African

Oral Literature
Backgrounds, Character, and Continuity

Isidore Okpewho

Indiana University Press

Bloomington and Indianapolis
© 1992 by Isidore Okpewho
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Okpewho, Isidore.
African oral literature : backgrounds, character, and continuity /
Isidore Okpewho.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-253-34167-1 (cloth : alk. paper). — ISBN 0-253-20710-X
(paper : alk. paper)
1. Folk literature—Africa—History and criticism. 2. Oral
tradition—Africa. I. Title.
GR35O.O37 1992 91-25671
398.2'096—dc20

1 2 3 4 5 96 95 94 93 92
 In cherished and grateful memory
of my mother

REGINA NWANYIMGBO ATTOH OKPEWHO

1. The Study of African Oral
Literature

Before getting down to the main topic of this chapter, it will be useful to settle a
few issues relating to terms used in our subject.

What Is “Oral Literature”?

The subject of our study is identified by various scholars by such terms as oral litera
ture, orature, traditional literature, folk literature, and folklore. Perhaps the most predom
inant element in these terms is the word literature, and we may as well tackle that
element first. It is true that nowadays the word is generally used to cover any volume
of written or printed text. When I say to a student, for instance, “Let me have the
available literature on bribery,” I mean that the student should bring everything that
can be found written on that subject, including newspaper articles and tribunal judg
ments. But of course the word literature is more commonly used in a restricted sense
to refer to creative texts that appeal to our imagination or to our emotions (such as
stories, plays, and poems), not to factual texts such as newspaper reports or historical
records, however attractively written these may be. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
and Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino would qualify to be called works of literature, but
E. J. Alagoa’s History of the Niger Delta, being mainly a record of facts, would not.
If we accept the idea of literature as a creative text, we will find that the other
words used for qualifying it are simply attempts to emphasize one aspect or other of
the subject. Oral literature is now the most commonly used term for the subject. It
simply means “literature delivered by word of mouth” and has turned out to be a
very useful concept for those scholars interested in examining the cultural relation
ships between those who can read and write and those who cannot—or, in a more
professional language, between orality and literacy. The idea is that there are certain
techniques which may be used to good effect in oral literature but which may not
work in written literature; on the other hand, there are certain techniques and ele
ments in written literature which may be seen as borrowings or survivals from oral
literature. These various techniques and elements have emerged as an interesting sub
ject of comparative study, and in chapter 10 we shall look into this subject to some
extent.
Orature is a recent but seldom used term that again emphasizes the oral character
4 Backgrounds and Resources
of the literature. Traditional literature puts emphasis on the fact that this form of
literature comes from the past and is handed down (Latin trado) from one generation
to another. Sometimes a prejudice is implied, in the sense that the material is simply
passed on from mouth to mouth and nothing really new is ever added to it. Some
earlier scholars actually felt this way, but the idea has since been dismissed by more
recent study. Folk literature identifies the creators of this literature as the folk, by
which was frequently meant the common, uneducated people mostly in villages or
rural communities. Nowadays we collect some of our most exciting pieces of oral
literature from performers who live in cities and some not-so-rustic towns who have
at least a primary school education and have traveled far and wide (even outside
Africa) with their performances.
The word folklore implies much more than just literature and in some quarters
underplays the literary aspect of what the folk do. It was first used by the Englishman
William John Thoms in a letter he wrote to the Athenaeum at a time when the study
of traditional culture was attracting a lot of attention in Britain and Europe. Let me
quote the first part of this letter to show Thoms’s and his generation’s understanding
of the word.

Your pages have so often given evidence of the interest which you take in what we in
England designate as Popular Antiquities, or Popular Literature (though by-the-bye it is
more a Lore than a Literature, and would be most aptly described by a good Saxon com
pound, Folklore,—the Lore of the People)—that I am not without hopes of enlisting your
aid in garnering the few ears which are remaining, scattered over that field from which
our forefathers might have gathered a goodly crop.
No one who has made the manners, customs, observances, superstitions, ballads, prov
erbs, etc., of the olden time his study, but must have arrived at two conclusions:—the
first, how much that is curious and interesting in these matters is now entirely lost—the
second, how much may yet be rescued by timely exertion. (Quoted in Dundes 1965: 4)

Two important insights may be gathered from this classic statement. First, because
of the simplicity of the lives of the folk from whom the materials were gathered—
because of their level of education and sophistication—they were considered incapable
of producing anything that may be considered “literature” in the same sense that one
would see the works of Shakespeare. For a long time the study of oral literature was
governed by the sort of prejudice which Thoms shows here in his description of
“Popular Literature” as being “more a Lore than a Literature,” i.e., more of an ordi
nary body of information than an artistic text. This prejudice has, of course, since
been modified if not altogether abandoned.
The second point made by Thoms establishes the concept of folklore: “manners,
customs, observances, superstitions, ballads, proverbs, etc.” are roughly its constitu
ents. Oral literature—which comprises riddles, puns, tongue-twisters, proverbs, re
citations, chants, songs, and stories—represents only the verbal aspect of folklore,
and I am happy to quote this definition by two East African scholars:

Oral literature may be defined as those utterances, whether spoken, recited or sung,
whose composition and performance exhibit to an appreciable degree the artistic charac-
The Study of African Oral Literature 5
teristics of accurate observation, vivid imagination and ingenious expression. (Nandwa and
Bukenya 1983: 1)

Other aspects of folklore include traditional methods of cooking, architecture, medi

cine, and dressmaking as well as religion or ritual, art, instrumental music, and
dance. The total body of information which a community possesses about all these
things is its folklore.1
Sometimes the use of the term oral literature and folklore is a little confusing. In
many cases the latter is used when only the former is meant, i.e., a scholar may praise
a Yoruba or Kikuyu proverb as an example of the poetic quality of the people’s
folklore. This is something of a generalization, for if we examined various aspects of
the material culture of the same people (e.g., their traditional architecture and weav
ing) there might be nothing quite so “poetic” about them. Such generalizations,
whereby a part is made to represent the whole, are quite frequent in literature and
are perhaps excusable. Whatever errors may have been made by scholars in the early
history of this subject, however, it is important to note that the folklore of a people
consists essentially of two kinds of activity: what these people traditionally say (e.g.,
songs, proverbs, tales) and what they traditionally do (weaving, dance, rituals).
Having examined the issue of definition, we may now trace some of the history of
our subject. It was necessary to cite the classic statement by Thoms because it gave
us an insight into the problems encountered in the collection and study of African
oral literature for over a century, from the generation of Thoms to the 1960s. Let us
now see how these problems have arisen and been tackled by examining the three
major interests that have so far governed the study of African oral literature.

An Interest in Culture
The serious study of what has come to be known as oral literature began in nine
teenth-century Europe. This study was part of a general concern which European
intellectuals showed in the whole question of human culture: what are its origins and
characteristics, and what steps are to be taken to teach the best examples of culture
to those members of the human race who show the least awareness of it? This general
study of human culture is known as ethnology.
One group of scholars who set themselves the task of answering questions about
the origins of human culture are the evolutionists. The concept of evolution is rooted
in the belief that all biological species have over a long period been undergoing
various changes until they have reached the form in which we find them today. The
pioneer in this study was Charles Darwin (1809—1882), and his arguments had a
great influence on students of culture such as his fellow Englishmen Edward Burnet
Tylor (1832—1917) and James George Frazer (1854—1941). Following Darwin, these
students of culture believed in certain fundamental principles regarding the develop
ment of human culture: there is one human race and one human mind spread out
across the face of the earth; if we examine two societies at the same stage of cultural
development, we will find that their folklore (folktales, folk songs, rituals, etc.) will
reveal very much the same qualities; and consequently, to understand any aspect of
6 Backgrounds and Resources
the traditional literature or culture in any society it will help to compare it with a
similar aspect in another society.
Frazer pursued the comparative study of folklore as far as it could go, and his work
has had a deep impact on the growth of interest in African oral literature. His classic
work The Golden Bough began as a narrow research into the origins of magical and
religious rituals among a small tribe in Italy. But this modest project grew steadily
until it covered thirteen volumes because Frazer went on to record bits of evidence
from numerous “primitive” communities throughout the world to prove the point he
was making about his Italian case: that the origin of religion would be found in the
magical rites of “primitive” man.
Frazer gathered a great deal of his evidence from Africa. By the turn of the century,
many British scholars were going out to newly created British colonies on the African
continent as administrators. Some of these scholar-administrators had been students
or colleagues of Frazer’s, and he encouraged them to collect pieces of evidence of
traditional customs and oral literature from the communities which they governed.
Consequently, The Golden Bough and other writings by Frazer are filled with references
to the traditional literature of numerous African ethnic groups, such as the Egyptians,
the Nubians, the Bantu, the Akan, and the Yoruba. Of the numerous colonial schol
ars who collected African oral literature under the encouragement of Frazer, perhaps
the most notable were John Roscoe among the Baganda (Uganda), Edwin Smith and
Andrew Dale among the Ila (Zambia), the Reverend Henri Junod among the Tonga
(South Africa), Robert Rattray among the Akan (Ghana) and Hausa (Nigeria), and
P. Amaury Talbot among the Ekoi (Nigeria).
In their own books these scholars examined various texts of tales, songs, riddles,
proverbs, and other forms of oral literature, as well as the people who performed
them, as part of a general program of studying “primitive” societies. The ultimate
aim of that program was to study the early forms out of which aspects of modern
culture developed and the stages through which they passed in this development.
These scholars frequently came to the conclusion that people in Africa were essentially
like people anywhere else in the world. H. Chatelain, who studied folktales from
Angola, was convinced, for instance, that African folklore generally is a “branch of
one universal tree.” But certain fundamental problems of approach in this ethnologi
cal study led to an unfortunate conclusion and consequently prevented the scholars
from recognizing as literature the texts that they collected.
First, their evolutionist way of looking at culture convinced them that whatever
texts they found were simply survivals of earlier ones; as these texts were passed down
from one generation to another they must have lost certain qualities which appealed
to their original owners, and whatever survived must have been weakened versions of
the original texts. Since the scholars were mainly interested in collecting details and
ideas in these texts that gave them an insight into the nature of man and the history
of human culture, they paid little attention to whatever stylistic merits the texts had;
in many cases, indeed, they simply contented themselves with bare summaries of the
contents.
The second problem of approach is closely connected with the first. The evolution
ists believed that since the texts of the oral tradition had passed from one mouth to
The Study of African Oral Literature 7
mother and from one generation to another, we could no longer speak of one author
or creator for any one of them. We could only see each text as the common property
of the community and as a product of joint or communal authorship. As a story
passed from one narrator to another, each narrator added his or her own touch to it;
and since the tales bore no signatures, there was frequently no way of distinguishing
one person’s touches from another’s.
These errors of judgment arose primarily because of the improper method of col
lecting and especially of recording the texts. If a tale is presented only in summary,
many of the stylistic touches which the narrator put into it to please an audience will
obviously be missed. And unless one version of a story is compared carefully with
another version of it, a scholar will not be able to discover that each version bears the
stamps of character and technique peculiar to its narrator. Such stamps are among the
qualities which identify any text as literature. But the evolutionists were so obsessed
with the concept of the development of culture and the history of cultural ideas that
they lost the opportunity for appreciating them.
Another group of scholars interested in the history of culture who have had some
influence on the study of African oral literature are the diffusionists. This group was
opposed to the evolutionists in a fundamental way. The evolutionists believed that if
two tales from two societies showed similar elements and a similar pattern, it was
because human beings all over the world thought alike and the tales reflected the
same stage of cultural development in both societies. The diffusionists, on the con
trary, believed that where such similarities occured it could only be because at some
time in the distant past the two societies had some contact with one another which
caused the borrowing of certain cultural ideas by one of them from the other. To
make it easy to trace the paths of movement of these ideas from one society to an
other, diffusionists mapped out the world into “culture areas,” grouping peoples on
the basis of the kinds of similarities that they showed in language, belief systems,
customs, climate, and other aspects of existence.
Diffusionist studies of folklore grew as a result of the interest shown by European
scholars in finding the origins and the paths of movement of European languages,
customs, and other forms of culture. It became widely accepted by many of these
scholars that these origins were to be found in India, and they wanted to find out
how far across the world this large “Indo-European” culture had spread. Like Frazer
and other evolutionist scholars, these diffusionists engaged in comparative studies of
folklore throughout the world. Much of this work was done under the encouragement
of the German brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, who themselves collected and
published many folktales from India as well as from their own country.
The Grimm brothers also had a few things to say about tales from other parts of
the world. In the introduction to their classic work Household Tales, for instance, they
expressed the view that if any similarities were found between tales told in Africa and
those told in Europe, the former should be seen as offshoots of the parent Indo-
European culture. The Grimm brothers made such a statement because they were
working under the prejudice that culture can only spread from a superior to an infe
rior people, not the other way round—and Africa was of course considered racially
inferior to Europe. The position of the Grimms was echoed by the American diffusionist
8 Backgrounds and Resources
scholar Stith Thompson. In his authoritative book The Folktale he suggested
that where similarities existed between European and African folktales, they could be
explained by the probability that the Europeans brought the tales with them to Africa
during the period of the slave trade (Thompson 1946: 438).
Diffusionist research into African folktales still goes on, though not with the same
zeal as in the days of the Grimms and Thompson; happily, too, the prejudice which
guided the earlier generations of scholars has been mostly abandoned. These days
diffusionist scholars occupy themselves with studying the distribution of tale units
within the various “culture areas” of Africa or with earnest debate on the African
origins of tales told among the blacks of the northern and southern United States.
Whatever the stage or shade of research we are dealing with, however, diffusionist
scholarship shows a fundamental disregard for the literary qualities of the folktale.
Unlike the evolutionists, the diffusionists look closely at versions of a tale and have a
better opportunity of discovering the interesting differences between one version and
another. But instead, they concentrate on the similarities in constituent units (motifs)
which these tales employ. For them, the stylistic differences between tales do not
matter. Consequently, like the evolutionists, they content themselves quite often with
the bare summaries of tales so long as these summaries show the motifs that constitute
the tales. Although their methods of research differ somewhat from those employed
by the evolutionists, the diffusionists are nevertheless equally obsessed with the idea
of the origins of culture. Such an obsession has left them little room to consider the
literary qualities of oral literature.
One final concern with culture may be considered here. The high period of ethno
logical research in Africa coincided with the period of European colonial activity, and
some of the great ethnologists of that generation were colonial administrators: Roscoe
in Uganda, Rattray in the Gold Coast (Ghana), Talbot in Nigeria. It is well known
that the colonial powers that came to Africa were primarily interested in seeking raw
materials (cocoa, palm oil, groundnuts, copper) for their growing industries and out
side markets for their finished products. But these powers pretended that they were
bringing culture (in the sense of European civilization) to a “primitive” race of people.
Africa was then seen as a “dark continent” which must be opened up with the light
of European culture, considered at that time to be the highest mark of human
achievement. The two arms of that culture were technology and Christianity. To
spread ideas of Christian conduct, the colonial administrators worked closely with the
Christian missions in Africa. The colonial scholars also directed their efforts along
lines which in many ways coincided with the objectives of the Christian missions.
The linguists among them studied the grammatical systems of the African languages
closely and proceeded to translate some of the major texts of Christian doctrine such
as the Bible and the hymn books into the indigenous languages. But a more interest
ing effort may be seen in what the scholars did with the texts of oral literature. Not
only were they quick to give credit to those texts which uphold good conduct, such
as the morality tales which abound in the continent. It would seem that in addition
they did not particularly encourage the study of texts which showed some evidence of
moral laxity. In his introduction to a collection of Ekoi (southeastern Nigerian) folk
tales, Talbot, for instance, remarks on the “cleanliness of tone” of the tales while
The Study of African Oral Literature 9
pointing out that “only one sentence . . . has been expurgated” from the texts re
corded (1921: 337).
We can see clearly from this latter point how much the oral literature of Africa
suffered at the hands of these early scholars. Apart from reducing the texts to bare
summaries which contained mainly what were considered the essential points, the
scholars also took the liberty to edit the texts so as to get rid of material they con
sidered “unclean” by European standards. It is quite possible that the narrators from
whom Talbot collected his stories, knowing full well how much these colonial edu
cators frowned on “unclean” material, made every effort to restrain themselves from
using the kind of language they would have used under normal circumstances to
attract an audience. In chapter 4 we shall see to what extent oral performers could
indulge their language to please the audience. At the time that Talbot was writing,
however, the peculiar nature of African oral literature could not be fully recognized
because the colonial government felt it had a mission to “civilize” the African peoples
away from their “crude,” “primitive” habits of life and expression.

An Interest in Society
By the end of the first thirty years of the twentieth century, scholarly study had
moved from a more general interest in culture to a more specific interest in society.
As more and more scholars visited and lived in various traditional societies throughout
the world, they became increasingly aware of the danger in making general statements
about human nature and human culture. They felt that these general statements often
ignored certain specific details of life such as language and other habits which make
one society different from another; for them, these differences were more interesting
than the similarities. They therefore preferred to study every society in its own right
and to record as much of the various aspects of the people’s folklore as possible.
Among the founding fathers of this approach were Bronislaw Malinowski, a Polish-
born British anthropologist; A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, also a British anthropologist; and
the American Franz Boas. Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown studied communities in
the Pacific—in the Trobriand Islands and Andaman Islands, respectively—and wrote
extensively about these peoples. Boas studied and wrote on Native American
communities, especially the Kwakiutl of the Northwest. Other scholars studied and dis
cussed Africa societies: E.E. Evans-Pritchard on the Nuer and Geoffrey Lienhardt
on the Dinka, both communities in the Sudan; the American William Bascom on the
Yoruba and S. F. Nadel on the Nupe, both in Nigeria; the Frenchman Marcel Griaule
on the Dogon of Burkina Faso; and so on.
Earlier scholars had also lived among individual societies and written extensively
on them: Rattray on the Akan (Ghana), Talbot on the Ekoi (Nigeria), Roscoe on the
Baganda (Uganda), and so on. But these scholars were guided by evolutionist ideas,
whereas the scholars inspired by Malinowski were hardly interested at all in the his
tories of the cultures they studied. They concentrated on the things—including the
oral literature—each community did here and now. For them, the usefulness of these
things helped to preserve the community as a social unit. Of the various differences
of approach between these groups of scholars, this one is particularly worth noting:
10 Backgrounds and Resources
whereas the evolutionists saw the folklore of a present society as a survival from the
past (mostly misunderstood by the users) and tried to speculate on what the original
form might have been, Malinowski’s generation saw it in terms of its usefulness for
the society—its functions. This newer approach is much more dependable than that
of Frazer’s generation. Its advantage is in putting emphasis on the known rather than
on the unknown.
Of the various societal functions which the sociologically inclined scholars of Afri
can oral literature have identified, we may mention a few. In his study of the poetry
of divination (ifa) among the Yoruba of Nigeria, Bascom emphasizes the usefulness
of this vast body of chants as an encyclopedia of the people’s wisdom and their rele
vance for present-day needs and problems among the Yoruba (Bascom 1959). In ex
amining tales of origin among the Kimbu of Tanzania, Aylward Shorter is convinced
that these “historical charters” are particularly useful in helping the people keep a
record of the various stages of their formation as a social group (Shorter 1969). Prov
erbs have been studied among various African societies—for instance, by J. C. Mes
senger among the Anang of Nigeria (1958: 229-307) and J. B. Christensen among
the Fante of Ghana (1958: 232—43)—for the several ways in which they help to
establish the authority of a statement or a custom in situations like court cases or
contests for a chieftaincy. Numerous other publications give similar emphasis to the
function of oral literature in the contemporary lives of various African societies.
The sociological interest has also helped in the emergence of oral literature from
the vast body of information generally known as folklore. The area covered by the
ethnologists was too wide—they had at the back of their minds human nature in
general—and their conclusions were often not based on a close examination of the
materials they studied. But the sociologists, by confining their interest to single so
cieties, have inevitably been forced to recognize not just the content of the folk lit
erature but certain features of its form and technique. This recognition of the artistic
quality of oral texts has led to the use of such terms as verbal art and oral art in
describing the literature.2
It was Malinowski who first encouraged this recognition by urging ethnographers
to record everything related to the “social context” of the folklore texts that they
collected during their fieldwork. Bascom spelled out the important details of such a
record.

The first point I wish to discuss is that of the social context of folklore, its place in the
daily round of life of those who tell it. This is not a “problem” in the strict sense, but
rather a series of related facts which must be recorded, along with the texts, if the prob
lems of the relation between folklore and culture or the functions of folklore, or even the
creative role of the narrators, are to be analyzed. These facts include: (1) when and where
the various forms of folklore are told; (2) who tells them, whether or not they are privately
owned, and who composes the audience; (3) dramatic devices employed by the narrator,
such as gestures, facial expression, pantomime, impersonation, or mimicry; (4) audience
participation in the form of laughter, assent or other responses, running criticism or en
couragement of the narrator, singing or dancing, or acting out parts in a tale; (5) cate
gories of folklore recognized by the people themselves; and (6) attitudes of the people
toward these categories. (1965: 281)
The Study of African Oral Literature 11
Such recommendations have proved influential in getting ethnographers to focus
their attention on the practice of oral art in traditional African communities. The call
was heeded by quite a few scholars, who took it upon themselves to provide fairly
detailed information about the lives and careers of African folk artists and about
situations in which they practice their art. One such effort has been made by the
Dutch scholar Daniel Biebuyck in his studies of traditions of the heroic narrative
among the Banyanga of Zaire. In a number of publications he has given us insight
into the lives of the narrators, their careers as oral artists, and how their work fits
into the overall culture of their people (Biebuyck 1978, Biebuyck and Mateene 1969).
A similar job has been done by Dan Ben-Amos (1971, 1972) in his studies of story
telling traditions among the Bini of Nigeria.
The value of these scholars’ contributions will be seen when we compare them with
the views of earlier scholars, especially the evolutionists. The evolutionists were not
interested in studying the performers of the oral tradition, mainly because they be
lieved that these performers were simply passing on material that came from the
distant past, most of which the performers did not understand. They in fact believed
that these performers were too primitive to make any truly creative additions to the
texts. The sociologists, on the other hand, by focusing attention on the performers,
have demonstrated a considerable faith in their creative skill and taken us one step
forward in the understanding of the traditional art.
But there are some problems even in the sociological approach that have prevented
the scholars from reaching a full understanding of the artistic quality of oral litera
ture. Although they have done a good job in highlighting the "social context” of this
literature and in stressing its functional or practical values within the society, they
have given far less time to illuminating and analyzing its artistic properties; we can
see that clearly from Bascom’s recommendations. As a result, they have published
tales, for instance, in flat, unimpressive prose, eliminating features of the oral style
such as repetitions and exclamations; they have done few careful analyses of techniques
in the original language that appealed to the audience of the tale in the first place;
and even when they have cared (and this was not often) to report the circumstances
surrounding the performance of the tale (audience participation, use of musical instru
ments, and so on), they have failed to tell what bearing these circumstances had on
the success or otherwise of the tale. It was therefore not easy to see, from the work of
these sociologists, how such a tale could be appreciated as literature.
Again, in accordance with their interest in the place of folklore in the culture of a
people, scholars such as Bascom and Ben-Amos have constantly stressed that any
judgment of a folk text must be based on the views of the society from which the
text comes. To a large extent this is right and proper. But surely, if these texts of
African folklore appeal to non-Africans like Bascom and Ben-Amos, it must be be
cause they contain certain qualities which go beyond an indigenous African sense of
beauty. It is therefore the duty of scholars, if they truly understand the language and
culture from which a piece of oral literature comes, to explain its literary qualities so
that an outsider can appreciate it. This basic job of literary criticism was not made
easy by the narrow interest in “social context” which the sociological approach en
couraged.
12 Backgrounds and Resources

An Interest in Literature
The champions of the sociological interest (mostly Europeans and Americans) were
unable to get down to a proper analysis of the literary merits of African oral literature
chiefly because they lacked a sufficiently deep understanding of and feeling for the
indigenous languages in which that literature was performed. Many foreign scholars
went to the African communities they wished to study, spent about six months at a
time, and had lived among the people for no more than two years by the time they
completed the study. In many cases their understanding of the indigenous language
was at best disjointed. The result was that when they came to record the texts of the
oral literature they had collected, they were frequently unwilling to publish the orig
inal language versions of these texts, partly for fear of revealing their shortcomings.
They contented themselves and their readers with translations in which gaps in the
original texts were carefully and skillfully concealed.
In some cases, it is true, these scholars secured the services of indigenous assistants
who were either villagers based in the community under study or, as in more recent
times, university research students under the scholars’ supervision. In such cases,
efforts were made to publish the indigenous text as well as the translation. Neverthe
less, the literary qualities of such a text still suffered both from the inadequate un
derstanding of the language by the foreign scholar and from the sociological bias of
the whole research project.
A major advance in the study of African oral literature as literature came when
native African scholars began to undertake research into the oral traditions of their
own people. Here were scholars who spoke the African languages before they went
out to be schooled in foreign languages and who understood perfectly well what
constitutes a beautiful expression in their own tongues before being exposed to the
same sense of beauty in other tongues. The differences between such scholars and
their European counterparts were inevitably strong. Whereas many Europeans treated
African culture and everything that came from it as “primitive” or inferior to their
own, the African scholars approached this culture with a feeling of understanding and
pride. And whereas the foreigners saved much trouble by eliminating from the texts
whatever they did not understand, the native scholars took the trouble to explain the
meaning and effectiveness of various techniques in the original texts which give them
their artistic qualities.
One of the first African scholars to revolutionize the study of African oral literature
was S. Adeboye Babalola of Nigeria. His book, The Content and Form of Yoruba Ijala
(1966), has shown how much better the insider could do in presenting this sort of
literature than the outsider. He tells us in the preface that he undertook to do the
study from “the need to give not merely the English translation of the texts but also
the original texts themselves and the need to give an account of both the inner form
and the outer form of this particular type of poetry.” The book appeared at a time
when European scholars themselves had come to the conclusion that despite a hundred
years or so of collecting and studying African oral literature, not much of an advance
had been made and that there was need for African scholars to come to the aid of
 The Study of African Oral Literature 13
their colleagues by doing careful stylistic analyses of the literature of their mother
tongues (Berry 1961).
This is precisely what Babalola has done in his book. Ijala is the poetry of Yoruba
hunters, chanted with a high tremulous voice and in a way which allows the per-
former to use changes in tone to manipulate the meanings of words. The subject of
ijala is mainly aspects of the hunting life, such as descriptions of various kinds of
animals and birds, glorification of distinguished hunters, homage to divinities that
protect hunters, and so forth. But the poets also concern themselves with other sub
jects, such as exploits in war and issues relating to moral conduct.
The book is divided into two main parts, part 1 being titled “A Critical Introduc
tion to Ijala.” In the introductory chapters, Babalola gives us the kind of information
that is contained in standard ethnographies: the cultural background to the perfor
mance of ijala, in terms of its being attached to a cult of hunters devoted to Ogun,
the god of iron and protector of all who make use of metals (e.g., hunters with their
guns and cutlasses); the festive and other occasions during which this kind of poetry
is performed; and the subject matter of ijala, being essentially a glorification of dis
tinguished animals and men as well as a poetry of social comment. After this Babalola
gives us a detailed account of the training of the poets, the nature of their perfor
mances, and the criteria by which these performances are judged by the Yoruba. This
very enlightening portrait is followed by a chapter titled ‘‘The Language of Ijala.”
Here Babalola treats us to an insider’s view of the various stylistic techniques, char
acteristic of the Yoruba language, which lend ijala its poetic flavor, such as the
complex structure of imagery and allusion, the manipulation of sounds and of the
voice to achieve specific effects of beauty and meaning, and (more interesting) those
linguistic devices which are not common in everyday speech but are part of the “po
etic diction” of ijala. This is clearly the kind of contribution that could have been
made only by someone steeped in the language and culture of the people, a contri
bution which has raised the study of African oral literature to the level of sophistica
tion that had been achieved in the study of modern (written) literature.
Part 2 consists mainly of a selection of some fifty chants of various kinds in corre
sponding Yoruba and English versions, with accompanying footnotes carefully ex
plaining details of content and style. At this point students of ijala poetry have been
so carefully introduced to the characteristic features of this form of expression that
even if they were not Yoruba, they could hardly resist the temptation of reading the
corresponding Yoruba and English texts line by line and looking out for those pecu
liar stylistic touches.
Another significant landmark in the study of African oral literature by an African
came with the publication of Daniel P. Kunene’s Heroic Poetry of the Basotho (1971).
Two things had happened by this time which encouraged Kunene in his work. First,
inspired by the efforts of American scholars Milman Parry and Albert Lord, many
scholars were beginning to study the nature of oral heroic poetry of various cultures
around the world; in his preface, Kunene acknowledges “Professor Albert Lord of
Harvard University, whose The Singer of Tales inspired me to seek him out and solicit
his advice, which he readily gave me.” Second, as more and more African nations
14 Backgrounds and Resources
gained independence from colonial rule, there was a growing feeling of nationalism
among the scholars, who resented the inferior position in which their cultures had
been put by several generations of imperialist scholars. In his introduction, Kunene
strongly condemns the prejudices not only of the imperialists but also of those “de
culturated” Africans who joined the imperialists in underestimating the merits of
African oral poetry.
Kunene’s book is more of a literary study than Babalola’s, giving somewhat less
room to an explanation of the cultural background of Sotho heroic poetry than Babal
ola does to the Yoruba ijala. Kunene first devotes himself to a careful analysis of the
structure of the Sotho language, then goes on to explain the Sotho concept of a hero
and the techniques used in choosing appropriate praise names for the hero. He then
analyzes these praise names (or “eulogues”) so as to identify the various categories into
which they fall. Next, following the work of Parry and Lord, Kunene examines the
pattern of repetition (“formula”) on which these praises are built and the ways in
which the formula is manipulated. He moves on to examine the ways in which the
poet builds imagery out of various elements taken from the surrounding culture and
environment (e.g., cattle, storms), and the various kinds of objects praised. He con
cludes by examining the relationship between the heroic style in the oral tradition
and its influence on Western-educated Sotho poets.
We should perhaps point out that this was not the first time an African language
had been so carefully studied. As we saw earlier, European linguists had analyzed
various African languages as a way of helping the colonial administrators and the
missionaries cope with the strange cultures that they had come to control or convert,
or else as a way of satisfying their academic curiosity about the unfamiliar and the
“uncivilized.” Kunene’s study, on the contrary, was the work of a man proud of his
culture and determined to reveal the complex and highly sophisticated ways in which
the language shapes the oral literature.
Useful work in projecting the literary beauties of African oral literature has in more
recent times been done by African writers who were determined to show the world
that though they have been educated in the white man’s language and are using it
effectively in expressing their literary thoughts, they nevertheless come from a rich
cultural heritage. One of the really interesting collections of traditional African poetry
published from this perspective is the Ghanaian poet Kofi Awoonor’s Guardians of the
Sacred Word (1974). Awoonor studies three living experts of Ewe (Ghanaian) poetry,
giving us an insight into their lives and careers as performers; presents selections of
their poetry; and provides notes which use facts from his portraits of their lives to
explain the effectiveness of their poetic styles. But the real beauty of the book is in
the translations. European translations of traditional African poetry were often quite
flat and tasteless, partly because the scholars did not understand the original lan
guages sufficiently but even more because they considered the people too “primitive”
to have anything truly “poetic” in their languages or literatures. In Awoonor’s book,
a distinguished Ewe poet uses the benefit of his creative experience to reveal the poetic
beauties contained in the literature of his people.
One of the most valuable contributions made to the study of African oral literature
may be seen in The Ozidi Saga, edited by J. P. Clark (1977). The story, recorded by
 The Study of African Oral Literature 15
Clark in 1963, comes from the editor’s Ijo homeland in the southernmost part of
Nigeria Told traditionally over a period of seven festival days, it narrates the fighting
exploits of the culture hero Ozidi and is accompanied throughout with music, song,
and dramatization of significant episodes.
Earlier editors of folklore texts took little trouble to record the conditions under
which an oral performer told a tale or sang a song, despite the plea by Malinowski
and Bascom that this should be done. But Clark, himself a poet and a playwright,
has used his understanding of the creative process to give us a text that represents as
vividly as possible the various things that happened both to and around the narrator
as the story of Ozidi was performed; he has set down for us whatever his tape recorder
has been able to catch from the performance. At certain points of the story, for
instance, the narrator says or does something that amuses the audience and they burst
out laughing; at such points in the text, Clark indicates “Laughter” to show us the
effect of the performance on the audience. At other points of the story we get the
notation “Exclamation,” and we at once realize that the narrator must have said or
done something that made the audience shout. At yet other points of the story, Clark
indicates statements made by spectators in the audience, whether in the form of
questions or of comments on aspects of the performance, and the narrator’s responses
to these statements. In addition to all these, Clark indicates those points of the per
formance where music is played and where certain tunes are sung by the narrator’s
musical group. The whole text is preceded by a detailed introduction in which Clark
not only gives us the cultural background to the performance of the Ozidi story by
the Ijo but also explains the role of music, song, and dance in the whole business.
There are also useful notes at the end of each of the seven sections representing the
seven days of the performance of the story.
The contribution of Clark’s book is that it highlights the element of performance
in the oral narrative event. Many European scholars had considered African oral nar
ratives as primitive and unsophisticated because they judged them on the same stan
dards as the written literature. The usefulness of Clark’s work is that it draws atten
tion to the fact that oral narratives are produced in circumstances different from those
in which, say, novels are written and must therefore be judged in different terms. If
a statement in the tale is repeated several times, for instance, it could be because it
drew a favorable response (e.g., laughter) from the audience the first time it was
made, so the narrator wanted to please his audience by making that statement a few
times more. In written literature, such a repetition might be considered boring; but
in oral literature, where the audience plays a major role in the creative process, the
repetition would be seen to be very much justified. In chapter 3 we shall examine
other ways in which the audience influences the production of the text in an oral
performance.
It would be wrong, of course, to form the impression that non-African scholars
have made no contribution to recent trends in the study of African oral literature.
During the 1970s it became clear that the emphasis in the study of the oral traditions
had shifted considerably toward an examination of their artistic or literary merits, and
one of the scholars who helped this move was Ruth Finnegan. In fact, in a book that
she published toward the end of the 1960s, Limba Stories and Storytelling (1967), she
16 Backgrounds and Resources

stood firmly against the prevailing trend in folklore studies. Although earlier scholars
had been inclined to ignore the element of individual artistic skill in the oral tradi
tions, she says quite firmly:

The storytellers {among the Limba of Sierra Leone] are all individuals, individuals who
perform on specific individual occasions. There is no joint common “folk” authorship or
set form of performance dictated by blind tradition. The stories are, naturally, composed
and enacted within the limits of the social background of Limba life and literary conven
tions; but each individual performer has his own idiosyncracies and unique fund of expe
rience, interests and skills. (1967: 17)

But it is in her survey study Oral Literature in Africa (1970) that Finnegan reveals her
full appreciation of the literary qualities of African oral literature. Although she com
mits a few errors of judgment—for instance, in declaring that Africa does not possess
certain types of oral literature such as epic and myth—she gives the subject as a whole
the sort of detailed treatment that we might find in any survey of modern literature.
Another useful contribution from European scholars has been made by Gordon
Innes. Part of what Finnegan means when she considers the traditional storytellers as
“individuals who perform on specific individual occasions” is that in a community
where two or more storytellers tell the same stories, one version of a tale is bound to
differ from another version, depending not only on the narrator’s personal skill and
experience but also on the context (e.g., type of audience) within which the tale is
told. This is the sort of issue that Innes has tried to examine. In his collection of
heroic and historical narratives among the Mandinka of the Gambia—Sunjata: Three
Mandinka Versions (1974), Kaabu and Fuladu: Historical Narratives of the Gambian Man
dinka (1976), and Kelefa Saane: His Career Recounted by Two Mandinka Bards (1978),
he has in each case presented the same story as told by two or three narrators. We
are given a brief but useful biography of each narrator and the circumstances of his
performance of the tale (e.g., use of musical instruments). This practice of presenting
the same theme from a variety of perspectives helps us a great deal in understanding
the relationship between what may be considered a “tradition” (in the sense of a
generally accepted body of information) and the individual creative skill of narrators
who undertake to reshape that body of information to suit their own contexts. Each
story is presented by Innes in both the original Mandinka and an English translation.
There are also detailed notes at the end which explain, among other things, how
skillfully each narrator bends the Mandinka language to suit his own artistic purposes.
We have constantly talked about performance in our discussion so far, and indeed
this is one aspect of the study of African oral literature that is gaining increasing
attention. By the term performance is implied the total act as well as the context or
environment involved in the delivery of oral literature—issues relating not only to
the role of the audience (as we saw in Clark’s Ozidi Saga) or of music but also to the
narrator’s use of the movement of the face, hands, and other parts of the body in
giving life to the narration. This aspect of oral literary study has received great em
phasis in the work of Harold Scheub, most notably in The Xhosa Ntsomi (1975). In
this study of a South African oral narrative tradition, Scheub devotes considerable
The Study of African Oral Literature 17
time to explaining the various ways in which the oral narrator manipulates symbols
and images within the tale, showing how one small image develops in scope as the
tale progresses. But even more interesting, he introduces us to the fascinating ways
in which the storyteller dramatizes various actions described in the tale so that even
though it is set in a fantastic world, it assumes the proportions of real life. In this
hook and in other publications on this subject, Scheub provides, as no scholar before
him ever did, a variety of photographs capturing the dramatic movements of his
narrators (mostly women) as they portray the various emotions and attitudes under
lying their tales.3 Such a study is clearly useful in giving insight into the warmth
and life that is involved in the production of the oral art.

Benefits of the New Trends

In giving greater recognition to the literary qualities of African oral literature, we
have no doubt freed African culture to a considerable extent from the prejudices of
the earlier European scholars. One outcome relates to the use of notions such as
“primitive” and “savage,” which occurred frequently and unapologetically in the works
not only of the evolutionists but even of the sociologists—take the subtitle, for ex
ample, of Rattray’s Ashanti Proverbs: The Primitive Ethics of a Savage People (1916). This
book was published in the heyday of imperial arrogance in Africa by a colonial ad
ministrator who had little understanding of or feeling for the Ashanti language. In
more recent times, these witticisms—proverbs, riddles, tongue-twisters—have been
found by numerous scholars (African and non-African) to reveal not only a depth of
wisdom but especially a high level of artistry or poetry in the way their tellers ma
nipulate sound and meaning. The literary interest taken in these aspects of African
oral literature has helped to show that the culture form which they come is far more
complex and sophisticated than words such as primitive and savage would seem to
suggest.
Another interesting offshoot of the literary interest in African oral literature has to
do with the growth of modern African literature as well as its study. This literature
was studied as an aspect of anthropology—that is, by scholars who were primarily
interested in understanding the nature of human culture and society at the fundamen
tal level, in small rural communities, for instance. It was in such an environment
that the use of words such as primitive inevitably grew. However, as scholars became
increasingly aware of the high level of cultural sophistication contained in African oral
literature, it was equally inevitable that the study of this literature should move out
of its old environment. In most African universities and other institutions where the
subject is taught, it is located within departments devoted mainly to the study of
language and literature. In these departments, oral literature is studied not only for
its own sake but also in the context of its relationship to modern African literature.
The justification for this is twofold.
First, as we have observed, African writers have been in the forefront of the contin
uing efforts to collect and translate texts from their people’s oral traditions, and they
have done this as a way of advertising the greatness of their indigenous cultures. From
Francophone Africa we may mention the Malian novelist A. Hampate Ba, who has
18 Backgrounds and Resources

translated (with Lilyan Kesteloot) some of the heroic tales, or epics, from the Bam-
bara; the Senegalese Birago Diop, who has done the same for Wolof folktales; and the
Guinean Djibril T. Niane, who was the first to provide a classic French translation of
the famous Mandinka (Mandingo) epic of Sundiata (Sunjata). In Ghana we have had
the poets Kofi Awoonor and G. Adali-Mortty translating pieces of the traditional
poetry of their people into sensitive English. In Nigeria the poet-dramatist Clark has
given us the epoch-making edition of The Ozidi Saga, and even the novelist Chinua
Achebe has become involved in translating Igbo folktales especially for young readers
(Achebe and Iroaganachi 1972). In East Africa Okot p’Bitek of Uganda led the way
in the collection and translation of texts of African oral literature; an example is his
translation of folktales Hare and Hornbill (1978). In South Africa the pioneering work
of Thomas Mofolo in presenting the story of Shaka has inspired the poet Mazisi
Kunene to publish the texts of greater epic narratives about the war leader in a
notable edition, Emperor Shaka the Great (1979). There are numerous other such efforts
across Africa.
Second, African oral literature is studied side by side with modern African litera
ture because many modern African writers consciously borrow techniques and ideas
from their oral traditions in constructing works dealing essentially with modern life.
These writers would like to feel that even though their societies have changed drast
ically from what they were several generations ago and even though they communicate
with the world in a language that is not their own, there must be certain fundamental
elements in their oral traditions that they can bring into their portraits of conterm
porary life. In Weep Not Child, for instance, Ngugi wa Thiong’o has evoked the image
of the ancestor of the Kikuyu race (Mumbi) in his portrait of the struggle of the
Kenyan people against foreign oppression. Wole Soyinka, in many of his writings,
has used the image of the Yoruba god Ogun as a symbol for the revolutionary spirit
needed to combat the social evils that plague both his country, Nigeria, and the black
race as a whole. In poetry, both Okot p’Bitek and Kofi Awoonor have borrowed
heavily from the techniques of folk expression in writing about present-day situations.
In chapter 10 we shall explore more fully the relationships between the oral and
written literatures of Africa.
Perhaps the more lasting benefit of the latest trends in the study of African oral
literature may be in helping us answer some very fundamental questions about the
nature of literature and of culture. In the final analysis, it seems, all knowledge aims
at helping us understand who we are, the value of what we do, how we have reached
the stage of civilization we have achieved, and what steps we can take to improve our
condition. From our discussion so far, it is clear that the earlier students of culture
tackled very much the same problems. But their error was in starting from rather
sweeping assumptions about the direction of human evolution (from “primitive” to
“civilized”) and treating the evidence at their disposal somewhat carelessly. Conse
quently they showed no interest in oral artists because they believed that at the
“primitive” stage of culture at which oral literature developed, it would be premature
to talk about individual artists.
Happily, recent studies in African oral literature are helping us look more closely
at the nature of the creative process in both Africa and the rest of the world and at
The Study of African Oral Literature 19
the relationship between one type of culture and another. For instance, how is oral
try composed both in societies without writing and in those that have had contact
with writing, and what is the place of this poetry in the society in which it exists?
What are the components, in terms of content and form, of the oral narrative, and in
what ways does the audience before whom the narrator performs such a tale influence
these components? What are the similarities and the differences between the psycho
logical outlook that gives rise to oral literature and the one that produces written
literature, and what happens when a society moves from an oral medium of expression
to a written one? On the evidence of both the oral and the written literature, what
are the essential differences between European and black African cultures? These and
various other questions can now be tackled because of the increasing interest in the
study of African oral literature as a subject in its own right.