ABSTRACT
Moving away from songs to verbally intoned poetry, rhetoric, and history in chronicle and referential poetry is also a continuation of the key issues introduced in this chapter. The textual resources in kwadwom are dense and heavily-coded—Akan poetics at the highest level—while that of apae is direct and straightforward, although both genres are based on ancient texts and therefore not easily comprehensible to Twi speakers and the Akan. The elders in the village started to create poetry out of Akwaa’s words and in the process they polished his crying words by using the praise names of the ruler, labeling the resultant poetry Akwaa-nnwom. A distinctive feature is the discrete use of formulaic phrases as end patterns to encode the text in symbolic language and provide prompters for the Responder to repeat the Leader’s phrase.
