Kpele Lala: Ga Religious Songs and Symbols

by Marion Kilson

English

313 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1971

Reviews

[Pete · Rating 3 out of 5]

Part 1 is an overview of the Kpele Cult in the Ga community in Ghana. It is the author's intent to analyze a large collection of songs in order to extrapolate a Kpele worldview and Ga cosmology. Part 2 is a song catalogue with translations, with indexed recording notes and brief descriptions of the time, place and meaning of the text. Despite the fact that the analyses are of songs, descriptions of the music (perfomance aspects, instrumentation, phrasing, scale) is minimal. The author locates tropes and terminology that she feels carries symbolic weight, and extrapolates song meaning from that. I am a bit put off by the assumption that there is a single Kpele or Ga world-view.