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en exprimant son admiration pour un passage particulièrement brillant, il suspend la voix avec détachement jusqu’à ce que le silence soit rétabli.
    (Coupez and Kamanzi 1962: 8)
    This might seem the antithesis of a reliance on the arts of performance for the projection of the poem. In fact it is part of this particular conventionand, for the audience, an essential part. To this kind of austere style of delivery we can contrast the highly emotional atmosphere in which the southern Sotho praise poet is expected to pour out his panegyric. Out of the background of song by solo and chorus, working up to a pitch of excitement and highly charged emotion,
    the chorus increases in its loudness to be brought to a sudden stop with shrills of whistles and a voice (of the praise poet) is heard: ‘Ka-mo-hopola mor’a-Nyeo!’ (I remember the son of so-and-so!)
    Behind that sentence lurks all the stored up emotions and without pausing, the name … is followed by an outburst of uninterrupted praises, save perhaps by a shout from one of the listeners: ‘Ke-ne ke-le teng’ (I was present) as if to lend authenticity to the narration. The praiser continues his recitation working himself to a pitch, till he jumps this way and that way while his mates cheer him … and finally when his emotion has subsided he looks at his mates and shouts: ‘Ntjeng, Banna’ (lit. Eat me, you men). After this he may burst again into another ecstasy to be stopped by a shout from him or from his friends: ‘Ha e nye bolokoe kaofela!’ or ‘Ha e nye lesolanka!’ a sign that he should stop.
    (Mofokeng 1945: 137)
    Different again are the styles adopted by story-tellers where there tends to be little of this sort of emotional intensity, but where the vividness and, often, humour of the delivery add drama and meaning to the relatively simple and straightforward wording. The Lamba narrator has been particularly well described:
    It would need a combination of phonograph and kinematograph to reproduce a tale as it is told …. Every muscle of face and body spoke, a swift gesture often supplying the place of a whole sentence …. The animals spoke each in its own tone: the deep rumbling voice of Momba, the ground hornbill, for example, contrasting vividly with the piping accents of Sulwe, the hare …
    (Smith and Dale ii, 1920: 336)
    Even within the same culture there may be many set styles of performance designed to suit the different literary genres recognized in the culture. Indeed these genres are sometimes primarily distinguished from each other in terms of their media of performance rather than their content or purpose. In Yoruba poetry, for instance, the native classification is not according to subject-matter or structure but by the group to which the reciter belongs and, in particular, by the technique of recitation and voice production. Thus there is ijala (chanted by hunters in a high-pitched voice), rara (a slow, wailing type of chant), and ewi (using a falsetto voice), and even though the content of various types may often be interchangeable, a master in one genre will not feel competent to perform a different type: he may know thewords but cannot manage the necessary subtleties of tone and style and the required type of voice production (Gbadamosi and Beier 1959: 9–10; Babalọla 1966: vi, 23). Many other cases could also be cited where the mode of performance is as significant for the native critic as actual content or structure.
    So far we have been speaking of the importance of performance in all types of oral literature and of the way in which techniques of delivery can be variously exploited and evaluated by performer or audience. But there is a further, related, characteristic of oral literature to which we must now turn. This is the question of improvisation and original composition in general. In other words, something more may be involved in the delivery of an oral piece than the fact of its actualization and re-creation in and through