Oral Literature in Africa (58 page)

When we come to consider the types of African stories usually termed ‘myths’ we run into some difficulty. This is partly because ‘mythology’ is sometimes loosely used to cover all kinds of prose narratives, including ordinary animal tales and. stories about people.
⁴¹
More important, however, is the point that if we accept either the popular or the scholarly distinction of ‘myth’ from ‘fictional’ narrative; this does not seem to fit much of the African material. As it is not possible to touch on every single case it may be helpful to make some rather general comments about the problem of delimiting and discussing African ‘myths’. This will involve recapitulating several points touched on earlier.

One recent account of what is meant by ‘myth’ is that put forward by Bascom, based among other things on his assessment of how this term has been used by students of oral literature. This provides a convenient starting-point. He writes:

Myths are prose narratives which, in the society in which they are told are considered to be truthful accounts of what happened in the remote past
. They are accepted on faith; they are taught to be believed; and they can be cited as authority in answer to ignorance, doubt, or disbelief. Myths are the embodiment of dogma; they are usually sacred; and they are often associated with theology and ritual. Their main characters are … animals, deities, or culture heroes, whose actions are set in an earlier world, when the earth was different from what it is today, or in another world such as the sky or underworld …

(Bascom 1965
b
: 4)
⁴²

This account fits well with the everyday connotations of the term ‘myth’ in terms of the content, the authoritative nature of these narratives, the way in which they are believed, and their special context and characters, often consciously distinguished from other less serious narratives.

When this sense of the term is taken, it seems evident that myths in the strict sense are by no means common in African oral literature. This is in spite of the narratives presented as myths in many popular collections.
⁴³
It is true that many of these have an aetiological element, refer to supernatural beings, or are concerned with events set in some remote time in the past. But they do not necessarily possess the other attributes of ‘myths’—their authoritative nature and the way in which they are accepted as serious and truthful accounts. It is seldom, also, that we seem to find narratives depicting the activities of deities or other supernatural beings alone or even as the central subject
⁴⁴
much more frequently the interest seems to be centred on human or animal characters with supernatural beings only appearing in secondary roles. Radin’s remark in 1952 that cosmological myths are rare in Africa compared to their significance among, say, the Polynesians or American Indians (Radin 1952: 2) has not been invalidated by evidence produced since then. And one could go further and say that myths in any strict sense do not seem, on the evidence we have, to be a characteristic African form at all.

It is worth pointing out the actual classifications made in several African societies between different types of narrative. Though these may not amount to a distinctive category of myth, they do provide a somewhat analogous though less marked contrast between more fictional tales and those said in some sense to be ‘true’. This can be illustrated from three or four of the better-studied African cultures.

First, the Fon of Dahomey. They generally distinguish in terminology between
hwenoho
and
heho,
a distinction only at first sight corresponding to ‘myth’ as against ‘fiction’.
Hwenoho
is literally ‘time-old-story’ and includes, to use Herskovits’s terms, ‘myths’ (stories of the deities and the peopling of the earth), ‘clan myth-chronicles’ (telling of the origin and adventures of the powerful families), and ‘verse-sequences’ (sung by professional poets to memorize genealogies and events incorporated into ritual or law).
(Herskovits 1958: 17) These narratives are not presented with the same art and dramatization as more fictional tales, and tend to be told by specialists (priests, diviners, etc.) or within a small family group, particularly a family council. The elements of entertainment and of conscious artistry seem relatively unimportant. The second group of Fon narratives, the
heho,
covers more light-hearted stories. There are tales about various supernatural, human, and animal characters: about hunters, women, twins, orphans, or children-born-to-die; about the trickster-deity Legba or the mythical Yo with his gross appetites; and various kinds of explanatory and moralizing tales. All these latter stories are normally told at night. Some of them also occur in the context of divination
⁴⁵
where they may appear on the surface to be obviously ‘myths’—yet they are locally classified as
heho
. In fact, as Herskovits points out (1958: 25–26), the classifications are not absolutely clear-cut ones; there is overlap between them in terms of symbolic characterization, plot, motif, and function.

In these and some other West African cases the local classifications bear some resemblance to the general distinction between ‘folktale’ (or ordinary fictional narrative) on the one hand and a blend of myth-legend on the other.
⁴⁶
In other cases, however, either no such distinction is made at all, or else what there is makes rather different, sometimes more complicated groupings. The Kimbundu classifications, for example, divide narratives into three main groups (excluding the closely related proverbs,
jisabu
)
. There are, first, the stories regarded as fictitious,
misoso,
arising from imagination. ‘Their object’, writes Chatelain, ‘is less to instruct than to entertain, and to satisfy the aspirations of the mind for liberty from the chains of space and time, and from the laws of matter’ (Chatelain 1894: 21). This class includes animal tales and stories about the marvellous and supernatural. Secondly there are the
maka,
reputedly true stories or anecdotes. These are instructive as well as entertaining, and are socially didactic, concerned with how to live and act. Finally there are the ‘historical narratives’—
malunda
or
misendu
—the chronicles of the tribe and nation transmitted by headmen or elders. They are considered to be state secrets and ‘plebeians get only a few scraps from the sacred treasure of the ruling class’ (Chatelain 1894: 21).

Another local classification that does not exactly fit the standard folktale/myth/legend typology is that of the Dogon. Their oral literature is divided
into several categories.
⁴⁷
There is, first,
so nanay,
‘true saying’. This includes the genealogies, back to the supposed time when all Dogon descended from the three sons of a common ancestor. It also includes accounts—how far appearing in narrative sequence it is not clear—about the deeds of the first ancestor and his descendants, and about the ancestors of each clan and the founding of the various contemporary villages. Then there are the
tanye
or
tanye nanay
(literally impossible or unbelievable but true). These are the ‘true’ fantastic tales, which are believed by the teller to have happened; they took place, he holds, in the ancient times when things could happen that would now be impossible. These include what Lifchitz calls ‘myths’—i.e. tales about, say, the origin of death or stories explaining the origin of various animal characteristics and so on. She goes on to point out, however, that it is only when told by elders or adult men, usually to educate the young, that these tales can really be called myths or ‘true’ if they are told by the young among themselves they become just ordinary stories (
elume
)
. ‘Untrue’ fantastic tales are termed
tanye nanay la,
i.e. incredible things that are not true. These are tales about events that not only could not but in fact, according even to the teller, never did take place, and take the form of fantastic stories often ending up with a dilemma. Distinct from all these are the stories (
elme
or
elume
) told to entertain children, often by the children themselves. These include stories about animals and can, at will, always be transformed into aetiological narratives by changing just one or two phrases and adding some such conclusion as ‘and since then people have done that’. These tales are not usually told by adults but by young people while in the fields or during their time as herders.

Other instances of complex indigenous classifications could also be cited. All of them make it difficult to draw any clear distinction between a ‘myth’ and a ‘folktale’ if this is to have any basis in local terminology.

There are also many cases in which no distinctions at all in the terminology seem normally to be made between different types of narrative. The West African Limba, for instance, mostly use the single term
mboro
to cover all kinds of narratives, the Yao of Malawi similarly use
ndano
of tales in general (Macdonald 1882: 48), the Azande have no distinct term for ‘myth’ (Evans-Pritchard 1967: 31–2), while for the Hunde of the eastern Congo
migani
equally covers ‘contes, fables, légendes’ (Viaene 1955: 212).

What light does this discussion of terminology throw on the occurrence
or nature of ‘myths’ in African oral literature? Amid the variety of classifications a few general points emerge.

First there is the frequent absence of any specific term that would exactly translate our term ‘myth’. It is true that the absence of the word need not imply the non-occurrence of the thing. But it is certainly suggestive if the local terminology either makes no distinction at all within narratives or a distinction on different lines from those of the foreign theorist.

Then there are the cases where there are local distinctions analogous to the familiar one between folktale and myth (or perhaps more often between folktale and myth-legend). Here it often appears that the crucial differentiating factors are not so much the content or the characters of the narratives but the context in which they are told. Thus among the Fon and the Ashanti the serious and ‘true’ narratives, the ‘myths’, are told within circumscribed groups or are limited to a select group of elders who guard them with care. They are used in serious discussion during the day, as distinct from the entertaining stories of the evenings. Certain of the same factors recur in the otherwise rather different cases of the Kimbundu and the Dogon. Among the former the
malunda
(historical narratives that might by more superficial commentators have been classed as ‘myths’) are secret, known only to the politically influential; and the Dogon
tanye nanay
are regarded as ‘myths’ when told in one type of context and merely as stories in another.

It emerges that in trying to distinguish different categories of African oral narrations, in particular potential ‘myths’, it may be more fruitful to look not primarily at subject-matter but at context. Questions about the circumstances in which the narrations take place, their purpose and tone, the type of narrator and audience, the publicity or secrecy of the event, and, finally, even the style of narration may be more crucial than questions about content and characters. Unfortunately it is precisely about these former factors that we are often least well informed: subject-matter is so much more easily observed than the more significant and more subtle aspects of narrations. We know, for instance, of the many aetiological tales or of those including references to certain supernatural beings or events. But without also being informed about the context of narration, there is no justification for glibly assigning them to the class of ‘myths’. Indeed, all we do know about the contextual aspect leads to the impression that these are probably ordinary stories, not authoritative myths. The point is that we cannot decide by subject alone, we
must
know about context.

A further point that stands out is that with the probable exception of certain West African narratives, religious beliefs seem often not to be regularly enshrined in narrative sequence at all. This emerges partly from the local terminologies which, in East, South, and Central Africa, seldom have a word to cover the
literary
formulation of these beliefs. The published narratives apparently relating to religious phenomena seem (in the cases where they are not just ordinary stories) to be elicited narratives: it is not clear that they would have been expressed in narrative and literary form, were it not for the request of the collector. If, however, we knew more about the contexts and circumstances of narration in general, this assessment might in fact turn out to be mistaken. But it is noticeable that it is particularly among those collectors who have had the closest knowledge of the peoples they are writing about that we find a telling absence of any reference to or inclusion of religious narratives, or even an explicit denial that these play any significant role at all in the local oral literature.
⁴⁸

It is probably possible to find some exceptions to this general lack of literary expression of religious ideas in much of Africa. The Bushmen may perhaps provide one instance of this, and the Pygmies or some of the Nilotic or West African peoples may provide others. It is possible that other exceptions may also emerge, particularly when more is known of the contexts in which religious beliefs are expressed. But at the moment the general impression remains of the lack of formulated religious narratives among most African peoples. Herskovits summed this up well in 1946 (though, because of his preconceptions, it led him to the different conclusion that the commentators had just inexplicably failed to record the religious narratives that he presumed must have existed). He observed:

Except for West Africa, narrative myth sequences appear only rarely in the literature … From the point of view of the student who approaches mythology as a literary phenomenon, what is lacking is the presentation of the narrative sequences, as told by natives, of events in the supernatural world that are believed to have brought about the situations described ….