Literary idiom of the Lion

Abstract

The topic concerns the literary function of the Lion in African oral literatures such as Swahili, Nama, Hausa, and especially Herero. It is proved that the creative process of narration is strictly subordinated to an exophoric or homophoric approach in compliance with the narrator's intention, whether moral, social, or political. At the same time different versions of the same motif, original or adoptive, indicate that the shift in re-telling a story, subordinated to the narrator's intention, may be a response in this way to a social demand. However, the literary prototype, portrayed by the Lion, does not simply reflect a fictional character in words which give him human identity. It constitutes an idiom which on the one hand is natural for a native speaker, i.e. trait, attitude, and behaviour, featuring the character personified by the Lion, condition his role as the anti-hero protagonist, and on the other hand, the stratification of reality by the narrator, i.e. reconstructing and deconstructing reality, causes the Lion's idiom to be not denotative but referential. The tendency to mythicize the Lion, shown for instance in research concerning Nama folklore, does not apply to Herero folklore. Simultaneously the treatment of the saga as a reflection of Angst would also fail in Herero.