Punu love poem

Love poem translated into yipunu (punu), the southern Bantu language, spoken by the Punus or Banupus in the Republic of Congo and in the south of Gabon (200,000 people).

The Punus represent the ¼ of the Gabonese population, tradition gives the Kassai to the south of Zaire as their original cradle. As with many African ethnic groups, urbanization, with the displacement of populations towards the towns, has gradually dispossessed them of their customs, rites, etc. The essential communication technique of African civilization is orality. Ethnologists like Levi-Strauss insist that African societies are based on concrete relationships between individuals. A society that favors this type of relationship is naturally led to emphasize speech and memory.

There are people in African society whose function is to be depositaries and transmitters. They recall the genealogies, magnify the lineages, preserve the ancestral experience in the form of proverbs or riddles. This who says history or wisdom speaks for his group, that mean, to instruct it, but also in its name. The speech engages the group. Thus, it presupposes a technique of diction and memorization (a ritual text must be recited without errors, if not there is a collective punishment), privileged place and time conditions (ceremonies, events that involve the participation of the village).