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Oral Traditions: Whose History*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Thomas Spear
Thomas Spear*
Affiliation:
Williams College
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Extract

Historians rarely pause to reflect on the history and theory of our own discipline, but it is a salutary exercise, particularly when the discipline is as young as African history. Twenty years ago a majority of African peoples emerged from colonial domination and acquired their independence. In that same year their history was also symbolically liberated from domination by the activities of Europeans in Africa through the inauguration of the Journal of African History. And one year later the new African history was given what was to become one of its dominant methodologies with the publication of Jan Vansina's De la tradition Orale.

African history was to be the history of Africans, a history that had begun well before the European ‘discovery’ of Africa. The problem was sources. Western historiography was firmly based on written sources which could be arranged in sequence and analyzed to trace incremental changes and establish cause and effect relationships in evolutionary patterns of change. Unlike written documents which were recorded in the past and passed down unchanged into the present, oral traditions had to be remembered and retold through successive generations to reach the present. Their accuracy was thus subject to lapses in memory and falsification in the long chains of transmission from the initial report of the event in the past to the tradition told in the present. To overcome these problems Vansina established an elaborate and meticulous methodology by which traditions should be collected and transcribed, their chains of transmission traced and variants compared, and obvious biases and falsifications stripped off to produce primary documents suitable for writing history within the western genre.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 8 , 1981 , pp. 165 - 181
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1981

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Footnotes

*

I wish to express my appreciation to David Dorward, Bronwen Douglas, Lindsay Farrall, Joseph Miller, Sheila Spear, Michele Stephen, and Jan Vansina for their support, criticism, and generous sharing of ideas.

References

NOTES

1. Tervuren, , 1961. English translation: Oral Tradition (Chicago, 1965).Google Scholar

2. Aptly described by Miller, Joseph as the “documentary analogy” in “The Dynamics of Oral Tradition in Africa” in Bernardi, B., ed., Fonti Orali (Milan, 1978), 75–101.Google Scholar

3. For an introduction to African historiography, see Spear, Thomas, Kenya's Past: An Introduction to Historical Method in Africa (London, in press).Google Scholar

4. For comprehensive analyses of the functionalist and structuralist critiques, see Miller, “Dynamics of Oral Tradition” and Pender-Cudlip, P., “Oral Traditions and Anthropological Analysis: Some Contemporary Myths,” Azania, 7(1972), 3–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. Muriuki, Godfrey, A History of the Kikuyu, 1500-1900 (Nairobi, 1974), 46–47.Google Scholar

6. Spear, Thomas, The Kaya Complex: A History of the Mijikenda Peoples of the Kenya Coast to 1900 (Nairobi, 1978).Google Scholar

7. Pender-Cudlip, “Oral Traditions.”

8. See Vansina, Oral Tradition, and his frequent frank revisions, such as “Once Upon a Time: Oral Traditions as History in Africa,” Daedalus, 100(1971), 442–468 Google Scholar and “Traditions of Genesis,” JAH, 15(1974), 317–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar, together with Miller, Joseph, ed., The African Past Speaks (Folkestone, 1980)Google Scholar, the other articles cited here, and the many valuable methodology articles that have appeared in the Journal of African History and History in Africa over the years.

9. See, e.g., Feierman, Steven, The Shambaa Kingdom (Madison, 1974)Google Scholar; Lamphear, John, The Traditional History of the Jie of Uganda (Oxford, 1976)Google Scholar; Miller, Joseph, Kings and Kinsmen (Oxford, 1976)Google Scholar; Muriuki, History of the Kikuyu, and Vansina, , The Children of Woot (Madison, 1978).Google Scholar

10. See the stimulating discussion by Goody, Jack in his The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge, 1977)Google Scholar, an expansion of his and Watt's, earlier “The Consequences of Literacy,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 5(1963), 304–45.Google Scholar

11. Such a core image or fomula is often called a cliché. Lord, Alfred B., The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, 1960)Google Scholar; Scheub, Harold, The Xhosa Ntsomi (Oxford, 1975)Google Scholar; Colby, B. and Cole, M., “Culture, Memory and Narrative” in Horton, Robin and Finnegan, Ruth, eds., Modes of Thought (London, 1973)Google Scholar; and Goody, J., “Oral Tradition and the Reconstruction of the Past in Northern Ghana” in Bernardi, , Fonti Orali, 285–95.Google Scholar

12. Scheub, Xhosa Ntsomi; Miller, “Dynamics of Oral Tradition.”

13. Vygotsky, L.S., Mind and Society (Cambridge, 1978)Google Scholar; Luria, A.R., Cognitive Development (Cambridge, 1976)Google Scholar; Bruner, J.S., et al, Studies in Cognitive Growth (New York, 1966)Google Scholar; Berry, J.W. and Dasen, P.R., eds., Culture and Cognition (New York, 1970)Google Scholar; and Cole, M. and Scribner, S., Culture and Thought (New York, 1974).Google Scholar

14. Africa, 37(1967), 50–71, 155–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15. In an effort to avoid such meaningless and often inaccurate dicotomies, I differentiate here between the two on the basis of their differing modes of communication. Thus oral historians compose oral tradition (which can thus be called either oral or traditional history), while literate historians write literate history. The two are, of course, ideal types. A wide range of oral traditions are composed within the oral genre, just as numberous kinds of histories are written within the literate one. And, as Goody points out (Domestication, 152–60), there is a range of intermediary types between the two.

16. While modes drawn from the social world predominate in traditions, traditional thought also draws its models from the natural world. See, e.g. Turner, Victor, The Forest of Symbols (Ithaca, 1967)Google Scholar or Willis, Roy, Man and Beast (London, 1974).Google Scholar

17. This point is elaborated more fully by Miller, “Dynamics of Oral Tradition;” MacGaffey, W., “African History, Anthropology, and the Rationality of Natives,” HA, 5(1978), 101–20Google Scholar; and M. Sahlins, “The Stranger King, or Dumézil among the Fijians,” Presidential Address to the Anthropology Section of Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science, 12 May 1980.

18. For kinship as ideology see: Bloch, M., “Moral and Tactical Meaning of Kinship Terms,” Man, 6(1971), 79–87 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Jackson, M., “The Structure and Significance of Kuranko Clanship,” Africa, 44(1974), 397–416.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19. Miller, , Kings and Kinsmen, 16–21.Google Scholar

20. For ‘culture’ see Geertz, C., The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973).Google Scholar

21. Willis, R., On Historical Reconstruction from Oral-Traditional Sources: A Structuralist Approach, [Twelfth Melville J. Herskovits Memorial Lecture, Northwestern University, 16 February 1976.] (Evanston, 1976).Google Scholar

22. Miller, “Dynamics of Oral Traditions.”

23. For an historical account of this process see Muriuki, , History of the Kikuyu, 62–82.Google Scholar

24. This is not to say that all ‘narrative’ truth is thereby lost. The narrative may well remain as the structure of the tradition and historical residues commonly remain, as I have shown above.

25. See Brantley, The Giriama and British Colonialism in Kenya (forthcoming) for abundant evidence of the fact that detailed and insightful history can, nevertheless, be written from such traditional evidence.

26. Horton, , “African Traditional Thought,” 155–87.Google Scholar I have reservations about the dichotomy posed here by Horton. For the less than “open” nature of science, see Kuhn, Thomas, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962)Google Scholar while, for the unsatisfactory nature of the dichotomy itself, see Goody, , Domestication, 1–9.Google Scholar Nevertheless, Horton's points closely reflect the differences between predominantly oral cultures and those which are predominately literate (ibid., 38-46).

27. The fact that this transformation takes place within the tradition itself makes this particular tradition a fascinating study of the making of mythical heroes. Mofolo, Thomas, Chaka (London, 1931).Google Scholar

28. Possession and prophecy remain important elements in coping with change today, as shown by the thousands of prophets leading independent churches throughout Africa. See Barrett, David, Schism and Renewal in Africa (Nairobi, 1968)Google Scholar and Middleton, John and Beattie, John, eds., Spirit Mediumship and Society in Africa (London, 1969), xvii–xxx.Google Scholar Traditional possession and prophecy also remain important, as demonstrated dramatically by Fry, Peter, Spirits of Protest (Cambridge, 1976).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29. Miller shows how migration traditions are usually “myths of transferal,” denoting “transfers of ideology and identity” rather than actual movements of population. “Listening for the African Past” in Miller, , African Past Speaks, 32–33.Google Scholar

30. The pervasiveness of images of migration and conquest led earlier literate historians to view change in much the same way as traditional historians. The most notable example is the now notorious “Hamitic hypothesis,” which combined traditional notions of causation with European racism to attribute the development of all African states to conquering white pastoralists whose ideas about statecraft came originally from Egypt or Southwest Asia. We now read the idiom of ‘conquest’ as indicating probable interaction between two peoples resulting in syncretic political structures. See Ogot, B.A., “Kingship and Statelessness among the Nilotes” in The Historian in Tropical Africa, Vansina, J., et al, eds., (London, 1964), 284–304 Google Scholar and Horton, R., “Stateless Societies in the History of West Africa” in History of West Africa, Ajayi, J. and Crowder, M., eds., (London, 1971), 1:72–113.Google Scholar

31. Miller, , “Listening for the African Past,” 39–42.Google Scholar

32. Brantley, Giriama and British Colonialism.

33. Turner, Victor, Schism and Continuity in an African Society (Manchester, 1957), 177.Google Scholar

34. “Stranger King,” 5.

35. Willis, , Man and Beast, 128.Google Scholar

36. Concern for the recovery of meaning features prominently in the collected essays in Miller, The African Past Speaks. It is now a feature of other historical schools as well, notably the French Annales and the new British and American social history. The literate historian can also learn much about the complex process of decoding and translation from the work of structural anthropologists such as Willis, MacGaffey, and Leach or of symbolists such as Turner.

37. “Good Buy, Columbus,” New York Times, October 12, 1980.Google Scholar