Resonance of creative visions in poetic language among the Karimojong herders in a Savanna landscape

This paper explores resonance of poetic language with life, bodily movement and a landscape among the pastoral Karimojong society in dry land savanna, Northeastern Uganda. Domestication provides time and space for man-animal interaction allowing herders’ identification and memory of individual animals. Karimojong shepherds compose songs comprising of individual name of each animal herded by the composer and sing for the animals to graze better. Composition of songs is continued throughout their lifetimes, during which the songs are memorized and accumulated by repeated singing. The sources of the poetic imagination are collaborative activities involving the composer and others such as herding, raiding and begging animals, and visual perceptions revolving around animal bodies, causing illusions through reversals of figure and ground, distance collapse resulting from varying sizes between objects, and adaptations to dark and light, all of which result from common pattern of moving and looking during herding. Their imagination develops according to the individual life stage. Herding songs about goats are sung by younger boys spending most of their day accompanying the herd. Men start joining cattle raids in their late teens and lead raids during their thirties. By this time, a man has not only accumulated experiences of raiding but has also played a leading role in animal management for the survival of his family. Therefore, raiding is the main topic of the songs sung by men in this age group. Herders receive creative visions, remember them as pastoral songs, and connect individual animals to different times and spaces via events and phenomena experienced by putting themselves in.