Oral Literature in Africa (53 page)

A further point about too much dependence on typologies here is that this under-emphasizes one of the most striking characteristics of much oral literature—its flexible and unfixed quality. This applies particularly in the case of prose. In the actual narration of stories—and the actual narration is what matters in oral literature—there is very often no fixed wording, and the narrator is free to bind together the various episodes, motifs, characters, and forms at his disposal into his own unique creation, suited to the
audience, the occasion, or the whim of the moment. The same point has been well made by Ruth Benedict in the context of American Indian (Zuni) stories when she speaks of the need for more intensive studies:

The usual library-trained comparative student works with standard versions from each locality; in primitive cultures, usually one from a tribe. This version arbitrarily becomes ‘the’ tribal tale, and is minutely compared with equally arbitrary standard tales from other tribes. But in such a body of mythology as that of Zuni, many different variants coexist, and the different forms these variants take cannot be ascribed to different historical levels, or even in large measure to particular tribal contacts, but are different literary combinations of incidents in different plot sequences. The comparative student may well learn from intensive studies not to point an argument that would be invalidated if half a dozen quite different versions from the same tribe were placed on record (Benedict 1935 i: xiii).

It is true that many collections of African stories give the impression of fixity just because they have been written down and printed. But in fact, in most African cases that have been fully examined, this variability of tales according to the teller and the occasion is one of their most apparent characteristics.
¹⁰
There is no one
correct
version or form. What on one occasion looks like, say, a ‘dilemma tale’ or a moralizing parable (to mention two well-known types) may on another, though otherwise similar in subject-matter, look like an aetiological explanation or just a humorous joke. Form, plot, and character may all equally, therefore, provide only a shifting and impermanent foundation for classification, and any attempt at making typologies on this basis can only result in misconceptions about the nature of the stories as actually told.

Altogether, then, the current interest in classification can give a rather one-sided view of the significance of many prose narratives in Africa. This is particularly true when, as so often, they are based on what turns out to be only superficially analysed material. Largely owing to the past preoccupations of evolutionists, of linguists,
¹¹
of educationalists, and of diffusionists, an amazingly large number of these collections have appeared without any rigorous commentary to elucidate their contemporary and local meaning, being presented as just bare ‘texts’, often no more than synopses of the outline plots. Detailed studies in depth of the literary and
social significance of the various stories in any one society are notably lacking. It is time more attention was focused on these aspects, and less on the comparative classification of stories, the tracing of the history of their plots, or the enumeration, however impressive in itself, of the quantities of texts that have so far been collected.

IV

The approaches discussed so far have mainly been those of recent American and Scandinavian scholarship, or the earlier British approach. The emphasis in more recent British work is very different. If the diffusionist and evolutionist schools concentrated on a few limited elements in their studies of African stories, the recent approach in Britain has been to ignore such stories altogether as an independent field of study. The ‘structural-functional’ approach of Radcliffe-Brown and others, which has until very recently dominated British social anthropology, is interested in local narratives only in so far as they can be seen to have a clear ‘social function.’

Various functions have been stated or assumed. Stories, for instance, are told to educate and socialize children, or, by drawing a moral, to warn people not to break the norms of the society. Other narratives—in this connection always persuasively called ‘myths’—are ‘charters’ which serve to uphold the present structure of society in general, and the position of the rulers in particular. Others again are said to fulfil the function of providing a model through which people can verbalize the relationships and constitution of their society. Throughout, it is the utilitarian aspect of oral narratives that is brought to the fore, and little or nothing is said, even in passing, about verbal or artistic aspects. The prime concern is with the functioning of society, the narrations are assumed to be of no serious interest in themselves.

We owe to this school an awareness of the social significance of certain stories. And we are also rightly reminded of a point overlooked by evolutionist and diffusionist writers: that the stories should be seen as part of their own social context and not just as survivals. But for someone also interested in the stories in themselves, particularly in their literary impact, such an approach in practice offers little further insight.

Obviously a literary critic is interested in social function. But this, paradoxically, is not made much clearer for us by the strict functional interpretations adopted by many recent scholars. In such writings we are seldom told much about, say, how widely known certain ‘myths’ really are, when they are told, how far (if at all) they differ in tone, context, or telling
from the more ‘fictional’ tales, how far people themselves regard stories as educative, what opinions are held by the tellers on the relative importance of the utilitarian purpose, the attractiveness of subject-matter, and skill in delivery, etc.

In fact the functionalists stress the utilitarian aspect so much but, when one comes down to it, with so little detailed evidence that one begins to wonder whether their confident assertions about a given narration’s function have in fact much evidence behind them. Doubtless certain of these functions of educating, upholding, mirroring, etc., are fulfilled by African stories at times (just as they are, directly or indirectly, by many other types of literature); but what is needed now is further study of the detailed ways in which these functions in some cases are, and in others presumably are not, fulfilled (with an awareness that there may well be other aspects to stories besides the utilitarian one).

On the one hand, then, this functional approach has not been very illuminating for many aspects of African stories.. It can also, on the other, be positively misleading. For one thing it implicitly insinuates the assumption that, to put it crudely, ‘primitive peoples’ (i.e. Africans) have no idea of the aesthetic, and therefore the only possible explanation of an apparent work of art, like a story, is that it must somehow be
useful
. And, of course, an assumption of this sort usually turns out to be self-verifying when the evidence is collected and analysed according to it. As will be clear from the whole tone of this book, I believe the evidence can be interpreted differently.

Again, the functional approach focuses attention on the stable and stabilizing nature of both the stories and the society in which they occur. This emphasis on the
status quo
has been a common criticism of the ‘structure and function’ school, and it is obviously particularly unsuited to an analysis of the living and creative art of the story-teller.

Furthermore, the functionalist publications have tended to perpetuate the kind of misconception discussed earlier—the assumption that it is always possible to make a clear-cut distinction between ‘myths’ and other tales. These writers tend to assume that any story that looks at all as if it could be interpreted as a ‘charter’ for society can be labelled a ‘myth’; the impression is thereby neatly given to the reader that this story is widely known, deeply believed, held different from other stories, and, perhaps, part of some systematic and coherent mythology. In fact, it is possible in a given case that none of this may be true at all; but just by using the little word ‘myth’ these connotations can be conveyed without being stated—or, therefore, questioned by either reader or writer.

Let me give an example from my own fieldwork to illustrate this point. When I first heard a Limba story about how in the old days Kanu (God) lived with mankind but then withdrew in impatience to the sky, I at first automatically classed this in my mind as a ‘myth.’ It was easy to see its function (explaining and justifying the present state of things) and, like other ‘myths’, it was presumably well known and taken seriously. This was, it seemed, the Limba myth which could be treated as the basis of their religious philosophy just as similar ‘myths’ have been elsewhere. It was only after recording several dozen more Limba stories that I realized that this particular story was no different in style, outlook, or occasion of telling from the clearly ‘fictional’ and light-hearted narratives about, say, a man wooing a wife or a cat plotting to eat a group of rats. Far from being widely known and believed, I only, in fact, ever heard it told by one man, who was using it as a setting (like other stories) for his own idiosyncratic tricks of style and content; other people did not know it or treat it particularly seriously on the occasions they did hear it. The story still, of course, has its own significance. But it certainly has not the clear-cut separate status that I had wrongly assigned to it before I had a more thorough knowledge of Limba oral literature. One wonders how many of the narratives so easily referred to as ‘myths’ have in fact been misclassified owing to too superficial an assessment of the data.
¹²

The same point could also be made about analyses using a similar approach, though without recourse to the favourite term ‘myth.’ Take, for instance, Beidelman’s interpretations of Kaguru stories as Kaguru representations of social reality, a kind of sociological model of their society through the medium of a story.
¹³
One tale describes how Rabbit (or Hare) tricks Hyena, and is interpreted, at first sight plausibly, as a Kaguru representation of matrilineal relationships. This may be so—but we are in fact given no solid evidence. As far as
plot
goes, much the same story occurs among other African peoples, so that for this interpretation to stand up we need to be given some discussion about, say, the indigenous and conscious interpretation of the story itself, the Kaguru attitude to this story (and stories in general), the contexts in which it is told, and perhaps some assessment of its relations to the general corpus of Kaguru oral literature. No attempt whatsoever is made to provide this information and it is fairly
clear that Beidelman felt no need to consider these points. Because of the general attractiveness of the neat structural-functional framework (of which this is just one variety) the limitations and naivety of this and similar approaches have been overlooked.

The predominance of this approach in British social anthropology is passing. Scholars are now realizing that, quite apart from the actual mistakes disseminated by this school, a concentration on just social functions and alleged contributions to social structure means treating only one limited aspect of oral narratives. Prose narratives (and oral literature generally) are once again becoming a field of interest in their own right. The influence of the older approach still lingers, however. For many years in Britain it was social anthropologists with this interest who appeared to hold the monopoly in the academic assessment of the role of oral narrative in Africa, and, as so often happens, their views are gaining popular acceptance just as they are becoming less influential in professional circles. It is partly to this influence that we owe the proliferation of collections of stories with the emphasis on bare synopsis or the moralizing element, and on references to, rather than full statements of, the ‘myths’ and ‘legends’ which stabilize society.

To end this discussion of the various approaches of the past to the study of oral narratives, there is one general point that can be made. This is, that all these approaches seem to have in common an implicit assumption that oral narratives in Africa (and other non-literate cultures) can be treated in a fundamentally different way from the literature of more familiar peoples. The normal questions asked by literary critics in the case of written literature are brushed to one side in favour of pursuing historical reconstructions or assumptions about utility. No evidence is given that such narratives
are
fundamentally different from literary narratives elsewhere—this is just assumed; and the assumption made to look plausible because it is dealing with the literature of unfamiliar cultures. And yet, amazingly, the crucial way in which such narratives in fact really are different—their
oral
quality—is scarcely taken serious account of at all.

In conclusion, it is clear that many of the earlier approaches to the study of oral narrative in Africa have in fact obscured many points of interest. In addition they have popularized various misconceptions about their nature or role. This has been done to such good effect that unproven or totally false speculations have been taken as truisms. There is still too general an acceptance of such questionable concepts as verbal fixity,
dominating significance of subject-matter, lack of native imagination or inventiveness, handing down narratives unchanged through the generations, or the basically pragmatic role of African stories. It is because of the wide prevalence of such misleading but often implicit theories that this rather destructive chapter has seemed a necessary prelude to any direct discussion of African narratives
.

Footnotes

1
   Most of the general accounts of African oral literature devote much or most of their space to a consideration of prose narratives, e. g. Herskovits 1961; Bascom 1964 (which includes a most useful list of collections of African stories); Berry 1961; Balandier 1956. Of the large and varied number of general anthologies of African stories, one could mention Seidel 1896; Basset 1903; Cendrars 1921; Meinhof 1921; Frobenius 1921–28 (12 vols.); Radin 1952; Arnott 1962; Whiteley 1964. Special studies of various aspects of African stories include Klipple 1938 and Herskovits 1936 (comparative study of motifs); Mofokeng 1955; Von Sicard 1965; Tegnaeus 1950; Abrahamsson 1951 (studies mainly in the ‘Scandinavian’ tradition); Werner 1925, 1933 (surveys content of stories, including myths). Of the innumerable collections of stories from single societies or areas, the following are of interest either because of the collection itself or (more often) because of the accompanying discussion: Roger 1828 (Wolof); Theal 1886 (Xhosa); Chatelain 1894 (Kimbundu); Cronise and Ward 1903 (Temne); Jacottet 1908 (Sotho); Junod ii, 1913: 191ff (Thonga); Tremearne 1913 (Hausa); Equilbecq 1913–16 (3 vols.) (West Africa); Smith and Dale ii, 1920, ch. 28 (Ila); Torrend 1921 (Zambia); Travelé 1923 (Bambara); Doke 1927, 1934 (Lamba); Lindblom 1928 (Kamba); Rattray 1930 (Akan); Herskovits 1958 (Fon); Stappers 1962 (Luba); Hulstaert 1965 (Mongo); Mbiti 1966 (Kamba); Finnegan 1967 (Limba); Evans-Pritchard 1967 (Zande). See also the excellent article by Crowley (1967) which, though specifically about the Congo, is of wider relevance. For further references see General Bibliography and the useful analysis of collections plus bibliography in Bascom 1964; many of the recent collections (often very much in popular form) are by no means improvements on earlier collections from the same peoples.