A Forest Language and What Its One Book Carries

Nyanga is a Bantu language of North Kivu, spoken by a comparatively small population in forested country west of the Rwandan border, and it has no substantial written literature of its own beyond the epic and the ethnographic material collected with it. That makes the Mwindo publication unusually load-bearing: almost everything an outside reader can know about Nyanga religious vocabulary comes through one work recorded from one man in one year. The epic itself is dense with that vocabulary. It names the powers of the sky, water and underworld as distinct and negotiable persons; it treats the karisi spirit, from which the bard's own title She-Karisi is formed, as the source of the material; and it presents chieftaincy, hunting prohibition and the obligations owed to a mother's kin as religious matters rather than social ones.

The atlas records the language rather than folding the epic into a general Bantu heading for a specific reason: a work recorded once, in one place, from one performer, is exactly the kind of material that gets attributed to a family instead of a language, and the family in question holds some five hundred languages. The Nyanga themselves place the epic in a wider body of narrative that includes hunting stories, riddles and the praise of chiefs, and Rureke was a specialist in that whole repertoire rather than in one poem. What reached print is therefore a slice of a living practice chosen by an outside collector, which is worth saying plainly, because a language known to outsiders through one book is easily mistaken for a language that has one book.