Pimpinaa : an analysis of Ghanaian children’s play-songs as a genre of African oral literature

Abstract

Children’s play-songs are one of the many ways that children employ their creative abilities to express their views about the world. The study analyses a selection of children’s play-songs with a view to unravelling the indigenous knowledge systems and philosophies encapsulated in the songs, as well as investigating the stylistic resources, including multimodal elements that make up the oral performances of the children. Though the research is interdisciplinary in nature, its focus is primarily a literary investigation with specific interest in the themes and the oral poetic aesthetics in the play-songs. Adopting Goldstein’s “induced natural” context enables the creation of an oral performance that is the closest scenario to a natural performance which was subsequently recorded. The primary data constitutes live video-recorded performances of children’s play-songs in their school setting. These songs, collected in direct contact with the children, have been analysed for their thematic and stylistic contents. Other data sources comprise references to play-songs in books, theses, newspapers, the internet, archived audio, and video clips of children’s play-songs, which have provided contextual background for the historical evolution of Ghanaian children’s play-songs. Employing the decolonial lens which privileges the views of the children as frame, the study affirms the children’s contribution towards preserving the African epistemology by exploring a plethora of themes reflecting African indigenous knowledge systems and philosophies. In exploring the oral aesthetics that complements the themes, elements of multimodality and all the stylistic features of orality as maintained by Okpewho, as being key features of African orature, are found to be present in their songs. This validates the thesis hypothesis that the children’s lore deserves to be repositioned as a key aspect of the genre of oral literature and therefore a window into the indigenous knowledges of the African hitherto lesser discussed in mainstream epistemology in education.