African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African folklore 612
indoctrination like Ibadan, owe much to the publication of Finnegan’s book. Her work
coincided, incidentally, with the growth of the so-called science of folklore, especially in
the American academy, and one could sense a certain disciplinary stress in the attempt by
Richard Dorson, the doyen of the discipline there, to undervalue Finnegan’s book in his
superfluous differentiation of the concerns of “folklore” from those of “oral literature”
(1972, 10–18).
Whatever one’s disciplinary outlooks or prejudices, Finnegan’s book has been
responsible, in no small way, for the immense strides taken in the study since the 1970s.
The countless citations of the book by contemporary scholars amply bear this out, as does
the fact that most of their works give the sort of acknowledgment of the literary texture of
the traditions that Finnegan has encouraged.
Collections and Anthologies
The list of these works is long, but a random sampling gives a sense of the generic and
geographic coverage of the oral-literary interest promoted by Finnegan, even when she is
not specifically identified as a source of inspiration. We may conveniently start with
collections and anthologies, which have gained fresh impetus from the entry of native
African scholars in the field. The Ghanaian poet Awoonor was one of the first to
celebrate the literary merit of the oral traditions with his translations first of a collection
of Ewe poetry (1974), then of the oral narratives (1981). East Africa gave us Okot
p’Bitek’s delicate renditions of Acoli poetry (1974) and later of the narratives (1978), as
well as Rose Mwangi’s collection of Kikuyu folktales (1982). There have been several
collections of tales and songs from Francophone countries, among which may be cited
Thoyer-Rozat’s editions of hunters’ chants from Mali (1978 and 1984). Loretto Todd’s
collection of trickster tales from Cameroon (1979) is introduced by a brief treatment of
the literary and imaginative quality of the oral tradition, and Roger Abrahams’s collection
of African Folktales (1983) also has a very stimulating discussion of matters of form and
performance as well as the key concerns of the tales. Harold Scheub’s The African
Storyteller (1990) organizes its Africa-wide collection of tales thematically; there is no
general introduction but, as in most of Scheub’s work, several photographs of narrators in
performance give vivid notice of the fact that these tales are products of imaginative
histrionic as well as verbal representation on the part of the living artists.
Scheub may, in fact, be counted among the first to consolidate the interest in oralliterary
research in more recent times with his masterly study (1975) of the Xhosa oral
narrative tradition (ntsomi), a work that appeared in the same series—Oxford Library of
African Literature—as Finnegan’s 1967 and 1970 studies. His work is pivotal in
foregrounding performance as the lifeblood of the oral text. It also epitomizes the flourish
of structural analyses of the oral tradition that we see in studies by Arewa and Shreve
(1975), Anozie (1981), as well as such Scheub alumni as Ropo Sekoni (1990, 1994) and
Rassner (1990). This intensive analysis, especially of the oral narrative, may also be seen
in the works of scholars like Seitel (1980), Cosentino (1982), and Jackson (1982), the
latter two following Finnegan in exploring the Sierra Leonean field. Among other area
studies, we may especially recognize Wande Abimbola’s insider’s view of ifa divination
poetry (1976) which takes William Bascom’s work in this area (1959) one step further;