African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African Americans 611
beginning to graduate in moderate numbers from colonial academies inside and outside
the continent. As various intellectuals—anthropologists, art historians, linguists,
musicologists, literary critics, writers, and others—directed their focus on fairly integral
communities, their insights became increasingly more representative of the subjects of
their attention. If the quality of texts of African oral literature appearing from this period
is anything to go by, we may safely say that the literary character of this tradition was no
longer much in doubt.
This is what makes Ruth Finnegan’s work Oral Literature in Africa (1970) such a
landmark in oral literary research in Africa. We should bear in mind, of course, that she
was not the first to use the word literature in characterizing the subject of her study. The
foundations for such a concept were laid by the praises lavished by much earlier scholars
like Junod (1913) on the creative genius of African narrative performers and Smith and
Dale (1920) on the virtuosity of their representations. And the word itself has been
applied to indigenous texts by observers and analysts all the way from Koelle (1854),
Bleek (1864), and Burton (1865) to Doke (1934) and Lifchitz (1940). The geologist Eno-
Belinga’s book, Litterature et musique populaire en Afrique noire (1965) is a modest
survey, mostly of the Cameroonian field, but it should be recognized as among works that
preceded Finnegan in drawing attention to the literary quality of the traditions. Even if we
dismissed these usages as limited perceptions of the claims of the traditions to be judged
on equal terms with literate classics, we should at least credit them with settling the
debate promoted by the likes of Walter Ong (1982, 10–15) even before it had begun.
Finnegan’s work takes full account of a vast array of the work of scholars across the
field, from the earliest generations of the study to its heyday in the 1960s, using the term
literature not only with the merit of historical insight but also with the benefit of training
in the relevant disciplines. Armed with a B.A. in classics and a doctorate in social
anthropology, she earned her stripes with fieldwork in various West African communities
but especially among the Limba of Sierra Leone, from which she published a number of
ethnographic studies and, particularly, the delightful Limba Stories and Storytelling
(1967). This work, in fact, established Finnegan as a key player in the field, for it helped
promote those factors we have come to recognize as ingredients of the peculiar artistry of
the oral narrative performance: the imaginative use of words and the images they conjure,
the idiosyncratic genius of the narrator, and the fervent dialogue between that genius and
the context (human and otherwise) within which it plays.
Only a scholar with such a background could have produced a work of the scope and
depth of Oral Literature in Africa, a solid ethnography of the subject that brings a sense
of history to bear on a moment when African intellectuals, not least the literati, were
basking in the hard-won liberation of their proud cultural traditions from the prejudices of
the past. Partly in deference to this cultural pride but partly also in honest representation
of the full dimensions of her subject, Finnegan strikes a just balance between content,
form, and context even as she casts an enormous historic and geographic net across the
entire sub-Saharan Africa.
Finnegan’s book is pivotal because it put a final stamp of authority on our recognition
of the oral traditions as literature, and even more because it brought a certain sense of
self-assurance to further endeavors in this field. It might not be far-fetched to state that
the establishment of courses in oral literature—and even their designation as
compulsory—in various universities in Africa, including the last bastions of colonial