Oral Literature in Africa (9 page)

This argument tends to the conclusion that there is no good reason to deny the title of ‘literature’ to corresponding African forms just because they happen to be oral. If we do treat them as
fundamentally
of a different kind, we deny ourselves both a fruitful analytic approach and, furthermore, a wider perspective on the general subject of comparative literature. We need of course to remember that oral literature is only one type of literature, a type characterized by particular features to do with performance, transmission, and social context with the various implications these have for its study. But for all these differences, the view that there is no essential chasm between this type of literature and the more familiar written forms is a basic assumption throughout this book.

Footnotes

1
On which see e.g. Jousse 1924; Lord 1960; Propp 1958; cf. Olrik’s ‘epic laws’, 1965.

2
e.g. Lévi-Strauss 1966; cf. also the discussion and references in Goody and Watt 1963.

3
For the general discussion in this chapter see particularly the valuable brief article by Bascom in
JAF
1955, also Chadwicks 1932–40 (especially vol. iii) and Chadwick 1939. Some of the more detailed theories which have affected the study of African oral literature are discussed in Ch. 2.

4
On some of the many variations in the forms of composition (including musical composition) among different peoples see Nettl 1954
b
and 1956: esp. pp. 12ff.

5
For instances of this see the various examples in Parts II and III and in particular the discussion in Ch. 9, pp. 266ff.

6
e.g. the solitary working songs, some herding songs, sometimes individual rehearsals for later performance, and perhaps some of the lullabies.

7
For further details on audience participation in stories see Ch. 13, pp. 385ff.

8
A few early observers speak of recording certain of their texts on ‘the phonograph’. See e.g. Torrend 1921 (Northern Rhodesian stories, including songs); Thomas 1910 ii (Edo); Lindblom iii, 1934: 41 (Kamba songs, recorded about 1912).

9
For early approaches of this kind see Ch. 2.

10
Or, better, to the readers of such original and detailed studies as e.g. Nketia 1955 etc., Babalola 1966, Kagame 1951
b
.

11
Several of them are more fully elaborated in later chapters, particularly Ch. 2.

12
See for instance H. J. Chaytor’s pertinent comment on medieval vernacular literature: ‘In short, the history of the progress from script to print is a history of the gradual substitution of visual for auditory methods of communicating and receiving ideas … To disregard the matter and to criticise medieval literature as though it had just been issued by the nearest circulating library is a sure and certain road to a misconception of the medieval spirit’ (1945: 4). The oral aspects of manuscript culture are further discussed in McLuhan 1962.

13
See below

14
In particular Parts II and III.

15
For some further discussion of the question of African oral forms as ‘literature’ see Whiteley 1964: 4ff. and references given there.

2. The Perception of African Oral Literature

Nineteenth-century approaches and collections. Speculations and neglect in the twentieth century. Recent trends in African studies and the revival of interest in oral literature
.

A considerable amount of work has been published on the subject of African oral literature in the last century or so. But the facts are scattered and uneven, often buried in inaccessible journals, and their significance has not been widely appreciated. The popular image of Africa as a land without indigenous literary traditions retains its hold; even now, it is still sometimes expressed in a form as crude as that criticized by Burton a century ago:

The savage custom of going naked’, we are told, ‘has denuded the mind, and destroyed all decorum in the language. Poetry there is none …. There is no metre, no rhyme, nothing that interests or soothes the feelings, or arrests the passions …

(Burton 1865: xii)

Even those who would immediately reject so extreme a view are still often unconsciously influenced by fashionable but questionable assumptions about the nature of literary activity among non-literate peoples, which determine their attitude to the study of African oral literature. We still hear, for instance, of the ‘savage’ reliance on the ‘magical power of the word’, of the communal creation of ‘folktales’ with no part left for the individual artist, or of the deep ‘mythic’ consciousness imagined to be characteristic of non-literate society. All in all, there is still the popular myth of Africa as a continent either devoid of literature until contact with civilized nations led to written works in European languages, or possessing only crude and uninteresting forms not worthy of systematic study by the serious literary or sociological student.

In fact, there is a strong indigenous tradition of both unwritten and, in some areas, written literature in Africa.
¹
The oral literature in particular possesses vastly more aesthetic, social, and personal significance than would be gathered from most general publications on Africa. Far more, too, has been published on this subject than is usually realized even by many of the students who have recently taken some interest in the subject. But because much of the detailed research this century has been carried out by individuals working in isolation or, at best, by various schools of researchers out of touch with the work of other groups, the subject as a whole has made little progress over the last generation or so, whether in consolidating what is already known, in criticizing some of the earlier limiting preconceptions, or in publicizing the results to date.

This introductory chapter traces briefly the history of the study of African oral literature over the last century. The purpose of the chapter is twofold. First, there have been so many assumptions and speculations about both Africa and oral literature that it is necessary to expose these to clear the way for a valid appreciation of our present knowledge of the subject.
²
Second, the various sources we have for the study of African oral literature need to be assessed and put in historical perspective. For though there are far more collections of African oral art than is usually realized, they are of very uneven quality and their usefulness depends on a knowledge of the theoretical preconceptions of the collector.

I

The European study of oral literature in Africa begins about the middle of the last century. There had been a few isolated efforts before then, notably Roger’s retelling of Wolof fables from Senegal (1828) and an increasing awareness of the written Arabic tradition. But until the mid-century there was no available evidence to refute the popular European image of Africa as totally without literary pretensions. By about the 1850s the position changed. African linguistic studies were emerging as a specialist and scholarly field, and this in turn led to a fuller appreciation of the interest and subtleties of African languages. The main motive of many of these
linguistic studies was to aid the evangelization of Africa, and grammars, vocabularies, and collections of texts appeared by and for missionaries. There was close collaboration between linguists and missionaries, and many of the great collections of texts in the nineteenth century were a result of professional or amateur linguists working in full sympathy with the missionary movement and published under its auspices.
³
A further stimulus was the general interest in comparative studies. This was revealed not only in linguistic work and in the comparative analysis of social and political institutions, but also in the field of literature: in the school of comparative mythology and in the impetus to collection arising from the publications of the Grimm brothers in Germany.

The result of these various influences was the publication of many lengthy collections of African texts and translations in the second half of the nineteenth century.
⁴
These contain narratives of various kinds (including stories about both animals and humans), historical texts, proverbs, riddles, vernacular texts describing local customs, sometimes additional vernacular compositions by the collector, and very occasionally songs or poems. There is of course some variation in size and quality, but by and large these editions compare favourably with many more recent publications. Most include complete texts in the vernacular with a facing translation usually into English or German, and occasionally a commentary (most often linguistic).

The main emphasis in these collections was, it is true, linguistic (or, in some cases, religio-educational, preoccupied with what it was thought fitting for children to know). There was little attempt to relate the texts to their social context, elucidate their literary significance, or describe the normal circumstances of their recitation. There are many questions, therefore, which these texts cannot answer. Nevertheless, the very size of many of these collections, presenting a corpus of literature from a single people, often throws more light on the current literary conventions among a given people than all the odd bits and pieces which it became so fashionable to
publish later. And the linguistic and missionary motive was not always so narrow as to exclude all interest in the wider relevance of these collections. A number of scholars noted the connections between their work and the progress in comparative studies in Europe. Bleek, for instance, significantly entitles his collection of Hottentot stories
Reynard the Fox in South Africa,
to bring out the parallelism between African and European tales. Although at first some people refused to believe that tales of such striking similarity to European folk-stories and fairy-tales could really be indigenous to Africa, this similarity of content gradually became accepted. By the end of the century, Chatelain could assert with confidence in his authoritative survey that many myths, characters, and incidents known elsewhere also occur in African narratives, and that African folklore is thus a ‘branch of one universal tree’.
⁵
The cultural implications of these collections were not lost on their editors. There was a general recognition, often accompanied by some slight air of surprise, that the negro too was capable of producing works which manifested depth of feeling and artistry and showed him to be human in the fullest sense of the word. Both the climate of opinion to which he felt he had to address himself and his own conclusions on the basis of his study of the language come out clearly in the preface to the early work by Koelle,
African Native Literature, or Proverbs, Tales, Fables and Historical Fragments in the Kanuri or Bornu Language,
published in 1854. It is illuminating to quote this eloquent and early statement at some length:

It is hoped that the publication of these first specimens of a Kanuri literature will prove useful in more than one way. Independently of the advantages it offers for a practical acquaintance with the language, it also introduces the reader, to some extent, into the inward world of Negro mind and Negro thoughts, and this is a circumstance of paramount importance, so long as there are any who either flatly negative the question, or, at least, consider it still open, ‘whether the Negroes are a genuine portion of mankind or not’. It is vain to speculate on this question from mere anatomical facts, from peculiarities of the hair, or the colour of the skin: if it is
mind
that distinguishes man from animals, the question cannot be decided without consulting the
languages
of the Negroes; for language gives the
expression
and
manifestation
of the mind. Now as the Grammar proves that Negro languages are capable of expressing human thoughts, —some of them, through their rich formal development, even with an astonishing precision—so specimens like the following ‘Native Literature’ show that the Negroes actually have thoughts to express, that they reflect and reason about things
just as other men. Considered in such a point of view, these specimens may go a long way towards refuting the old-fashioned doctrine of an essential inequality of the Negroes with the rest of mankind, which now and then still shows itself not only in America but also in Europe (Chatelain 1894: 20. Chatelain’s introduction gives an excellent summary of the publications and conclusions on African oral literature to that date).

By the end of the century the same point could be stated more dogmatically and succinctly; as Seidel has it in his description of the impact of African oral literature, ‘Und alle sahen mit Erstaunen, dass der Neger denkt und fült, wie wir selbst.denken und fühlen’; (Seidel 1896: 3) but the point has been made—and often with a similar air of discovery—at intervals ever since.
⁶

The appreciation of the cultural relevance of the collected texts was taken further by the emerging tradition that a general study of any African people could suitably include a section on their unwritten literature. Even in the nineteenth century some general volumes appeared in which the literary creations of African peoples were set in the context of their life in general.
⁷

One of the striking contributions of these early collectors—missionaries, linguists, ethnographers—is the frequent recognition that the texts they recorded could be truly regarded as a type of literature, fundamentally analogous to the written fiction, history, and poetry of European nations. This point is worth making. Recent scholars of the subject too often give the impression that they are the first to recognize the true nature of these texts as literature (although it must indeed be admitted that not only has it been difficult for this approach to gain popular acceptance, but for much of this century it has for various reasons been overlooked by professional students of Africa). Many of those working in this field in the nineteenth century, however, were quite clear on the point. The term ‘literature’ appears in the titles of books or sections,
⁸
and Chatelain expressed a fairly common attitude among collectors when he stressed the importance of studying ‘their unwritten, oral literature’. (1894: 16).
⁹
One of the earliest clear statements is that of Bleek in the preface to his famous collection of Namaqa Hottentot tales. These fables, he writes, form

[an] extensive … mass of traditionary Native literature amongst the Namaqa …. The fact of such a literary capacity existing among a nation whose mental qualifications it has been usual to estimate at the lowest standard, is of the greatest importance; and that their literary activity … has been employed almost in the same direction as that which had been taken by our own earliest literature, is in itself of great significance (Bleek 1864: xii–xiii).

By the end of the century, then, the subject was fairly well recognized by a limited group of scholars. A certain amount had been both recorded and published—in special collections, in general surveys of particular peoples, and as appendices and illustrations in grammatical works. Though few were working in this field, they tended to be in touch and to be aware of each other’s research, so that by the 1890s serious comparative and general accounts could be produced, drawing on the published works of others.
¹⁰
It is true that a certain air of condescension was at times discernible; but this attitude in fact often seems less noticeable in these nineteenth-century sources than in many produced later. There was a general appreciation of the cultural implications of the studies: the fact that Africa could no longer be treated as an area totally without its own cultural traditions, that these could be looked at comparatively in the context of European as well as of African studies, and, finally, that the texts recorded by linguists, missionaries, and others could be treated as at least analogous to parallel written forms. Needless to say, this more liberal approach met with little popular recognition. The works were obscurely published and intended for specialist reading, and—perhaps even more important—the common myth that saw the African as uncultivated and un-literary was too firmly established to allow for easy demolition.
¹¹
But at least among a small group of scholars, in particular the German and English linguists, there was a sense that the subject had been established as one worthy of study and one which had even made a certain amount of progress.

This serious interest was consolidated by the group of German scholars working together towards the end of the nineteenth and during the first decades of the twentieth century—and also, to a lesser extent, later. Linguistic studies were considered to include African languages, and a series of specialist journals were published, some short-lived, others still continuing today, in which systematic work on various aspects of African
languages, including oral literature, appeared.
¹²
University chairs were established in Bantu or African languages (at Hamburg and Berlin) before any similar appointments in the English-speaking academic world.
¹³
The linguistic interests of these scholars were by no means strictly limited to grammatical or syntactical analysis, but included both the recording of literary texts and a general appreciation of African literature as a suitable object of scholarship. Comparative surveys appeared which, though in some respects dated, are still among the best available.
¹⁴
Drawing on the various published sources for African texts (both large and small), the authors called attention to the literary status of many of them, and pointed not only to the obvious prose forms recorded from Africa but also—a far less common recognition even now—to the various categories of poetry. Seidel, for instance, lists love songs, satirical songs, war songs, epic, dirges, religious songs, and didactic poems as among African literary forms, and even makes some attempt to discuss their formal structure (1896: 8ff.). To this general recognition of the subject was added a tradition of systematic empirical research. The extension of the German empire further stimulated the interest in African studies, and many texts were recorded and analysed by scholars publishing in German, above all in the areas under German rule—South-West Africa, German East Africa (covering Tanganyika and Ruanda-Urundi), Kamerun, and Togo.
¹⁵
Between them these collectors recorded or discussed such forms as prose narratives, proverbs, riddles, names, drum literature, and, more unusually in the subject as a whole, different kinds of poems and songs, sometimes accompanied by the
recording and analysis of the music, in keeping with the early German interest in ethnomusicology.
¹⁶