Oral Literature in Africa - Saylor.org

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Oral Literature in Africa
Oxford. They had lost the first typescript—no ‘not lost’, I seem to recall
Peter Sutcliffe, then the front man at the press, as saying in his high Oxford
tones, ‘we don’t lose manuscripts here: it will just have been put on a shelf
with the wrong label’. As far as I know it never did turn up; but in those
laborious days of typewriting I had kept and could amend the carbon copy.
As for how it began: after my initial stint of fieldwork I was working
on my Oxford doctoral dissertation in 1962–3 and longing for some kind
of overview to set my detailed Limba notes in some perspective. I still
remember the startling moment, sitting at a wide table in Rhodes House
in Oxford, when I found that yet another promising sounding title was
again just a detailed account with little or no wider perspectives. Could the
long self-motivated course of reading that I had necessarily embarked on
be turned instead to something of use to others? Could the short seminar
papers I delivered on the subject build up into something more useful?
Perhaps when I had completed my reading (as if one could . . . ) and
gathered it into a larger volume, it might act in some way as a tool perhaps
even a kind of workbench for the better work of others? That at any rate
began to forge itself into my ambitious aspiration, a gadfly when the going
got tough and incentive to dispute the arrogant knowingness of those who
would yet again circulate their certainties about all African culture. Dare
I hope that something of that original aim might be achieved both in the
first edition and this more recent and more meagre offering?
When I came to read through the original edition again this year I was
surprised how much was based on my own earlier fieldwork. It underlays
my approach and interests throughout, as well as my confidence in
interpreting its miscellaneous and disparate sources. How much I owe to
those Limba story-tellers amidst the fought-over unhappy northern palms
of Sierra Leone! But in addition the direct use I made of Limba findings
in chapters 12 to 16, and in scattered references earlier, certainly adds to
the volume’s authenticity. All the inputs there might well have grown to
full books in themselves (as the narrative section had, in Finnegan 1967)—
especially, perhaps, the discussion of oratory. Better, I persuaded myself, to
use them for a volume that would help and incite others (would that the
same, I told myself, had been done with the many specialist ethnographies
destined to languish on the shelves of well-endowed university libraries
rather than adding to the wealth of collaborative human knowledge).
Perhaps more important, that deep experience of personal fieldwork, never
forgotten, was what informed and provoked the emphasis on performance