Literary analysis of the Gonja dirge

Abstract

This thesis is a literary analysis of fourteen Gonja dirges using descriptive theory as an analytical tool. The Gonja people are the speakers of Ngbanyato, a Kwa language spoken by about 500,000 people in the newly created Savannah regionand other regions of Ghana. The data used for this study was taken from a collection of dirges recorded on funeral grounds from Busunu in the West Gonja district of the Savannah region. Some dirges were also taken from Amidu (2013) (lecture notes). A total of fifteen participants were involved which comprised ten females and five males using the purposive sampling technique.The study established that, the Gonja dirge is an integral aspect of funeral rites that must be performed on the loss of some elderly person in the Gonja community. The study also found out that, the Gonja dirge can be classified into two based on who is performing the dirge, and that includesKenanawↄbawhich is performed by grand children and Ngbanyachewↄba, which on the other hand, is performed by Gonja women. With regard to the structure of the dirge, it came to light that the songs are generally short in nature. Themes such as advice, consolation, anger, regret and grief were also found to form part of the Gonja dirge. The study also examined literary devices such as personification, simile, ideophone, assonance, alliteration, rhetorical questions, repetition, metaphor and symbolism as the major figures of speech constituting the Gonja dirge.