TAKE ORAL TRADITIONS SERIOUSLY — PROF NKETIA (P.21)

Story: Kofi Yeboah

A RENOWNED Ghanaian Musicologist of international repute, Emeritus Professor J. H. Kwabena Nketia, has advised Ghanaians to take oral traditions, such as languages, poems and drumming seriously in order to sustain and enlarge their ancestral legacy.
While suggesting the collection and examination of existing oral traditions for use as models, he insisted on the injection of creativity into such oral traditions to refine them.
“We should not trivialise poems but be creative in their usage. We can do this by studying those tradition, he said, when he delivered the second Asante-Opoku-Reindorf Memorial Lecture at the British Council Hall in Accra.
It was on the topic: “Referential modes of meaning as strategies of communication in oral tradition.”
The lecture was instituted last year by the Akrofi-Christaller Institute of Theology, Mission and Culture (ACITMC), in conjunction with the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences (GAAS), to celebrate the lives of David Asante (183 -1892), Theophilus Opoku (1842-1913) and Carl Christian Reindorf (1834-1917), all of whom were renowned repositories of Ghanaian oral tradition.
Emeritus Prof. Nketia, who is the Chancellor of ACITMC with more than 200 publications in Akan and English under his sleeve, spiced his 67-minute lecture with many poems and drum languages to establish the richness in their modes of reference as strategies of communication in oral tradition.
His recital of some of the poems and drum appellations, normally associated with the chieftaincy institution, thrilled the audience and kept them alive throughout the lecture.
According to Emeritus Prof. Nketia, there were many ways by which creativity could be injected into oral traditions, pointing out that even the singing of dirges ought to be spiced with innovation.
He said the referential modes in such oral traditions were strategies that created relationships between units of experience and units of expression.
The President of the GAAS, Dr Leticia Obeng, who chaired the ceremony, expressed concern that although Ghanaians had rich languages, many people did not pay much attention to them as they did to the English language.
“Our languages are very beautiful. We need to do something about them,” she stressed.