Oral Literature in Africa (61 page)

There are also other less obvious phrases that are worth study. These are, so to speak, the internal formulas by which the story is begun and ended. Thus all Limba stories tend to open (after the introductory formulas) with a phrase setting them firmly in the fairly remote past (rather like our ‘Once upon a time’)— ‘A woman once came out (on the earth)’, ‘A spider once got up and …’, ‘A chief once married a wife …’, and so on. A Kamba tale often opens with the more dramatic ‘How did it happen …’ (Lindblom I, 1928: x), the Kimbundu with the generalizing ‘I often tell of …’ (Chatelain 1894: 21 etc.), while the Luba employ what is perhaps a favourite device for bringing the protagonists directly and vividly on to the stage by an opening like ‘That which did—leopard and bushbuck’ (or whoever the main actors are) (Burton 1935: 69; 75). The stock endings, in both phraseology and situation, are also interesting. There is the common Hausa conclusion ‘they remained’; the Limba return home, marriage, or formal reporting to some authority of the adventures undergone by the hero; or the frequent conclusion in Ila fool stories about how the events have now become a byword, as ‘And to this day it is put on record. When a person looks for a thing he has got, they say: “You are like yon man who looked for the axe that was on his shoulder”’ (Smith and Dale ii, 1920: 407). These may seem very trivial points, but in fact the study of them, in the context of a large collection of narratives from one area, can throw light both on the conventional elements involved—the phraseology and presentation thought suitable—and also on the attitude of the narrator himself to the story he is telling.

On a slightly higher level, in studies of stories the literary conventions peculiar to a culture about the treatment of certain motifs and situations could often be more emphasized. Thus when one sees a relatively large selection of Kamba stories, it emerges that one of the stock climaxes is for the monster, about to die, to tell his conqueror to cut off his little
finger; when this is done, all the people and the cattle devoured in the course of the story come to life again (Lindblom I, 1928: ix). Similarly, in Zulu stories a stock way of killing an enemy is to give him a bag of snakes and scorpions to open (Krige 1936: 357), while the
deus ex machina
in Luba stories is usually a little dirty old woman who lives in the woods and who appears at the critical moment (Stappers 1962: 17). Similarly we can find many other cases of stereotyped and yet, through that very fact, markedly allusive and meaningful treatments of particular episodes. There is the pregnant but outwardly simple Limba comment in a story ‘he sharpened his sword’, which at once hints at drama and danger to come, or their economical indication of the horror, finality, and shock of finding a dead body lying on the floor by a brief reference to the flies buzzing round the corpse. Both these motifs occur in several narrations; yet their full impact would not emerge were they not known to be common and yet allusive literary stereotypes.

Even more important than the points mentioned so far is the need for further study of the delivery and dramatic performance of African stories. Since these narratives are
oral
ones, to ignore this aspect is to miss one of their most significant features. The vividness, subtlety, and drama with which stories are often delivered have often been noted in general terms by those who know a lot about the literature they present (as distinct from collectors who merely reproduce texts written for them by employees). One of the best single descriptions of African stories, for example, allied to a full appreciation of the social context, is that of Smith and Dale on Ila stories; when they come to pointing to the difficulties encountered by foreign readers in fully appreciating the literary value of the tales, they concentrate, significantly, on precisely this:

We have to reconcile ourselves to the fact that for us, at least, it is impossible to do justice to these tales, and we doubt if the most skilful hand could reproduce in a translation the quaintness, the liveliness, and humour of the original …. They gradually lose flavour as they pass from the African’s telling, first into writing and then into a foreign idiom. It would need a combination of phonograph and kinematograph to reproduce a tale as it is told. One listens to a clever story-teller, as was our old friend Mungalo, from whom we derived many of these tales. Speak of eloquence! Here was no lip mumbling, but every muscle of face and body spoke, a swift gesture often supplying the place of a whole sentence. He would have made a fortune as a raconteur upon the English stage.
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. It was all good to listen to—impossible to put on paper. Ask him now to repeat the story slowly so that you may write it. You will, with patience, get the gist of it, but the unnaturalness of the circumstance disconcerts him, your repeated request for the repetition of a phrase, the absence of the encouragement of his friends, and, above all, the hampering slowness of your pen, all combine to kill the spirit of story-telling. Hence we have to be content with far less than the tales as they are told. And the tales need effort of imagination to place readers in the stead of the original listeners (Smith and Dale ii, 1920: 334–6).

Junod too, in describing the stories of the Thonga and of the Southern Bantu in general, stresses the same fact. The storytellers ‘live’ and act the tales rather than just telling them. No written version, however accurate in language or translation, could hope to reproduce the real atmosphere of the actual narration (Junod 1938: 58). A similar description is given by Doke of the art of the Lamba story-teller:

To reproduce such stories with any measure of success, a gramophone record together with a cinematograph picture would be necessary. The story suffers from being put into cold print ….

(Doke 1927: xiii)
⁷³

In my own study of Limba stories, the single characteristic that I found both most striking and most incommunicable in writing was just this—the way narrators could add subtlety and drama, pathos or humour, characterization or detached comment by the way they spoke as much as by the words themselves.

In the majority of published collections of African tales not even a token reference is made to this fact. Detailed studies tend to be lacking. We are practically never told, for instance, about the accepted stylistic devices through which the performer makes his narrations more effective, or of individual differences between various narrators in respect of this skill. I have tried to treat these questions in a preliminary way for Limba story-tellers. Since this account is easily accessible (Finnegan 1967). I will here merely mention some of the general factors often involved in delivery.

Figure 21. Sites of many Limba fictional narratives
a) entrance to a hill top Limba village, often the gentle and satisfying close to a story (more frequent than any attempt at introducing a moral) Kakarima 1961 (photo Ruth Finnegan);

b) start of the bush and the bush paths where wild beasts and the devils of story roam free, 1961 (photo Ruth Finnegan);

First there is the way in which stories are dramatized, the narrator taking on the personalities of the various characters, acting out their dialogue, their facial expressions, even their gestures and reactions. This point is worth remembering when one is tempted to complain of the shadowy or crude characterization of many personalities in African stories—it is not necessary to formulate all this in words when a good narrator can present it much more economically and subtly in performance. The narrator does not enact the actions of the characters in the full sense: this is dramatized narrative and not actually drama. But even from his seat or when, as happens occasionally, he stands or moves within the circle of listeners, he can vividly suggest the acts and feelings of his characters by the use of dramatic dialogue or through expressions on his face or gestures of hand or body.

Actual mimicry of a humorous and satirical kind seems most common in the case of animal characters. Some attempt at copying the cries and sounds of birds or animals in a stylized form is frequently mentioned as a characteristic of story-tellers. In Hausa stories, for instance, special words are used to imitate the sounds of dogs quarrelling and barking, the wildcat’s call, and the crow of the rooster, with the words intoned to resemble the animal sounds. Speeches by animal characters are often sung, sometimes in falsetto, and always with a nasal twang (Tremearne 1913: 28). The Bushmen have a specialized form of this in the speech conventionally attributed to certain animals (and the moon) in stories; the Blue Crane, for instance, adds
tt
to the first syllable of almost every word, whereas the tortoise’s lisping makes him change all the clicks and other initial consonants into labials (see especially Bleek 1936). Though not so complex as the Bushman example, similar stylized and imitative speech attributed to animals occurs widely in African narrations.

The actual delivery and treatment of the words themselves is also relevant. Even when he does not choose to elaborate any extremes of dramatization, the narrator can and does create vivid effects by variations and exaggerations of speed, volume, and tone. He can use abrupt breaks, pregnant pauses, parentheses, rhetorical questions as he watches the audience’s reactions and exploits his freedom to choose his words as well as his mode of delivery.

A form of onomatopoeia is often used to add elegance and vividness to the narration. A style plentifully embroidered with ideophones is one of the striking characteristics of an effective storyteller. We can actually
hear the sound of a Limba boy leaping into a lake (
tirin!
)
,
the noise of the Akan spider hitting the ceiling (
kado!
), the Luba onomatopoeic expression of a chase (
kwata-kwata-kwata
)
,
or the tortoise swimming (
seki seki seki
) and pheasant fluttering its wings (
fufufu
) in Mabale tales. In this way the action is dramatized by a skilful teller.

In all this the participation of the audience is essential. It is common for its members to be expected to make verbal contributions—spontaneous exclamations, actual questions, echoing of the speaker’s words, emotional reaction to the development of yet another parallel and repetitious episode. Further, the audience contributes the choruses of the songs so often introduced into the narration, and without which, in many cases, the stories would be only a bare framework of words.

Songs are characteristic of African tales all over the continent. They do not occur in every story, and in some cases there are local distinctions between ‘prose’ and ‘choric’ stories (e.g. Lamba (Doke 1934: 358)). But songs are infinitely more common than would appear from a cursory reading of the published collections. Since the songs are almost always so much more difficult to record than prose, they are usually omitted in published versions; even when they are included, the extent to which they are repeated and the proportion of time they occupy compared to spoken narration is often not made clear. Yet the singing can at times become the main element of the story—’So much so that in many tales the narrative is to it no more than a frame is to a picture’ (Torrend 1921: 3). Or, as Steere writes of the Swahili:

Frequently the skeleton of the story seems to be contained in these snatches of singing, which the story-teller connects by an extemporized account of the intervening history.

(Steere 1906: vii)

Similar comments could be made on narrations from many areas in Africa, though the emphasis on singing varies not only with the type of tale involved but also, in some cases, with the individual teller. Among the Limba, for instance, I found that certain individuals were particularly fond of songs so that the singing, with much repetition of the choruses, took up more time than the words, and the plot and verbal element were little developed; other narrators on the other hand only introduced songs or recitative rarely, and then merely as an ornament. But in spite of these variations, it is safe to say that singing is an element that is worth looking for in tales of all kinds (except, probably, specialized historical narratives) all over Africa.