African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

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memorabilia of the ancestors, including, among the Kalahari, sculptural figures
representing specific ancestors, named duein fubara or “foreheads of the dead.”
Among the generally noncentralized Ijo communities of the Niger Delta, knowledge
of the past was not considered the preserve of any specialist, expert, or court historian,
except for elders, priests, and drummers, who had to learn the drum praise poetry (kule),
the equivalent of the Yoruba oriki. The general knowledge view of oral traditions among
the Ijo reflects the multiple forms in which historical information came down from the
past, so that the oral traditions were not strictly demarcated from folklore or oral
literature. Indeed, oral historical narratives were rendered with the same opening and
closing gambits or formulae as were used in the telling of folk tales. As well, folk tales
and historical narratives were both termed egberi, “stories,” only differentiated by the
modifiers lugu, and elemu kura, that is, “stories of the imagination,” and “stories of
former times.” Yet the genres cannot be completely separated since there were also
historical folk tales. Songs (numo), riddles (duu), and proverbs (kabu) were accepted as
repositories of history. Thus, a corpus of riddles among the Nembe are known to recount
the history of the ancient community of Onyoma and of its mythical priest king,
Onyoma-pere.
Prospects
The growing sophistication of studies in African oral traditions and historiography can
gain from further deepening and expansion of its multidisciplinary bases. Historians have
yet to take up Richard M.Dorson’s invitation (1972) to integrate into their work some of
the standard methods of folkloristics. Progress in Africa is stunted by poor funding of the
universities, and in the West, by the low priority accorded African studies in recent times.
The Western cult of theory appears to be currently exercised, among others, by
postmodernism, keen to challenge and attack what proponents term the totalizing
metanarratives of the mainstream, without presenting alternative constructions of African
historiography. The attention seems still to be fixed on methodology and questions of the
truth value of oral traditions. African historians, on the other hand, continue to be
exercised by the practical problems of constructing community histories, and, therefore,
with the problems of dialogue between the academy and the people, and with the
ideology and philosophy of the practice of oral traditions and historiography on the
ground.
References
Alagoa, E.J. 1966. Oral Tradition among the Ijo of the Niger Delta. Journal of African History VII,
no. 3:405–19.
——. 1968. The Use of Oral Literary Data for History: Examples from Niger Delta Proverbs.
Journal of American Folklore 81:235–42.
——. 1968. Songs as Historical Data: Examples from the Niger Delta. Research Review (Legon) 5,
no. 1:1–16.
——. 1971. Ijo Drumlore. African Notes (Ibadan) 6, no. 2:63–71.
——. 1975. Riddles in Nembe. Oduma (Port Harcourt) 2, no. 2: 17–21.