ORAL HISTORY: MIGRATION AND LOCAL IDENTITIES - Academia

Migration and Narration2000, p. 212). In oral histories, therefore, exaggerations and the extolmentof the past are part of the methodological requirements of an artand science threatened by the test of time and oblivion. “The enigmaof memory and forgetfulness reflected a [African] dilemma before itbecame a scholarly conundrum. Orators and authors alike found thatto tell the past required intellectual labour, both protective and proud”(Lonsdale, 2000, p. 206). The dilemma is reflected in a four-prongedaspect, the “four-part discourse”: first, the civilising use of time was amatter of contest to which stakeholders of history were to take part;not only those endowed with the genius of the word, but also thosewhose glorifying history granted access to public debate. Second, acircumstantial selection was operated, which was to say what historyor what aspects of history needed to be known or not to be told, forthe people’s own good; principled oblivion was also a way of servicinggenerations for the sake of the future. Third, historical time hadto be redeemed within a favourable formula. These criteria requiredthe active consent of a public (audience) cast in the same purposefulmould, namely one that could mobilise active ardour and devotedenthusiasm to the contest of time (Lonsdale, 2000, p. 207).A further element of the dialectic relation between time and performanceis inherent in the narrative of oral history; it is a condensedpoetic of cognomens and praise names, metaphors, and cross-referencesnot easily amenable to accurate dissection. Not all references aboutthe past reveal history; history is revealed only during key occasions.Historical time is in anastomosis with mythical time (Zahan, 1961,pp. 6-7). Hence a sense of frustration amongst certain Africanists facedwith a history difficult to tell with an absolute chronological accuracy.But then chronological accuracy and absolute dating is a concern forrationalists obsessed with fitting and streamlining the world into a linearchronological process. Africa’s past is in many ways resistant toquantitative and statistical analysis. In his seminal work Children ofWoot (1978), following over two decades of meticulous research intothe history of the Kuba people of central Africa, Jan Vansina dampensthe ambitious expectations of many Africanists to fully recover, someday, Africa’s unwritten past. In spite of a sophisticated and elaborateprocess model developed around systems of decoding and analysingthe array of narrative styles used in oral history, limited results in the110