African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African folklore 432
scholar’s effort,” that is oral information that has been recorded and exists in either audio
or print format (1992, 423). Recording information through interviews in the field has so
far been neglected. Similarly, other librarians/scholars, such as H.O.M.Iwuji and
A.O.Amadi, both warn of condemning vast parts of cultural information to oblivion if no
efforts are made to preserve it. Amadi describes the situation in strong and unmistakable
terms: “The grief arising from the devastation of a library by fire or similar causes in the
Western world is only comparable in intensity to the loss, through death, of an old man in
Africa. The later, like the former, is the veritable embodiment of an archive or a protolibrary—a
library without shelves” (1981, 140; also quoted in Iwuji 1989, 205). To
remedy the situation, scholars/librarians such as Aleybeleye, Alemna, and Iwuji propose
a different role for both academic and public librarians. They suggest that the librarian
acts as field worker who actively goes into the villages to record data and then provides
access to them in the library. The library would thus become a center for a culture’s oral
heritage.
On the national level, several African countries have recognized the need to preserve
their oral heritage and have made attempts at collecting, organizing, and disseminating
oral tradition (see Appendix, African Studies Centers and Libraries in the United States
and Africa).
Both Alemna and Aleybeleye deplore that most of these projects have not been able to
fulfill all of their ambitious goals. One obvious reason for this has to do with funding.
The costs for funding such projects are high and ongoing, including money for personnel,
equipment, buildings, and so forth. Another issue is the training of personnel in collecting
the data, recording them, and providing access. Above all, the scope of collecting a
country’s oral data is enormous and requires a sustained effort of governments, funding
agencies, academic institutions, and libraries.
All these projects were initiated by African countries. However, not all collections of
African oral data are in African libraries. There exist numerous private collections, both
in and outside of Africa, collected by researchers who either store them at their homes, or
deposited them at their institutions or an archive known for its focus in that area. In the
case of private collections, access, or even finding out about their existence, can be
problematic. However, tools for the researcher to locate archival collections exist—some
of which are mentioned below.
Tools to Locate Folklore Collections
There are a number of journals devoted to improving access to African archival
collections. History in Africa, edited by ibrarian/ historian David Henige, is an example.
In his article on the state of archives in Africa, Henige discusses the lack of information
on archival collections in Africa and points out that as a consequence one of the goals of
History in Africa is to publish accounts of various African or Africanist archives. Another
journal worth mentioning in this respect is African Research and Documentation, the
journal of the Standing Conference on Library Materials on Africa (SCOLMA). This
journal typically publishes bibliographic articles and accounts of archival projects, such
as the Oral Traditions Association of Zimbabwe (OTAZI) and the East African Centre for
Research on Oral Traditions and African National Languages (EACROTANAL) which