African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African Americans 369
INSTITUTIONAL STUDY OF AFRICAN
FOLKLORE
Africa has been a battleground in the folklorist’s attempt to assert the autonomy of
folklore. As a result, there has been much interdisciplinary debate surrounding the
concept of African folklore between the late eminent folklorist Richard Dorson and
literary scholars and anthropologists. The first debate arose in 1965, when Dorson was
invited to conduct a folklore seminar in London by the Department of Africa of the
School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London. He used the
opportunity to speak out against W.H. Whiteley’s handling of African prose material in
Whiteley’s book A Selection of African Prose; 1: Traditional Oral Texts, calling attention
to the lack of comparative notes and motif references, which a folklorist would normally
look for, and the imbalance of genres represented. Whiteley’s book was a lesson in “How
not to publish folklore texts,” according to Dorson.
A repeat of this confrontation took place in 1967, at the Oral Data Conference in
Wisconsin, cosponsored by the African Studies Programs of the University of Wisconsin
and Northwestern University. There, while literary scholars expressed disappointment at
the folklorist’s neglect of esthetics, Dorson drew attention to the lack of comparative
perspectives in the approach of the literary scholar, linguist, and anthropologist.
Simply put, in the attempt to assert the autonomy of folklore as a discipline, folklorists
have prescribed a host of mutually exclusive criteria or rules. Besides more recent
definitions of folk and folklore offered by Dundes and Ben-Amos, the issue of what,
exactly, constitutes folklore has been based on the nature of the material under study, as
well as the evolutionary status of the people to which the material belongs. While Dorson
adopts these two criteria in his book African Folklore, he also advocates a third, which
unwittingly repudiates the previous two: Folklore is what folklorists have studied by their
methods.
Applying all three criteria simultaneously, the problematic outcome is evident in the
contradictions in the following propositions in Dorson’s book: (1) Chatelain’s book
Folktales of Angola (1894) is folklore because it contains comparative notes; but (2)
anthropologists studying Africa in the past were wrong to not label the material as
folklore; but (3) what was in Africa before the arrival of an elite in “recent” decades is
not folklore.
Besides the muddling of criteria in the assessment of African folklore material, the
attempt to trace elitism or shades of “traditions” in Africa to recent decades overlooks
centuries of “elitism,” written poetry, and religious pluralism that existed long before the
African contact with Western civilization.
Despite the folklorist’s ambivalent signals in appraising African materials, the
continued study of African folklore throughout the world has not been hampered by
definition games. To put this in perspective, highlighted below are some of the significant
landmarks in the institutional study of African folklore in the United States, Europe, and
on the African continent, placing particular emphasis on the study of oral literature. We
have here used oral literature, verbal art, and folklore interchangeably.