The study of the African epic was born in denial. In the third volume (1940) of their classic Growth of Literature, H. Munro and N. Kershaw Chadwick, discussing the “distribution of literary types” across the world, conclude there is no “narrative poetry … at all in Biblical Hebrew or anywhere in Africa.” Assuming a difference between such poetry and “saga,” by which they mean a narrative form with an admixture of prose and verse, they conclude the latter is found in “several African languages” (1940: 706).

In his equally epochal book, Heroic Poetry (1952), C. M. Bowra also has difficulty in recognizing the existence of epic or “heroic” poetry in Africa. Adopting an evolutionist approach in his discussion of “the development of primitive narrative poetry” across nations, he concludes, on the one hand, that, in cultures like Africa, heroic poetry had not quite graduated from a tradition of predominantly panegyric forms to one of sustained heroic narratives, and, on the other, that such narratives of heroic pretensions as might be found on the continent were centered around figures who achieved their feats more by magic than by force of sheer physical might. Bowra’s language is particularly alarming: in discussing pieces of historical panegyric and lament songs from Uganda and “Abyssinia,” he observes that in spirit they are “close … to a heroic outlook” but that “the intellectual effort required” to advance such texts to the level of heroic poetry “seems to have been beyond their powers” (1952: 10–11)!