A REVIEW OF AFRICAN ORAL TRADITIONS AND ......4 AFRICAN STUDIES REVIEW intense feelings. Always in motion, myth is liberating, but its leap into the unknown is, in the oral tradition,

A REVIEW OF AFRICAN ORAL TRADITIONS AND LITERATURE

Harold Scheub

There is an unbroken continuity in African verbal art forms, from interacting oral genres to such literary1 productions as the novel and poetry. The strength of the oral tradition seems not to have abated; through three literary periods, a reciprocal linkage has worked these media into a unique art form against which potent influences from East and West have proved unequal. Vital to African literature is the relationship between the oral and written word; in seemingly insignificant interstices have flourished such shadowy literary figures as Egyptian scribes, Hausa and Swahili copyists and memorizers, and contemporary writers of popular novellas, all playing crucial transitional roles in their respective literatures. The oral tale is not "the childhood of fiction" (Macculloch, 1905), but the early literary traditions were beneficiaries of the oral genres, and there is no doubt that the epic and its hero are the predecessors of the African novel and its central characters.

The African oral tradition distills the essences of human experiences, shaping them into rememberable, readily retrievable images of broad applicability with an extraordinary potential for eliciting emotional responses. These are removed from their historical contexts so that performers may recontextualize them in artistic forms. The oral arts, containing this sensory residue of past cultural life and the wisdom so engendered, constitute a medium for organizing, examining, and interpreting an audience's experiences of the images of the present. The tradition is a venerable one. "When those of us in my generation awakened to earliest consciousness," says a contemporary Xhosa storyteller, "we were born into a tradition that was already flourishing."2 A San performer expresses it poetically: "A story is like the wind: it comes from a distant place, and we feel it."3 Walter Benjamin, having read an African tale, commented, "This story from ancient Egypt is still capable after thousands of years of arousing astonishment and thoughtfulness. It resembles the seeds of grain which have lain for centuries in the pyramids shut up air-tight and have retained their germinative power to this day." A story, he concluded, "does not expend itself the way information does. "It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time" (Benjamin, 1973: 90). These images of the past, over the years honed into motifs with the potential for metaphor, engage those of the present, which have not yet received figurative significance through the blending process. Contemporary images are still mere information. "When the weather

African Studies Review, vol. 28, nos. 2/3, June/September 1985.

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gets a little warmer," the San storyteller goes on, "I sit in the sun, sitting and listening to the stories that come from out there, stories that come from a distance. Then I catch hold of a story that floats out from the distant place—when the sun feels warm and when I feel that I must visit and talk with my fellows."4 These oral performers, wrote the Xhosa novelist, A. C. Jordan (1973: 3), "gave artistic utterance to their deepest thoughts and feelings about those abstract and concrete things that came within their experience. . . ." The San storyteller concludes, "When I get home, I must first sit a little, cooling my arms, letting the fatigue go out of them. I simply listen, watching for a story that I want to hear." That story, he says, "is wont to float along to another place, our names pass along to those people who do not see our bodies moving along here. Our names are things that, floating, reach a different place. Mountains may lie between two roads, but a man's name passes behind the backs of those mountains, those names with which, returning, he moves along."5

One of the themes in African oral tradition has to do with a force that makes kin of all living things: a splendid bird becomes identified with a badly deformed child who is neglected by her own family. Through the patterning of images, the storyteller reveals that in the realm of nature there is no distinction between the perfection of the bird and the flawed child; they are equally sacred (Turnbull, 1959). The brief Mbuti tale shares the theme of the Nyanga epic of Mwindo (Biebuyck and Mateene, 1969). Each has a point of reference in a remote time when all was sublime. The origin of death (Abrahamsson, 1951) meant the end of this perfect time: now despair and pessimism began. It was the age of the hero. Rites of passage became a means for recapturing that period when all things were blissfully related; the order of nature, echoing the harmonious era, became the model for the ordering of the human world. The imaginative tale carries these images and themes, dramatizations of the rituals. The heroic epic is the means of revealing the great shifts on a cultural level necessary to the securing of that passage for a whole people. Because it is dependent on the same metaphorical transformation as the tale, it is understandably constructed of tales stitched together; to further link fiction and history, the epic images are laced with those of heroic poetry. Central to these movements, if it is possible to generalize about so diverse a set of traditions, is a hero who is a composite of all elements of nature and society; these flow through him, he comes to represent them in their interdependence—and always with a temporal reach, involving past, present, and future.

The major oral genres—the riddle and lyric poem; the proverb; and the tale, heroic poetry, and epic—are characterized by a metaphorical process, the product of pattern and image; and, being prescriptive rather than descriptive, they resolve themselves into models for human and cultural behavior, falling into a cyclical, not linear, mode. History, a part of heroic poetry and epic, appears in fragmentary form.6

Broadly, oral history is more a comment than a record. It is a way of observing a society that reveals the way the community feels about itself. It preserves for posterity important moments in a cultural movement through time, and it does this by means of images that are often found in imaginative tales and poems. This is because those images embody aspects of tradition that can be expressed in no other way. They are sometimes fantastic, often cyclical, always mythic, and are found permanently trapped in the images of epic.7 Oral history is not the aligning of images in linear modes, but the fragmentation of lineal

AFRICAN ORAL TRADITIONS AND LITERATURE 3

images and their recasting in new configurations and contexts. (E. H. Gombrich [1961: 319-20] relates how Constable was convinced that Albert Cuyp, in his painting, Dordrecht in a Storm, "had made a valid discovery. He had examined Cuyp's rendering of lightning and found it like nature. Not a transcript, of course—who could describe a flash of lightning, and that in oil paint?—but a configuration which, in the context, became the valid cryptogram for that unpaintable glare." Oral history is "Not a transcript, of course," but a "valid cryptogram" for human experience.)

The oral categories are interwoven; a common internal structure characterizes them, each with a rhythmical ordering of image and motif which controls the ties between the art tradition and the real world. It is by means of this common structure, it is because of the metaphor or its potential (the organizing factor in each of the genres), that vital links are established with the visual arts, as well as with dance, mime and music. Each of the forms in some way nourishes the other. The lyric poet partakes of the riddler's art, the tale operates according to the principles of the riddle and lyric, and the tale contains the germ of the epic—in all cases, the metaphorical core controls expansion and development into more complex forms.

African oral tradition is never simply a spoken art; it is an enactment, an event, a ritual, a performance.8 Patterning of imagery is the most visible artistic activity, involving the blending of the contemporary world and the fanciful fabrication of the tradition; the combining of the images and their transformation into dramatic ritual is the result of metaphor.9 "The deliberate conjunction of disparate items which we call metaphor," writes a poet, "is not so much a way of understanding the world but a perpetually exciting way of recreating it from its own parts. . . ."10 When the realms of art and reality are brought into contact and that relationship is caused by metaphor, the audience is in the presence of myth. Metaphor takes an audience's routine experiences and, in a performance, links them to ancient, often fantastic,11 images from the art tradition. The combination renders contemporary experience comprehensible, and roots the members of the audience in history. Metaphor implies transformation, from one set of images to another, but without giving up any of the original meanings or perceptions that an audience might have of them. This process becomes mythic because of the changes involved. Real world images may be cultural, historical, or personal; their blending with fantasy, the movement from one state of being to another, is mythic, and is coupled with a re-enactment that is ritualistic. The drama of performance is an effort to capture both the ritual, the graphic images of transformation, and, more importantly, the fierce focusing of venerable emotions on contemporary change. Myth is not a tale; it is a process within a tale. It is related to stories of the gods because gods are creators and are thus involved in primal transitions. The shifts wrought by the gods have their parallels in those brought about by culture heroes, epic heroes, even tricksters and tale characters. The audience may have moved from the place of the gods, but the tales and the shifting states stay stable; we remain in the presence of myth, which is always in transition. It is the dying and reborn god, the hero transforming his society; it is the tale character shifting identities through the dramatization of a cultural rite of passage. Myth is a metaphor, and because of that it is a narrative device, but it is more. Ancient motifs, condensed, symbolic, heavy with emotional potential, are embedded in the tradition; myth has the power to activate those motifs, to release and contain the


intense feelings. Always in motion, myth is liberating, but its leap into the unknown is, in the oral tradition, seldom open-ended. It insists upon a return to origins, altered perhaps but ever cyclical, and for that reason it obviates history while depending on history for its images.

The purpose of metaphor, at the core of the mythic process, is to harness the emotions of the members of the audience, trapped as they are in images of past and present, thereby divining paradoxes and resolving conflicts, and to move that audience into a new perception of reality. But metaphor is not always myth. The riddle is a figurative form comparing "two otherwise unrelated things in a metaphorical manner."12 In the comparison, the problem is fathomed, but perhaps more important the attributes of each set are transferred to the other. When the Lingala riddler utters this poser, "Mokonzi moko, akofandaka se o kati ya nzube" ("A chief who only sits among thorns"), the answer, "Lolemo" ("The tongue") (P-D. Beuchat, 1957: 140), reveals a description not only of the tongue but also of the chief. Because the riddle involves paradox as well as imagery, it exercises both the intellect and the imagination of the audience: in its attempts to find the answer, it becomes a part of the metaphorical transformation. The delight in discovery characterizes the riddle, and prepares members of an audience for the more complex coupling that occurs in the tale and epic, and reflects the relations among images in lyric poetry. The riddle operates in two modes, much as lyric and tale do; one is literal, the other figurative, with a tension and an interaction between them.13 It is not that the literal mode acts as a block or misleading clue to the audience,14 but that the literal level of interpretation interacts vigorously and creatively with the figurative; that is the full experience of the riddle. It is not simply a solution that is wanted, it is the prismatic experience of figurative imagery placed against the literal. The Zulu raconteur riddles, "Ngendishi yami egubuzekile" ("A dish of mine that is turned upside down"),15 and the answer participates in the metaphor of poetry as the solution is sought. "A stupid little fellow who drags his intestines," riddles the Berber performer, and again, "My little meadow which is not mown," and again, "She gave four to the sky, she gave four to the earth, she gave four to her mistress"16: the play is between fantasy and reality, between the figurative and the literal. In the riddle, the audience's imagination, made active during performance, is also made visible.

The riddle establishes a model for all oral art. The relationship between images has at least the potential for metaphor and complexity. In the African lyric,17 it is possible to see a set of riddles operating as the separate images in the poem relate to one another metaphorically—and also, often, with paradox. Andrew Welsh (1978: 58) notes, "The riddle is the root of the lyric element in the sense that both the riddle maker and the lyric poet developed their respective expressions through the same associations of picture and thought, the same process of seeing, knowing, naming." The combination of figurative images creates the final experience of the lyric poem. It is often more complex than the riddle because it embraces a number of riddling connections, and a single riddle relationship may become more complex when it is introduced into the context of yet another, and so on as the riddling images of the poem interact. The poet supplies a series of images that repeat aspects of a basic theme or examine an emotion with intensity. Each metaphorical set, in itself a riddle, acts as a kind of clue, bringing the audience closer to an understanding of the poet's intent. "Mon coeur est tout joyeux," in a Mbuti song, establishes a theme (Trilles, 1945: 228).


It is repeated concretely and metaphorically, "Mon coeur s'envole en chantant"; then image follows image— "Sous les arbres de la foret./Foret notre demeure et notre mere"—as the poet contrasts herself with a bird, explaining the significance of the place. In that homely image and its suggestion of childbirth, the poet continues "Dans mon filet j'ai pris/Un petit, tout petit oiseau." That is the significance of "laforet, notre demeure et notre mere." The poet repeats the image yet again, but with a thematic change: "Mon coeur est pris dans le filet/Dans le filet avec I'oiseau," tying the separate image strands together. The lyric poet repeats the image, establishes the boundaries of the varieties of imagery that may be introduced into the poem, and creates the rhythm; these assure that the different sets of images will be experienced by the audience in a similar way. In the Mbuti song, the singer unites the images of ensnared heart and trapped bird; when we learn that the poem is performed by a woman while giving birth, the images of joy, forest, and snaring achieve a metaphorical union, and the lyrical riddling is at an end.

Myth is not a theology or body of dogma or a world-view; it is not so much a story as that which moves the story, and we find it in incipient form in the riddle, lyric, and proverb. In the latter, metaphor is achieved when a somewhat hackneyed expression is brought into contact with reality. "Mlomo umoza upoke nyama ku nkaramol" asks the Tumbuka sage, "Can one mouth take meat from a lion?"18 and a contemporary instance of the uselessness of a minority opinion is linked to the tradition. "Mahara mboya, ukwiza sima yamara," says the Tumbuka wise man, "Wisdom is like mushrooms that come in season when the porridge is finished" (Young, 1931: 344), and a modern experience of the Sunday norning quarterback touches the ancient lore of the culture. The proverb is a metaphorical relationship, tying an old saying to a situation with which it may or may not have a clearly perceived relationship, but that, with thought, reveals a "valid cryptogram" for that real life experience. The proverb in this respect behaves similarly to the way image operates in lyric poetry, in which diverse images are brought into contact with one another. The audience knows what it must do, and it works toward an understanding of the relationship: the proverb form, and the audience's experiences with it, force a movement toward reason. Proverbs are tired cliches only when viewed in isolation (in a book or collection, for example), but when they are placed into realistic contexts, they become vital, even dynamic. What gives them freshness is the experience to which they are giving form. In the lyric, linkages must be understood within the poem before they can be comprehended in the realistic context. In the proverb, the only way for the metaphor to be realized is by means of the instant connection between the art form and reality. The proverb is similar to the riddle in the sense that metaphor is intended, as the ancient truth of the culture touches contemporary experience. More, perhaps, than the riddle, the proverb establishes ties with the culture's sages; ancient wisdom is carried by the proverbial expression that through constant use becomes easily remembered—and hackneyed, until given new life. The proverb gives cultural and artistic form to present action. The riddle does much the same thing when problem and solution are harmonized. The Mende proverb, "Manuma gbii na kambei hu" ("There is no mercy in the tomb") (Senior, 1947: 205), possesses an ambiguity that gives it the potential for many uses; the equivocality is drastically narrowed and concentrated when creatively applied.


The three independent genres interact primarily by means of their identical metaphorical construction. As oral forms become longer and more complex, it is this same process that animates them, as if the riddle and lyric poem formed their core with the proverb adding a somewhat didactic bridge between the worlds of the real (i.e., the present) and the fantastic (i.e., the past).

The single most important characteristic of African oral performances is the patterning of images. Children learn to organize like images, establishing a model for the comprehension of more sophisticated forms in which unlike images are meant to be aligned. In the simple tale, patterns are built on the actions of a single character, as fantasy and reality are linked in a linear movement from conflict to resolution; at the same time, the metaphorical structure, not unlike that which governs the movement in lyric poetry, controls the patterning, providing the possibilities for complexity, for meaning, and for the revelation of the mimetic relationship. That lyrical core assures that the potential for expansion and development are not lost. Out of a triangular relationship that includes a central character, a helper, and a villain, the basic movement is developed. The tale at this stage will not necessarily be metaphorical; it may simply bring like image sets into contact with one another for no purpose other than to move the tale effectively to its resolution. But the possibilities for metaphor are a part of the form because of the existence of patterning.

Many tales have a built-in capacity for linkage to other tales; a number of them, when placed in a narrative frame, produces a complex story. When two tales or more are thus joined and the parts harmonized by the metaphorical process, an epic matrix if not an epic is created (along, incidentally, with the roots of the literary novel). It is at this stage that organizing activities similar to those found in the proverb assume importance. In the shorter tales, a process like that of the riddle and poem have been sufficient, but, as organization and theme become more involved, the metaphorical movement found in the proverb becomes crucial because it supplies the structure necessary to carry a complex theme. The proverb-type activity establishes the ties between past and present; the type found in the riddle and lyric can then continue to supply the internal ordering of the larger forms. And panegyric poetry contributes the ties with history. When the number of tales develops to a complexity no longer supportable by the simple structure of the story, and when that set of tales is brought into a context that includes history and the hero, epic is the result.19

In non-narrative poetry, the lyric and panegyric, the only relationship available to the bard is a metaphorical one; it binds images. In the tale, metaphorical union is not necessary to the sense of the story. But when it does occur, when both narrative and metaphor are present, the tale assumes the form of the lyric. In the trickster tale, for example, the relationship is between the trickster and his dupe. There is seldom a helper. All is illusion as Trickster creates a deceptive world to approximate the real. This linkage between the real world and an illusory realm contains the possibilities for a metaphorical relationship, a set of worlds controlled and manipulated by the trickster. While figurative movement is seldom a consideration in such trickster tales, its structures are evident. In the elaborated tale, metaphor becomes dominant. In fact, a reciprocal relationship exists: metaphor is a crucial compositional device that holds such tales together, at the same time that the unified narratives generate metaphor. In the Zulu tale, "Umxakaza-wakogingqwayo" (Callaway, 1868: 181-217), and the Lamba "Story of Mr. Lion-child and Mr. Cow-child"


(Doke, 1927: 14-23), three distinct narrative sections can be identified, with a model revealed in the opening part, repeated in stark, simple terms in the second, then duplicated once again in a more complex fashion. In each case, the purpose of the intervening section is to make unquestionably clear to the audience the metaphor that the storyteller is creating. Once that has been done, it is possible to move to the third part; the contours of the metaphor are not apparent, a pattern has been created that will enable the members of the audience to experience the final figurative turn, the real point of the tale. These are involved tales, with a large number of images requiring an active organizing mechanism, yet the transformation process at the center is one with all such movements in the African tradition. In a Kordofan tale, "The Monkey Girl" (Frobenius, 1910), a less complicated narrative, metaphorical possibilities exist in the relations between father and son, and the performer makes plain the nature of those ties by carefully labelling the substance of the four tasks in the final part. The artist and the tradition have developed a number of such techniques to assure that the poetic experience is not lost. As images multiply, the danger of obscurity becomes manifest, so the design that reveals the crucial metaphorical activity must be reinforced.

In heroic poetry, or panegyric,20 the relationship among images seems also obscure at times. Some, in fact, refer to the images as melanges,21 so difficult is it to discern their relationships. The images are indeed connected; a discourse is initiated by the poet, and the panegyric assumes lyrical form. As in the lyric poems, the rhythm of the poetic performance, its single subject, the thematically designed boundaries, bind the diverse images. Of all African art forms, heroic poetry is the closest to history in its choice of images. It frequently concentrates on historical figures. The creator of such poetry usually ignores repertories of fantasy, selecting instead images of animals and land-forms to accompany the many historical allusions. Panegyric poetry examines heroic aspects of humans—positively, in the rush of pleasure in recounting the affairs in the lives of authentic culture heroes; negatively, in the comparison of the flawed contemporary leader with the great heroes of the past.22 While the raw material of this poetry is by and large realistic, it is history made discontinuous, then placed in novel frames. Within this new context, the hero is described, then judged. It is in the measurement of the poem's subject against the ideals of the society that the work has its metaphorical power. "While such poetry is not a historical rendering, it nevertheless has no existence outside history. Images, selected at least partially for their power to elicit strong feelings from an audience, are first removed from their mainly historical contexts," as in the tales. "Certain emotions associated with such subjects as heroism and the kingship are intensified, and reordered. Because contemporary events are thus routinely measured against cultural values, history is constantly being revived and revised. The poems depend on this enhanced narrative, reproduced, atomized, and redefined. It is a subjective accounting, but the poet, using all his magic to convince his listeners otherwise, contains these as yet unchannelled bursts of energy and gives history a new gloss."23

As with lyric poetry, panegyric builds on a diversity of images, tied to one another in intricate ways. This developing web reveals the character of the poem's subject, and at the center is the lyricism common to proverb and riddle—a regularly repeated pattern with alterations. The poem may have varied images, but the pattern organizes them. In many works, thematic parallelism,


dominating other devices, unifies the poem. In a Sotho heroic poem, Jonathane Molapo's martial abilities are compared to violent natural images— "Setsokotsane sa mara a Lejaha!" ("Whirlwind of the troops of Lejaha!").24 Into this unifying, steadying matrix, the bard places images that have somewhat ambiguous values, which adapt themselves fairly readily to whatever image environment they happen to be in—"Seoehla ke khahanyets'a Mokutu" ("Down-horned cow confronts Agitator") is an example, and "Nare ea habo Mphaphathi" ("Buffalo of the Mphaphathi family"). These lines take on the coloration of the dominant images around them and add to the illusion of unity. In this poem, the violent natural images are preponderant and act as the binding element, juxtaposing comparisons with deadly animals; both sets of imagery deal with violence in combat:

Tsukulu ea Mateketoa a Leribe, Seoehla ke khahlanyets'a Mokutu, Setsokotsane sa mara a Lejaha! Setsokotsane sa khothometsa batho, Batho ba nkoa ke sekhohola sa marumo, Sekhohola sa lehlabula, sefefo, Sefako se marotholi a thata-thata; Ea n'esale se etsa batho mofela Ho ba isa Loting, bochabela! Mohlankana oa Linare, Lechokha, Lechokha la khaola batho maratha; Ea ba khaola matsekela Tjotjela, Nare ea habo Mphaphathi. Nare e hlabile naka li chochile, Ea hlaba li le litsenene, Tsukulu ea moshemane 'a Manka! Holimo la bataola moreneng, La otla, la kokotolla melora! Ntsa ngoana, motsoetse 'a lehlabula, Mateketoa ba ea fehla le Litjotjela, Motsana, oona ba ea o chesa.

Rhinoceros of the Teketoa of Leribe, Down-horned cow confronts Agitator, Whirlwind of the troops of Lejaha! Whirlwind threw people down, People seized by a torrent of spears, A summer downpour, a tempest, Hail with granite stones; Always causing people to perish, Leading them to the Maloti, in the East! Youth of the Buffalo, Pursuer, The Pursuer chopped people to pieces, The Fierce-starer chopped them into groups, Buffalo of the Mphaphathi family. Sharp-horned Buffalo gored, It gored with its javelin-like horns, Rhinoceros of the boy of the Takers! The heaven struck at the chiefs place, It struck, raising the ashes! Take out the child, Mother of summer,


The Teketoa and Fierce-starers are causing war, They are burning this little village.

Nature images are strong in the first half of the poem, to be complemented by images about goring buffalo and chopping pursuer and fierce-starer. The strength of the nature imagery reasserts itself in the end ("The heaven struck . . . "), and the almost unrelieved imagery of violence is touched with tragic meaning in the final line, "Motsana, oona ba ea o chesa."

With the rhythm of the poem, the internal sound harmonies, these parallel images must be seen as major organizing factors in panegyric. In a Swati poem, the unifying image has to do with water—flowing spring, ford, lofty pool, the sea, the labyrinthine sea—and this is coupled with a historic event that is at the center of the poem, the movement of Swati soldiers across the seas during the Second World War.25 What holds such poetry together is not the narrative of history but metrical and sound patterning that complements a metaphorical movement, the bringing of the subject of the poem into alignment with a series of diverse images with certain common qualities that the bard examines and to which the poem's subject is finally linked.

Fragmented history is also frequently a part of African epic which treats both the acts of heroic characters who existed in fact and those who are fictional. The epics of Sunjata26 and Mwindo27 are respective examples. The effect is the same; in all other respects, they are similar. It is not historical veracity in the linear sense that determines epic, it is the insight into history and culture provided by this confluence of oral genres. Now, within a pretext or setting that makes possible the merging of various frequently unrelated tales, the metaphorical apparatus, the controlling mechanism found in the riddle and lyric, the proverb, and heroic poetry, coordinates this set of tales to form a larger narrative. All of this centers on the character of the hero, and a gradual revelation of his frailty, uncertainties, torments: he often dies, falls, or is deeply troubled, in the process bringing the culture into a new dispensation often prefigured in his resurrection or coming into knowledge. The mythical transformation caused by the creator-gods and culture heroes is reproduced precisely in the acts and cyclical, tortured movements of the hero.

While the tale is at the heart of epic, significant changes occur. The epic is a complex reshaping of the tale. Heroic poetry provides a grid, helping to organize the narratives and narrative-fragments that are transported into the epic framework; it also supplies the specific historical and geographical data for certain epics. What African epics owe to the tale tradition is not difficult to discern. Less obvious is the role that heroic poetry plays in their construction. The greater part of the Malagasy epic about Ibonia is composed of elaborate praise-names (Becker, 1939: 58-59):

O.meda lahy io zaza io, hoy Ranakombe. Akorakoray lahy, akorakoray lahy, hoy Ranakombe; fa ny anaran' io zanako io hataoko Impandrafitrandriamanibola; fa izany no lahy sarotra amin' ny tany; nampiady ombelahy arivo, himana ombelahy zato indray manezaka ihany, taranak' Impanarivo, zanak' Itsimanan-kely, manamutra ny an' olona, mangorona ny tsy an' ny tena; ny avy ao tsy azo alaina


hariharina, fa azon-dahy loza.

Quel terrible enfant que celui-ce, dit Ranakombe. Poussez des acclamations, poussez des acclamations; je donnerai a cet enfant les nom d'Impandrafitrandriamanibola (L 'orfevre-de-dieux-d 'argent); viola un homme terrible sur la terre; ilfait combattre mille taureaux, il en mange cent d'un seul coup, il descend d'Impanarivo (Le-Richard) fils d'ltsimanan-kely (qui-n'a-pas-peu); il enleve le bien d'autrui; il rafle ce qui ne lui appartient pas; et on ne peut ramasser ce qui provient de ses rapines, car c'est entre les mains d'un homme funeste.

Out of these praises grows a heroic cycle—Ibonia's miraculous bird, his name-giving, his movement to manhood, his taking of a wife from a deadly rival, his struggle with his cultural enemies, his death. Weaving through the entirety of the actions of the epic is a panegyric pattern, providing the work's primary structure. Like the tales, this epic dramatizes rites of passage, birth, puberty, marriage, death. Unlike the tale, Ibonia, in his struggles and the movement through the dense forest of praise-names, moves beyond the routine activities of earth-bound humans, and comes to stand for a fresh fulfillment of the rituals, especially of marriage, so that in the end, before his death, he announces his testament (Becker, 1939: 131):

Voalohany indrindra: indro ny fanamabadiana. Na iza ho andriana, na iza ho mpanjaka, na iza ho mpanapaka, na iza ho mpiteny, aza mba misy manaha ny fanambadian' olona; fa ny lalam-panambadiana mahafaty, ka aza mba sarahina. (Izany anatra izany, hono, no nahamafy ny fanambadiana.)

Void done les recommandations que je vous laisse: Premierement, void, le manage. Que nul, prince, roi, chef ou porte-parole, ne delie les liens du manage, car le chemin du manage engage jusqu'd la mort et qu'il n'y ait pas de separation. (C'est ce conseil, dit-on, qui a renforce les bases du manage.)

The epic of Ibonia thus comes to represent a shift in view regarding traditional rites of passage: the tale character unquestioningly undergoes the rituals, the epic hero alters them and gives their new forms permanence.

The epic of Sunjata also occurs within a network of praises; the work is obviously tied to historical events, and heroic poetry is a critical part of the narrative. The tale itself is simple and straightforward, with common motifs from the oral tradition. The role of a woman is central, as an extension of the hero who, as often happens, is somewhat passive. It is the combination of Sunjata and his sister that creates the character of the hero. Like Ibonia, Sunjata goes through the various stages of life—miraculous birth, coming to manhood, accomplishing impossible tasks that reveal him as a man destined for nobility,


the struggle with Sumanguru, the discovery of Sumanguru's secret and his consequent destruction, the accession of Sunjata to leadership, and the story of his companion Tira Makhang.

I taata; wo le ye a tinna jalolu kara fo aye "Woling woling nding, Makhara Makhang

Konnate, Haimaru ning Yaamaru." Wo soomo i naata a daani. Feng te a bulu, A taata nyankumo muta a ye a dii i la; Wo le ye a tinna jalolu kara fo a ye "Nyankumolu khaba la Simbon."

They went off; that is why the griots call him "Bee, little bee, Makhara Makhang

Konnate, Haimaru and Yaamaru." Next morning they came and begged from him. He had nothing. So he went and caught a cat and gave it to them; That is why the griots call him "Cats on the shoulder Simbong." (Innes, 1974: 46-47)

The simple tale weaves through the historical fragments trapped in images and given new context in the fictional activities. A strong sense of realism thus invests the imaginary character and his actions, even though they are taken directly from the imaginary tale tradition.

The Ozidi Saga, "told in seven nights to dance, music, mime and ritual" (Ojobolo, 1977: ix), describes the miraculous birth of the son of a murdered general, his development as a ward of his supernatural grandmother, and the battles that he fights to regain his family's former greatness. He errs, however, when he becomes overly enthusiastic in his quest, and he must be educated by the divine Smallpox King, who purifies him. Again, the saga is developed within a network of praises (Ojobolo, 1977: 104-5):

Agbodo bo wonronron bera duo suoembo, e, obulukubo mo angose_ duo

yaii. Bo paa, kene_ yankuu, ba suomumi eyo

kpofa kpofa. Omu tuu mu wan tiri ma mu vuaan paa,

owo wan odole oweibo, mamubose_ tu-ma timi:

"Suomo, suomo, suomo!" Egbelegbele binepwei: "Eronron rin ronronron, ron ron ron

rin ronron." Suomo, suomo ke suomo suomo e,

gbayebo, Ozidi ba ba akpoa ba kerne ke ke_ Ezon emine_, ba omomo soyem bera kpo nemi-a.

Melu melu melu melu melu. Agbodo pake_ aforebo wuu.


As his sword hurtled dazzling into his hand, oh, both battle kilt and girtle merged with

his body, And when he emerged, so awesome was he,

there was no place to go in. And when he swept out into the open ground,

those his orderlies, the two of them, were at his back (cheering):

"Surge in, surge in, surge in!" And from the horn-blower: "Eronron rin ronronron, ron ron ron

rin ronron." That he should charge, charge in and charge,

yes, as the word was given, Ozidi no longer knew that there could be anybody in the world, in the world, in Ijo, seeking a fight with him.

All glaring and flaring was he. Wind from his sword streamed out.

She-Karisi Candi Rureke's version of The Mwindo Epic (Biebuyck, 1969) is similar to Okabou Ojobolo's saga of Ozidi. The Nyanga epic takes the audience through Mwindo's supernatural birth, his struggle with his father and his cultural rebirth, his trip to the underworld where he has a series of confrontations with his father's allies whom he destroys and then restores. After his reconciliation with a subdued father, Mwindo destroys a dragon. This act brings upon him the censure of the gods, who take him to heaven and teach him what a proper hero is. Throughout the epic are the praises, often sung by Mwindo himself (Biebuyck and Mateene, 1969: 65, 154):

Utukoce Mwindo Mwindo kdbutwa-kenda Nibingurdnge Iyangura Kabusd ntatukire muntse Utukoce Mwindo Nd Mwindo kdbutwa-kenda.

You are impotent against Mwindo, Mwindo is the Little-one-just-born-he-walked. I am going to meet Iyangura [his aunt]. For Kabusa, shall I go out of the way? You are helpless against Mwindo, For Mwindo is the Little-one-just-born-he walked.

The significance of the panegyric influence on the epic is two-fold. First, in such works as the Sunjata epics in the Innes collection, data about geography and history are injected into the narrative, tying the imaginative tales that compose the epic to the real world, to historical place, event, and time. Second, the emphasis on praise-names singles out the hero, his character, his ideals, his struggles. This is not the case in the tale, where characters are not as important as the actions they perform; indeed, they are often not even given names. The stress in epic is on character, and the praise-names are evidence of this.

Epic thus has a grander sweep than either the tale or heroic poetry. It enshrines the themes and emotional experiences of the tale on a broad scale; it embodies the details and historical and cultural specificity of panegyric poetry.


The combination of tale patterns and poetic rhythms in the epic transfers the images of those genres to historical figures and acts, endowing history with the cultural symbolism of the imaginative tradition. Heroes, whether or not they have existed in fact, become emblematic of change, and they are no less real for that. Epic is refracted history, revealing in telescoped, intensified images transitional periods in a culture's life. It is the shift from a Sumanguru, a Shemwindo, a Mringwari,28 a Raivato, to a new society envisioned by and imaged in Sunjata, Mwindo, Liongo, Ibonia, each of whom in some way typifies a cultural ethos. The epic carries with it images and experiences of the past, what the society has traditionally stood for, into the new world. The hero is a part of both realms; he would not be able to take his people with him if he were not identifiably a part of the cultural past. But he has a vision of the new world. If he dies in the process of realizing it, if his flaws are exposed, his vulnerability exploited, that is a part of change; and the atmosphere of yearning, regret, and loss are a part of the epic tradition, because it involves leaving a familiar world, and a transition into an uncertain one. Epic embraces both worlds. To make the change, the hero moves to the boundaries of his community, necessarily so; and as he escorts his society into the new world, he becomes its original insider.

As the epic form is built on the tale, so the epic character grows out of the tale characters. But the epic hero pulls at the sinews of the tale's cyclical pattern—that is the result of the emphasis on realism; in the end, he remains faithful to that periodicity. Still, the revolutionary zeal of the hero, his insistent posing on the borders of society, his vulnerability and mental struggles, his agonizing battles with the traditions of his society and the teachings of the gods, have emancipated him from the submissive tale character. The hero exists on both the outside and inside of his society, as does another character from the oral tradition, the trickster, who pretends to be on the inside, but whose tricks place him on the edge. He could not perform his tricks were he anywhere else; he needs dupes, and to dupe someone places him on the community's periphery. The trickster must be an insider to become an outsider; the hero is the opposite. The true insider, however, is the tale character. The tale deals with cultural activities and generally supports them; the epic allows anti-cultural actions because of the move from a view of the culture as it is to the culture as it will be; the shift from the one to the other places emphasis on the individual within that society who carries cultural and historical symbolism with him. Tales in their thousands regularly affirm the culture; characters rhythmically, routinely, and anonymously go through their rites of passage, helping others to do so, linking present culture to the timeless age of the beginning, in the process assuring cultural continuity. In the Chaga tale of "Mrile," for example, the role of the individual is negated in favor of the survival of the culture (Raum, 1909).

With the trickster and hero, a shift in the organization of the triangular pattern of the simple tale occurs. Of the elements composing this pattern—the central character, the villain, and the helper—it is the latter, usually existing as a separate character and frequently fantastic, who becomes the defining thematic component in the more complex narratives. In some stories, there is often no helper as a distinct character, yet his function remains crucial. In the trickster character, it becomes wit, humor, a unique ability to counter odds. Trickster is in control, unlike the tale character who is often manipulated by external forces. The change can similarly be seen in, for example, the heroic epic of Mwindo, in which the hero's movements and the development of his character are


crystallized in his aunt, Iyangura, and in his father, Shemwindo.29 These external characters have become something more than simply a brother saving his sister from ogres as in the tale. Now they define and shape the heroic character. The principle of the helper remains stable, an external force assisting the central character in some way; it has moved to another level of complexity. The adapted helper may be the adjunct of the epic's move to psychological realism, as characters in the epic come to be seen as manifestations of traits of the major character. In the Mwindo epic, the hero moves between the extremes of his own character as he swings physically from Shemwindo to Iyangura. Thomas Mofolo uses this device with extraordinary effect in Chaka (1925), in which the central character struggles between the Isanusi and Noliwa/Nandi parts of his nature.

In the tale, the helper is a separate being because the main character must not possess fantastic abilities; it remains possible to place the tale character in danger by simply absenting the helper from the scene. In the epic, that helper becomes merged in the person of the hero, and so loses its fantastic quality and takes on human dimensions. Or the helper becomes a dramatized facet of the hero's character. In either case, it is a move to realism. With the epic hero, the oral tradition shifts from the tale character who represents a means for becoming integrated with a society (we often stand on the brink of allegory in such narratives) to the character who chooses to position himself apart from his society (and here, we stand on the threshold of the novel form).

The hero is a loner, he has a vision only partially shared by the rest of his people. It is his task to use his special gifts to convince his fellows of the correctness of that vision, and to effect a transformation—it might be a purely martial conquest of a kingdom, as with Sunjata, or a more sublime transition to a new sense of leadership, as in the epic of Mwindo, or the significant human qualities that characterize a people, as with Liongo. Hero and Trickster share these qualities: each is alone, each attempts to alter society. In tales that are not epics but have epic possibilities, like the Nguni "Sikhuluma" saga30 or the Chaga "Mrile" tale, similar hero-helper themes are generated. The central character in the tale, on the other hand, seldom stands alone, except during the brief period that he is an outsider when, in isolation, he undergoes the ritual initiation prior to re-entry into his community. This refocusing of attention from things done to who does them is critical, not only to an understanding of the oral tradition and its permutations but to a comprehension of its ties with literature.

While Trickster and Hero stand alone, each yearns to be an insider. But it is not being on the inside that is important, it is becoming an insider. Being an insider means accepting the society as it is. Becoming one means altering the society to accommodate what an individual stands for, not the other way around. The shift is revolutionary. Now the individual reshapes the world; he does not accept it as it is, as the tale character invariably does.31 The trickster, culture hero, and epic hero are in the process of redefining human society to approximate their own needs and visions. While the tale character, in the act of reshaping himself through the ritual to meet cultural requirements, links the society to its past, the hero's vision and his struggle have to do with the future. (Not that the past is ever wholly neglected: it is always drawn into the present and projected into the future.)

In the heroic epic, the etiological theme has to do with the birth of a society, as it does, albeit whimsically, in the trickster tales. In that respect, the trickster's illusions can be seen as the kernals of the heroic act of creation. The culture hero


always leaves a residue; in his trickster activities, he transforms the earth or human society or the relations between humans and gods, between ruler and ruled. The trickster also recreates the world, through illusion and deception. The difference between the trickster and the culture hero lies here: the trickster's creations are evanescent; they die as quickly as he obtains fulfillment of his desires, though his dupe may never be the same. But the culture-hero's trickster-illusions are forever; they are the form of the mountains, the curbs on the rights of kings; they are, in the Fon culture hero's case,32 for example, the mediating of gods and mortals. It is here, at the point at which the trickster and culture hero part, that the culture hero and epic hero merge. The latter, not a trickster in the same sense as the culture hero, is nevertheless cast in that role because his actions too have a permanent cultural imprint. This is why it makes no difference that Sunjata is a historical character while Mwindo and Ibonia may not be; the distinction has little relevance.

It turns out that the romantic investment in the individual is not a peculiarly Western phenomenon, and is at the heart of the epic and the novel. It would not be an easy matter to move from the oral tale to the literary novel, because, for one thing, of the cyclical nature of the tale. But the shift from the oral epic to the novel is accomplished because of the altered perception of the central character. If the novel is predisposed to the actions and mental processes of a changing individual locked in a struggle with his environment, then it has roots in the epic. Although epic heroes will always contain qualities of tale characters, the latter exist to fashion a model for human behavior. The trickster moves decisively against that model, as does the epic hero. This breaking of a cyclical pattern is what enables the trickster and hero to become outsiders, engaged in a struggle against the norms of their societies, changing those standards in the interest of immediate gratification or for a noble vision. In this way, the epic hero moves away from the tale character towards the historical figure. It is true that, though he breaks out of the cycle of the tale, his actions remain so under the influence of the tale tradition that he enters his own grand cycle. But the break is the thing, for it allows the introduction of realism into the oral narrative, making the transition to the novel possible. The hero's stand against his society, his reshaping of the values of his community, and his historical nature all argue for critical changes in the oral tradition. History and fiction have come into a tentative union in the epic, making possible the birth of the novel.

One of the keys to understanding the antecedents of the African literary tradition is to be found in that fecund period when writing is as oral as it is literary. It is the time during which the scribe or copyist controls the written word—and, to a certain extent, the oral. To attempt a literary theory33 without examining the roots of literature in the oral tradition is to begin in the middle. To insist upon an insurmountable barier between the two media—Albert B. Lord writes, "The written technique . . . is not compatible with the oral technique, and the two could not possibly combine . . . "34—is to deny an extraordinarily fruitful interaction. To exclude the oral tradition from any influence on literature except for "residual oralism"35 ignores this rich interplay and the fact that the novel form, for example, is prefigured in the oral epic. Lord (1960: 129) argues that "Once the oral technique is lost, it is never regained," and further that "it is not possible that [a person] be both an oral and a written poet at any given time in his career," that "The two by their very nature are mutually exclusive." The fact is that the oral technique is never really lost; the products of the literary poet


continue their indebtedness to the traditions of the oral bard. The eras when the connections between the media are at their most vigorous are critical; the roles of storyteller and bard in the oral tradition, and poet and novelist in the literary, must be studied in concert with the work of scribe, memorizer, and reciter in the transitional period.

In ancient Egypt, the craft of the scribe was "the greatest of all the professions"; it was said that "The scribe orders the destinies of everyone."36

During a time of limited literacy, pronounced during the first generations of writing, the scribe was the mediator between the oral performer and his audience; he wrote summaries of the tales and poems of the Egyptian artists, and so perpetuated their craft. He was frequently a disseminator of oral materials, a preserver; and a new form of mneumonics was developed. There was a connection between the two media throughout the three thousand years of the ancient Egyptian literary tradition. Scribes not only wrote down the oral materials; they apparently felt free to rephrase, rearrange and transpose, omit sentences, add information, elaborate on advice, and generally shape the imagery, sometimes even having an effect on the content—in other words, they assumed the prerogatives of the oral artist. This seems evident in a comparison of the four extant versions of "The Instruction of Ptahhotep," a work of literary art dating from the Old Kingdom (Lichtheim, 1973: 61-80).

With the advent of literature, the oral tradition did not die. The two media continued their parallel development: both depended on a set of similar narrative and poetic principles, and each proceeded to develop these within its own limits. The media have similar origins and different formal conventions. While the one is not easily transferred to the other, there is no unbridgeable gap between them; they constantly nourish each other. Artists became aware of the potentials for transference, and proceeded to investigate and develop them. In its beginnings in Egypt, literature sought to carry to a logical end the predisposition for complexity that is a part of the oral tradition—it is what enables the riddle to become lyric, the lyric to become heroic poetry, heroic poetry and the tale to become epic. This impulse towards complexity (it would be called "stitching" in the ancient Greek tradition, and the bard was Rhadsodos, "the stitcher of songs"), a characteristic of the oral tradition, not only persists in literature, it is what makes possible the writers' explorations of literary possibilities in the materials they have inherited from the oral artists. Writers struggled to make the oral forms literary; they combined the genres that they inherited, they developed the techniques and artistic devices that make expansion and complexity possible in the oral tradition, and applied them to literature. Ultimately, literature contributes its unique conventions to this process, but only as the writers escape the influence of the scribes and copyists and respond to their own artistic ingenuity and begin to explore the possibilities of the written rather than spoken word. The epic hero in the oral tradition moves beyond the allegorical character types of the tale and achieves realism and believability; elements important to literature can be seen as derivatives and elaborations of the oral tradition.

In the Egyptian literary tradition, Africa's first such tradition and among the world's first,37 the relationships between the oral traditions and written forms become manifest. Wisdom literature, religious poetry and hymns, autobiography, storytelling, heroic poetry were among the major categories of literary expression in the Old Kingdom (2700 to 2300 B.C.); other forms included historical inscriptions on stelae, temple walls, and tombstones; scientific writings, mainly


mathematical and medical; and correspondence and accounts. It is possible only to speculate about the full richness of the Egyptian literary tradition on the basis of what has survived in papyri, tombs, and stelae, but it is clear from the writings that the literary tradition was already well advanced.

Basic to all Egyptian literature is the story, "the love of tales and . . . the manner of telling them . . ." Bernard Lewis writes (1948: 1). "In the developing pattern of the Egyptian story," he goes on, "drawn on the broader canvas of Egyptian history, we can trace the variation and the enrichment of a few basic themes." The strength of the Egyptian storyteller's art not only had a significant impact on the early literature, it continued undiminished in its power when that tradition gave place to a new one in the modern era. "Several civilizations have risen, flourished, and fallen in the valley of the Nile," notes Lewis, "each with its own religion, language, culture, institutions and style of life. Yet beneath them all a certain basic unity persisted."

The wisdom genre emerged during the Old Kingdom, and remained a popular art form throughout the ancient period. It was represented chiefly by the "Instruction," shOyet, obviously born in the oral tradition, a series of maxims or proverbs passed on to a son by a man of wisdom, instructing him in the art of living. The earliest known author is Imhotep, an advisor to King Djoser in the Third Dynasty (c. 2650 B.C.). Prince Hardjedef, a son of Cheops, was a moralist of some literary fame; fragments of his "Instruction" have survived. Already during this period, certain changes were taking place in the transcription of the oral tradition. "The Instruction of Ptahhotep," written by a vizier who lived at the end of the Fifth Dynasty (c. 2350 B.C.), when wisdom literature was already a highly developed art form (Ptahhotep quotes the maxims of his predecessors), is an example of such change. Ptahhotep's "Instruction" contains thirty-seven maxims. It is a series of proverbs, developed mainly in units of four, with such recurrent themes as generosity and justice. What is significant is the use of a frame, or pretext, as a prologue and epilogue, holding the set of proverbs together. This may appear relatively unimportant, but it is crucial: it provides the mechanism for taking the forms from the oral tradition and working them into longer, potentially more complex (in a literary sense) forms. This movement towards more involved works, thanks to the frame or setting, is an early sign of literary development; even though the literary artist inherited an oral tradition that encouraged such combinations, he had now found a useful and artistic means of doing so.

Writers of the Old Kingdom seem to have been predominantly members of the Pharoah's entourages,38 and their works were heavily didactic. The Pyramid Texts (Mercer, 1952) are, many of them, redolent of the oral tradition. The text of the Wenis (Unas) autobiography,39 for example, follows the form of much of African heroic poetry, containing simple repetition, parallelism, and more complex forms of patterning. It is obviously an early piece of written poetry, and its structure is close to that of Hima (Morris, 1964), Yoruba (Babalola, 1966), and Zulu (Cope, 1968) heroic poems (Faulkner, 1924: 98):

It is Wenis who eats men and lives on gods, Lord of porters, who despatches messages. It is "Grasper-of-Horns" who is in Kehau who lassoes them for Wenis, It is the serpent "He-whose-head-is-raised" who watches them for him and who drives


them to him. It is "The-Wanderer-who-slaughters-the-Lords" who strangles them for Wenis, He cuts off their intestines for him, He is the messenger whom he sends to punish . . .

The poem is a series of praise-names, sometimes developed, forming the portrait of a leader. It comes from the pyramid of Wenis (Unas), and is a part of the Pyramid Texts, the poetry of which, R. O. Faulkner (1924: 101) notes, moves from straightforward repetition ("He has come to thee his father,/He has come to thee, O Re ./He has come to thee his father/He has come to thee, O Ndi ./He has come to thee his father,/He has come to thee, O Pndn . . . ") to more involved patterns ("Hail, mighty of magic! Hail, Serpent!/Cause thou the terror of Wenis to be like thy terror;/Cause thou the fear of Wenis to be like the fear of thee;/Cause thou the cry of Wenis to be like thy cry . . . ") and variants on refrains ("The reed rafts of the sky are placed for Re;/I, Re, cross on them to the horizon with Horus of the Horizon./The reed rafts of the sky are placed for this Pepi;/He crosses on them to the horizon with Horus of the Horizon./The reed rafts of the sky are placed for Horus of the Horizon . . . "). An even more complex stage can be found in the Wenis hymn, in which, Faulkner (1924: 101) notes, "the actual repetition is confined to the initial word, the parallelism being maintained by similarity of idea and by the grammatical structure." The uses of parallelism can be seen in another hymn from the Pyramid Age (Faulkner, 1924: 102):

The fire is laid, the fire shines; The incense is laid on the fire, the incense shines. The perfume comes to Wenis, O incense; The perfume of Wenis comes to thee, O incense. Your perfume comes to Wenis, O gods; The perfume of Wenis comes to you, O gods. Wenis is with you, O gods; Ye are with Wenis, O gods. Wenis loves you, O gods; Love him, O gods.

At this early stage, if these poems are an accurate indication, and judging what we can from the contemporary heroic poetry traditions elsewhere in Africa, we might conclude that this kind of poetry represents no development of the form as it exists in the oral traditon; rather, it is a transcription of the oral performance. This seems not to be uncommon in this period during which the two media coexist, when either reportage or imitation of the oral tradition is the rule, the copyist or scribe being the dominant literary person; the creative artist remains, by and large, in the oral realm, working with the tools of that highly evolved art form.

In the early years of the Egyptian literary tradition, it is possible to see tentative moves from the mere copying of the oral tradition to attempts to give a number of otherwise separate, individual pieces of a genre unity and form. Wisdom literature brings together a number of proverbs under a single rubric, tying them with themes and giving them frames. The early autobiographies, those of Weni and Harkhuf (both of the Sixth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom), are really praise poems developed at some length. Weni's autobiography is especially carefully and self-conciously developed, with the patterning convention from the


oral tradition; the recurrent structural patterns have to do with the relationship between Weni and the pharaoh. The theme, "I was excellent in his majesty's heart; I was rooted in his majesty's heart; his majesty's heart was filled with me," becomes the pattern: "his majesty made me a sole companion and overseer of the royal tenants," "his majesty made me go in to hear [the secret charge in the royal harem against Queen Weretyamtes] alone," "His majesty sent me at the head of this army . . . ," "His majesty sent me to lead this army five times . . . ," and then the refrain, "I was worthy in his majesty's heart, because I was rooted in his majesty's heart, because his majesty's heart was filled with me," and a new series is developed, "His majesty sent me to Ibhat to bring the sarcophagus . . . ," "His majesty sent me to Hatnub to bring a great altar of alabaster . . . ," "His majesty sent me to dig five canals in Upper Egypt . . ." (Lichtheim, 1973: 18-23). In each of the sections, intersected by the praises or the "His majesty . . . " refrain, the writer creates an autobiographical record. "The Autobiography of Harkhuf" (Lichtheim, 1973: 23-27) has the same formula and refrain, "His majesty . . . sent me together with my family . . . ," "His majesty sent me a second time . . . ," "Then his majesty sent me a third time . . . ," with each segment elaborated. It is means of autobiographical writing,40 but it is constructed like a heroic poem, and in fact is in the end a praise poem similar to Wenis' hymn. This also represents a development of the oral poem, a prose piece of writing with poetic structure, but we have already seen this in the oral epic.

The full development of Egyptian literature seems to have been reached during a difficult and sorrowful period, that which separates the Old from the Middle Kingdoms, in the famous Twelfth Dynasty (1991-1786 B.C.). "It is the writings of this age that were read in the schools five hundred years later," observes Adolf Erman (1966: lii-liii), "and from their language and style no one dared venture to deviate." It was a terrible period of change; the Memphrite state of the Old Kingdom had collapsed, and civil war, starvation, and chaos were the result. The social equilibrium of the Old Kingdom was replaced by rampant conflicts that were reflected in literature. Literary genres multiplied, moving beyond but retaining wisdom literature, the hymns, and the autobiographies of the previous period. Political and social creeds emerged, along with philosophical discussions in dialogue form, complaints and critiques, royal testaments, and prophecies. The tone of these literary works echoed the period: it was predominantly somber. Ipuwer, a chief singer, created "Admonitions of an Egyptian Sage," in which he sadly described anarchy in the land (Lichtheim, 1973: 149-63). The theme of reversal of material fortunes developed, became popular, and remained so for a long time. Literary art during this period was characterized by verbal eloquence, rich imagery, new forms of repetition; it was an oratorical art, clearly tied to the oral tradition, but the verbal usages were becoming more literary. At the end of this period, "Complaints of the Peasants" (Erman, 1966: 116-31) (c. 2070 B.C.) was written. This work was noteworthy for its skillful combination of narrative segments and monologues (Posener, 1971: 229), representing yet another complicating of the oral tradition. The "complaint" was a framework for nine petitions in which an oppressed person agonized about honesty and equality. Like wisdom literature, this genre was a device for unifying diverse material.

During the period of the Middle Kingdom (2050 to 2775 B.C.), the state again grew strong, and literature flourished. Texts were written, instructing officials in the administration of the new bureaucracy; these remained in use for

r 20 AFRICAN STUDIES REVIEW

some one thousand years. Satires were composed; compositions with a political theme, initiated during the anguish of the First Intermediate Period following the downfall of the Old Kingdom, developed into literature of propaganda ("The Prophecies of Neferti," for example, at the beginning of the Middle Kingdom, supported the cause of a usurper, Amenemhet I [Lichtheim, 1973: 139-45]). A "literature of pessimism" that grew out of the preceding period was still common, but the literature also reflected the hope of a coming golden age. The prophetic genre was popular, and messianic literature, which had come into being earlier, developed. And wisdom literature continued its long life.

During this period, literature was controlled; the state mobilized the resources of literature to establish itself. It was a period of peaceful organization, and the literature was devoted to extolling the virtues of the monarchy and helping it to consolidate its achievements. Poets lauded the king, a scholar named Kheti wrote "The Satire of Occupations" which glorified the monarch. It was during this period that the Egyptian language reached its perfection. Several imaginative works produced at this time, including "The Story of Sinuhe" (Simpson, 1972: 57-74) and "The Story of the Eloquent Peasant" (Simpson, 1972: 31-49), are among the finest that Egypt has produced.

"The Story of Sinuhe" was apparently created by artists with strong positive feelings about the monarchy. It is autobiographical, related to inscriptions in the tombs and to the motifs of the oral tradition. It is short by modern standards, "but Egyptian literary texts are never long and rarely amount to more than about twenty of our pages" (Posener, 1971: 232). (Margaret Alice Murray [1949: 212] has suggested that they were "merely notes for the guidance of a professional storyteller who, like the bard of our own early history, travelled about the country and made his living by narrating interesting or amusing stories to an illiterate audience. For such a man, especially for a beginner, notes would be useful, if not essential. The story could be lengthened or abridged at will, conversations would be interpolated where necessary, and the tale enlivened by appropriate gestures.") Yet it is generally considered a "novel," an adventure story with considerable psychological insight. It is a "hymn to the glory of the Pharaoh" (Posener, 1971: 232-33): the literature of propaganda, derived from the oral praise poem and given impetus by the times, is an integral part of it. The combination of the oral storytelling tradition, the heroic poetry tradition, and the autobiography of the Old Kingdom produced this first novel in Egyptian literature. In the autobiographies of Weni and Harkhuf, autobiography and praise poetry were early merged. There is a qualitative difference in "The Story of Sinuhe." It represents a conjunction of autobiography, tale, wisdom instruction, and praise poetry, and is part of the logical process of combining going on during the entire period of ancient Egyptian literature and encouraged by like tendencies built into the oral tradition.

"The Story of Sinuhe" praises the role of the king, especially his clemency; it stresses the superiority of the Egyptians over the Asiatics (Montet, 1964: 211-13). But the praise of the king might be related to the fact that this document is also a cleverly contrived means whereby the author ingratiated himself with the king. It is the story of a man who leaves home out of fear of the sovereign whom he served, thrives in a foreign land because he has intimidated his hosts with praise poems about the strength of his king, destroys a gargantuan enemy, then in his old age yearns for his Egyptian home, and the king of his praise poem becomes a praiseworthy king in real life (he grants Sinuhe permission to return).


The tale is built on a venerable motif, the weak overcoming the strong: the clever Sinuhe wins the favor of his Asian hosts, then does the same with his Egyptian sovereign. It also traces a common oral odyssey—a movement away from home, an initiation in an alien and menacing place, and a triumphant return.41

The art of storytelling was a major force in Egyptian literature from the time of Ramses II to the new Kingdom (Montet, 1964: 219). Erman (1894: 372), noting that fairy tales always delighted Egyptian audiences, adds that the charm of "The Story of Sinuhe" lay "rather in the elegance of its language than in its contents merely; the long letters and speeches, which continually interrupted the narrative . . . were evidently the chief value of the book." Another critic (Murray, 1949: 212) observes, "The early stories are more in the nature of fairy tales in which magic plays a large part, but the story of Sinuhe is the precursor of the modern novel . . . " William A. Ward argues that it is not simply that it tells a story of high adventure; there is something more, "a sombre recital of events which could happen in real life," and this is a key deviation from the world of the oral tale. Ward adds, "the historical backgrund in which [Sinuhe] moves is genuine"; "the hero may be fictitious but the world in which he lived and the great figures of the period are reproduced accurately."42 The author used the loyalist and propaganda literary themes of the period for his own satirical purposes, and created a novel that is a compound of realism and ancient imaginative motif. "The Story of Sinuhe" is the oral epic translated to the written word.

A tale from the same period, "The Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor" (Simpson, 1972: 50-56) is an adventure on the Red Sea, narrated by a sailor.43 It dates from the nineteenth century B.C., and is marked by stylistic qualities common to popular oral and written tales, most notably repetition and a stark, straightforward manner. A brief narrative forms its setting, a framework in which the speaker addresses himself to a prince. The form, made famous by the Thousand and One Nights collection,44 was perfected by the Egyptians;45 tales were bound tightly together, the narrative forming the pretext. "Here," Peet (1931: 28) notes, "we have passed the age of simple story-telling, as the existence of a setting itself sufficies to show." This framework makes possible a form that encompasses numerous tale and tale fragments, and encourages the inclusion of realistic details and a concentration on the psychology of individual characters,46

a quality of the African oral epic that has become a preoccupation with Egyptian prose writers.

The Second Intermediate Period (1775 to 1575 B.C.), during which the Middle Kingdom came to an end and Egypt was invaded by Hyksos armies, produced little distinguished literature. The classical age had ended. The New Kingdom (1575 to 1085 B.C.) was the period of empire. During this era, a new literary genre appeared, the love poem. When it appears in papyri, it is already well developed, with its own system of conventions, suggesting that it has predecessors in literature but also that it has its roots deeply embedded in oral lyric poetry, which it strongly resembles. Compare, for example, this Egyptian love poem with the Mbuti poem (pages 4-5), especially its organization and paralleling of images:

The voice of the goose cries out, as he's trapped by the bait.

Your love restrains me, so that I can't release it.


I'll take my nets, but what shall I say to Mother,

to whom I go every day laden down with birds?

I set no trap today— your love captured me.47

The poems were written to be orally performed at banquets, perhaps with mime and musical accomplishment. They also had a wide readership, revealing again an art form that moved easily between the two media, with the scribe mediating them.

In the Eighteenth Dynasty, a linguistic and literary revolution occurred. Poets began to ignore the classical language in which literature had traditionally been composed, and they began to write in the colloquial language of the time. During the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties, the literary tradition moved in new directions, written in what was called "New Egyptian." Soon, Erman (1966: liv) notes, "the same striving after refinement of expression, which characterized the older literature, is active in it also." This literature continued to flourish for five centuries. A major literary achievement of the New Kingdom was the story of "Anupu and Bata,"48 which combines in a single story two narratives of different provenance: the rejected lover motif (later to appear in Greek oral tradition in the Phaedra and Hippolytus tale, in the Hebrew tradition as the story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife), and "a basic tenet of Egyptian theology, that of the self-creating demiurge" (Posener, 1971: 239). The first part of the tale is set in a realistic environment, the second part in a supernatural atmosphere. "More important than the mythological connection," Lichtheim (1976: 203) argues, "is the depiction of human characters, relationships, and feelings in a narration of sustained force." The formal connection is Bata and his brother, who appear throughout; the linking theme is the dual relationship between Bata and a woman. The tale is complex, and the two parts respond to each other in much the same way that segments of oral tales parallel one another.

Later in this period, at the end of the Ramessid era (c. 1075 B.C.), "The Report of Wenamun" (Lichtheim, 1976: 224-30) appeared. It is the record of a mission, a literary elaboration of a genuine report, the story of a Theban envoy who goes to Byblos to purchase wood for the sacred boat of Amun. It is, as Posener (1971: 244) suggests, "a sort of minor Odyssey, without the marvellous element. . . ." Lichtheim (1976: 224) writes, "What Sinuhe is for the Middle Kingdom, Wenamun is for the New Kingdom: a literary culmination." She adds, "Wenamun stands on the threshold of the first millennium B.C., a millennium in which the modern world began, a world shaped by men and women who were the likes of ourselves." Wenamun, sent to get timber for the boat of Amun, King of Gods, is robbed. When he attempts to get his money back, he is told by the Prince of Byblos to leave his harbor. Wenamun has a confrontation with the prince: the conversation is recorded in the tale as a stormy one, and ironic, until the prince learns that Wenamun is carrying with him an image of Amun called Amun-of-the-Road. The nobleman becomes frightened (cf. "The Story of Sinuhe") when Wenamun threatens him with this, and the prince releases him. Then Wenamun is stopped by ships belonging to those from whom he had earlier taken money, insisting that he would keep it until his own had been found. The prince allows Wenamun to leave the port, then allows the other ships to give chase. Wenamun meets the Queen of Cyprus, and here the papyrus breaks off.


It is an important piece of literature. "It stands out in worth against the background of the simple folktales of the New Kingdom," argues Peet (1931: 49-50), "just as Sinuhe in the Middle Kingdom stands out against the Shipwrecked Sailor." He concludes, "Here is a story which has almost all the characteristics of great literature, and yet there is no striving after effect. A wonderful picture . . . of the decline and fall of the Egyptian empire, impregnated with a pathetic belief in the power of Amun to save as of old." At the basis of the story is the folktale, the same journeying motif that organizes images in the Odyssey, but the chief interest is not the travelling or the struggle with the enemy fleet. It is Wenamun's conflict with the Prince of Byblos. The oral tale fades into the background as the psychological sparring between the two becomes the story's centerpiece. There is an interaction between "The Report of Wenamun" and "The Story of Sinuhe": in the latter, the struggle is between Sinuhe and his sovereign; in this case, it is between Wenamun and an alien ruler. The interest in both includes the folktale motif, but the significant concern is the realistic confrontation, the psychological probing, the irony and suggestion of satire. The literary artist continues to experiment with the inherited oral forms.49

During the Late Dynastic Period (1085 to 330 B.C.), Egypt was dominated by other forces—Libyans, Ethiopians, Assyrians, Persians—and after 330 B.C., it was ruled by the Greeks and Romans. During the Greek period, a new literature known as the Demotic appeared. The novel and wisdom literature remained as popular as ever, and there were also didactic pieces, religious works, and an epic, "The Cycle of Petubastis" (Posener, 1971: 252). Among the finest works of Demotic literature are "The Stories of Setne Khamwas" (Lichtheim, 1980: 125-51). Some time later, when large numbers of Egyptians converted to Christianity, a Coptic literature developed,50 largely church oriented, with translations of religious texts. Egyptian literature never lost its contact with the tale-telling elements of the oral tradition during these momentous times; they put their mark on this literature as well. Consider, for example, the tale of the Coptic saints who visit heaven and hell—conversing with mummies in tombs (Lewis, 1948: 6, 93).

An unbroken continuity exists in Egyptian literature, from earliest times to the present. If it took different guises, fell under varied influences, and was expressed in diverse languages over a five thousand year period, the strength of the oral substratum and the related force of the ancient literary tradition persisted and formed a uniquely Egyptian literature. The oral tradition cannot be separated from the literary; it was not simply that there was a period of "spoken literature" or "literary oral tradition" in which the scribe was the dominant figure, but that there was and remained a routine nourishing of the literary tradition by the oral, and it is likely that the reverse was true. It was the linkage between the epic and the tale/heroic poem that made it possible, ultimately, for the Egyptian novel to evolve. This was accompanied by the development of another oral genre into literature: the oral proverb became wisdom literature. In both categories, the initial stages of transition were fairly straightforward; the oral traditions, because of their natural tendency towards complexity, were organized into larger groups, then given frameworks and the illusion of unity. This is already evident in the oldest extant instructions; it occurred too in "The Story of the Shipwrecked Sailor," the earliest known literary papyrus. The creative atmosphere was by then present for a new, more subtle development, a prose form that allowed greater emphasis on realism, that in its descriptiveness and linearity extended and even broke with aspects of the tale form. Scribes had


much to do with the development of the narrative art, taking the materials created by the oral musicians, bards, and storytellers, and transposing them to literature. First as memorizers and copyists, later as artists, who but the scribes would be sufficiently acquainted with the conventions of both the oral tradition and literature to see the possibilities of the novel in the oral tale and epic? By then at ease in both media, they began to write psychological studies, working within the oral-literary network that had become the laboratory of their craft. The novel and wisdom literature are, arguably, Egypt's major contributions to world literature. Wenamun said of Egypt, "It is from her that wisdom came forth to reach the land in which I dwell," and the Bible speaks of "All the wisdom of the Egyptians"51: the Egyptians had something else to teach us, that it may be necesary to rethink conventional wisdom about the relationship between oral tradition and the written word, that they may not after all be separate media

The Arabic tradition, in which adab refers to both the oral and written word, may provide another clue to this critical relatonship: it makes no distinction between them. The verbal expression is the key; the vehicle for communication may be secondary. The vigor and vividness of the Arabic literary traditions are reflections of the oral, with its jazala, the strength and forthrightness of its expression, its clarity and eloquence.52 If the Egyptian oral/literary achievement was a somewhat localized if highly influential movement, the next such tradition, that of Islam, touched a greater portion of the continent. But Egypt, with its artistic combination of the oral and literary, provided the essential touchstones for the continued development of Africa's verbal traditions. There was sufficient homogeneity in the oral panegyric and lyric tradition to consider it a monolithic art with regional variations. These genres shared many characteristics with their Arabic counterparts, and to understand the Africanization of Islam, we must begin in Arabia. Two characteristics of the Arabic oral-literary tradition are significant here: first, there are the close ties between the oral and written word; second, the mode of preservation, in the institution of the rdwf, or memorizer, assured that the two media co-existed for a lengthy period.

The Arab invasion of Egypt in A.D. 641 brought to Africa yet another new language, religion, and culture. Islam and the Arabic language spread rapidly, and Egypt remained an important center of Muslim culture until the early sixteenth century. "But this Arabo-Islamic civilisation was not brought [to Egypt] ready made by the invaders from the Arabian wilderness," writes Lewis (1948: 8). "Rather did it grow during the early centuries of Arab rule, incorporating and redirecting many streams of culture from earlier sources. . . ." It brought with it a potent poetic art form, with deep roots in a pre-Islamic oral tradition. Hamilton Gibb (1926: 13) tells of bards "all over northern Arabia, reciting complex odes, qasidas, in which a series of themes are elaborated with unsurpassed vigor, vividness of imagination, and precision of imagery, in an infinitely rich and highly articulated language. . . ." The ode was lyrical and panegyric, and revealed the life of the nomad, who sang in the poetry of his loved ones and described in exalted terms his favored horse or camel." "[I]t is a poetry," Theodor Noldeke (quoted in Lyall, 1930: xviii) observed, "which makes it its main business to depict life and nature as they are, with little addition of phantasy." In fact, Lyall (1930: xxxiv) argues, it "is most truly their history." Abdullah ibn al-cAbbas sees it as "the public register of the Arab people: by its means genealogies are remembered, and glorious deeds handed down to posterity" (Lyall, 1930: xv). The bard in Arabia was as respected a figure as in


African societies: "the profession of the poet," Lyall (1930: xvii) goes on, "was a defence to the honour of them all, a weapon to ward off insult from their good names. . . ."

The custom of writing verse began at the end of the first century after the Flight. Because of the fear that much of what the great poets created, the classics of Arabic poetry, might be lost, the figure of the rawi came into being. This reciter, or memorizer, was the person who committed the poet's work to memory (Gandz, 1939: 171). Many people sang the verses of the poets, but the rawi was specifically given the task of remembering the poetry as the artist composed it. It was his profession to accompany the poet, to memorize the images as the artist composed them, to recite the poems, to provide them with historical and cultural frameworks, to explain obscurities and to supply exegeses. "Upon request," writes Salomon Gandz (1939: 172), "the rawi would have to give information as to the origin of qasida, the occasion at which it was composed and the person or events alluded to. In later times the rawi became also the secretary."

Hammad al-Rawiya was one of the most accomplished ruwah.Si He once boasted to the caliph, Walid ibn Yazid, "I can recite for you, for each letter of the alphabet, one hundred long poems rhyming in that letter, without taking into count the short pieces, and all that composed exclusively by poets who lived before the promulgation of Islamism." He proceeded to recite 2,900 qasida by poets who had flourished before Muhammad. The power the ruwah had is glimpsed in the way they were frequently attacked. "Hammad," a contemporary, Mufaddal al-Dabbi, said of him, "is a man skilled in the language and poesy of the Arabs and in the styles and ideas of the poets"; but he was nevertheless concerned: "he is always making verses in imitation of some one and introducing them into genuine compositions by the same author, so that the copy passes everywhere for part of the original, and cannot be distinguished from it except by critical scholars—and where are such to be found?"54 As was the case with the scribe of ancient Egypt, the rawi did not apparently view the poetic word as inviolate; it could be manipulated, altered, and rearranged as oral images generally are. The conventions of the oral tradition triumphed.

The models for the poetry of Islam had been set in pre-Islamic times. The oral forms proved themselves accommodating and adaptable not only to the requirements of Islam but also to disorienting shifts in locale. The poetry embraced a wide range of experiences and polarities, from "the spirit of bedouinism," the nomadic idealism and romanticism, to urban life that developed with the coming of the cAbbasids and Persians. "A dichotomy of aesthetic evaluation," writes cAbdullah al-Tayyib (1983: 36), "derived from the inherent contrasts within the Arabic soul, bedevilled the notions and concepts of poetic excellence. . . ." This debate continues to modern times: "the quarrel between partisans of innovation and adherents of tradition is only one aspect of this" (cAbdullah al-Tayyib, 1983: 36). (It can be seen today in the struggle occurring, for example, within the Swahili literary tradition, between the wanajadi, or traditionalists, and the wanamapokeo, or reformists. [Mulokozi and Kahigi, 1979: 1]) Islam carried this internal artistic polarity with it as it began its crusade. Its ability from the beginning to adapt to and cradle these extremes testifies to its flexibility, and explains much about its relationship to African oral art forms.

The literature of the faith is rooted in the Arabic oral tradition: "whether sacred or secular," writes Michael Zwettler (1978: 4), "the works—particularly


the poetical works—that have given rise to a textual tradition seem invariably to have existed in some sort of oral form prior to being set down." The transformation of a number of pre-Islamic meters used in popular oral poetry to the literary qasida55 suggests a significant linkage between oral and written forms in Arabic. In fact, the continuity between the two media is unbroken. Islam became a part of a poetic tradition: it was one more experience that the poetry enveloped and expressed. It was not so much the poetry that changed as the means of preserving and studying it.

Now Islam began its journey, and the inherent adaptability of the oral/literary tradition enabled it to adjust to the various cultures with which it came into contact. The experience of Islam with the Arabic oral materials became a model for its sometimes troubled ties with African verbal forms, and the disruption was as minimal, poetically speaking, as it had been at home. "Occupation followed conquest," writes Lyall (1930: xxxiv), "and . . . the Arabic language assimilated itself to the speech of the conquered", and so did its art. "The poetic literature" that evolved from the traditions of the ancients "was inspired by study and reflection, not for the most part on Arab soil . . ." (Lyall, 1930: xxxv). Because of the ties with the oral tradition, the flexibility they occasioned, and the means of preserving the poetry (assuring, as it did, the continued co-existence of the media), Islam did not impose itself on the indigenous forms so much as blend with them—it had done so in its own history, and it found the African forms similar to its own and quite as flexible.

Islam early showed its artistic ability to adapt to African art. In Egypt, the ancient literary tradition continued to be a rich reservoir of narrative material, and, as Lewis (1948: 9) has pointed out, "Egyptian Arabic historians and authors began to regale their readers with a series of strange tales and miraculous narratives of a mythical past. . . ." So historical and legendary Islamic figures began to take on an Egyptian coloration, as the epic process of the oral tradition found yet another unique form of expression. "With the spread of the Arabic language and background among the masses, a vast semi-popular literature appeared, in which the history and legends of Arabia and Islam were worked into connected romances in interspersed prose and verse, suitable for public recitation" (Lewis, 1948: 9-10). The stories of cAntar are examples.

Arabs and Islam moved to al-Maghrib, and in the ninth century A.D., they made contact with the West African empire of Ghana, and Tuareg Berbers brought Islam there. From 1056 to 1147, the Berber al-Murabitun from Mauritania overran Morocco, and brought Spain under their control. They came to dominate the remainder of northern Africa, and continued to make penetrations into western Africa, beginning with the movement of Abu Bakr ibn cUmar, who was responsible for the fall of the empire of Ghana in 1076. After the Berbers adopted Islam and accepted Arab domination, they came to form the major part of the force that moved into Spain under the Berber leader, Tariq ibn Ziyad. Much of the migration to the Iberian peninsula was Berber, and Spain was considered a dependency of the emir of North Africa. Early Arabic poetry in this region was lyrical and panegyric, following eastern and African patterns and traditions. Its themes had to do with martial exploits, and praise of rulers and heroes.56 Tariq ibn Ziyad, the conqueror of Spain, was also its first poet in Arabic; his work showed both Berber and Islamic/Arabic influences, as the blending process continued to meld diverse cultural forms and outlooks. The Arabian verse forms seemed readily moldable to Berber poetry, and African


experiences dominated the imagery. The Tunisian poet, Ibn Hani' al-Andalusi, born about 932, wrote much poetry, "and were it not," wrote ibn Khallikan "that he carries his eulogisms to an excess bordering on impiety, the diwan of his verses would be one of the finest which exists (Nykl, 1946: 28). He is considered the finest Islamic poet produced in al-Maghrib; his poetry consists chiefly of panegyrics of Fatimid Caliph al-Mucizz (Abu Tamln ibn IsmacIl), conqueror of Egypt and founder of the University of al-Azhar. "He is the cause of the world, for him it was created,/—Some kind of cause there is for all things!—/From the pure water of divine inspiration, which is the froth/Of the source of his well—and he is the cure!" (Nykl, 1946: 29). The praise poetry tradition of Africa, still vigorous among the Berbers to this day, here mingles with the qasida of the Arabic tradition—two panegyric traditions merging with African imagery and Islamic didacticism.

Other early Berber poets included al-Bulluti, Mundhir ibn Sacid (born 886 A.D.) and Ibn Hazm. In the second half of the eleventh century, the distnctly Berber elements in Islamic/Arabic poetry began to become merged with the imagery of Spain and formal characteristics of Europe and the East. This is suggested in the poetry of the finest Arab-Andalusian poet of this period, al-Mu°tamid cala-llahi. After the fall of the "kings of the taifas," the classical poetic tradition went into a decline.

The experience of Egypt and al-Maghrib with Islamic/Arabic poetry was duplicated elsewhere in Africa. In West Africa, it was during the rule of Sunjata of the Mali empire (1230-1255) that Islamic poetry flourished. The tradition was further encouraged by Sunjata's successor, Musa (1312-1335), who founded Timbuktu as a center of Islamic learning. It would reach the peak of its influence in the sixteenth century; a number of notable Soninke, Fulani, and Berber poets were associated with it. Later, the jihad of cUthman dan Fodio (1754-1817) led to a spread of Islam in the Hausa states, and Islamic verse forms joined with the indigenous court praise singing.57 Mervyn Hiskett (1975: 1) notes that the two cultures "existed side by side, sometimes merging, but often confronting one another, to produce what has been described as 'mixed Islam'. . . ." He argues, "But the Hausas have always had a thriving unwritten indigenous literature, much of which is also in verse. . . . It cannot be ignored in studying the genesis and development of written Islamic vernacular verse because, to an important extent, this arose as an expression of protest against some aspects of the oral, indigenous form. Thus knowledge of the one is necessary for understanding of the other." But Hiskett (1975: 1) also insists that "Hausa literate verse—that is, written as opposed to purely oral verse—was wholly Islamic, both in content and in purpose . . . ," that it "continued to be largely modelled on classical Arabic prototypes." While it is true that the themes of the poems are Islamic, it may also be true that, with a classical Arabic form as malleable as the qasida and the equally flexible Hausa panegyric and lyric traditions, the two forms blended with comparative ease.

The indigenous Hausa kirari verse form came, with the jihad, under the influence of Islamic literary conventions. Arabic verse was being composed by Hausa in the seventeenth century, and the activity quickened in the eighteenth. It was apparent during this period that members of the Hausa Muslim community began to compose verse in Hausa to counter the popular indigenous song tradition. It is said that they refused to use Hausa traditional verse forms, that they simply translated Arabic images into Hausa. It was, Hiskett writes, "a


genre of Hausa verse literature which, in its content and in the labels used to describe it, was dependent upon a pre-existing Arabic literary tradition."58 He argues that in certain genres, especially legal works and panegyric, the poetry strayed little from the Arabic tradition, but in such poetry as that having to do with death and resurrection, "composers seem to allow themselves a looser reign and quite often avail themselves of imagery drawn from the Hausa environment in order to paint their pictures of the lurid torments of Hell and the fleshly joys of Paradise."59

While Hiskett seems to argue that there is a great if not an unbridgeable gap between Arabic and Hausa poetic forms, a comparison of lyric and panegyric poetry from the two traditions suggests that there are areas in which a ready accommodation might have been made, with Islamic themes made compatible with Hausa forms and images—a process identical to that which occurred in Arabia. Hausa poetry shares with Arabic poetry panegyric and lyric traditions; these are so similar that if there were an attempted imposition of the latter on the former, it cannot have created serious artistic dislocations. The organization of images to support a theme is common enough in both traditions. These are Arabic and Hausa examples of lyric poetry built on the theme of death. A pre-Islamic poet in Arabia composed these images:

Be still then, and face the onset of Death, high-hearted, for none upon Earth shall win to abide for ever.

No raiment of praise the cloak of old age and weakness: none such for the coward who bows like a reed in tempest.

The pathway of Death is set for all men to travel: the Crier of Death proclaims through the Earth his empire.

Who dies not when young and sound dies old and weary, cut off in his length of days from all love and kindness;

And what for a man is left of delight in living, past use, flung away, a worthless and worn-out chattel?60

A verse on the same theme was created by Ibn cAbd Rabbihi, an Andalusian court poet. It was his last poem:

I became weak; the constant flow of Time, Its borrowed days and nights have used me up: How am I not to feel weak at seventy and ten, with two more years gone by? Why enquire about my illness, friends? You see yourselves before you what it is!61

And this is an excerpt from a Hausa wa'azi verse by cAbdullah ibn Muhammad, the younger brother of cUthman dan Fodio:

Everything of his has passed away, All the heirs now drink the soup.

When the day of your death comes, You will forget son and grandchild,

That wealth you have hidden away, Will not ransom you, you hear?

Those who nurse the sick are frightened, Not one has any power to help,

They just sit there staring, The master of the house lies prostrate on his bed. . . ,62


There are metrical differences in these poems; and when one considers lyricism in the oral tradition and that in the written, other differences can be seen, chiefly having to do with metrical count and, in literary verse, a diminishing use of formulas.63 But the similarities are considerable, most significantly the gathering of like images and, by means of poetic devices common to both lyric traditions, their bonding in the service of a single theme. Lyric poetry is a mode that makes convenient the importation of a belief like Islam: it conforms readily to the indigenous poetic tradition.64

The Arabic oral tradition also shares a panegyric form with Africa. "She is like a male ostrich," chants the Arabic poet, cAlqama, as he compares his camel to an ostrich in the al-Mufaddaliyat, "With legs coloured and scanty down on his fore wing-feathers." There follows a series of like praises: "A fleet runner is he . . . Small is his head, set on a slender neck . . . ," etc.65 This praise tradition is very close to that of the Hausa. Hiskett (1975: 2) writes, "Praise-singing in the courts of kings is an old-established convention in the western Sudan," and he isolates two kinds of Hausa praise forms, the kirari, short praise-epithets, and longer praise songs called yabo or wakar yabo which often contain kirari. He gives an example of a praise song for an official of the court of Mohmman na Zaki (1618-1623) (Hiskett, 1975: 3):

Male elephant—lord of the town, Abdulla, like a bull hippopotamus, Forger of chains and arrows for the foreigner, Forger of chains and adzes for the foreigner.

And this, from a song for Galadima Dauda (c. 1450) (Hiskett, 1975: 3):

Champion of the axes of the south, Champion of the young men of the south, Harbinger of wealth, Galadima.

G. C. B. Gidley (1975: 110) provides contemporary examples of this art form, showing that it remains a vital one:

Male porcupine, you cannot be ridden bare back, there must be a saddle! A great man's residence is one thing, where a mere youth lives is another, You pestle, anyone who swallows you will certainly spend the night upright! Male porcupine, you cannot be ridden bare back! A bullet is the remedy for the ambusher! His equal knows him, and not just casually, Look out, callow youth! Make way for an elephant!

Abu '1-Tayib Ahmad ibn al-Husain al-Mutanabbi (1967: 68-69), an Arabic poet born in al-Kufa in 915 A.D., wrote a panegyric to Saif al-Dauda, commemorating the building of Mar'ash in 952 A.D.:

For a good reason the caliph has made him ready against the enemy and named him the Sharp Sword, to the exclusion of all others; the spear-heads have not dispersed from him out of compassion, neither have the foemen quit Syria out of love for him, rather there banished them from him dishonourably, one honoured in praise, who was never reviled nor ever reviled others and an army which rips through every mountain as though it were a violent wind confronting a tender branch. It is as though the stars of night feared his raid, so they stretched

F


against it veils consisting of his dust. Whoever else gratified by his rule baseness and unbelief, this is he who gratifies virture and the Lord.

Comparisons—bull hippopotamus, axes of the south, male porcpine, violent wind confronting a tender branch—and their inter-relationships comprise the panegyric traditions of the two peoples, and the traditions are so alike as to be identical. It seems not even to be a question of the one influencing or being imposed upon the other: it seems to have been a simple shift of theme, from the pre-Islamic world view to the Islamic. The form remained stable, as did many of the images and metaphors.

The Hausa "Song of Bagauda" (Hiskett, 1964, 1965) is an example of the blending of various Hausa indigenous forms—the panegyric, in the listing of the Hausa kings and their accomplishments; the lyrical, in the developing imagery that establishes moods and elicits emotions; and a didactic strain to which the first two categories are regularly stitched. This is not alien to the stitching devices found in the African oral forms. It may well be the strongly Islamic didactic element (as, in other African societies, it will later be the Christian) that is the major Arabic contribution to the poetry; the remainder, including the supposedly imported qasida form, may be largely Hausa. Considering the flexibility of the qasida, that it has an "epic quality," that it is sometimes polemical, sometimes rhetorical, that it contains wisdom literature, that it is both lyrical and panegyric, that it "really stands in a class of its own," as cAbdullah al-Tayyib (1983: 42) points out, it should not be surprising that it readily adapted to Hausa poetry. That artistic tonicity is precisely the point: it made it possible for the ode to adapt itself to a variety of cultures and verse forms, including the Hausa. "There seem to have been many patterns to the qasida in its earliest history, of which one finally became supreme and generally followed. Of these early patterns some survived as rare or specialized forms" (cAbdullah al-TAyyib, 1983: 42). These include the lament, the commendatory poem, the panegyric, the lampoon, self-praise, elegy, aphorisms, and descriptions (cAbdullah al-Tayyib, 1983: 42). For all the suggestions to the contrary, the Hausa and Arabic lyrical and panegyric traditions seem very similar, and it is likely that the African oral tradition absorbed the new faith without a major shift in its artistic forms. Al-Musayyah, in the al-Mufaddaliyat, speaks of a panegyric he is composing: "I shall surely bring as an offering, on the wings of the winds, an ode of mine that shall pass into every land, until it reaches al-Qa'qa./It shall come down to the watering-places ever as something fresh and new, and it shall be quoted as a proverb among men, and sung by the singers." Another poet, Mazarrid, also in the al-Mufaddaliyat, "I warrant to him with whom I contend that my words shall be so striking that the night-traveller shall sing them as he fares along, and the caravans be urged forward by them on the road;/Well remembered are they, cast forth with multitudes to bear them abroad: their sound is gone forth in full sunshine into every land;/They are repeated again and again, and only increase in brillancy, when the diligent lips of men test my verse by repetition."66 Any Hausa marolcl, praise-singer, would have understood and appreciated those words.

A similar flexibility existed among the Swahili. "The metre of the Hamziya," writes Jan Knappert of an important work, "is the same as that of Liongo's famous eulogy in praise of himself . . . , which was composed in the same century. Liongo's poem may have been composed as much as half a century earlier, even though liguistically the Hamziya is considerably more archaic. All


Liongo's songs have come down to us as oral traditions, since they do not belong to the written tradition of Islamic literature" (Knappert, 1979: 104). Liongo Fumo, a Swahili heroic figure, was a poet who composed in the oral tradition. "Liongo's Song" is a praise poem of the African classical variety (Knappert, 1979: 93.):

I am a young lion, I have instilled the wish to die in my heart; I fear nothing but disgrace, if my enemies see my back. I am a young eagle, soaring up, soon out of sight; I am a terror for the birds, I seize them in flight. I am like the buzzard when I fly up in the sky, devouring young meat, just like the lion, the king of beasts.

The Hamziya ws originally an Arabic "panegyric epic" composed by an Arab poet, Muhammad ibn Sacid al-Busiry of Egypt (b. 1213 A.D.); that work was recreated in Swahili in the early eighteenth century by the Swahili poet, Aidarus ibn Athman of Pate. "The original Arabic poem, composed obviously under the impact of strong religious emotions, was a glowing narrative on the life and history of the Prophet Muhammad, which was couched with all the eloquence and rhetorical mastery which the poet could master" (Mkelle, 1976: 71). Like "Liongo's Song," the Hamziya is a panegyric (Knappert, 1968: 60-61.):

How can any of the prophets climb like you did to heaven with which no heaven vies? They are not your equals; elevation held back the lights of sublimity (from) in your midst, where there is greatness. They have levelled your qualities with (those of other) people like water that (tries) to compare with the stars. Be thou a lamp of virtue and divine favour, all lights emanate from thy good light.

The re-creation and translation of the literary panegyric is within the same Swahili tradition that produced Liongo's oral poetry. In this case, it has a similar metrical organization, with the didactic addition that weaves through the imagery as it does in much Islamic poetry. As in Hausa literature, the major contribution of Islam is not imagery and metrics so much as the heavy homiletic element; perhaps because it is the most visible characteristic, it is the one observers have a tendency to remember, and with which the poetry subsequently becomes typed.

"Praise be to my bow, made of the twig of the roo tree," sings Liongo in a non-Islamic praise poem.67 "Thou are the powerful one, who causeth death and resurrection," wrote the nineteenth century Swahili poet, Shehe Muhiuddini. His poem was a combination of supplication ("Send us rain, take away from us thirst and sun!") and panegyric ("thou are the Merciful, the Compassionate, there is no doubt for Thee").68 The Swahili Islamic prayer occurs within a familiar oral panegyric context. A linkage exists between Liongo's song, which contains a series of self-praises, and the "Prayer for Rain" of Shehe Muhiuddini, in which religious pleas occur in a praise poem dedicated to God. There is little difference between the two in imagery and structure. The combination of epic, lyric, and panegyric made the Swahili oral tradition attractive and useful to the Muslim, for it provided the vehicle for the faith, when appropriately laced with didactic comment.

As in the Egyptian and Arabic oral/literary traditions, Islam in Africa was maintained in both modes, and there seems to have been a lengthy period during


which they co-existed. Hiskett (1975: 18) writes, "Because the reformers were literates, and because the religious nature of their poetry made it worthy, in their eyes, of preserving, they wrote it down in manuscript, using the Arabic script. They then began to circulate these manusripts among fellow-scholars up and down Hausaland so that they, in turn could recite the poetry to the illiterate peasants and nomads whom they wished to influence.... It was this innovation of the reformers that created a written literature." cAbdullah ibn Muhammad (1963: 6) at an early age, became a copyist, and worked for his brother, the Shehu cUthman. cAbdallah ibn Muhammad wrote, "it was rarely that a book on the science of the Unity reached our country and I knew it, and did not copy it down for him." cAbdallah's book, Tazyin al-Waraqat, includes, in his words, "proverbs, wisdom, injunctions, battles, panegyrics, congratulations, elegies, boasting and other things. . . ." He tells of how he had earlier composed verses but then abandoned them, "neglected and forgotten, not recording them nor informing any one of them because of my knowledge that there was no benefit from them, for the most part, as regards religion, and because of my lack of knowledge of Arabic and of prosody." But in fact his poetry existed in both oral form (preserved by the memorizers, and therefore retrievable when he set about to compile his anthology) and written, the latter with commentaries. He was convinced that his work, deeply rooted in the oral tradition, would be "laughable to literary men." But its acceptance by the literati, and the fact that it had now passed back into the oral tradition, not only reveals the acknowledgement of the oral character of the literature by the scholars, it suggest the close ties between the two modes. cAbdallah (cAbdallah ibn Muhmmad, 1963: 84-85, 101) tells of how, when a poem he had written reached the culama', al-Mustafa read it to the community, then "tucked up his sleeves, and composed quintains on the message, mixing them like water and wine. . . ."

In Swahili, too, the role of the copyist was central during the period of creative interaction between the two traditions. Lyndon Harries (1962: 5) commented, "the poet almost invariably employed a copyist or a narrator who memorized the poem and later wrote it down. He did not copy the poem in the sense of making an exact reproduction of what the poet had already written." He added, "It became a convention for any heroic poem to include a section at the beginning of the poem in which the narrator gives instructions to his scribes. . . ."

What happened among the Hausa and Swahili was occurring elsewhere in Africa—among the Fulani, in northern Ghana among the Gonja, in Senegal among the Tokolor and Wolof, in Malagasy and Somalia. Islamic literature did not long remain alien to the African artistic experience; it quickly became assimilated into existent poetic traditions, because of the presence in Africa of like forms, but for other reasons as well. The activity of the years during which the two media were productively linked assured that the indigenous oral tradition became fully integrated into the developing literary tradition. The oral mode became the core of the literature: written works were built around if they did not actually imitate or grow out of the oral tradition. Had there been a direct imposition of foreign written forms on African arts, an artificial hybrid would have been the result—short-lived, because it probably would have had no audience. As long as literature remained merely a record of the oral tradition, there was no conflict. It was when written materials evolved into an art form that complex interaction between the two modes occurred, because such


performance aesthetics as relations between audience and performer became significant concerns.

The only way Islamic (and, in later years, Christian) literature could flourish in Africa was on terms established by African art forms, and these were, as they had been in Arabia, oral. Islamic scholars may at times have been less than appreciative of the indigenous art forms, but this seemed to be for their subject matter rather than their poetics; and in the end, those scholars were not above—surely they realized the futility of doing anything else—adopting the African oral forms to communicate their images. It was a matter, first, of accepting those forms and altering them but little (and this includes the qaslda which bore signal similarities to African poetry), other than provide an overlay of Islamic teaching in the form of didactic commentary. Nor was this alien to the African oral experience: consider the combination of the narrative elements of the tale and the didactic characteristcs of oral poetry in the epic. The second step was more complex; it involved a substitution of the central mythic imagery—the Islamic for the traditional African faiths. The mythic transformational mechanism would remain stable, but the images that it manipulated would change. This delicate task was perhaps not as difficult as might be supposed, because a characteristic of the oral tradition is its ready ability to incorporate oral materials from other cultures into its own forms, so long as there are sufficient attachment points.

In Egypt, the early Islamic period was dominated by a popular literature in which Arabic and Islamic materials were integrated into native Egyptian images and forms. A similar combining occurred among the Hausa and Swahili. Islam moved into the African artistic consciousness under the cover, as it were, of this major modal shift. It took advantage of the move from the oral to the literary mode, as Christianity would later attempt to do. The transitional period facilitated the coupling of the traditions, allowing the mixing of the two media that occurs during any oral-literary transitional period, and, since the Islamic forces had initiated the translation of the language to writing, they were able to exercise a certain amount of artistic control during that time. But that intervening period would not have been possible without the strong and ultimately dominant nexus of the indigenous oral tradition, and the range of copyists and memorizers.

The possibility of disorientation was reduced by the blending of the traditions. This was one of the important contributions of those opaque people in the middle, the copyists and memorizers, the writers of popular fictions who owed as much to orality as to literacy. All had similar functions; all were responsible in some way for preserving the oral tradition in written form, first as a record, later as the heart of their new literary genres. In contemporary Africa, the oral tradition retains its vitality and indeed its form through the popular literature of the market place and major urban concentrations, written down by modern counterparts of scribes and ruwah who take liberties with the original materials much as their predecessors did, yet generally remaining faithful to the oral performance. Some served their apprenticeships as translators of works into African languages; others were antiquarians and collected oral tradition; most continued to live and write under the vibrant influence of a living oral tradition. All were learning the craft of literature.

Early writers in the contemporary period were often a combination of copyist and oral storyteller, and nowhere is this more evident than in the popular genre,


shorter works and novellas in African and European languages, often heavily didactic, with images that are almost invariably extreme. The robust interaction between the profoundly rooted oral tradition and the burgeoning literary tradition of the moment has echoes of ancient Egypt. During the last half century or so, there has been an extraordinary artistic dialogue between these media, and if the present use of such literary genres as the novel was triggered by the western schooling of Africans, the forms were at once placed into African oral and not western literary contexts. In any case, the novel, a literary form indigenous to Africa, has continued to exist in potential form in the epic.

It took little to efFect the transformation of the oral form into the literary. Some authors—as in Egypt, Arabia, and Islamic Africa—simply imitated the oral tradition, and continue to do so. Western readers became excited when Amos Tutuola's works (1952), imitative of African oral tales, began to appear, believing that these represented authentic developments of the classical African tradition. Others wrote in the same genre—Daniel Orowole Fagunwa (1950), Violet Dube (1935), Samuel E. Krune Mqhayi (1942), and Mario Antonio (1966). These writers have been among the contemporary copyists, scribes, ruwah. But their works are little more than exotic culs-de-sac, efforts to transpose oral works into literary forms, yet lacking organic development and growth. They are not rooted in the oral tradition so much as reflective of that tradition. In the rich Xhosa literary tradition, there were antiquarians who, beginning in the nineteenth century, and for a variety of reasons, collected materials from the African oral tradition and recast, retold, or simply transcribed them. It was left to other writers to attempt to develop a literary style and mode that would artistically respond to and tap these works. It was not simply a matter of writing the tale down, or retelling the narrative in literature. The early Egyptian scribes and the traditional Arabian ruwah did that, but they then proceeded to explore the possibilities of the literary form itself. There is during such a period, and it may well go on indefinitely in any literary tradition, a routine interplay between the two media—and for the imitators, that interaction has largely been absent.

African literature has from the beginning been involved in a complex dialogue with the oral tradition, thematically as well as formally. As in the Egyptian and Islamic cases, during the early stages of the modern literary tradition, the oral influence dominates; literary artists depend on both universal oral motifs and purely African images. Some works of popular literature can be seen as a set of instructions for coping with the realities of a literary world, but couched in the manner and style of the oral tradition: How to Write All Kinds of Letters and Compositions, compiled by Many Authors (n.d.), for example, and The Way and How to Conduct Meetings, by K. C. Eze (n.d.) have the same impact as oral tales that depend on the exchange of letters for their effect.69 In Mabel the Sweet Honey that Poured Away, by A. Onwudiwe {pseud, Speedy Eric) (n.d.) and Miller Albert's Rosemary and the Taxi Driver (1960), images have the oral qualities of extreme emotion (one critic thought that these works "are close to pornography, although the writers still persist in their moral preoccupation" [Dathorne, 1975: 170]); and because it is essentially a private literary activity, as opposed to oral performance which is public, lascivious scenes are among the vivid images. Indications of ties with the oral tradition are everywhere to be found. The use of typographical signs suggests an experimentation with the possibilities of the written form, an effort to convert typography to graphic image, as if the writer were seeking to duplicate gesture—a heart with an arrow through it in Mabel the


Sweet Honey that Poured Away, a heart with two swords piercing it, the use of capital lettered instructions to the reader (Onwudiwe, n.d.: 20, 43-44): "WE SHALL SEE WHAT MABEL DID IN HER OWN CASE, READ ON, DEAR." Most characteristics of popular literature recall the oral tradition and reveal writers' bold attempts to transpose it to writing. The world of Mabel, the carefree prostitute who moves rapidly to her destruction, occurs in a cultural context that discourages such activity, so that there is a moral conflict reminiscent of the oral tale. The story is heavy-handedly didactic, containing sexual imagery, with a framework of insistent morality to cushion it and gives its use legitimacy (there is something to be learned in this plethora of risque images after all), and a brash touch of irony. The tale of Mabel is a written version of one of the most venerable of African oral tales, the good girl/bad girl narrative, in which a good girl establishes a model, to be followed by a bad sister who does all those things in a negative way. In Onwudiwe's story, the reader is given the story of the bad girl; the part detailing the activities of the good girl is not provided—that is supplied by the moralizing indulged in by the author. Patterning is simple, straightforward, and useful: a series of events that repeats and deepens the single thematic concern. That basic pattern is reinforced by the homilies—Africa's proverb and panegyric traditions made manifest, and already fully rehearsed in the oral epic. Complex interactions occur within the literary tradition, between, for example Cyprian Ekwensi's Jagua Nana (1961) and Mabel the Sweet Honey that Poured Away, and simultaneously in these cases between the oral and written media.

There are times in the popular literature when the written word will seemingly not contain the oral; the literary language is simply broken apart as highly emotional images are evoked. Miller O. Albert's Saturday Night Disappointment (n.d.) is an example; it is necessary to follow the movement of the tale by means of the colorful, emotional network created by the images rather than by the linear use of language that one anticipates in most literary works. This is "spoken literature," elements of an oral tradition transported to the written form in an extraordinary way, with many of the oral aspects intact (unlike Tutuola's works, in which the original oral tale has lost most of its orality, so that the reader becomes despairingly conscious of repetition, for example). The vitality, the vivid imagery, stark dialogue, and outrageous didacticism reconstitute the oral performance in a bizarre way in much popular literature. Of course, the oral performance is not itself being transposed: the body of the performer is not there, the voice, music, dance, the relations between audience and artist are lacking. But the writers of such literature brazenly work their ways to the emotional core of the oral performance; they understand the way images are patterned, they grasp the significance of the motif and its organizing capacities. Cyprian Ekwensi's People of the City (1954) and Jagua Nana (her portrait is among the finest in popular literature) are at their best when they are most oral, but Ekwensi is unable to sustain this, and his works suffer as literature. The Egyptian author of "The Story of Sinuhe" knew what could be done with the oral tradition, because he doubtless underwent a lengthy period of conditioning and discipline as a scribe, during which he probably learned much about the conventions of the two media in which he was working. Certainly the writers of popular literature understand better than the imitators the art of emotional elicitation and its formalizing; they instinctively know the difference between mimicry and organic growth. It is a craft that Guybon Sinxo70


explored in the Xhosa popular literature tradition, and A. C. Jordan (1940), O. K. Matsepe,71 and R. R. R. Dhlomo72 built on that kind of writing, exploring new relationships not only between the oral and written materials, but between the written and the written—i.e., a creative dialogue was established between the writers of popular fiction and those who wished to create a more serious form of literature. The threads that connect these three categories of artistic activity are many, they are reciprocal, and they are essentially African. Writers in Africa owe much to the oral tradition and to those authors who have occupied the space between the two traditions, in the area of creative interaction.

Later, the literary language becomes a set of graphic signs, but during the early stages of this fruitful relationship, the literary is still very much an oral language, one of printed sounds; the signs are simply transferred to the page. In Egypt and Arabia, the oral artist worked closely with a copyist, and when the two became one, it was inevitable that artistic possibilities in the written mode would become evident. Elsewhere in Africa, where the languages were first written down by aliens, this process was telescoped. Some of the first writers in these literatures were, in effect, their own copyists: they were oral performers in literature. This will explain the style of much of the popular literature and such novellas as Walin Katsina Alhaji Bello's Gandoki (1934) and Omenuko (1935), by the Igbo writer, Pita Nwana, with their clear echoes of the oral. Later, Chinua Achebe, an Igbo using English as his literary language, enters a dialogue with Nwana's work, which is in turn a dramatization of an actual life.73 A tangled relationship is thus initiated between history and literature, with Nwana's work, midway between the historical figure and Achebe's fictional character, occupying a curiously fertile intervening stage—it is a hybrid stage in the tradition of the rawi and scribe. These oral, historical, and literary ties are characteristic of African literature. The interaction between oral and literary is frequently distorted but that link is seldom absent.74

Two contemporary written narratives reveal very different paths to that connection. Njogu Gitene's Kiuyu story, Mami hingurira (1970), a twelve-page piece, is patterned on an oral tale. The title suggest the origins of the story: "Mother, open for me," a common motif, a song sung to would-be rescuers ("Mother, open the door for me./I have come with honey . . . ," is this tale's variation on the motif). The oral story is placed into an urban framework and is given a widely used African literary theme, that of the innocent abroad, the rural person who goes to the city and is corrupted; the central character moves between the polarities of evil urban and benevolent country influences. Images are vivid—there is a pursuit by the police and a confrontation with police dogs, and there is a scene in which the central character is rejected by his parents for his criminal activities—the door is not open to him.

The Swahili writer, Shaaban Robert, authored a number of novels that were taken almost directly from the oral tradition.75 His Adili na Nduguze, Adili and His Brothers (1952) is an example. The story is largely told by means of a flashback. It contains a prologue and an epilogue; the frame is composed of a discussion between Adili and a king, with Adili explaining why he whips two monkeys every night. The tale ends with the king's intervention on behalf of the monkeys, who are really Adili's transformed brothers. The flashback, meant to explain why they were changed into creatures, is a series of tales from the oral repertoire, held together by Adili and his quest for a wife. Adili na Nduguze is in certain respects similar to early Egyptian literature, the product of a period


during which oral traditions and the written word co-exist. As in Egypt, an incipient novel can be found in a combination of tales with a pretext or setting. The tales themselves are based on familiar oral motifs, with the journeying and Adili's regular referral to the monkeys for corroboration of his story acting as the chief linking devices.

The two stories seem similar: each is based on the oral tradition, each incorporates a number of folklore motifs. But there are differences, and these have to do with the relationship between oral tradition and the written word. Such Egyptian stories as "The Autobiography of Weni" and "The Story of Sinuhe" also contain oral motifs; they represent a literary culmination of aspects of orality, with devices enabling them to integrate a variety of materials into a single work. And they are keyed to the real, immediate world. In the oral tradition, too, tales are always linked to reality. Shaaban Robert's story lacks immediacy; it is a museum piece, a frozen retelling of an ancient tale. Robert is one with Tutuola and the other literary imitators of the oral, simply recasting the latter to the former. It is a record, not an organic development. In the much shorter Kikuyu story, the oral motifs are placed within a context of and animate real life events and concerns; they do not simply recall unattached oral story material. Gitene retains the mythic mechanics as well as the motifs, and he ties these to the contemporary world. His tale thus has a sense of realism, with realistic images dominant, pointing to a major storytelling development, in which oral motifs and mythic-metaphorical transformation devices continue to exert an influence on a modern form with contemporary themes, settings, and characters. The oral motif and mythic apparatus remain at the center of tale-telling even in the most sophisticated novels. While the Robert story contains motifs, the mythic device remains for the most part moribund.

Stephen Andrea Mpashi's Bemba story, Cekesoni Aingila Ubusoja (1950), is another oral tale given literary form. It involves the movement of an unlikely hero who undergoes a series of adventures that become a dramatization of a rite of passage. Cekesoni begins as a wastrel. He leaves home, and has adventures in the army. Along the way, he goes through changes, a kind of puberty ritual. He initially debases himself, is dissolute and lecherous; he goes to Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia; on a second tour of duty, he goes to East Africa and Malagasy. And during a final tour, he journeys to Egypt and Israel. In the end, he returns to Lusaka, the typical journeying hero of the oral tradition, where he is demobilized and begins his readjustment to rural life.

At the same time that writers like Mpashi and Gitene were experimenting with the literary form, similar work was going on in the field of drama where the linkages with the oral were quite as evident. Much published drama in Africa seems to have been composed as a direct response to the influence of the oral tradition, and it had a significant role to play in the media transitional period. It was not, it appears, meant to be acted; it is simply a convenient path to the oral, with briefly stated directions and a concentration on concrete action.76 It was not so much drama as a dramatic means of realizing certain oral storytelling qualities in literature. The exploration of those aspects of the oral tradition most relevant to a literary form of drama—the ritual and its re-enactment characteristic of certain of the classical forms—would have to await bolder experimentation. For now, the activities of the dramatists largely paralleled those of the novelists, as drama became another means of telling a story in print while retaining as many of the conventions of the oral tradition as possible. Marcus A. P. Ngani's


Umkhonto KaTshiwo (n.d.) is an example, as are Joseph Sebata Tsephe's Ha Dinyamatsane (n.d.) and D. B. Z. Ntuli's Indandatho yesethembiso (1971).

The substantive experimentation centered on the novel, and similar problems were being wrestled with throughout Africa during this transitional period. Fantasy, reality, and Islam combine in Bello's Gandoki. Like Cekesoni Aingila Ubusoja, this is a story based on the hero myth. Gandolci. a product of Islamic history and the folk tradition ("The two jinn were still inside me . . . "), derives almost all of its adventure imagery from the oral performer. The central character leaves home, has a series of adventures (each with folkloric motifs), overcomes his enemies, and returns home a hero. The separate tales that make up the work are held together by a frame quest for the enemy, Goringo. And the pre-Islamic oral elements are overlaid by Islamic didacticism: as Gandolci overwhelms his enemies, he converts them to the faith. Echoes of the ancient Egyptian and the early Islamic traditions are evident in the writer's stitching activities in this written narrative.

Samuel Yosia Ntara's Nyanja novella, Nthondo (1933), is the Christian counterpart of Gandolci. There are lengthy discussions of Nyanja custom (encouraged, perhaps, by the fact that the novel was entered in a contest conducted by the British government), but through this emerges a pattern taken from oral tale-telling; it is similar to that found in Gandolci, Cekesoni Aingila Ubusoja, and Mabel the Sweet Honey that Poured Away. Nthondo, a youth who is a thief and a murderer, goes on long journeys, creates scandals, is jailed—and remains unrepentant. He continues to steal, and is disliked by his own people. Another pattern sheathes the first, a series of dreams that becomes the didactic element similar to that found in Mabel the Sweet Honey that Poured Away; it is also an orally derived device, which enables images to comment on images. These dreams, alike in their themes if varied in imagery, indicate the way to the ultimate Christian message. The motif of the outsider who moves to the inside organizes much of the imagery of the tale, along with the heroic journey in which a vulnerable central character fails and falls, then returns, is embraced by his people, and becomes a great leader.

Nwana's Omenuko is based on a historical character, Chief Igwegbe Odum.77

"This book," writes A. E. Afigbo (1966: 222), "perhaps so far and from a literary point of view, one of the greatest achievements in the [Igbo] language, is from the historian's point of view a great failure. Though not initially conceived as a fiction, it has been dismissed as such by nearly all who have read it." Nwana's Omenuko makes an egregious error at the beginning; he betrays his own people, selling some of them into slavery to keep himself solvent (he has just lost his goods in a river). For this, he becomes an outcast, fleeing with his brothers and sisters into exile. During his period of banishment, he thrives, comports himself with distinction, even heroically, and struggles with rival chiefs who fear and therefore despise him. They try to reduce his power by manipulating the European district commissioner. Finally Omenuko repatriates the slaves, and is readmitted to his own home, something of a hero. The structure of the story is taken from the oral tradition, centering on a person who, because of a flaw in his character, absents himself from home, and while in exile undergoes a change. The historical character has thus been fictionalized by means of one of the most durable of oral models. Afigbo argues that Nwana's Omenuko is nothing like the historical character, yet even the Chief Igwegbe that he describes fits basically into the oral pattern.


Chinua Achebe's novel, Things Fall Apart™ though much longer and somewhat more intricate than Omenuko, follows the same model. Achebe's work interacts with Nwana's. Like Omenuko, Okonkwo goes into exile for a crime against his people, and there he prepares himself for his return. To this extent, Achebe's hero follows the oral movement much as Nwana's central character does. But Okonkwo's re-emergence is not that of the returned hero, because a historical event has intervened, and the purposeful interruption of an Omenuko-like myth is the point of the novel. The order and balance of the oral tradition, pronounced in Nwana's tale, are impossible in Achebe's. It is not only history that makes this so, it is also the continued development of the novel form with greater concentration on realism and psychology than on the harmonious cycles of the oral tradition. Achebe's is a novel worked within an African context; its full power cannot be felt outside an Igbo environment and its predecessors in literary and oral storytelling.

Chiquinho (1947), a Portuguese-language novel by Baltasar Lopes, falls into precisely the same pattern as Omenuko, Nthondo, and Cekesoni Aingila Ubusoja: Chiquinho leaves his childhood home, goes to Sao Vicente to get an education, then returns to his home. The three parts of the novel parallel the familiar movement in the oral tradition. The central character leaves the familiar—and, here, idealized—home, journeys to an alien place where an education or initiation occurs, then returns a changed person prepared to participate gloriously in the activities of his community. Lopes almost cynically reduces this romantic tale tradition to grim realism. The experience in Sao Vicente means alienation for Chiquinho, estrangement, unemployment. And his return to his home means a return to a world of poverty, suffering, and starvation. In the first part of the novel, the childhood world is lovingly described, even romanticized, and it is contrasted with the Sao Vicente world with its poverty and separation (described not sentimentally but in stark detail). But there is also irony here, as the first world is revealed in the second. This does not become clear until the third part of the story, when Chiquinho goes back to the first world; rather than rediscover the world of his childhood, he finds that it is identical to Sao Vicente. The idealistically blurred realm of the child has been brutally clarified—the child has come of age. Reality and fantasy co-exist in this novel, the fantastic details limning the world of the child. And the device of parallelism characteristic of the oral tradition is effectively applied. The hero's separation, initiation, and return are angrily developed: return is far from triumphant. Instead, the world away from home, where initiation takes place, becomes an awful mirror-image of the world he left. That is the realistic vision of the novel. The oral tradition has contributed theme and form; what Lopes does is to make crucial alterations in each, much as Achebe does in Things Fall Apart, as he moves from the romantic tale to the realistic novel. Open-endedness has replaced a cyclical ordering.

The oral tradition provides much of the historical detail for Thomas Mofolo's Chaka (1925), a novel about the Zulu king. This may obscure the fact that Mofolo also depends on the oral tradition for the formal structure of his work (written in Southern Sotho). Mofolo borrows a technique from African oral historians: he blends reality and fantasy to reveal a historical truth. Isanusi and his associates form the world of fantasy, and become a chief means whereby the character of Shaka and his actions are commented upon, in much the same way that the second part of Lopes' novel becomes a commentary on the first. Chaka


is, like Chiquinho, a contemporary version of the heroic legend; and like Achebe's novel, it has a realistic and modern development that breaks with the romanticism and the circular ordering of the oral tradition. The hero does not come full circle; rather, there is an impediment to the mythical realization of the rite of passage. The possibilities built into the character of the outsider epic hero are here developed. Like Okonkwo, Shaka becomes a victim of his needs and the world he has conceived. The oral tale provides the formal aspects of this story and some of its character-types. But the ending is a development of literature. What has occurred is a shift, prefigured in the oral epic, in the way the storyteller views reality. That major change does not, however, emancipate the literary artists from their continuing dependence on the African oral tradition in the themes and form of their work, even though cast in a contemporary context and moving perforce toward realism. The oral heroic pattern is used perversely in Chaka, with the paralleling of Isanusi and the king. The novel provides dramatic testimony about the way character relationships found in the oral tradition can be transformed in literature to realism; here, they become useful means for psychological revelation, as Isanusi becomes the concrete embodiment of what is transpiring in Shaka's mind. Two oral forms (the hero journey, and the dovetailing of tale parts to comment on one another) are used by Mofolo for strictly literary purposes: realism in character portrayal and action.

In A. C. Jordan's Ingqumbo Yeminyanya (The Wrath of the Ancestors) (1940), a Xhosa novel, the hero is confronted with a choice—the present, represented by the European schools, and the past, symbolized by the traditionalist, Jongilanga. Zwelinzima attempts to mediate the two, but he fails. In his attempts can be found the germs of future success; it is not, Jordan argues, a question of one or the other, present or past, it is a question rather of the blending of the two, something that Okonkwo cannot learn, something that Omenuko knows and exploits. As with Shaka, Zwelinzima contains the polarities within himself, and, like Shaka and Okonkwo, he is a contemporary African hero, torn by the past and the future. Like the epic hero, he must lead his people. Some of the heroes in modern Africa novels (Okonkwo of the Igbo, Shaka of the Zulu, Zwelinzima of the Xhosa) fail because of an essential flaw: they cannot, as Mwindo and Sunjata do, make the great change. This is their agony, their private grief and public shame, and they move rashly in one direction or another, unable to bridge two worlds. This realistic appraisal of events and the tragedy of subsequent action occur in literary works that represent the fruit of the oral artists' experimentation with tale and epic.

It is in Ousmane Sembene's Les bouts de bois de Dieu (1960) that the hero succeeds, because temporal blending is effectively achieved; here, the themes and forms of the oral and literary traditions are most eloquently harmonized, as the hero becomes representative of a past that does find productive links with the present and future. An object, not a character, becomes crucial to this transition; the locomotive, by itself, is neutral and passive. It is the use that the African people, galvanized by Bakayoko, choose to make of it that is the key. The hero encourages his people, up and down the railway line, breaking down ruinous cultural barriers among Africans and between Africans and Europeans. He sets out to shape a future with the past fully in hand. Sembene consciously tempers the role of the hero, preferring to see Bakayoko as symbolic of a struggling people caught between the polarities that bring down Okonkwo, Shaka, and Zwelinzima. It is not simply Bakayoko, but a group of characters—Fa Keita, Ad'jibid'ji,


Maimouna, Penda—that comprise the hero in this work. African novelists have been experimenting with the cyclical concepts of time

embedded in the oral tradition—Ngugi wa Thiong'o's A Grain of Wheat (1967) and Wole Soyinka's The Interpreters (1965) are examples. Kateb Yacine, in Nedjma (1956), uses the cyclical configuration of imagery to construct his complex work. The confusing relations among the various characters move into focus and out, as the novelist works the temporal and organizational elements of his narrative, paralleling images, contrasting and obscuring, until the character of Nedjma is revealed, along with the four men who are attracted to her. This complex use of time is also important in al-Tayyib Salih's Mawsim al-Hijra ila al-Shamal, Season of Migration to the North.n The polarities are north and south, and the African hero is torn between them. In this case, the hero turns tables and history against Europe. As in Nedjma, the author of Mawsim al-Hijra ila al-Shamal provides the mirrors characteristic of the Arabic literary tradition and of the Arabic and African oral traditions. In England there is a graveyard which is a re-creation of a mythical Africa; it is Mustafa's bedroom, and means death to the women he brings there. In Sudan there is a graveyard, the mementos of the life Mustafa spent in England. On either side is death. Al-Tayyib Salih uses the character of Wad Rayyes for similar reasons: Mustafa sketches him eight times. Why, the narrator of the novel wonders, this interest in Wad Rayyes? Is he a mirror image of Mustafa, in his destructiveness and sentiments? As al-Tayyib Salih enters a splendidly ironic dialogue with Joseph Conrad—Mustafa and Kurtz, the narrator and Marlow—similar questions about the relationship between narrator and the subject of his tale recur.

At the center of the African novel, as of the epic, is the hero, caught between past and future, forced to make decisions fateful to himself and, frequently, to his community as well. Inaction is not possible; a movement from one state to another is urgently called for. That transformation is the metaphorical and mythic core of the storytelling tradition; it grows out of a complex of images, forms, and themes, organized as fragments of history are recombined and, in the process, tied to the ancient tradition of the people. The process is poetic performance, and what makes the transformation possible is myth: it partakes of ancient images, it generates motion.

The African literary tradition has thus moved through various stages as writers have attempted to develop a theory of mimesis that denies neither past tradition nor present reality. This has meant that the oral experience has retained its hold on the creative imagination. It becomes obvious in all of Africa's literary traditions, in the activities of the scribes and their counterparts, as the writers either imitate the oral tradition or use that tradition as a means for exploring contemporary reality in literary form. Other writers then build on these popular early works, but although they move another step from the oral structural characteristics, they remain dependent on the oral motifs and transformational devices. In the work of Onwudiwe, Mpashi, and Gitene is a suggestion of themes and forms more fully developed in the novels of Achebe, Jordan, Lopes and Mofolo. This has to do with the plight of the modern hero and his options, his agony, his internal struggle. As the authors probe the hero's psyche, they deviate from the basic movements of the oral tradition, and the cyclical romanticism of the ancient works is replaced by a realistic open-endedness. Integral to these formal considerations are the themes, linking past and present, rural and urban, the traditional and the modern. These contemporary activities have their genesis


in the oral tradition: there has been a continuum in the African oral/literary tradition, from the tale, to the epic, to popular writing, to the major literary works.

The contemporary African literary tradition is sometimes confused with that of the West. It is not clear why this should be so. (Western literary critics have been slow to discover the oral roots of their literature, preferring to view the oral and literary as separate and largely unbridgeable traditions. Homer and Dickens are storytellers, but the orality of Dickens' literature has not been satisfactorily tested.) The idea persists that African writing is derivative of European tradition. Writing of Jordan's Ingqumbo Yeminyanya, D. D. T. Jabavu (1943: 24) said "as we know the author's acquaintance with Dickens, Jane Austen, and so forth we can with confidence ascribe to him the influence of English literature at its best." The confusion is a result of colonialism.

One of the legacies of the West's presence in Africa has been the confusion of that mythic linkage through the substitution of a Western image of the continent and its people. That conception, centuries old, is apparently complex because it has run such a tortuous course through history. It has its origins in the earliest ideas that Europe had of Africa, and has evolved into a set of images vital to the West, finding form in the violence of Robert Ruark (1955) and the subtleties of such South African liberal writers as Nadine Gordimer (1981) and J. M. Coetzee (1981, 1983), coloring its literture and shaping its perception.

That image was crudely drawn, then savagely honed to vivid caricature in European literature. From the earliest times, in the writings of Herodotus, for example, and Diodorus Siculus and St. Hippolytus,80 then Luiz Vaz de Camoes and writers of the colonial period like Julien Viaud (Pseud., Pierre Loti), Rudyard Kipling, and Gustav Frenssen, and such contemporary writers as Graham Greene and Saul Bellow,81 contributions have regularly been made to the development and reinforcement of the image of Africa. The picture of the barbarian as painted by medieval Europe had to do with anyone not Greek or Roman, and later in the Middle Ages came to include Moslems, the Berbers of North Africa, and the Tartars. But as Africa impinged itslf on Europe's consciousness, attitudes towards blacks, having deep roots in European culture, were tied to images of the barbarians, and a mythically potent perception was born. In the nineteenth century, the image received a romantic patina, as the concept of the noble savage attracted artists and others seduced by its simplicity and primitiveness. Early travel accounts, missionary records, the writings of administrators often affirmed the concept. Ethnographic and historical works of the nineteenth century, when colonialism was in full blossom, created the prototypes for twentieth century attitudes. The Afrikaans literary tradition of the Boer nation, for example, was built on the Western mythus. If Edgar Rice Burrough's Tarzan novels were the most obvious manifestations of the image, Joseph Conrad and Raymond Roussel provided its more subdued and surreal renderings.

As it became fully linked to motifs in the western tradition, the image tied black people and culture to a stereotype that has been of such utility to whites that they have been loath to release it; it transcends the Africa of reality, controlling notions in a thoroughly debased way. The twentieth century took its measure of the crude myth, then, with liberalism ascendant after the two world wars, the image and attendant lexicon of racism were altered to reflect the new sensibilities. But, though frosted with the rhetoric of the mid-twentieth century,


the ancient archetype persists. Had there been no Africa, Europe would have invented one: "Well," Bellow writes in Henderson the Rain King (1959), "maybe every guy has his own Africa"; and Thomas Browne, in Religio Medici (1953): "We carry with us the wonders we seek without us: there is all Africa and her prodigies in us." And Valery Larbaud (1951: Vol.IV, 109-10) "Quand nous voudrons, nous rentrerons aux forets vierges./Le desert, la prairie, les Andes colossaux,/Le Nil blanc, Teheran, Timor, les Mers du Sud,/Et toute la surface planetaire sont a nous, quand nous voudrons!/. . . /Pour moi./L'Europe est comme une seule grande ville . . ." Images of terra incognita were so beguiling and writers so eager to satisfy the longings fed by the myth that every new discovery simply strengthened its hold.

In literature, Africa frequently became Europe's other side, Europe's dark side. There was this about the African: he embodied the greatest fears of the whites. In John Buchan's Prester John, Wardlaw (1910: 96) expresses the nightmare: if the Africans "ever combined they could keep it as secret as the grave. My houseboy might be in the rising, and I would never suspect it till one fine morning he cut my throat." When Africa was not simply the image of the primitive and the barbaric, it became the brooding metaphor. The fears were one side of the burden the Africans were caused to bear; the other side belonged to the liberals. Isak Dinesen (1937: 17-18), for example: "The discovery of the dark races was to me a magnificent enlargement of all my world." She considered that person "with an ear for music" who "happened to hear music for the first time when he was already grown up," and she likened this to her African experiences: "After I had met with the Natives, I set out the routine of my daily life to the Orchestra." Alan Paton created Kumalo in Cry, the Beloved Country (1948), and revealed a vital figment of the liberal imagination, as the flat character became a symbol, embodying the pained conscience of the white liberal. Paton's celebrated work is only the most famous in a venerable tradition of western novels about Africa written from African points of view. It is one of the world's most durable minstrel shows, whites in black-face creating for the West a picture of the Europeans' Africa. It is only a somewhat bizarre development of the travellers' accounts of their wanderings on the continent.82

Nineteenth century writers attempted to become a part of the black world the better to communicate that exotic realm to a Europe and America seemingly insatiable in their desire for such works. Anna Howarth came to South Africa for her health, and wrote Jan: An Afrikander (1897). She developed a character of mixed blood, a Jekyll and Hyde figure—now Jan Vermaak, now the eminent Sir John Fairbank (who would have suspected?)—to enable her to move comfortably from the one race to the other. The tragedy in the novel, and its attractiveness to the West, grows out of the ambiguity: in one character could be found the two polar elements that make up the dream-world of Europe.

Robert Ruark had a literary dialogue with John Buchan, Camara Laye (1954) with Pierre Loti. The latter, in his Le Roman d'un Spahi, bathes in African symbolism. An African context and a strong sense of the primeval suffuse the book. During the rainy season, all is lush and fertile, and in this world Jean has his sexual awakening (Loti, 1881: 94, 105-06): "Anamalis fobil!" becomes a refrain: "Anamalis fobil!—hurlaient les Griots enfrappant sur leur tam-tam—I'oeil enflamme, les muscles tendus, le torse ruisselant de sueur. . . ." And a beautiful African woman, Fatougaye, "Melange de jeune fille, d'enfant et de diablotin noir, tres bizarre petite personnel" seduces him, possesses the bewildered innocent. She


is black, he is white, and the novel develops the familiar stereotypes of good and bad according to the racial polarities. "Et tout le monde repetait en frappant des mains, avec frenesie: Anamalis fobil!—Anamalis fobil! . . . la traduction en brulerait ces pages . . . Anamalis fobil! les premiers mots, la dominante et le refrain d'un chant endiable, ivre d'ardeur et de licence,—le chant des bamboulas du printemps!. . . ." Africa thus takes on symbolic connotations: '''Anamalis fobil! hurlement de desir effrene,—de seve noire surchauffee au soleil et d'hysterie torride . . . alleluia d'amour negre, hymne de seduction chante aussi par la nature, par I'air, par la terre, par les plantes, par les parfums!"

J. M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer have a dialogue with James Dorant Ensor, who in the nineteenth century wrote a pair of books in which a European takes on the role of the black: "Nature," says Sitongo, "has stamped my features with such indelible traces of my origin, that in this, the land of my birth, where such distinctions are common enough, they would have proved an almost insurmountable barrier to materially advancing my prosperity, or, at all events, most effectually have prevented me enjoying any other society than that of gentlemen of a similar complexion to myself (Ensor, 1884: 3). In the work of Joyce Cary, Graham Greene, Joseph Conrad, and others who have their European and American cultures as foundations and contexts from which to view Africa, the continent becomes a symbol for a yearning within humans and a fear—a longing for something elemental, a fear of the unknown. But in South Africa, where the tradition has seen novels in which masquerading is a fairly common characteristic, the tradition begins to change. The role-playing remains at the heart of the non-African literary tradition in that area, the white writer moving into the black character, with the ambiguity of the so-called "coloreds" a useful symbol, but the two contemporary novelists view the reversal in a new way. No longer is it engaged in for voyeuristic purposes. Now, the Africans are positioned to overthrow white domination, and white literature, duly reflecting white sensibilities, reflects the inevitability. The reversal tradition takes an ironic turn, as we see the bewildered white writers attempting to come to terms with history. In Gordimer's July's People and Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K, a hopeless sense of alienation emerges, as the historic alienation of the blacks becomes that of the whites. The masks will not come off, the minstrel show has, in a surrealistic way, become reality. In the nineteenth century, whites sought to see the world through black eyes for the delight of European audiences; now, Europeans in South Africa see the world through black eyes, and find themselves. The European fear of Africa, and the role-reversal initially indulged in for freak-show purposes, have returned to bedevil contemporary European writers and their audiences.

The African writer and critic stand between the two great images, that which animates African oral tradition and literature, and the competing myth from the West. In time, the latter will almost certainly diminish in importance83; it is significant in contemporary African writing because the historical experiences of slavery and colonialism have brought the western image to the center of African thought about its past and its place in the world. But the treatment of the conflict in fiction and poetry does not mean that African writers have become disoriented and require directions to the ancient artistic traditions.

The reason for any misunderstandings may not be so much the failures of the writers as of the critics. For one thing, there has been an unfortunate set of conclusions among those who have studied the relationship between oral


tradition and the written word; these minimize the connections and make insurmountable the gap, so that it often appears that there are no links at all. This is perhaps one of the most ruinous misconceptions afflicting the criticism of literature. It makes possible remarkable arguments—that, for example, the novel form is, in any society, isolated from the oral. To argue that there is no substantive transitional literature, no period during which the oral and written work are richly interacting, is to ignore the scribe, the ram, the writer of popular fiction. The assumption that the novel form evolved in the West and was transported to the rest of the world is as blind as it is arrogant, especially when one considers that the novel was vibrant some three or four thousand years before workers went to factories in Europe. Scholars have perceived a need to distinguish these linkages, but the need once stated is ignored. One critic (Moore, 1980: 7) comments, "The problems of establishing a vital connection between a rich and ancient oral tradition, expressed in languages which have special tonic and sonic qualities of their own, and the activity of writing for the page in the new languages of colonialism, are complex and daunting enough." Some years earlier, the same critic (Moore, 1962: viii-ix) argued, "The opening shots in the campaign to create a new African literature were fired, not by Africans, but by black writers from the Caribbean," adding, "This literary movement began in Cuba as long ago as 1927. . . ." In the event, it is as if there were no past.

The compartmentalization of oral tradition and the written word is only the most dramatic, and injurious, of the many separate categories in which literary and oral scholars work, and this not only in Africa. But in Africa, the problems seem most manifest—and grievous, for they have led to misconceptions about the verbal arts. The potentially most fruitful scholarly work will surely be in the relationship between oral and written materials; it has scarcely been touched. Another problem has been evident for years. Alan Merriam (1982: 2, 6-7) wrote of "The problem of the divisions between studies conducted by social scientists and those framed by humanists," and concluded that "if there is a neglect in Africa studies . . . it is the almost total neglect of the humanities." The challenge as he saw it was "the humanities and the social sciences in African studies and the bridges which must be built between them . . . " Social scientists and humanists have become "they" and "them" working in shielded surroundings, "they" considering the cultural and historical implications, "them," concentrating on the artistic. They have not yet been bonded; when they are, we may expect major revisions of current thought on oral history and art.

In the oral traditions, categories abound—tale, epic, heroic poem, riddle, proverb—and analysts have steadily missed their interconnections because of this. The division is also present in literature. "African language literatures," the least studied of all of Africa's verbal arts, are taken as individual literatures, regionally and linguistically demarcated; their inter-relationships are seldom glimpsed, not to mention their ties with the oral tradition and with "European language literatures." Those latter have themselves been atomized, into "African literature in English," "in French," and "in Portuguese." This fragmentation has become sanctified in universities where the separate literatures are taught in the relevant departments, so that there is not a chance that they will be seen as part of a monolithic African tradition. Moreover, the Sahara Desert contnues to act as a barrier, so that the oral and written arts of the north are only infrequently tied to those of the south.


The current state of the art, then, finds an oral tradition and a literature dissected into a number of sacred turfs, each generating and garrisoned by a body of scholars. One of the most dramatic conclusions that these fissures have led to is the extraordinary one that African literature had its beginnings in the 1950s. One critic wrote that "the vast bulk of modern African literature coincides with the dissolution of the British empire in Africa." It is a matter of little wonder, therefore, that scholars have looked to Europe for the mainsprings of the contemporary African novel, poem, and drama. It is only when one sees the continuum of the continent's verbal arts, when one grasps that the supposed wall between oral tradition and the written word is more apparent than real, when one discovers the ancient roots of the novel and the creative experimentation with poetry, that one becomes aware of the richness of this art tradition.

"The storyteller," wrote Walter Benjamin (1973: 87), "takes what he tells from experience—his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to the tale." History is constantly made theatrical; it is dissected, its images wrenched from normal environments and placed within new, frequently fabulous contexts. The poet establishes a predictable rhythm in his line, and succeeding lines are measured against it. The audience is thereby led to a new experience compounded of familiar images. That experience has warmth because it is constructed of images reflecting the known world; it has depth because, partaking of imagery passed on through an ancient tradition, it redefines those familiar images. The combination is myth; it has no existence outside the poem, but it shapes our perception of everything that we experience outside the poem. Songs, Plato wrote, "are really 'charms' for the soul. They are in fact deadly serious devices for producing concord" between reason and emotion (1975: 95) and, one might add, between history and poetry. The realistic images connect the poetic performance to the culture, but these are selective, and they are altered, reshaped. The performance is not simply a reflection of that culture; it is the essence of an experience of history and art. The work of art bridges the generations. Humanity, wrote C. S. Lewis (1938: 1), "does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privileges of always moving yet never leaving anything behind."

The figure of an oral poet, robed magnificently in a mantle fashioned of the skins of wild animals, moving about in a splendor of gesture and dance, his speech made fanciful by rhetorical flourishes and poetic nuance, suggests history made myth. "Aesthetic form," Herbert Marcuse (1972: 81) wrote, "means the total of qualities (harmony, rhythm, contrast) which make an oeuvre a self-contained whole, with a structure and order of its own (the style). By virtue of these qualities the work of art transforms the order prevailing in reality. This transformation is 'illusion,' but an illusion which gives the contents represented a meaning and a function different from those they have in the prevailing universe of discourse. Words, sounds, images, from another dimension 'bracket' and invalidate the right of the established reality for the sake of a reconciliation still to come." African oral and literary works have had as their central aims the work of transforming the order prevailing in reality. The oral and literary are a part of a single unbroken tradition; there are many echoes, strains, and dialogues connecting contemporary writers to the creators of "The Story of Sinuhe" and "The Report of Wenamun," to the Berber poets of al-Maghrib and the Hausa praise-singers, the Swahili epic performers, the storytellers of ancient Zimbabwe.


We critics have been effective in analyzing details of this great tradition, but we have consistently failed to see it in its fullness.

NOTES * Primary works will be reviewed in this essay; secondary works will be briefly surveyed in the notes.

1. For purposes of this paper, "literature" will be defined, as in the Oxford English Dictionary, as a "body of writings," and "literary" as "Pertaining to books and written compositions."

2. From an interview in my collection. 3. These are the words of //kabbo, quoted in Bleek and Lloyd (1911: 300-1). (The

quotation is translated there as follows: "//kabbo explains that a story is 'like the wind, it comes from a far-off quarter, and we feel it.'")

4. //kabbo, quoted in Bleek and Lloyd (1911: 300-1). (I have taken the liberty of polishing the translation.)

5. //kabbo, quoted in Bleek and Lloyd (1911: 302-3). (Again, I have polished the translation.)

6. For analyses of the linearity of African oral history, see Vansina (1961), and the work of two of his students, Henige (1974, 1982) and Miller (1980). Others who have written on this subject include de Certeau (1975), Seldon and Pappworth (1983), and Thompson (1978). Journals specializing in the subject include Oral History, Oral History Review and Newsletter, Journal of the Canadian Oral History Association, and History in Africa.

7. Archibald MacLeish, (1964: 16-17) tells of how a poem details "a relationship of man and the world," how poetry is "something which traffics in some way between world and man. But in what way? Lu Chi tells us. The poet is one who 'traps Heaven and Earth in the cage of form.'"

8. The literature on verbal performance remains thin, although there has recently been considerable interest in the subject. Fine (1984) summarizes the field. Tedlock (1972, 1983) has attempted to discover typographical equivalences for aspects of performance; Hymes (1981) has done the same. Seitel (1980) applied Tedlock's approaches to African oral tales, and Rothenberg (1968) recast poems from a variety of cultures with a similar approach. Alcheringa is a journal dedicated to attempts to transcribe oral performance, with phonograph discs and typographical equivalencies. See also: Bauman (1977); Blacking and W. Kealiinohomoku (1979), especially part four, "Case Studies in Music and Folklore from Asia and Central Europe" (141-201), and Kubik, "Pattern Perception and Recognition in African Music" (221-49); Cordwell (1979), especially chapters by Joshi and Borgatti.

9. Research on metaphor has been rich and adventurous. For a bibliography of work on the subject before 1971, see Shibbles (1971). Among the important works on metaphor are Wheelwright (1962), Turbayne (1970), Black (1962), and Ricoeur (1975). In 1978, Critical Inquiry devoted a volume to metaphor; the essays were subsequently published (Sacks, 1979). The journal Poetics Today devoted an issue to metaphor (1983: 4/2).

10. Dickey (1968). "It is a way," he goes on (1968: 2), "of causing the items of the real world to act upon each other, to recombine, to suffer and learn from the mysterious value systems, or value-making systems, of the individual, both in his socially conditioned and in his inmost, wild, and untutored mind."

11. Five recent and useful works on fantasy: Jackson (1981), Todorov (1970), Rabkin (1976), C. Schlobin (1982), and Apter (1982). There are two helpful bibliographies: Schlobin (1979) and Tymn, et al., (1979).

12. Bryant (1984: 13). Of particular interest here is Welsh (1978). For other general works on the riddle, see Taylor (1951), Sutton-Smith (1976), Scott (1969), Georges and Dundes (1963), Hamnett (1967), and the studies of Kongas Maranda (1971a, 1971b, 1971c, and 1976). Works specifically on the African riddle include Harries (1971),


Gowlett (1975, 1979), and Kallen and Eastman (1979). See also: Bascom (1949), Blacking (1961), Bynon (1966), Haring (1974), Layton (1976), Messenger (1960). The riddle is a much studied genre; it is possible to mention only a representative sampling of studies. Green and Pepicello (1978, 1979, 1980, 1984) have written a series of articles on the subject.

13. Taylor (1943: 130) concludes, "a true riddle consists of two descriptions of an object, one figurative and one literal, and confuses the hearer who endeavors to identify an object described in conflicting ways."

14. Petsch (1899) quoted in Georges and Dundes (1963). 15. Hadebe (1968: 33). The answer is: Isibhakabhaka, the sky. 16. Bynon (1966-1967: 170-71). Answers: needle and thread, pubic hair, a cow. 17. There are some useful collections of African oral lyric poetry, but much of it is in

translation only. See, for example, Trask (1966) and Doob (1966). For a more complete bibliography, see Scheub (1977).

18. Young (1931: 345). Here is a sampling of proverb research: Arewa (1970), Dundes and Arewa (1964), and Seitel (1969). See also: de Caro and McNeil (1970), Fischer and Yoshida (1968), and McKnight (1968). For a bibliography of collections of African proverbs, see Scheub (1977).

19. Attitudes of collectors of African oral narratives have not been studied, but they must have had an impact on the methods adopted in making the collections. One thinks, for example, of the missionary, G. Reginald Veel, working for the Propagation of the Gospel in Kokstad in South Africa; he "omitted from the stories parts which would be offensive according to our standards, but are allowable as a matter of course among primitive folk" (1930: 103-4). George McCall Theal, the South African historian, had a unique method of collection: "Most of [the tales] have been obtained from at least ten or twelve individuals residing in different parts of the country, and they have all undergone a thorough revision by a circle of natives." Considering the apparent looseness of his transcription of the texts, his attitude seems important: "Most Kaffir tales are destitute of moral teaching from our point of view." And when a commoner woman in a tales marries a prince, he reveals his Victorian hauteur: "What recommendation," he wonders, "has the girl in this story to the favor of the young chief?" (1882: vii-ix, 204). Dorothea Bleek, in a volume of tales collected by her father, W. H. I. Bleek, and her aunt, Lucy C. Lloyd, notes that "Some [tales] I have shortened by leaving out wearisome repetition . . ." (1923: v), not realizing that by so doing she was tampering with the very heart of the San stories. Henry Callaway did what he could with collection techniques of the mid-nineteenth century, and if his method destroyed the spontaneity of the tale and robbed it of its audience, it was nevertheless an exacting technique, and the result is a selection of tales that is exceptional, including narratives performed by the redoubtable Lydia umkaSethemba, whose "Umxakaza-wakogingqwayo" remains one of the finest African tales recorded (1868: 181-217). But Callaway was also a child of his times: "In reflecting on the tales of the Zulus the brief has been irresistibly fixed upon my mind," he wrote, "that they point out very clearly that the Zulus are a degenerated people; that they are not now in the condition intellectually or physically in which they were during 'the legend-producing period' of their existence; but have sunk from a higher state" (1868, from the "Preface," unpaged). Callaway was caught in the currents of nineteenth century European folklore ideology regarding the myth-producing era and the remnant theories of Edward Burnett Tylor (1871) and Max Miiller (1868, 1870, 1875), the latter of whom was incredulous: "the mere fact that the Zulus possess nursery tales is curious, because nursery tales . . . generally point back to a distant civilization, or at least to a long-continued national growth (1868: II, 212). Callaway was himself wary; Miiller quotes him as saying, "It has been no easy matter to drag out the . . . tales; and it is evident that many of them are but fragments of some more perfect narration" (1868: II, 214). Callaway's comments are only the most dramatic evidence of the environment under which African tales were gathered in the nineteenth century. In 1861, at the


request of George Grey, then Cape Governor, Bleek wrote to missionaries in southern Africa, asking them to make collections of oral materials. In a letter to Charles Brownlee, Secretary of Native Affairs, he wrote in 1875, "if we look around us in South Africa to see what has thus been done to preserve the original mental products of its highly interesting indigenous races, how little do we find accomplished?" He urged that "the collection of the folk-lore of the nations among whom they [the missionaries] are respectively living . . . must be undertaken at once, or it will be too late, if we want to retain pictures of the native mind in its national originality" (1875: 2).

Leo Frobenius went to Africa twelve times between 1904 and 1935, and he collected, among other materials, oral narratives from a range of societies throughout the continent. Many of these tales were published in Das Schwarze Dekameron (1910), and, between 1921 and 1928, he produced twelve volumes of African oral narratives, translated into German, including Damonen des Sudan (1924), Dichten und Denken im Sudan (1925), Dicht-kunst der Kassaiden (1928), Die Atlantische Gotterlehre (1926), Erzahlungen aus dem West-Sudan (1922), Marchen aus Kordofan (1923), Spielmannsgeschichten der Sahal (1921). Frobenius was a leader of the "Historical-Cultural School"of European folklore methodology, with Friedrich Ratzel, a German geographer and ethnographer (he attempted to apply biological laws to social relations, explaining every phenomenon by the "innate" capacities of the race); Fritz Graebner, a German ethnographer and the head of the historical-cultural school; and Wilhelm Schmidt, an Austrian ethnographer and linguist (Cocchiara, 1952, 1971). Frobenius was one of the originators of Kulturkreis, regarding culture as an individual organism that develops according to its own biological laws; people, he believed, are not creators, only bearers of culture, which develops independently of them (Cocchiara, 1981: 617, 645). Frobenius occupies a unique place in African intellectual history; Leopold Sedar Senghor (1973: vii-xiii) has observed, "no one did more than Frobenius to reveal Africa to the world and the Africans to themselves." He goes on, "I had started to attend courses at the Paris Institute of Ethnology and at the Practical School of Advanced Studies. So I was intellectually on familiar terms with the greatest Africanists and above all the ethnologists and linguists. But suddenly, like a thunderclap—Frobenius! All the history and pre-history of Africa were illuminated, to their very depths. And we still carry that mark of the master in our minds and spirits, like a form of tattooing carried out in the initiation ceremonies in the sacred grove." He adds, "Leo Frobenius was the one, above all others, who shed light for us on concepts such as emotion, art, myth, Eurafrica," and concludes, "Frobenius helped us to leave the ghetto of the first phase of Negritude, with which we had been all too content. . . . I have been saying it for decades: the independence of the mind is an indispensable condition of all other independence. And it was Leo Frobenius who helped us to achieve it." S. A. Akintoye (1979: 158), Director of the Institute of African Studies of the University of Ife, in a speech in 1975 agreed with Senghor: "it was to Leo Frobenius that we owe the first truthful reporting of this [Ife] civilisation to the world at large."

The early collections of oral narratives were often means to aid in the study and learning of African languages. In the years before 1870, most of the collectors were missionaries: Bleek, Thomas J. Bowen, Callaway, Gottlieb Christaller, Karl Hugo Hahn, Hans Nikolaus Rijs, J. B. Schlegel, Christian Friedrich Schlenker, and Jakob Friedrich Schon. Sigismund Wilhelm Koelle (1854), a German missionary and linguist, published a collection of Kanuri tales, suggesting that the volume (1854: vi) "introduces the reader, to some extent, into the inward world of Negro mind arid Negro thoughts, and this is a circumstance of paramount importance, as long as there are any who either flatly negative the question, or, at least, consider it still open, 'whether the Negroes are a genuine portion of mankind or not.'" In South Africa, writers such as Azariele Sekese (1893) became antiquarians, and made collections of narratives. These were to culminate in such anthologies as those of Z. D. Mangoaela


(1921), Henry Masila Ndawo (1920), Garvey Nkonki (n.d.), and C. L. Sibusiso Nyembezi(1958).

In 1896, August Seidel's Geschichten und Lleder der Afrikaner was published. He wrote (1896: 1), "Ein wilder Afrikaner! Ein Schwarzes Tier! Er sollte denken! Er sollte fuhlen! Seinge phantasie sich als schopferisch erweisen! Ya, mehr noch, et sollte Sinn und Ferstandnis haben fur poetische Formen, fur Rythmus und Reim! Es scheint ganz underkbar, und doch ist es so."

The French were also avid and systematic collectors. Rene Basset (he published a number of Arabic tales, for example, in "Contes et legendes arabes," Revue des traditions populaires, from 1888 to 1919), Eugene Casalis (1841), and Blaise Cendrars (1920) were among them. Earlier, Henri Gregoire published a volume in which, among other subjects, he wrote of griots (1808: 185-86): "Les negres ont les lews nommes griots qui vont ausssi chez les rois faire ce qu'on fait dans toutes les cows, louer et mentir avec esprit. Lews femms, les griots, font a peu pres le metier des almees en Egypte, des bayaderes dan ITnde: C'est un trait de conformite de plus avec les femmes voyageueses des troubadours, mais ces trouveres, ces Minnsinger, ces minstrels furent les devanciers de Malherbe, Corneille, Racine, Shakespeare, Pope, Gesne, Klopstock, etc." Edouard Jacottet published two excellent collections of Sotho oral tales (1895, 1908a). In 1908, he published an English translation of Sotho narratives, The Treasury of Basuto Lore: "I have taken great care," he wrote (1908b: xxii), "to reproduce [the tales] exactly in the form they were dictated to me. . . ." L'Abbe Boilat produced Esquisses senegalaises (1853), and L. J. B. Berenger-Feraud's collections of tales appeared in Les peuplades de la Senegambie (1885) and Receuil de Contes Populaires de la Senegambie (1885), with a comment on "L'origine des Laobes et des Griots." In 1882, J. Riviere produced Receuil de Contes Populaires de la Kabylie du Djurdjura, containing tales collected among the Kabyle. Another missionary who collected tales was Heli Chatelain; he worked in Angola mong the Ovimbundu. His Folk-Tales of Angola was published in 1894. Much later, his Contos populares de Angola (1894) was printed. "In Africa," he wrote, "where there are no facilities for intimacy with the natives, and where there is no written literature, the only way to get at the character, the moral and intellectual make-up, of the races and tribes, is to make a thorough study of their social and religious institutions, and of their unwritten, oral literature, that is of their folklore" (1894: 16). The important storyteller in his collection is Jelemia dia Sabatelu, whose "Sudika-Mbambi" (Chatelain, 1964: 85-97) is among the finest tales in the volume.

Henri Junod's Les chantes et les contes des Ba-Ronga de la bate de Delagoa was published in 1897: "C'est la le plaisir litteraire des peuples primitifs, leur theatre et lew livre, et les Ba-Ronga non seulement sont sensibles a ce divertissement intellectuel: Us Taiment avec passion . . . ," he wrote. Fang tales were collected by Henri Trilles (1898). "Ce folklore" he observed, "s'est meme conserve dans chaque tribu avec une nettete et une precision qui seraient de nature a surprendre ceux qui ignorent avec quelle force et quelle persistance se perpetuent dans le peuple, et surtout dans les peuples primitifs, les legendes des Aieux, les legendes contees le soir'aux petits enfants attentifs par les vieux grand'peres' a la tete chauve! Les fees et les ogres du pays noir sont aussi immortels que les ogres et les fees du pays bland" (1909: 945-46).

But in France, it was Francois-Victor Equilbecq who was considered the pioneer of research into African oral traditions. "Un administrateur aujowd'hui oublie va etablir un bilan et une synthese, deftnir une veritable methodologie de la litterature orale," writes Cornevin (1976: 58). Equilbecq travelled in Senegal, Guinea, Zaire, Mali, collecting oral materials. His publications include Contes populaires d'Afrique occidentale (1972) and a three-volume work, Essai sur la litterature merveilleuse des Noirs, suivi de contes indigenes de I'Ouest Africain francais (1913-1916). "[I] definit une veritable methodologie de la collecte et propose une classification sur laquelle nous reviendrons plus loin. Certains auteurs avaient certes deja etudie les traditions orales africaines. Mais aucun n'avait eu une vision d'ensemble aussi remarquable des


problemes" (Cornevin, 1976: 62). In more recent times, French scholars have continued the work of collecting

African oral materials, and have maintained the high standards set by their earlier counterparts. Deborah Lifschitz and Genevieve Calame-Griaule did work among the Dogon. Lifschitz's findings were published in Revue de Folklore francaise et de Folklore colonial (1936, 1938); Calame-Griaule's Ethnologie et langage: la parole chez les Dogons (1965) is, in part, a study of Dogon myth. Calame-Griaule was a member of the Association des Classiques africaines, established in 1963 by Pierre-Francis Lacroix and Eric de Dampierre. Its publishing arm is Classiques africaines, first under the imprint of Julliard, later of Armand Colin, and consistently the most reliable and most effective producer of African oral texts (and, in certain cases, phonographic discs that accompany the texts). The series began in 1963 with Poetes Nzakara, edited by de Dampierre. Among the publications in this series are Pierre-Francis Lacroix, ed., Poesie peule de I'Adamawa (1965); Alfa Ibrahim Sow, ed., La Femme, la Vache, la Foi; Ecrivains et poetes du Fouta-Djalon (1966); and Christiane Seydou, ed., La geste de Ham-Bodedio ou Hama le Rouge (1976).

There were also collections from Zaire, Rwanda, and Burundi. J.-M. Jadot, president of the Association des Ecrivains et Artistes coloniaux en Belgique, was an early collector (1959), along with C. Joset and L. Lejeune, and Olivier de Bouveignes (1935), who commented on oral materials from Zaire: "Leur sensibilite est extremement vive, elle les guide plus souvent que la raison et le jugement, mais elle les sert bien souvent pour en faire des poetes, d'une fraiche et vivante originalite. . . ." The Musee royal de l'Afrique centrale, Tervuren, dedicated itself to the preservation of the oral arts of central Africa, and COPAMI was created in 1935 for this purpose. In 1952, the Centre de recherches de l'Institut pour la recherche scientifique en Afrique centrale was formed; scholars associated with this organization include Th. Kamanzi and Andre Coupez, who edited Recits historiques rwanda (1962). Other members include A. E. Meeuseen and Jan Vansina (then Chef du Centre d'Astrida, Vansina produced La legende du passe, Traditions orales du Burundi [1972]).

In 1964, the United Nations decided to prepare a General History of Africa. As a part of this project, preliminary meetings were held in Abidjan, Niamey, and Ouagadougou, and, in 1968, a Centre regional de documentation pour la tradition orale (C.R.D.T.O.) was established in Niamey. This center was to carry out regional research on oral traditions, and it would work primarily in Cameroun, Chad, Benin, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Upper Volta, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo. A liaison bulletin is published, research fellowships are awarded to the national institutes of the member states, individual research workers are assisted, technical training courses are organized, and items receive large distribution in Africa and elsewhere in Langues africaines and Cultures africaines series. Dooulde Laye discusses "problematique et methodologie des sources de I'histoire africaine" in La tradition orale (1972). Among other excellent publications of this Centre are Katsina, Traditions Historiques des Katsinaawaa apres la Jihad, by Issaka Danjoussou (n.d.); Histoire du Dawra, by Makada Ibira de Kantche (1970); and Receuil des Traditions Orales des Mandinques de Gambie et de Cassamance, by Sekene-Mody Cissoko and Kaoussou Samou (1974).

Schools of analysis have been equally active if not as successful. Works of synthesis have been attempted by Ruth Finnegan (1970) and Isidore Okpewho (1979, 1983). The structuralist method has not been very effective in the analysis of African oral narrative. Sunday Anozie has made a number of interesting efforts (see his "Structuralism in Poetry and Methodology," for example [1972]), and Luc de Heusch is now in the process of making a study, structuralist in orientation, of central African oral tradition, Mythes et rites bantous. Two volumes have been completed (1972, 1982). (For Vansina's tempered assessment, see "Is Elegance Proof? Structuralism and African History" [1983].) In its analytical approach, the work is clearly derivative of Claude Levi-Strauss's four volume study, Mythologiques (1964, 1966, 1968, 1971). A


French group composed of Genevieve Calame-Griaule, Veronika Gorog-Karady, Suzanne Plaitel, Diana Rey-Hulman, and Christiane Seydou has formed the Research Group on Oral Literature of the French Centre national de la recherche scientifique. Members of the group "draw meaning by connecting the interpretation of tale variants to relevant sociocultural and psychomental conditions." This essentially structuralist-oriented ensemble has been the focus of considerable interest in the United States (see Journal of Folklore Research, 20, 2/3 [1983], 145-246, and Research in African Literatures, 15 [1984], 161-288; the quotation is from the Journal of Folklore Research, p. 147; see also Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines, 8, 30 [1968]). Tale type and motif indexing have been engaged in by Erastus Ojo Arewa (1966), Hortense Esther Braden (1926), Kenneth W. Clarke (1958), and Winifred Lambrecht (1967). Some scholars have been more adventurous. In See So That We May See (1980), a volume containing Haya narratives, Peter Seitel adapts the method's of Dennis Tedlock (1972, 1983) to African materials. Donald Cosentino juggles intellectual system with artistic considerations in Defiant Maids and Stubborn Farmers (1982), and Deborah Foster has effectively demonstrated a useful means of expressing gesture in her analyses of Swahili oral performance (1984). Rober Cancel has experimented with videotapes of Tabwa oral narrative presentation.

20. Two of the more helpful articles on heroic poetry are Mafeje (1967) and M. G. Smith (1957). See also: Morris (1964), Babalola (1966), Bokako (1938), Vilakazi (1945), Mangoaela (1921), Schapera (1965), Rubusana (1911), Rycroft (1962), Lekgothoane (1938), Moloto (1970), Fuze (1922), Sekese (1893), Nyembezi (1948), Stuart (1924a, 1924b, 1925, 1926, 1929), Gunner (1976, 1979, 1982), and Kunene (1971).

21. Damane and Sanders (1974). Some of the poems in the collection of Z. D. Mangoaela (1921), say these editors (1974: 38), "may fairly be described as melanges in which the narrative element has almost disappeared, and in which it is often impossible to see any connecting link between one stanza and the next. When a chiefs lithoko consists of several such melanges one can only assume that each poem was recorded on a separate occasion, for it is difficult to see why a continuous recitation should have been divided up in such a way."

22. The latter is most evident in the contemporary South African panegyric tradition. See Mafeje (1967).

23. Scheub, "Oral Poetry and History," forthcoming in New Literary History. 24. Mangoaela (1921: 117). My translation. 25. From a poem in my collection. 26. Innes (1974). See also Niane (1960). Daniel P. Biebuyck's work and that of Isidore

Okpewho (1979) are in the forefront of studies of the African epic. The study of epic generally, African and non-African, is surprisingly lacking in boldness, considering the enormous amount of epic material available for analysis. See Biebuyck's introductions to The Mwindo Epic (1969) and Hero and Chief (1978b), and his essay, "The African Heroic Epic" (1978b). Okpewho's study is placed largely within a Western framework as far as methodology is concerned. See also: Becker (1939), Ojobolo (1977), Camara (1974). See also: Johnson (1980), and Bird (1972).

27. She-Karisj Candi Rureke (in Biebuyck, 1969). Most references in this paper are to this first published version of the epic. See also: Biebuyck (1978: 6), which contains three additional versions of the epic, plus summaries and fragments. Biebuyck, in this latter work, notes, "The Nyanga epics contain few direct historical statements, but indirectly, and in symbolic form, they tell much about Nyanga history" (p. 41). He adds, "The early hero-chiefs, Mwindo and Kabutwakenda, are listed neither among the primordial ancestors of the Nyanga nor among the immediate ancestors of the chiefs. . . . The closest historical reference to the Mwindo figure . . . a personage who holds the position of commander in chief of the army and whose title is Muhindo (Hunde pronunciation of Mwindo). No such title exists among the Nyanga, and we can only speculate as to whether or not the Nyanga might originally have celebrated the feats of such a warrior lord in the epics" (p. 43).


28. The Liongo epic exists in published form in fragments, and there are various sources containing them. See, for example, Steere (1870: 438-69), Werner (1933: 145-54), Harries (1962: 146 et seq.), and Knappert (1979: 66-101).

29. These comments refer to the She-Karjsi Candi Rureke version of the Mwindo epic (i.e., the first published version, Biebuyck [1969]).

30. See, for example, "Usikulumi-kathlokothloko" and "Uzembeni; or, Usikulumi's Courtship" (Callaway, 1868: 41-54); and Zenani (1972).

31. At the same time, the epic hero is based on the tale character: it is the characters who surround him, and their functions, their ties with him, that change.

32. See the Legba tales in Herskovits and Herskovits (1958: 123-69). 33. See, for example, Terry Eagleton's recent Literary Theory; An Introduction (1983), in

which almost no attention is paid to the oral tradition (with the exception of a passing reference to Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale [1968] on page 104).

34. Lord (1960: 129). See: Benson (1966) for a discussion of scribes who compose "for an audience of readers." See also: Curschmann (1967) for a discussion of "transitional texts"; and Zwettler (1978) for an analysis of Arabic oral forms.

35. Ong (1982). See also: Bekker-Nielson, et al. (1977), Gandz (1939), Ong (1967, 1971), Peabody (1975), Rao (1982), Stock (1983), Yates (1966), and Goody (1968, 1977).

36. Quoted in White (1963: 151). There is a considerable literature on this subject. Most useful and accessible is the three volume work of Lichtheim (1973, 1976, 1980). Also of interest are Simpson (1972), Frankfort, et al. (1954), Glanville (1942), W. S. Smith (1958), Wilson (1951a, 1951b), Rundle Clark (1959), Breasted (1912), Budge (1895, 1904). See also: Barucq and Daumas (1980), Breasted (1906), Bresciani (1969), Brunner (1966), Brunner-Traut (1963), Burkard (1977), Culley (1976), Diop (1967), Erman (1923), Fox (1985), Guglielmi (1973), B. Lewis (1948), Maspero (1967), Pirenne (1961, 1962, 1963), Posener (1971), Pritchard (1955), and Rollig (1978).

37. Modern literature in the West covers a period of approximately six hundred years; Old Testament literature, the composition of all of it, falls within a thousand year period, in the last millennium B.C.; the literatures of Egypt and Babylon cover three thousand years, of which two thousand fall before the beginnings of the Old Testament. (Peet, 1931: 11.)

38. Posener (1959: 225-27). See also White (1963). 39. Faulkner (1924). See also Lichtheim (1973: 36-38). 40. Tomb autobiographies are the first form of prose literature in the Egyptian literary

tradition—the first form, that is, that has survived. 41. The story was composed not long after 2000 B.C., and was still popular five hundred

years later. Alan Henderson Gardiner praised the work: "this story is one of those world-masterpieces of literary skill which stand out for all time as the expression of some side of universal human experience of feeling. . . . [F]or us too the Story of Sinuhe is, and must remain, a classic. It is a classic because it marks a definite stage in the history of the world's literature; and . . . because it displays with inimitable directness the mixed naivete and subtlety of the old Egyptian character, its directness of vision, its pomposity, its reverence and its humour . . . " (from Notes on the Story of Sinuhe [Paris, 1916: 164-65], quoted in Peet; 1931: 34-35). Peet (1931: 35) called it "the most Egyptian of all the stories," noting that "the story is a psychological study."

42. Ward (1965: 111-12). Ward argues that the tale of Sinuhe is "At the summit of Egyptian story-telling . . . which for excitement, adventure, human interest and composition is paralleled by no other Egyptian work. It truly deserves a place among the 'great books' of world literature."

43. The tale is similar to the sailor tale of the Thousand and One Nights. 44. See Gerhardt (1963). See also Abbott (1949) and Macdonald (1924). 45. In fact, the Thousand and One Nights owes much to the Egyptian oral and literary

traditions. "The Merchant Ali from Cairo," "Ala ed-Din," or "Aladdin et la lampe merveilleuse," which many thought the collector, Antoine Galland, had made up, and which was to become one of the most popular tales in the world, is of Egyptian origin,


as are "Jaudar and His Brothers" and "Ma'ruf the Cobbler" (Gerhardt, 1963: 318-37). 46. Ward (1965: 105). In this story, Ward observes, "lie many basic emotions of ordinary

people—fear of the unknown, sympathy for another's problems, the security of a home and the heartache that follows its loss. There are pathos and despair, there is hope. There is humour as well. . . . Above all, there is deep understanding of people in trouble."

47. Michael Fox kindly allowed me to read the text of his forthcoming book in proofs (1985). This translation is from that volume.

48. Also called "The Tale of the Two Brothers," in Simpson (1972: 92-107). 49. Another hybrid form developed during this period, indicating that the oral and literary

flexibility continued to attract writers, was an "Instruction" by Amennakhte, a form of literary history that recalls the great writers of former times.

50. By the fifth century A.D., the Coptic language had replaced Demotic and become the national cultural language of Egypt, under Roman rule and under the Byzantine rule that followed it. Earlier, in the first half of the fourth century A.D., King Azana of Ethiopia (320-340) converted to Christianity, and in the fifth century, the Ethiopian church embraced the monophysite doctrine, which became the central tenet of the Coptic Church, and which was revealed in the written arts, expressed in Ge'ez, the official language of Ethiopia. See Gerard (1971: 271-76; 1981: 7-23).

51. I Kings 4:30 to 5:10. 52. Al-Tayyib (1983: 36). It is difficult to provide an adequate survey of the great amount

of material on Arabic and Islamic literature. See: cAbdallah ibn Muhammad (1963), Deeb (1979), Ahlwardt (1856), Arberry (1957), Bivar and Hiskett (1962), Blachere (1952-1966), Castro (1954), Gibb (1926), Gidley (1975), Hillelson (1920), Hiskett (1964, 1965, 1969, 1975), Kezilahabi (1973), Knappert (1967, 1968, 1969, 1971, 1979), Lyall (1914a, 1914b, 1917-18, 1930), Mkelle (1976), Mulokozi (1975), Nicholson (1907), Noldeke (1864), Nykl (1946), Palmer (1967), Prietz (1931), Sayyid Andallah bin Ali bin Nasir (1972), Skinner (1977), von Grunebaum (1953, especially chapter eight: "Self-Expression: Literature and History"; 1955, especially chapter five: "The Spirit of Islam as Shown in Its Literature,"), and Whiteley (1969). See also: Cowell (1976), Arberry (1967), and Zwettler (1978).

53. ruwah is the plural of r&m. 54. Lyall (1930: xv). The stories of scribes with remarkable abilities of memory and

recitation are known in a number of societies. Among the Telegu in India, according to V. Narayana Rao (in a paper presented at the conference, "In Search of Terminology," Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore, 1982, and in private communications), "The poet who is dictating still works in conditions similar to the oral singer. He has to compose as he utters the poem. He does not have the benefit of thinking with the aid of pen and paper." The poet, says Rao, "said" his poem to the scribe, "who was the specialist in writing on palm leaf. Not all people who read could write." Rao tells the story of the scribe (vrayasakadu), "a specially trained person about whom many stories are told in Telegu. Legends have it that Ganapati, the elephant god, was the scribe of Vyasa, the legendary author of Mahabharata. Gurunatha, another legendary scribe, wrote while the poet, Tikkanna, dictated. The poet made a vow that he would not keep the scribe waiting; he would not fumble for a word; if, for any reason, he fumbled he would cut his own tongue out. A difficult situation came up, and the poet did fumble, saying, 'Emi ceptudunu Gurunatha,'' 'I don't know what to say, Gurunatha,' and he promptly proceeded to cut off his tongue. But Gurunatha, the scribe, wrote that line down, 'Emi ceptudunu Gurunatha,' and it fitted very well into the verse and the context, and he said that it was perfect. It meant, 'What can I say, Lord of the Kuru family?' It turned out that the poet's words of apology to the scribe metrically and semantically fit the poem that he was creating: the flow is as important as anything else in the oral tradition, and the point of the legend was that the literary tradition was here obeying the conventions established by the oral tradition and adapting to them." (Tikkanna was the first Telegu poet to break with the oral tradition.


He was a famed literary poet, and did not follow the standards set up by the oral tradition. Because of this, he was not accepted by many audiences. Rao thinks that this legend was developed to make Tikkanna acceptable to the large audiences that retained the conventions of the oral tradition.)

55. See Zwettler (1978: 75-76), for a discussion of the rajaz meter. 56. For a discussion and analysis of Arabic poetry of this period, see Nykl (1946). 57. See Hiskett (1975: 1-11) for a brief discussion of the oral verse tradition among the

Hausa. See also Gidley (1975) and, especially, M. G. Smith (1957). See Hiskett (1975: 12-20). See Hiskett (1975: 21-26). Katari, son of al-Fujacah of Mazin, in Lyall (1930: 17). Ibn cAbd Rabbihi, in Nykl (1946: 42). See Cowell (1976) for a detailed study of this poet's work.

62. In Hiskett (1975: 29-30). Compare these poems, in turn, with this non-Islamic poem by a Xhosa, Magagamela Koko, from South Africa:

The story is painful: to begin by being wealthy, wealthy in one's youth, and then, when you are grey, as old as I, to be shorn, to have one's feathers shorn, You recall, then, what once you were, you look at yourself, and see that you had been eight and now, suddenly, you are seven. And you're unable to understand what it means on this earth. It is painful to start life with wealth, then, when physical strength ebbs, to lose everything: strength leaves you, your stock diminishes, you wonder who will care for you.

(From my collection.) 63. See Monroe (1972) and Zwettler (1978). 64. Examples of Hausa lyric poetry can be found in Prietze (1931). Here is an example,

with English translation by Neil Skinner:

Ke yarinya an kire ki! Kadan na ga idonki, Ba ni hankalina, In rik~a rawan jiki, In rik~a tunaninki Ina sonki, ba ki sona. Ubanki ya hana ni. Sai na je wurin sarki. Ni yanzu za ni hau in tafi yah, In mutu saboda ke.

Hey, girl, listen! When I see your face, I lose control of my senses, I tremble and tremble


And think and think of you. I love you but you do not love me. Your father denies you to me. I must go to the sarki. Now I must go off to war, To die because of you.

For contemporary literary lyrics, see, for example, Sa'id (1982). 65. ii, p. 335; quoted in and tr., Lyall (1917-1918: 370). 66. Quoted in Lyall (1917-1918: 372), from the al-Mufaddaliyat, ii, 31, and ii, 61. 67. Liongo Fumo, "The Bow Song," in Knappert (1979: 75). 68. Shehe Muhiuddini, "Prayer for Rain," in Knappert (1979: 199). 69. In a key scene in a Xhosa tale, for example, a destructive father sends' a maliciously

worded letter to his daughter at the same time that the daughter's in-laws send a misleading letter to their son who is working in a distant town. (My collection.)

70. See, for example, Sinxo's uNomsa (1922), Umfundisi waseMthuqwasi (1927), and Umzali Wolahleko (1939).

71. For example: TShelang Gape (1974a), TSa Ka Mafuri (1974b), and Letiofalela (1972). 72. Dhlomo has written a series of historical novels, including uShaka (1937), uMpande

kaSenzangakhona (1938), and uCetshwayo (1952). 73. Afigbo (1966). See also Ezuma (1965). 74. Various movements, literary and political, have developed for this purpose, including

nigritude. This is a sampling of the broad range of works on negritude: Cornevin (1976), Chevrier (1984), Ba (1973), Markovitz (1969), Arnold (1981), Adotevi (1972), Aguessy (1971), Bastide (1961), Blair (1976), Damas (1965), Diakhate (1965), Gerard (1964), Irele (1964, 1965), Kesteloot (1963), Melone (1962), Jean-Paul Sartre in Senghor (1948), Simon (1963), Kesteloot and Kotchy (1973), Hale (1974), and Cesaire (1971). The writings of Leopold Sedar Senghor are central to the literature of negritude; these include Poemes (1964), and a number of articles on the subject (see the bibliography in Markovitz, 1969: 262-71).

75. See, for example: Kusadikika nchi iliyo angani (1951). 76. This is not the case with all African drama, of course. See, for example, lyi-Eweka

(1979), Beik (1984). See also Toye (1976), Etherton (1982), Banham and Wake (1976), Cornevin (1970), Gibbs (1980), Jones (1976), Ogunba and Irele (1978), Osofisan (1973), Traore (1958), and Schipper (1982).

77. See also Mazi Mbonu Ojike, My Africa, and The Original History of Arondizuogu from 1635-1960, both cited in Afigbo (1966: 222, 223).

78. For another view of the relationship between the two novels, see Emenyonu (1978). 79. Salih (1969). The critical and analytical material on African literature is vast, and it is

possible only to indicate its range here. A number of journals are devoted to a study of African literary works, most significantly Presence Africaine and Research in African Literatures; these two, and, for the time of its run, Presence Francophone, are the journals of record for the field. Other journals: Abbia, Africa (Lisboa), African Literature Association Newsletter, L'Afrique Litteraire et Artisique, Afro-Asian Theatre Newsletter, Ba Shiru, Black Orpheus, Books for Africa, The Classic, The Conch, Drum, Ghala, Izwi, Jewel of Africa, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Journal of the New African Literature, Kiabara, Kiswahili, Limi, Mazwazo, New African, The New Classic, New Writing from Zambia, Odi, Odu, Oduma, Okike, Okyeame, Sketsh, Staffrider, Studies in Black Literature, Transition. (A number of these journals have suspended publication.) Journals in which occasional articles on African literature and oral tradition have appeared include: Africa (London), African Affairs Quarterly, African Forum, African Statesman, African Studies Review, Africa Quarterly, Africa Quarterly, Africa Report, Afrika und Ubersee, L'Afrique Actuelle, Afriscope, Ambiguous Africa/Afrique, Black Images, Black World, Books Abroad/World Literature Today, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Busara, Cahiers Cesairiens, Cahier d'Etudes Africaines, Caribbean Quarterly, Colloque sur I'Art Negre, East Africa


Journal, East West Review, Freedomways, Ghana Cultural Review, Index on Censorship, Insight (Lagos), Jeune Afrique, Journal of American Folklore, Journal of Modern African Studies, Kano Studies, Kunapipi, Lotus, New Africa, Nimrod, Nigeria Magazine, Nigerian Opinion, Phylon, Uganda Journal, West Africa.

There are many studies of African literature. Some of the French works have already been mentioned (see note 74). Some of the most provocative writing on African literature has been by the creative writers themselves, especially Chinua Achebe (Morning Yet on Creation Day, for example [1975]), Wole Soyinka (Myth, Literature and the African World [1976]), and Ngugi wa Thiong'o (Writers in Politics [1981]). Some contemporary critics have developed political positions on literary topics, most notably Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, and Ihechukwe Madubuike (Towards the Decolonization of African Literature, Vol. 1, African Fiction and Poetry and Their Critics [1983]), but most criticism and analysis follows the pattern established by Gerald Moore (in Seven African Writers [1962]) and Judith Illsley Gleason (This Africa; Novels by West Africans in English and French [1965]), which emphasizes summaries of novels, followed by theme analyses which are usually political or cultural. A sampling follows: Beier (1967), Burness (n.d.), Cartey (1969), Cook (1977), Dathorne (1975), Gakwandi (1977), Irele (1981), Jahn (1968), JanMohamed (1983), King (1971), Larson (1972), Lawson (1982), Lindfors (1976), Mutiso (1974), Ngara (1982), Nyamndi (1982), Obiechina (1973, 1975), Ogungbesan (1979), Olney (1973), E. Palmer (1979), Peters (1978), Pieterse and Munro (1969), Ramsaran (1965), Roscoe (1971), Shelton (1968), Taiwo (1967), Wauthier (1964), Wren (1980), and Wright (1973). Of the many theses and dissertations on African literature, there are these: Graham-White (1969), Soile (1972), and Umeasiegbu (1975). The novel has been studied more completely than other literary forms. Egudu has written on poetry (1977, 1978). See also Goodwin (1982). Portuguese-language literature has been studied by Cesar (1967), Burness (1977, 1981), Hamilton (1975), Ervedosa (1963), Moser (169), Andrade (1962), and others. A number of interviews with African authors have been published, including Killam (1973) and Pieterse and Duerden (1972). Bibliographical works have appeared, most notably Jahn (1965) and subsequent revisions. Other bibliographical materials include Zell, et al. (1983), Lindfors (1979), and Kom (1983).

80. For works analyzing European perceptions of Africa, see Curtin (1964), Fairchild (1961), Friedman (1981), Gilman (1982), Hammond and Jablow (1970), Milbury-Steen (1981), Raskin (1971), Rose (1976), Sandison (1967), Said (1978); Schneider (1982), Snowden (1983), Street (1975), Tokson (1982), and Allen (1979).

81. The list is lengthy, and also includes Evelyn Waugh, John Updike, Simenon, Joyce Cary, and William Boyd.

82. (1983). 83. There was a period of one hundred years during which Hispanic writers in the

Americas were slavishly dependent on European and North American literary models. It was only when these writers became reassured about their own cultural and historical pasts that the literary "boom" being celebrated today was possible. The movement of influence has been reversed: North American literature, grown increasingly insular, narrow, intellectually labored and imaginatively vacuous, has much to learn from the originality and emotional breadth of Latin American literature.

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Documents

A REVIEW OF AFRICAN ORAL TRADITIONS AND ......4 AFRICAN STUDIES REVIEW intense feelings. Always in motion, myth is liberating, but its leap into the unknown is, in the oral tradition,