UNESCO
A contribution to the recovery of the African cultural heritage found in oral traditions
AFRICAN PRESENCE, ORALITY AND TRANSCULTURE
By Luz María Martínez Montiel
(Taken from Oralidad magazine, 10/1999, pp. 28-32)
The chains imposed by slavery did not freeze the soul nor did they paralyze the thoughts of the Mandingos, the Yorubas, the Bantus, the Fantis, the Ashantis, the Ewe-Fonts, or the Akans. It is now high time to forget forgetfulness. Memory does exist and it emerges through stories and narrations, through myths and beliefs, through drum beats and silences—in gestures, dances, and their ethics for life and death.
No narrator transmits word by word whatever text he may have received through oral tradition
During the almost four centuries of “black slave trade” or Atlantic traffic, the African slaves came from towns in Western Sudan, Equatorial Africa, and the Angolan region. We have been able to reconstruct their ethnic origins thanks to research carried out during the past fifty years. Fully aware that these cultures define the identity of a great part of America, the studies carried out so far on African ethnic groups, though considerably numerous, are still insufficient. In many of our countries there is no systematic research on these cultures, which gave birth to Afro-Caribbean populations. In general, America studies its African history only from a demographic point of view, using these elements to reconstruct history, even though the numbers involved in slave demography are sometimes uncertain.
Orality in the African Perspective
Depending on the disciplines interested in the subject, different angles have been used to study orality in Africa south of the Sahara desert--or Black Africa, as the area where black peoples live is also called. Folklore experts have interpreted these cultural expressions as the survival of traditional ways no longer alive; ethnologists, on the other hand, conceive them as a reflection of contemporary society, and a method to transmit or teach group values; and finally, psychiatrists (according to Freud) explain them as a way to express psychological problems.
African oral literature is simultaneously all this, and even more, for we must never forget that a myth, a story, a proverb, even a riddle are first and foremost a collective creation subject to specific canons. To understand this kind of literature, therefore, we must first analyze its form and its contents under a multidimensional glass. To study this cultural source we must follow the strict lines that define it, unlike those present in any other literary critique.
With each new text come broad possibilities for analysis, linking the works of oral literature with other aspects of the same culture. Because of their dimension within traditional orality, the language, the vocabulary, and the syntax enrich this form of expression more than the spoken language. In oral tradition, we find formulas for the beginning and for the end of the story, specific modes, onomatopoeia, diminutives and augmentatives, etc.
A distinction must then be made between fixed and free styles; in the first category, by definition, the text is always the same (proverbs, enigmas, formulas, oaths), so the language becomes archaic; in the second category, on the contrary, the formula can change (stories, narrations, etc.).
According to the narrator and his audience, these narrative systems also have variable elements. Some stories are acted out, as in a theater. No narrator will transmit word for word the text he has received through oral tradition, and it is precisely in this freedom that we discover the richness and diversity of oral literature. Traditionally, some societies participate as a group during their recreational activities or the telling of a story or a narration: a story told between two or more people, fun games, choruses, fable- or story-singers, etc.
The story’s grammar follows a narrative structure, defining the repetitive sequences. The vocabulary is extremely varied, following the oral tradition of the work’s original society. It has been said that there no society in the world lacks these works handed down through cultural traditions. These forms are better conserved in some societies than others, according to their imperative needs to keep specific elements of their culture alive, for they would otherwise be lost. That is precisely the case of the stories and genealogical reconstructions preserved in Africa century after century, closely related to important actions (sometimes mythical ones) carried out by each ethnic group’s cultural heroes. And that is precisely—and none other—the heritage deposited with the Griots, those incredible oral historians Peul from Western Sudan.
Within the stories’ vocabulary, the actors: men, animals, plants, genii, etc., take their place and represent a specific symbolism in each society. You can draft a whole repertoire of metaphors and metonymies with these elements. The actions and the gestures can be understood either universally, or only by the specific society they are being acted for. There is a symbolic value also present in the narrator’s accessories (jewelry, dresses, disguises, etc.).
Every myth (and many stories are but mythical residues) must be deciphered, for they hold an implicit message. Being the shortened version of a cosmogony with occasional (collective in the case of a myth, individual in the case of a story) omissions, the narration can be deciphered because of its repetition. Together with the implicit message comes the explicit—and less important—message: it does not modify the internal structure of the text. It only defines the end of the story, of the narration, or of a genealogical reconstruction.
There are multiple symbolisms in these stories, since oral transmission hands the message down indirectly, through codifies language, and the symbolism can either reduce or intensify the internal conflicts of a given society.
We are not going to analyze written African literature in this essay. We will just emphasize the fact that modern genres are undoubtedly based on traditional ones, though their main characteristic is that they project the black African world beyond its frontiers, allowing it to become part of the concert of nations. We can then understand why since the middle of the 20th century, African thoughts and ideas appear on the theater through epic or political subjects or in traditional representations (music and dance). They were widely made known, thus letting their influence appear in theaters all over the world.
Besides these genres already mentioned, there is a flowering of combat and militant literary poetry, realist or metaphysical and allegoric novels, and many others where African personality reaches international recognition. The elements for this recognition of African oral literature go back to the beginning of Europe’s occupation of the black continent, when missionaries and explorers would refer to literature written by “blacks” when they finally understood the fables, the historical legends, the stories, and in general everything related to the oral tradition of the African peoples. It was the weapon Africans used to counter colonialism’s devastating actions. In these oral traditions they found the secret to keep their traditional cultures alive. When the newly-independent countries recovered their own language and shook off colonial weight, they were able to reconstruct their ancestors’ traditions and re-plan their national culture. Africa’s millenary experience was preserved in “books” that their elders kept in their memories. As the African Hampaté Ba says, “When an old man dies, a whole library goes down with him.”
You are forced to go to linguists in this kind of research, which must be consolidated by a solid knowledge of the society in question, its system of values, categories for space (including its frontiers with the supernatural world) and time (as a historical feat can quickly become a legend).
The unwritten history of the African peoples can be found in the unconscious aspects of their social life—analyzing their culture and all genres of their oral literature. Oral literature is the source par excellence; through it you can really study their social structure, thus giving history back to a society lacking a written language. Admittedly, though, history and historical conscience do not necessarily coincide, and that is precisely where problems come up between anthropology and history. But once you have recognized that all societies have their own culture and their own history, then their historical conscience becomes evident. It emerges from a global ideology having gone beyond the ethnical divisions of a country and now able to carry out a patient reconstruction of the temporary sequences, supported by all auxiliary sciences like archaeology, ethno-botany, glotto-chronology, ethnology, etc.
Oral tradition is not only a reflection of the society that produces it, it can also show its internal social and psychological contradictions that become evident only through words. If we analyze the different aspects of the main subjects—and its variations--of the oral tradition of a nation, and if we are able to establish a comparison between European, African, American, and Asian folklore taking off from classic mythology, we will then be able to perceive the specific humanistic profile of a people and their degree of participation in the humanism of our universe.
To update oral tradition in Afro America, we would now have to mention two of its main pillars. The first one: the substitution of African elements by others brought by colonial domination; the second one: the persistence of their original characteristics. In relation to the first pillar, it is interesting to note how colonized people were able to use colonial language to express their desires—in this case, we can see how an aspect of an imposed culture can become a liberating one. Likewise, the composition of local languages with an African component makes them a special depository of an imaginary Africa—which they idealized in their memories—whose contents are essentially retained. The factor responsible for this persistence—the institution of the drum—must then be seen as a substantial and essential institution, totally indispensable, and only through an in-depth study will you be able to reach the deepest aspects of African soul. Until very recently, Western historians and ethnologists had rarely—and not always correctly—gone into the study of percussion rhythms in Africa as a substitute for writing.
Drums represent the link with the past: as a means of communication, the accompaniment for dances, the transmission of sacred or profane messages, the drums were the guardian of that memory-remembrance used by African people to preserve—transmitting them from generation to generation—the values of their traditions and the keys to their identity, unifying collective emotions. No dance is possible without the drum, which is responsible for the sound script the dancer must follow when, through the ear, he reads the drum’s dictates; according to Jahn, the drum’s writing “can spread news much quicker than graphic writing.” To understand the semantic value of the drums, we must go to African languages, because they are phonic systems whose sound levels give each word a different meaning according to the vowels’ sounded depth. Written systems are inadequate to write the grave, acute, or intermediary tonalities, particularly the intermediary ones, since no writing system has the signs necessary to represent them. The drums, on the other hand, faithfully reproduce the tonal language the African languages need. This is what Jahn says on the subject:
The drum’s expression is, therefore, the immediate and natural reproduction of language: it is an intelligible “language” for all those who have the necessary practice, but in this case instead of being destined for the eye, it is destined for the ear. While in school, young Europeans learn to relate optical signs with their meaning; in the same way, in old days young Africans had to learn the art of capturing the acoustical signs of the drum… (Jahn, Neoafrican Cultures, 262).
Drums have many shapes and sizes, chosen according to their role in the different and numerous societies that use them. You can find Yoruba drums in Cuba and Brazil; the variety of the drums in the Guyanas is as large as the number of groups that play them, who come from the Congo, Dahomey, Ghana, Angola, Sierra Leona, Guinea, and Gambia. In every different country the making of the drum requires a whole ritual to sanctify it as the instrument in charge of calling the spirits, invoking the gods, congregating the community, and even marking the rhythm to be followed by the dancers and the steps they must dance to. All the more reason for choreography to be understood as one more code, written through body language—but nothing, absolutely nothing can happen without oral expression, be it spoken or sung.
There is a final aspect of oral tradition in the African framework: in traditional cultures—analyzed as such even after they fell under colonialism’s impact—European researchers, and in particular the French ones, have classified the whole wealth of Negro-African oral literature taking off from the evidence of the vitality of these cultural creations, which act as windows toward a new kind of humanism. Archetypes of African categories are thus established, and by interpreting oral traditions inside out, they do away with conflict. Paradigms are thus created: oral literature exalting a mythical Africa, one corresponding to the traditional world and including stories and chronicles taken as historical expressions. On the other hand, the psychological approach lets us see how the contents of their stories and legends really have a social base. In these expressions animals are attributed human behavior and nature is able to speak. The most realistic story does not necessarily follow reality in a strict sense, yet the most fantastic one does have at least some reality behind it. It becomes evident that these creations reflect the social pattern in which they are made up; variations in a story will be the result of sociological and psychological changes—all of which goes to show that myths are live experiences, they are nothing more and nothing less than expressions that become permanent stories.