Read Oral Literature in Africa Online
Authors: Ruth Finnegan
Such activities may appear odd to certain outside observers—as if having ‘modern’ competence in one sphere must necessarily involve an approximation to Western cultural modes in others. But the complexity of the facts contradicts this view, which in part still derives from nineteenth-century ideas about evolutionary stages. In fact, many different forms of literature are possible and exist, and if most of the examples in this volume appear to deserve the term ‘traditional’, this is perhaps more a function of the outlook and interests of previous collectors than an indication that certain forms of oral art cannot coexist with some degree of literacy.
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One of the main points of this section is to emphasize that the African world is not totally different from that of better-known cultures. It is true that much remains to be studied, that the special significance of the oral aspect must be grasped, and that one of the difficulties of appreciating
African literature arises from the unfamiliarity of much of its content or context. But—and this is the crucial point—the unfamiliarities are on the whole those of detail, not of principle. Far from being something totally mysterious or blindly subject to some strange force of ‘tradition’, oral literature in fact bears the same kind of relation to its social background as does written literature. In each case it is necessary to study in detail the variations bound up with differing cultures or historical periods, and to see the significance of these for the full appreciation of their related literary forms. In neither case are these studies necessarily easy. But it is a disservice to the analysis of comparative literature to suggest that questions about African oral literature are either totally simple (answered merely by some such term as ‘tribal mentality’ or ‘tradition’) or so unfamiliar and mysterious that the normal problems in the sociology of literature cannot be pursued.
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African literature, like any other, rests on the basis of language. Something must now therefore be said about this. Though a full account could only be given by a linguist and this description only tries to convey a few points and illustrations, the topic is so important for the appreciation of African oral literature that some treatment must be attempted here.
Linguistically Africa is one of the complex areas in the world. The exact number of languages to be found is a matter of dispute, but the most often cited figure is 800, if anything an underestimate (Greenberg 1962, 1963). These, let it be stressed, are languages in the full sense of the term and not mere ‘dialects’. They can, however, be grouped together into larger language families. The exact composition and relationships of these are, again, a matter of controversy, but the overall picture is clear. The best-known group is that made up of the Bantu languages (these include such languages as Zulu, Swahili, and Luba), which extend over a vast area, practically all of south and central Africa. In the opinion of some recent scholars, even this large Bantu group is only one sub-division within a much larger family, the ‘Niger-Congo’ group, which also includes most of the languages of West Africa.
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Another vast family is the Afro-Asiatic (also called Hamito-Semitic), a huge language group which not only includes Arabic but also, in the
form of one language or another, covers most of North Africa, the Horn of East Africa (including Ethiopia), and an extensive area near Lake Chad (where it includes the well-known and widely spoken example of Hausa). The Central Saharan and Macrosudanic families are two further groupings, the former covering a large but mostly sparsely inhabited region north and east of Lake Chad (including Kanuri), the latter various Sudanic languages around the Nile-Congo divide and eastwards in the Nilotic and Great Lakes region of East Africa.
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Finally there is the Click (or Khoisan) family covering the Bushman and Hottentot languages which, in the south-west of Africa, form a separate island in an area otherwise dominated by Bantu.
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Besides these indigenous languages we should also mention the more recently arrived language of Arabic and, more recently still, European languages like English, French, or Afrikaans.
In spite of the differentiation into separate language families, there are nevertheless certain distinctive features which the indigenous languages tend to have in common. These, Greenberg writes,
result from later contacts among the languages of the continent, on a vast scale and over a long period. Practically none of the peculiarities listed … as typical are shared by all African languages, and almost every one is found somewhere outside of Africa, but the combination of these features gives a definite enough characterization that a language, not labelled as such for an observer, would probably be recognized as African
(Greenberg 1962: 22)
Some of the detailed characteristics in the realm of phonetics or semantics are not worth lingering over in the present context, but the significance of tone must be mentioned. Outside the Afro-Asiatic family, tone (pitch) as an element in the structure of the language is almost universal in Africa and is particularly striking in several of the West African languages. Even some of the Afro-Asiatic languages (in the Chad sub-group) seem to have developed tonal systems through the influence of neighbouring languages. Complex noun-classifications are also widespread though not universal. The best-known instance of this is the system of classes, characterized by prefixes, into which all nouns are divided in the Bantu languages; but similar morphological forms are also to be found elsewhere. Series of derivations built up on the verb are also common and express such
concepts as causative, reciprocal, reflexive, passive, or applicative. As will be seen later, all these features have direct relevance for the student of oral literature (Lestrade 1937: 304).
Contrary to earlier views based on either ignorance or speculation about the supposed primitive nature of non-literate language, it is now clear that African languages are neither simple in structure nor deficient in vocabulary. They can, indeed, be exceedingly complex. Some, for instance, make complicated and subtle use of varying tones to express different lexical and grammatical forms. Others have a system of affixes which have been compared in scope to those of Russian, Hungarian, or ancient Greek (Andrzejewski 1965: 96). In these and many other ways each language has its own genius, its own individual resources of structure and vocabulary on which the native speaker can draw for both everyday communication and literary expression.
A full appreciation of these points can naturally only be gained through a detailed study and knowledge of a particular language and its various forms of expression. But a general discussion of the single example of the Bantu group of languages may serve to illustrate better than mere assertion the kinds of factors that can be involved in the constant interplay in any African language between its linguistic and literary features.
The literary resources of the Bantu languages have been vividly described by Doke. He writes:
Great literary languages have a heritage of oral tradition which has influenced the form of the earliest literary efforts: in many cases this early heritage has had to a great extent to be deduced; but we are in the fortunate position of being able to observe the Bantu languages at a stage in which their literature is still, in the vast majority of cases, entirely oral …
(Doke 1948: 284)
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The linguistic basis from which Bantu oral literature has developed and on which further written forms may be built emerges clearly from his description.
In the first place, the literary potentialities of these languages include their large and ‘remarkably rich’ vocabularies. Languages like Zulu or Xhosa, for instance, are known to have a vocabulary of over 30,000 words (excluding all automatic derivatives), the standard Southern Sotho dictionary (20,000 words) is definitely not exhaustive, and Laman’s great Kongo dictionary gives 50,000–60,000 entries. A large percentage of this
vocabulary, furthermore, is employed in daily use by the ‘common people’ (Doke 1948: 285). While they naturally did not include traditional terms for objects and ideas outside indigenous cultural forms, Bantu languages have, both earlier and more recently, shown themselves peculiarly adaptable, in assimilating foreign terms; and in the range of ‘the fields of experience with which Bantu thought is familiar, the extent of Bantu vocabulary tends to be rather larger than that of the average European language’ (Lestrade 1937: 303–4).
Vocabulary, however, is not just a matter of the number of words. It also concerns the way in which they are used. In this respect, the picturesque and imaginative forms of expression of many Bantu languages are particularly noticeable. These are often applied to even the commonest actions, objects, and descriptions. The highly figurative quality of Bantu speech comes out in some of these terms—
molalatladi,
the rainbow, is literally ‘the sleeping-place of the lightning’;
mojalefa,
the son and heir of a household, is ‘the eater of the inheritance’;
bohlaba-tsatsi,
the east, is ‘where the sun pierces’ (Lestrade 1937: 304). This also comes out in compound nouns. In Kongo, for instance, we have
kikolwa-malavu,
a drunken person (lit. ‘being stiff with wine’), or
kilangula-nsangu,
a slanderer (lit. ‘uprooting reputations’), and in Bemba
icikata-nsoka,
a courageous person (lit. ‘handling a snake’), and
umuleka-ciwa,
ricochet (lit. ‘the devil aims it’) (Knappert 1965: 221, 223–4). Besides the praise forms mentioned later, figurative expression is also commonly used to convey abstract ideas in a vivid and imaginative way. The idea of ‘conservatism’, for instance, is expressed in Zulu by a phrase meaning literally ‘to eat with an old-fashioned spoon’, ‘dissimulation’ by ‘he spoke with two mouths’, while in Southern Sotho idiom, the idea of ‘bribery’ is conveyed by ‘the hand in the cloak’ (Lestrade 1937: 304)
The flexible way in which this vocabulary can be deployed can only be explained with some reference to the characteristics of Bantu morphology. One of the most striking features of its structure is the wealth of derivative forms which it is possible to build up on a few roots through the use of affixes, agglutination, and at times internal vowel changes. By means of these derivatives it is feasible to express the finest distinctions and most delicate shades of meaning.
The verb system in particular is extraordinarily elaborate. There are of course the normal forms of conjugation of the type we might expect—though these forms are complex enough and exhibit a great variety of moods, implications, aspects, and tenses. Zulu, for instance, has, apart from imperative and infinitive forms, five moods, three implications (simple,
progressive, and exclusive), three aspects, and a large number of tenses built up both on verbal roots and through a system of deficient verbs forming compound tenses (Doke 1948: 292–3). But in addition there is also a wealth of derivative verbal forms which provide an even more fertile source on which the speaker can draw. There is an almost endless variety of possibilities in this respect, with full scope for
ad hoc
formation according to the speaker’s need or mood, so that stereotyped monotony is easily avoided.
The extent of these derivative verbal forms can be illustrated from the case of Lamba, a Bantu language from Central Africa. For this one language, Doke lists seventeen different formations of the verb, each expressing a different aspect. These comprise:
A few other forms occur sporadically: