Social Commitment in Female Song: a Functionalist Study of Agbachaa-Ekuru-Nwa Oral Performance of Mbaise Igbo

Abstract

Women artistic performance is a well-known cultural phenomenon in Africa. They use poetries or songs as a medium to perform moral function of social criticism and thus control the excesses in behaviour, extol exemplary members of society and also uphold the culture and tradition their societies. Women songs, which are oral art forms at the centre of their performances in themes and characterizations, serve as a vehicle for transmitting cultural values and civilization from one generation to another. Their target audience is everybody in society: the men, the women, the youth, the politicians, the religious people, and indeed all classes of people both high and low.  Through this means, they entertain, instruct and evoke adequate emotions in their audience toward building a virile society. However, the relevance of their songs to social change has not been given adequate attention. This study undertakes a critical appraisal of the oral poetries or songs composed and performed by women for social commitment. In order to expose the contributions and relevance of this oral art form as an agent of change in its different communities, we examined oral poetry or songs collected from Agbachaa-EKuru-Nwa women performance group of Mbaise Igbo, using the functionalist approach. Since social commitment in literature is a product of functionalism, our approach here becomes relevant. However, it is discovered that female poetries or songs as oral genre of social commitment use a great deal of satire and lament, or admonition and hortative as thematic devices in a repeated manner to express issues of great concern in the communities they occur. The study also reveals that, issues of great concern like child upbringing and its implications diffuse from the domestic domain into the public domain. The paper concludes that it so because women as wives and mothers recognise the fact that the family as the basic sociological unit is responsible for situations found in the larger society. In that wise, female poetries or songs where ever they occur, contribute immensely in satirising deviant behaviours while applauding exemplary ones, and by so doing they serve as commentaries or documentaries of socio-political and economic lives of the people.

Key words: Agbachaa- Ekuru-Nwa, Social Commitment and Functionalism.