Oral Literature in Africa (51 page)

Footnotes

1
   Though see Tucker 1933; Griaule 1938a: 205–75; Adam 1940: 131–4; Gbadamosi and Beier 1959: 53–8; Béart 1955; Blacking 1967.

2
   Further material can almost certainly be found which so far has achieved only local circulation, e.g. Beier and Gbadamosi, Ibadan, n.d. (Yoruba children’s poems), and collections made by local teachers and others. Children’s songs are also sometimes included on recordings published by the International Library of African Music (e.g. five Tswana children’s singing games TR III).

3
   See also slightly different versions in Curtis 1920; Vilakazi 1938: 120. The reference to the mother’s absence may be just a conventional part of the song, or may, if taken literally, indicate that this lullaby too was much sung by nurses. Some other Zulu lullabies (
isihlabelelo
) are made up specially by the mother for individual children with whom they are intimately connected, so that each individual has his
isihlabelelo
, ‘the song of his childhood, regarded as something essentially his own’ (Krige 1936: 338–9).

4
   e.g. the Swahili song given by Von Tiling 1927: 290.

5
   Kamba children are often called ‘mother’ by their own mothers

6
   i.e. I am glad that you came to me, but I never cried so much when I was a baby.

7
   i.e. digging stick. Women are usually very busy in their gardens at the start of the rainy season, but this mother is thinking only of her child.

8
   For some further references to lullabies, besides those already mentioned, see e.g. Nketia 1958
b
(Akan); de Rop 1965; Coupez 1959; Béart 1955: 60ff. (various lullabies from West Africa); Sempebwa 1948 (Ganda); 1949; Anya-Noa 1962–63; Belinga 1965: 23ff.

9
   They are sometimes mentioned in passing for other peoples, e.g. Tracey 1929: 97 (nursery rhymes among Kalanga, Southern Rhodesia); Béart 1955, Ch. 6 (West Africa); Adali-Mortti 1958: 39 (nursery rhymes among the Ewe and other West African peoples); Hillelson 1918 (Arabic); Simmons 1955: 420–1 (Efik); Lambert 1959: 78.

10
  A nearby village.

11
  
Iyoo, o / Abo, kwekwe, / ihwu, Iruka / ede / bwaloka, okabwalede, / nkpi bwaloka
(Thomas 1913 iii: 51).

12
  e.g. the West African Dogon (Griaule 1938
a
: 212–14) and possibly Fulani (if the examples of ‘chain-rhymes’ cited by Arnott 1957: 393ff. are intended for children, which seems not improbable), as well as the instances from the Swazi (South Africa), Mbete (West Central Africa), and Moru (Southern Sudan) mentioned below. Cf. also Gamble 1959: 82–3 (Wolof, Mandingo, and Fula), Blacking 1967: 101; 102; 116–17 (Venda); and catchword compositions (for adults) in Malawi (Macdonald 1882, i: 50–1).

13
  Adam also gives an example where the responsev directly echoes the second half of the query (1940: 132).

14
  Some of these are in the ‘chain-rhyme’ form.

15
  He gives twenty-four in all, fully illustrated with the music, original, and (usually) translation.

16
  They are mentioned (or, in a few cases, described) for e.g. Kamba (Mbiti 1959: 259); Ganda (Sempebwa 1948: 20); Ewe (Jones 1959: 16–39); Ashanti (Nketia 1962: 67); Tswana (1933: 80); Mpama-Bakutu (Windels 1939: 19); children in Leopoldville (Comhaire-Sylvain 1949, 1952); Ibo (Nettl 1954
a
: 238–9); Efik (Simmons 1958); Hausa (Krieger 1955).

17
  The Dogon examples collected by Griaule suggest the same kind of variations on a single theme for some of the verses as is evident in the many variants of the ‘same’ rhyme in the Opies’ collection of English school children’s rhymes

III. PROSE

12. Prose Narratives I. Problems and Theories

Introductory. Evolutionist interpretations. Historical-geographical school. Classification and typologies. Structural-functional approach. Conclusion
.

The existence of stories in Africa is well known. One of the first things students of African oral literature or of comparative literature generally discover about Africa is the great number of so-called ‘folktales.’ They will hear above all of the many animal tales that so vividly and humorously portray the tricks of the spider, the little hare, or the antelope, or exhibit the discomfiture of the heavy and powerful members of the animal world through the wiles of their tiny adversaries. Less well known, but still familiar, are the many African tales set in the human world, about, say, the trials of a young man wooing a wife, the self-sacrifice of two friends for each other, or the triumph of the youngest, despised member of a family; and the famous ‘myths’ of the various African peoples about such subjects as the origin of death, of mankind, or of authority.

In fact, all this is if anything
too
well known. So much has been published of and about this one literary form that its relative importance in the general field of African oral literature has been radically misjudged. Far from being ‘the great form’ in African literature, as even the author of a recent and well-informed work on Africa has asserted (Bohannan 1966: 137), tales and other prose narratives in fact generally appear to be markedly less important than the majority of poetic forms, in terms of complexity, of the relatively lesser specialism of their composers, and of the assessment of the people themselves. This, however, is seldom recognized. Owing to a series of secondary characteristics like the greater ease with which prose can be recorded and the way the nature of the tales (particularly those about animals) seemed to fit certain preconceptions about African mentality, these
stories have been published in large numbers and have caught the public eye to the almost total exclusion of the often more intrinsically interesting poetry.

So much, indeed, has been published in this field that it would be easy to write not a chapter but a book surveying the present state of knowledge of this form of African literature. But to include too lengthy a description here of this single form of verbal art would inevitably present an unbalanced picture of African literature. These two chapters therefore will give only a brief summary of what is known about African prose narratives and the problems of analysis, and will concentrate on pointing to gaps in our knowledge rather than repeating what is already known.
¹

Because so much has been written and published over many years, this field of study has been particularly subject to the vicissitudes of anthropological theories and has reflected only too faithfully the rise and fall of fashions in interpretations of African (and ‘primitive’) cultures. As a result there are considerably more misconceptions and misunderstandings to clear away in the case of African prose than with poetry. Indeed, when one considers the vast amount published it is surprising how poor much of it is. Poor, that is, in the sense that so much is based on unquestioned assumptions and so little is said about many topics in which a student of literature would naturally be interested, like, for instance, the art or
originality of the individual composer, the nature of the audiences reached, the local assessment of the relative worth or seriousness of stories against other forms, or the position of the story-teller himself. So for all these reasons—the ready accessibility of some aspects, the misunderstandings or gaps in other respects—this section, unlike most others in the central part of this book, will tend to be argumentative and critical rather than descriptive and illustrative.

I

Something has already been said in Chapter 2 about some of the many different approaches to the study of African oral art. These will not all be recapitulated here, but, even at the cost of some repetition, something further must be said about the special case of prose narratives; it is in this field—sometimes regarded as ‘folklore’
par excellence
—that these various theories have found their most fluent and extreme expression. The end result has too often been to play down or explain away any literary dimension.

One of the most influential of these theories, dating from the nineteenth century but casting a shadow even today, is the type of evolutionist interpretation of human history and society put forward, in various forms, by writers like Morgan, Tylor, or Frazer. Besides their application to the supposed unilinear evolution of institutions such as religion or marriage, these speculative historical generalizations could also be brought to bear on the nature and history of literature. In this field the word ‘folklore’ became popular as a term to describe the supposed customs, beliefs, and culture of both ‘early’ man and his presumed equivalents today: contemporary ‘primitive’ peoples and the modern peasant, i.e. the ‘folk’ among whom could still, supposedly, be found traces of the earlier stages of unilinear human evolution. When apparently similar customs or beliefs could be detected in societies otherwise considered ‘advanced’ (in the opinion of the analyst), then they could be explained as ‘survivals’, remnants of the cruder, barbaric stages of the past. ‘Folklore’ even came to be defined as ‘the study of survivals’, with the implication that its subject-matter (which included ‘folktales’) was basically crude, primitive, ‘early’, and, in many cases, due to old ideas passed on from previous generations. It was thus—to quote Frazer’s words—’due to the collective action of the multitude and cannot be traced to the individual influence of great men’).

(Frazer 1919 i: vii)

The implication of these approaches for the study of oral literature is plain. Any type of oral prose narrative from whatever society could be, and was, referred to as ‘folktale’ and thus treated as a kind of ‘survival’ from an earlier and even more primitive state. In this way, the aspect of individual originality and authorship could be played down—or rather, the question of authorship not even raised; for once the word ‘folktale’ was used, collective tradition could be assumed and no question about individual creation could arise. A further relevant assumption was the still commonly mentioned ‘fact’ that all ‘folktales’ (and thus all oral narratives) have been handed down through generations from the remote past, most probably in a word-perfect form. Again, this questionable assumption drew attention away from problems of authorship or of contemporary relevance and variations, and from questions about the actual situations in which these stories are actually told. Moreover, because the tales could be treated as ‘survivals’, there was felt to be no need to apply to them the normal procedures of literary criticism or to relate them to the contemporary social and literary background, for this, it was assumed, was often alien to the real content of the stories. This approach also lent encouragement to the amateur collection and publication of isolated unrelated snippets of tales and proverbs; for when the whole idea of the subject of ‘folklore’ was that these ‘folktales’ were only scraps (survivals), there was no inducement to try to collect them systematically. So it is that, even recently, the journals are full of such articles as ‘Four Babongo proverbs’, or ‘Two riddles and a folktale from the Ping Pong natives’, with no attempt to relate the specimens to any background whatsoever or even to have collected anything more than the barest synopsis of the plot.

By now the evolutionist framework from which these approaches sprang has been rejected in professional anthropological circles. Yet in spite of this, these assumptions about oral narratives still linger on. We read, for instance, in a recent collection of Hausa stories of the ‘callousness or … macabre type of humour’ in some stories being ‘residues from the past’, or how their ‘animal and fairy stories are probably as old as the language and perhaps even older’ (Johnston 1966: xxxi, xxxix); many similar instances could be cited.

That these attitudes should still be attractive is not altogether surprising. The hidden implications of the term ‘folktale’ lead one astray at the outset—good reason for giving up this otherwise quite useful word. It is also pleasant enough to be able to concentrate on confident assertions about the great age of certain stories without needing to produce evidence (the bland ‘probably’ of the statement just quoted is typical here). This whole
approach absolves one from any systematic treatment of the more difficult and interesting problems.

In fact the question of originality in oral literature is by no means a closed one. Contrary to the assumptions of many writers, the likelihood of stories having been handed down from generation to generation in a word-perfect form is in practice very remote. This whole concept, in fact, is much more plausible in the case of
written
than of oral literature. As already remarked in an earlier chapter, one of the main characteristics of oral literature is its verbal flexibility (even more marked, perhaps, with prose than with some types of verse). So that even if the basic plot did, in a given case, turn out really to date back centuries or millennia—and in one sense it is a truism that all stories (written or unwritten) have already been told—this would be only a very minor element in the finished work of art produced in the actual telling. The verbal elaboration, the drama of the performance itself, everything in fact which makes it a truly
aesthetic
product comes from the contemporary teller and his audience and not from the remote past.

In any case, how significant is it if some of the content is old or derivative? Does this tempt us to ignore the literary significance of, say, Shakespeare’s
Othello
or Joyce’s
Ulysses
? The explaining away in terms of origin of subject-matter has really no more justification for oral than for written literature. To suppose otherwise is to assume that in non-literate cultures people inevitably accept passively the content in the narratives told them and are not tempted to add or embroider or twist—an assumption which, as will be clear already, there is no evidence to support.

II

Evolutionist approaches, then, with their accompanying assumptions about the nature of oral prose narratives, both drew away attention from significant aspects of oral literature (including its literary value) and at the same time disseminated unfounded ideas about authorship and transmission. The second group of approaches to be discussed here has done no more than focus attention on certain questions to the exclusion of other equally interesting ones. These are the problems treated by the so-called historical-geographical or diffusionist school that originated in Finland but which also has much influence in America and elsewhere.

This school asks questions about the exact historical and geographical origins of a particular story with the idea of tracing its journeys from one area to another. Unlike the evolutionists, these scholars take little interest
in
generalized
questions about origin, or in the relative primitiveness of different categories of tales. They aim to reconstruct the ‘entire life history of the tale’, working back to the first local forms, hence to the ultimate archetype from which they were all originally derived, in much the same way as literary scholars trace back a series of manuscript traditions to their first original. As an aid to the more effective carrying out of this aim, various classifications have been made to facilitate the recognition of the ‘same’ tale in many areas so that its biography can more easily be plotted (see particularly Thompson 1961). Various classifications and indexes have been compiled, the best-known being Stith Thompson’s monumental
Motif-index of Folk-literature
in which the various ‘motifs’ of ‘folktales’ are listed for easy reference and comparison (Thompson 1955).
²

This general emphasis on questions about the life history of specific tales has been one of the dominating influences in the recent study of oral prose narratives (most often referred to by this school as ‘folktales’). Many interesting similarities have been discovered in the plots of stories to be found in Africa and elsewhere—in Europe, in Arabia (notably in the
Arabian Nights
), in India, and, finally, in the New World, where they probably travelled with African slaves. Attempts have also been made, following this approach, to trace the historical and geographical origin of tales found in Africa. Certain plots, it has been concluded, can be reckoned as being indigenous to Africa. An example of this is the famous tale based on the idea of a tug of war in which two large animals (often the hippopotamus and the elephant) are induced by a smaller animal to pull against each other believing that their opponent was really the small weak animal, which had thus tricked them.
³
Another allegedly African motif is that of ‘death’ from a false message, in which the wrong message is given to mankind so that they have to undergo death instead of living forever (Klipple 1938: 55ff, also Abrahamsson 1951). Other motifs, it has been argued, come from outside Africa. The path of one of these—the ‘root motif in which a crocodile is misled into releasing his victim’s foot when told it is a root—has
been traced through India and Europe by various South African writers.
⁴
Other African motifs have been given a polygenetic origin or still remain to be analysed. In fact, in spite of the general influence of this approach, not many systematic studies of the life history of motifs in African tales have yet been completed. Yet plenty of preliminary material has been collected in that many editors of collections of African stories have said something about comparable motifs in Africa or elsewhere.

The fascination of this approach, however, has sometimes blinded commentators to the significance of other aspects of African prose narratives. There has again been a tendency to play down the significance of the contemporary verbalization and performance of the story as a whole in favour of an attempt to trace back the detailed history of certain elements of its subject-matter. Local artistry, inventiveness, and meaning are minimized, and the concentration focused on external origins.