African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African Americans 977
A number of these ancient peoples, such as the Buganda, Lugbara and Bunyoro, have
persisted and continue to practice their traditional arts.
JENNIFER JOYCE
URBAN FOLKLORE: A SUDANESE
EXAMPLE
For a long time, studies of folklore in the Sudan have been biased against urban folk
groups. This can best be demonstrated by the complete absence of urban folklore studies
in the publications issued by the Department of Folklore of the Institute of African and
Asian Studies at the University of Khartoum. An excellent site for the study of urban
folklore forms is the Sudan Textile Factory, located in Khartoum, with tens of thousands
of workers who come from different parts of the Sudan. Workers at the Sudan Textile
Factory qualify as a folk group because they share a number of factors, such as their jobs
at the factory, as well as their ethnic associations and the neighborhoods in which they
live.
Most definitions of folklore are inadequate for such folk groups in an urban setting. In
a context as dynamic as the urban situation of Khartoum, it is very difficult, and even
impractical, to delimit genres. To solve this problem, a performance-oriented definition
needs to adopted. This entry uses the definition given by Roger Abrahams, who believes
that the term folklore applies to “those traditional items of knowledge which arise in
recurring performance” (1970, 195). Therefore, folklore in this discussion is meant to
indicate a cultural behavior and a communicative process. A genre might consist of
words, such as nicknames, games, or physical objects. What qualifies a certain item for a
genre is the way it is accepted, adopted, and transmitted among the workers. In any case,
a genre is transmitted and performed through a communicative process.
Jocular Genres
Jokes and jocular anecdotes are widely used by the workers at Sudan Textile Factory,
mainly when they get together in their free time. Though most of the workers have a rich
repertoire of jokes, not every worker is a good joke teller. Since telling jokes needs a
degree of specialization, only a few workers are accepted as successful. Those recognized
joke tellers do not only narrate jokes; they also invent jokes about the people and the
machines of the factory.
Generally, the joke is thought to be a playful judgment of something or someone
presented in a humorous expression. The meaning of this expression is a code that is not
recognized by everybody, but is easily understood by the members of the same folk
group—that is, the workers. Ideally, jokes are new for the audience; so the joke tellers
among the workers do not perform the same joke repeatedly.