African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African folklore 642
entire thought worlds shaped around oral poetic formulas. With the introduction of
writing and printing, such modes of thought would shift to produce new ways of thinking
and forms of social organization. In its cruder manifestations, these ideas suggest a “great
divide” between oral and literate societies. These dualities of orality and literacy, in turn,
superseded others like developed/underdeveloped, magical/scientific, Western/non-
Western, and so on. In such scenarios, it often appeared that literacy by itself was capabl e
of bring ing a bout ch an ges in ment, political ideas, economic development, and abstract
thought. It often became something of an article of faith that widespread literacy would
precipitate economic “lift off” in non-literate societies.
This idea of a great divide between oral and literate cultures has been challenged from
many directions. Ruth Finnegan has questioned the confident, generalizing claims that
are made about the changes attributed to literacy. Instead, case studies from different
historical periods and geographical areas indicate that literacy is taken up and used in
diverse ways with manifold consequences. Literacy should not be viewed in isolation
since technologies are socially embedded and are shaped by the social relations into
which they migrate. It is, consequently, difficult to establish any general or universal
patterns for the impact of new technologies on societies.
This set of ideas was also explored in the field of linguistic anthropology and applied
linguistics and came to be known as the New Literacy Studies. Research in this field has
uncovered the rich multitude of literacy practices, multiliteracies, and literacy events in
and across societies.
In terms of African oral literary studies, the initial phase of the debate on oral
formulaic composition-in-performance influenced a great number of scholars. Many
notable works appeared as a result of the application of these ideas and included Isidore
Okpewho (The Epic in Africa) and Harold Scheub (The Xhosa Ntsomi).
Another field in which formulaic analysis of oral texts had an influence was in the
arena of oral history in Africa. As historians came to rely on oral history as a source for
reconstructing the precolonial past, the question of how to historicize information in such
data became important. Vansina, in his pioneering work, adapted ideas of the formula to
suggest that the most conventionalized forms of speech might be the oldest. The question
of how, or indeed if, one can locate such kernels in sheets of testimony has produced
much active debate.
These literary and historical investigations into the oral realm have been important, but
they highlight the extent to which questions of literacy have been sidelined in discussions
of African orality. Indeed, analyses of oral literature in Africa often screen out wider
social forces (including literacy) so that, at times, oral forms appear to exist in a
ringfenced world, cut off from history and social change. Karin Barber, a noted scholar of
Yoruba literature, has suggested that the current field of African cultural studies is
somewhat artifically divided between studies of oral literature on the one hand and, on
the other, analyses of mainstream canonical writers working in Europhone languages.
Barber has instead suggested that the bulk of popular cultural production in Africa
occupies the zone between these two points. Such cultural production also invariably
entails a complex interweaving or “genetic engineering” of oral and written forms. To
engage properly with popular culture in Africa is to come to terms with forms that
straddle not only the modalities of the verbal and written but also forms like cinema,
radio, video, and the like.