Oral Literature in Africa - Saylor.org

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Oral Literature in Africa
at least lengthy poetic texts that can be so described—from many places
in Africa, most notably ex-French West Africa. Collections, anthologies,
translations and annotated texts abound. Epic now has its place in the corpus
of recognised African literature, routing the once-predominance of prose
forms, the more firmly established as an unquestioned African form through
film and broadcast representation. The controversy—one I have always
been glad to start off (as I learned in my Oxford days, debate is what gives
a subject life)—has been productive indeed, not least in encouraging greater
critical scrutiny of the term (notably in Derive 2002) and the challenge, led
by Isidore Okpewho (1979), to the once taken-for-granted, but in practice
typographically and culturally constructed, of the apparent distinction
between prose and poetry, a re-assessment which has had such valuable
implications for the study of more obviously ‘written’ literatures.
Other topics where to an extent I risked my neck, deliberately so, have
disappointingly attracted less interest. Few scholars have taken up my
provocative remarks about myth (though I welcome Isidore Okpewho’s
typically well-documented Myth in Africa, 1983) and drama (see Breitinger
1994, Conteh-Morgan and Olanyan 1999). Let me offer them up as hostages
to fortune and suggest that these topics too might relay further critical
investigation. There will almost certainly be other possible misconceptions,
as yet unnoticed by myself, which I can only leave the diligent reader to
winkle out.
It will doubtless be clear to any careful reader of the first edition that
I am sceptical about the idea of inevitable progress. I am therefore immensely
glad to see that one of the great changes since I first wrote is our increasing
awareness and, no doubt causally related to this, technological capture,
of the multisensory nature of human artistry. This must surely be noted
as one of the great advances of the last generation of scholars, aided but
not dictated by new technological devices. We can now document sound,
music, dance, movement and colour, and draw on brilliant many-sided
resources to experience them, not least in the webpages the publishers
are so illuminatingly adding to their print texts. By now we can gather to
oral literature forms that would once have been ruled out as imported or
‘hybrid’—the bandiri Sokoto group, for instance, in which solo male-voice
performances accompanied by drums and a singing chorus blend standard
Islamic vocabulary with a delivery style reminiscent of both praise singers
and Indian film song, at once local and transnational (Bubu and Furniss
1999: 30); film representations of Sunjata and similar narratives (Hale 2003,