we discover, comes through a series of catastrophic encounters designed by hostile nature and by devious human engineering.
We follow the poet as he traverses the expansive stretch of the Sahara, stopping in various countries, cities and landmarks of geography and history, bearing personal witness to Africa’s often tormented, occasionally glorious experience. There is an early stop-over in Senegal, Senghor’s symbolic woman, ‘immortal in her blackness… a land made for poetry, the perfect/turn of every phrase’. There is a hurried flight across geography, with snapshots across lands of the Nile into Sudan, where current unfolding tragedies feed into a history as ancient as our rivers and mountains: ‘And there is this Sudan…/Where janjaweed repaints memory in blood clots/Of innocents, where crude-fed militias kill in jest’. A pattern is established here that is played back again and again throughout the rest of the poem: healing images of beauty and joy alternating with indelible portraits of horror and pain, of stretches of fertile land dissolving into arid wastelands. And always, the agency of fellow humans is there, sometimes in the background, sometimes on boastful parade.
The poet’s voice is always there, reminding us of a time when ‘The desert relived a verdant age of creators’, invoking poets of mythical fame, Kairos and Chronos, ‘Their flight-path of song’ spreading ‘from Luxor through Bubastis into the Baltic’, telling a forgetful and ungrateful world of how ‘Africa touched the world before the world /touched Africa’. Often, the descriptive power of the poet’s words is amazing, unforgettable:
It was the age of flame trees, their implacable beauty
Claiming more surface than the sand. Lavish sunlight
Daubed each petal with pigment from stars. A fruity
Blanket perfumed Sudan, made a galaxy of delight. (p.10)
The use of beautiful rhetoric to mislead a gullible world into devious action provides occasion for deadly satirical comment as the poet takes a side swipe at Tony Blair, at Africa’s blood diamonds and at Nigeria’s chronic inflation. The winds bring back ‘Mansa Musa/And his caravan of gold…/The one man-hurricane that shook a peninsula/To its liquid foundations with solid wealth’. In the true traditions of epic, this poem encompasses vast stores of knowledge in an impressive encyclopaedia of memories and imagined scenarios.
In contrast with Chapter I, which opens with a powerfully evocative portrait of a world in its pristine beauty clothed in floral splendour, Chapter II opens with a portrait of the desert as a wasteland devastated by heat and the terrors of slave-raiding wars, leaving the women in perpetual sorrow, singing endless laments for their lost sons, daughters and husbands. Despite their great tragedy, these are no ordinary women to be overwhelmed by the whirlwind. Like their men, planted on a hostile landscape, they are ‘a people like baobabs/Like cactus, gypsum-grown in their stalwart roots… sandstone women/Singing shuttle songs with Time the weaver’.
In Mauritania, Nouakchott in particular, the poet unveils for us abundant evidence of ‘Wider architectures amidst the ruins of Arab industry’, three centuries of pillage and profit from human misery, presided over by a mock-parliament under whose decree ‘slavers were paid/compensated for villainy’. Against this portrait of pain, we find some comfort: ‘But the Negro, he is strong;/And she bears her children with faces set as flint’. Such comfort is not, cannot be, enough. So in a sequence of quatrains, the poet speaks of how ‘memory suffers seizures with the script/written in blood of infants’ and looks forward to a near future in which deep rooted crimes committed over centuries of pillage shall see redress and retributive justice. In the meantime, though, while we await that day of reckoning, we must serenade Africa’s suppressed history in song, in symphonies of small departures into the ‘Nile’s polyphonies/from loud Rwanda to hushed Sudan’. Our songs must strip naked endless seasons of ‘hurt’s perfection/Where citizens drink gun powder tea for fuel’, and young boys are schooled by zealots to accept the necessity to bottle their testicles and bury it in the sand, in the name of religious duty.
For the sake of a fuller and deeper knowledge and understanding, the poet takes it upon himself to lead us from country to country, city to city, so we can bear personal witness and testament to Africa’s history buried under the rolling sands of the Sahara. Each city, each country, comes with its own basket of tales, occasionally pleasant, sometimes sad, often harrowing narratives of terror, treachery, death. Everywhere we pause, there are important lessons to learn, for instance about the myth of racial superiority-inferiority, reminding us that ‘Hate’s shifting colour feeds the error/Of final solutions’; and the hardest lesson of all: that ‘nothing… Defeats the earth’ and ‘Man shall not live by dread/Alone’. There are no sacred cows in history’s museum of memories, history’s hall of fame and shame. Even the ‘Pharaohs and their reign of labour/Their cities of death’ must eventually succumb to earth’s final judgement and consignment of their glory to desert dust. The men who hunger for fame, ready to ‘risk all, life and limb… /For a warrior’s burial’, have often lived and died forgotten, ‘Genies of thwarted dreams in the sands/Waiting for the wind’.
The poet reminds us of the often underestimated horrors of the Trans-Saharan slave trade, compared to the more frequently storied Trans-Atlantic slave trade: ‘There were routes to slavery’s hell/Apart from ship holds… agony in every cell/From thirst and scorpions’. The agony is magnified by time as we multiply the tears and groans across the desert by two thousand seasons multiplied again by two: ‘And time itself could not be tomb enough for rage’.
There are details here that, almost inevitably, remind us of Ayi Kwei Armah’s portraits of the Sahara Desert and its slave trading Arab overlords in Two Thousand Seasons:
Springwater flowing to the desert, where you flow there is no regeneration. The desert takes. The desert knows no giving. To the giving water of your flowing, it is not in the nature of the desert to return anything but destruction. Springwater flowing to the desert, your future is extinction (1973, ix).
Remarkably, this bleak opening of Armah’s novel is counterbalanced by a visionary future as positive as the closing lines of Ipadeola’s epic:
Against this what a vision of creation yet unknown, higher, much more profound than all erstwhile creation. What a hearing of the confluence of all the waters of life overflowing to overwhelm the ashen desert’s blight! What an utterance of the coming together of all the people of our way, the coming together of all people of the way (321).
And by ‘our way, the way’, Ayi Kwei Armah means the most fundamental principle of life-reciprocity, a principle that is alien to the nature of the desert, the nature of the predators who make much of the desert their home.
The final sections of Chapter II take the poetic voice to some of its most memorable levels of expression, poetry at its loftiest imagining, its most sublime articulation, at its most disciplined versification, most vivid image-making magic. Resistance to enslavement gives birth to a generation of warriors with the attacking skill of scorpions, gliding over desert sands like wind or smoke, ‘surprising lizards/The way death surprises men’. In a concluding footnote, we are reminded of what became of the glory that once was Egypt, pride of the Nile. The lofty songs of the Pharaohs are reduced to puzzling whispers, murmurings across Time’s primeval reach into eternity.
Chapter III takes off from Marrakech like ‘a hummingbird standing still in the sun’. We fly over Casablanca with its unfurling dreams, to legendary Fez and Jelloun’s country: ‘There is poetry here, of neat sculptured quatrains/And jagged, as of the edges of the distant Pyrenees’. To demonstrate how abundantly poetry flows in this land, the poet captures for us the superb flight of young eagles in exquisite and polished poetic lines, one of his finest quatrains:
The swagger of young eagles soaring in the sun
Oblivious to the weight of light resting
On outstretched wings, their trajectory of fun
Wide as Sahara, swooping low and cresting…
Soon enough, we return to the ancient tale of how Egypt lost her famed glory: ‘Egypt bled from Thebes to Luxor… Civilization changed pilots, survivors wore sack/As vultures settled to feast…’. Brutal facts of history understated in cryptic poetic and proverbial lines. All civilizations, once declared Wilson Harris, are built on a series of thefts. We turn our backs on Egypt, pause for a second look at Marrakech, take note of piles of slain Almoravids, once the fearsome warriors who spread their religion with pitiless fury. In Section XI, we are offered a brief, tantalizing vision of a united Africa, unified ‘across passports and boundaries’, bringing solace to ‘The outcast, prodigal mother of every race’. As the phantom lighthouse of Libya sinks into the sea in the emblematic city of Sirte, we notice that ‘A nightingale links/Asia to Europe through Africa’, a secret long known to daring ‘boat people’. History as recent as Tripoli/Libya’s descent into manipulated chaos is played back to us. Some argue it could have been avoided, that the signs were all so clear, but it is in the nature of tyranny to grow disdainful of the approaching storm on the horizon. The poet reminds us that ‘Even saints/Cannot secure reprieve for a rat in a cat’s paw’. The final section of this chapter recalls the repeated cycle of violence that continues to torment the African continent, such as in Mali, where ‘Mari Djata’s peace, unperturbed by the ages/Knows nothing about the troubles of Timbuktu/Today’.
Chapter IV opens with a celebration of speech, poetry and song, where, in Eritrea, the Sahara touches down, and the people, like coral, grow into the land and sea and scatter like cotton seed. We listen to a mystery woman sing in praise of the brave and we wonder ‘who on earth/Presumes to know the many forms of treasons/Perpetrated against her people’. As we work our way towards the end of this chapter, we pause briefly over the ultimately fruitless industry of tomb-raiders, knowing that ‘There is never enough in the coffers of thieves’ even though ‘greed conjures daydreams of golden-rings/Lapis lazuli, diamonds, the crown jewel of Thebes’. We are once more reminded that the Sahara was once a floral garden. But today, ‘The desert is a diary of pain’. We hurry away, pursued by startling pictorial images of death: Death ‘from a bullet in the eye,/Shrapnel in the guts, gas in the lungs./Death from pellets, from a shattered thigh/Crude deaths and clean, death with prongs’, all designed by merchants of pain and misery, for profit.
After the horrors and putrid smells of war, we breathe a sigh of relief as Chapter V welcomes us with the fragrance of Leila’s psalms, Leila, mystery woman, symbol of beauty and love. We could listen to Leila forever, but soon, too soon, our joy is interrupted by The Atlantic Interval. It is brief, and poignant, bursting with memories of dreadful images of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and of the turbulent Middle Passage, ‘Where the fittest marched in chains to merge/With futures alien as the skin of shipmasters’. By the strategic brevity of The Atlantic Interval, the poet seems to emphasize the fact that three hundred years of horror across the Atlantic may not, cannot, compare favourably with two thousand years of misery across the Sahara.
Movement II, INFINITE LONGINGS, is introduced with a memorable quote from ‘Negus’, Kamau Brathwaite’s quintessential poem of hope:
I
must be given words to shape my name
to the syllables of trees
(I
must be given words to refashion futures
like a healer’s hands…)
The Movement brings us to a significant departure from the endless cycle of horror and misery recorded in Movement I, despite occasional moments and memories of life lived in harmony with nature and our own human possibilities. Here is a more confident walk into the dawning of a new age of promise and hope for a life lived in relative freedom from the constant menace of predators, whether man or beast, or even a hostile geography. Reminders of past horrors and the threat of their recurrence are still around us, but our skills and strategies of resistance and resilience are much better developed. The art of survival is no longer beyond the reach of the populace at large:
Millions watch the skeletons of terrors past
They drink their water quietly and eat couscous
Assured that terrors end however long they last
And meekness wins, and nothing different does.
The invading forces of Phoenicia and Assyria may still come to restage their wars of pillage. Timbuktu may come under a new wave of savage attack. And Sudan may begin to bleed all over again. But the invaders, this time round, are in for a surprise. They will find Sudan battle-ready in the hopes of the young and courageous, as recorded by the poet in a salute to the heroic defence by the youth, determined to fight genocide to the death, and resurrection of hope beyond despair. Some hard, accusing questions are raised, insinuating the complicity of nations driven by greed to reduce the earth to rubble and wasteland, the sea to a stagnant pool. But a new and determined Africa has the capacity to strategize and bring into being the birth of a new age, restoring to the Sahara its long lost capacity for fruitfulness: ‘That day will come when humankind/Will reclaim the Sahara again as home’.
In a sense, the poem, so far, has played a dizzying see-saw with our thoughts and emotions, from deeply depressive dives through moments of stability and balance, up to the loftiest heights, then down and up again and again before cruising into a stable flow in which the Sahara reclaims its long lost fertility. Perhaps the Testaments could and should have ended here. But this is a long tale with a long tail. So we must listen to the poet’s concluding reflections in a final movement titled REMNANT MUSIC. Significantly, it opens with an invocation of the spirit of one of Africa’s most revered ancestors, Cheikh Anta Diop, ‘High Priest of Knowledge/Sun that’ll never set’. The invocation is closely followed by a serenade for a model ancestral poet. The poets are always there, to bring us relief in moments of agony, to put our minds and spirits at rest when life offers us reasons to embrace joy after seasons of sorrow and pain.
The ultimate lesson of The Sahara Testaments is that Africa’s recurrent misery is as much a result of terror unleashed by invading forces as it is the result of a knowledge and spiritual deficit. The poet, I suggest, is urging us to rediscover who we once were, how rich our land once was and still is, at least in parts. There is need to ‘remind the child of those ancestors/Stalwart in the defence of the city of Jos/Whose last words in the claws of captors/Echoed a truth from the foundations of earth/That the world never ever ends. It evolves/Like a proscenium stage through abundance or death/Memory and willed amnesia…’. It is significant that, in the final Movement, Sundiata’s mortal moment is incarnated in the birth of a Thomas Sankara, that the ancestral poetic narrators resurrect in the voice and vision of the incomparable Chinua Achebe, ‘who wrote the monuments with alphabets of magic’. Writing in Anthills of the Savannah about his views of struggle, Achebe once told us: ‘The story is our escort; without it we are blind’. Our final hope is in the mouth of the storytellers as poets. It is they who must keep reminding us ‘That Africa will never end…’, that at century’s end in the year 2099, a prodigal history could and will turn the table around, with Africa seated at its head.
The Sahara Testaments is a work of rare creative genius, written to a competent technical polish, profound in its articulation of a bold vision for the African continent and for humanity at large. The use of quatrains throughout the entire poem is a brave undertaking, and even though the rhyme scheme doesn’t quite work in some instances, there is more than reasonable compensation in the poet’s amazing command of poetic diction, the power of imagery and vivid narrative detail. The work sets a new and exciting departure into the future of African poetics in general, the heroic saga in particular.
Works Cited
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———1980. ‘The Anthropologist Looks at Epic.’ Research in African Literatures. 11.4: 429–448.
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