African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African Americans 337
singers tend to use the same strategies. The language and imagery are rather earthy and
hard hitting. Over the years, from the days of colonialism to the present, this has
sometimes caused the singers to be harassed by the authorities.
There are, however, other kinds of dances for which the Sukuma are well known, such
as the snake dance and the bugobogobo, an agricultural dance. It appears that the snake
dance evolved from a hunters’ dance. The bugobogobo is an efficient mechanism for
harmonizing the rhythm of hoeing the fields and keeping the farmers entertained.
References
Millroth, Berta. 1965. Lyuba: Traditional Religion of the Sukuma. Uppsala: Almqvist and Wiksells
Boktryckeri AB.
Welch, Elvie Adams. 1974. Life and Literature of the Sukuma in Tanzania, East Africa.
Dissertation. Howard University.
JOSEPH L.MBELE
See also East African Folklore; Epics; Tricksters in African Folklore
HERSKOVITS, MELVILLE J. (1895–
1963)
The founder of African studies in the United States, Melville J. Herskovits collected and
analyzed African folklore in the course of ethnographic research in West Africa and as
part of a long-term project to examine the retention and transformation of African
cultural elements in the Americas. Many of the “Africanisms” he identified in the
Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States consisted of folklore traced to African
sources. Since he studied African folklore found on both sides of the Atlantic, Herskovits
was able to observe how it changed as he developed his theories of acculturation and
culture change. Drawing from his broad comparative perspective, he described such
common features found in sub-Saharan Africa as the performance of narratives as
dramatic expression, delight in double entendre, improvisation, the presence of multiple
narrative forms, the uses of folklore for moral education, and the artful use of indirection
in speech and folklore.
Folklore, for Herskovits, meant verbal creative expression. He also counted other
aesthetic forms among his extraordinarily broad research interests of music, dance,
games, and material culture. Like other folklorists of the early and mid-twentieth century,
Herskovits classified texts and analyzed their origins and distribution. He challenged the
Eurocentric biases of the comparative folklorists of his time through identifying multiple
sources from Africa, as well as Europe, for the folktales of Africans in the New World. In
Suriname Folk-Lore (1969)—co-authored, like many of his works on folklore, with his
wife and close collaborator Frances S.Herskovits—he found, for example, that the The
Good Child and the Bad story among Suriname Creoles contains “correspondences” with