By: Edwin Adjei, University of Ghana – Legon
All societies have literature. Literature is a society’s creation about its environment to satisfy the various needs and aspirations of the people in it. For example, literature includes entertainment through work songs, love songs, folk tales, lullabies; and it helps us mourn (dirges), and find role models to praise (legends and epics). Literature abounds in African societies so much that it is almost impossible to imagine them without it: one cannot take even a few steps without hearing a story being told, a proverb being used, a lullaby being sung, a story book being read, work play songs being sung, or riddles being bandied about. Today, African literature is finally becoming recognized for its contributions in the academy after many years of controversy over its existence, what it should be called and the mode of transmission. These controversies demonstrate the colonialist politics and assumptions that prevented the appreciation and full acceptance of African literature by outsiders for far too many years.
The bond between literature and African societies is an unbreakable one in both its oral and (increasingly) written forms. As Immaculate Kizza notes, “In addition to its entertainment value, African oral literature is also an encyclopedia of the various peoples’ histories, cultural experiences, traditions and values; a record of their feelings, attitudes, and responses to their experiences and environment; and also, a tool for preserving and disseminating that knowledge both internally and globally.”
For example, according to Kwame Gyekye: “Folktales are, in the traditional setting, an effective way of inculcating virtues in children. Also, many of the maxims dealing with practical aspects of life appropriate to children such as respect for elders and obligations to blood relatives are used to show children the acceptable standards of social behavior.” Another value of literature is noted by Esi Sutherland-Addy who writes:
“Women in their own spaces employ artistic means to comment upon and document their daily lives, thoughts and feelings that speak about their work, personal relationships, worldviews, and in the process. their orature captures the vagaries and ordinariness of their existence. Their thoughts, words and deeds are reflected in lullabies, work songs, insult songs, and the songs of motherhood.”
Literature is therefore a priceless asset that no society will want to lose.
Yet colonialist politics and racist views long prevented African oral literature from being recognized as literature. This was due to the definition of literature by Peter Widdowson and others before him who saw literature as only “written works.” Since most African literature is (beautifully) performed, it was ignored, and assumed therefore that Africans did not have literature.
Moreover, non-African scholars even questioned whether the epic form could exist on the continent. Ruth Finnegan made the assertion that even though the epic is assumed to be the typical poetic form of non-literate people at a certain stage of “development,” it did not seem to occur in Sub-Saharan Africa. She made this assertion because, according to her, African texts are published as prose narratives rather than as poetic narratives, and the fact that certain scholars have incorrectly described praise poetry as epic poetry. After much critique of her statement, she conceded that her statement was to rouse a debate on the existence of the epic in Africa. Before her, Cecil Bowra had made the assertion that, “Though African poems and many others like them show a real admiration for active and generous manhood, they come from peoples who have no heroic poetry and have never advanced beyond panegyric and lament. The intellectual effort required for such an advance seems to have been beyond their powers.” Cecil Bowra continues: “The African poet’s outlook is limited to the actual present and he does not conceive of great events in an objective setting. Indeed, this restriction of outlook may be the reason why African tribes in general have no heroic poetry. The present so absorbs and occupies them that they feel no need to traffic with the past and imaginary.” African non-conformance with pre-set definitions, despite the creativity and close connections to the past of much African literature, could not be absorbed into the canon of these scholars.
I agree with John William Johnson, who debunked such assertions with the response that poor collection methods as well as different stylistic forms in many texts led Finnegan to make this erroneous assertion. His assertion holds true for Cecil Bowra as well. As Isidore Okpewho has said, “No sensible scholar of the epic will contend that any tradition of the oral epic is exactly like the Homeric, for the obvious reason of cultural differences.” But a deeper critique regarding the astonishing assumptions underlying these assertions is also required. To wit, these assumptions form part and parcel of the colonialist (and neo-colonialist) treatment of Africa and Africans that this Blog so frequently critiques. Thankfully, scholars worldwide such as Daniel Biebuyck, Lilyan Kesteloot, Mariam Deme, Philip Peek and Kwesi Yankah have accepted more recently that epics exist in African literature, relegating the assertions of the absence of epics on the continent to the past.
Finally, however, even the folktale has not been left out of the political denigration of African literature. Storytelling is one important oral tradition that is common in African societies. The Grimm brothers, in the introduction to their classic work “Household tales,” claimed that if any similarities were found between tales told in Africa and those told in Europe, the former should be seen as offshoots of the parent Indo-European culture. The brothers capitulated to the perception that “culture” can only spread from a superior to an inferior people, and Africa was of course considered racially inferior to Europe. The position of the Grimms was echoed by the American diffusionist, Stith Thomson. In his authoritative book, “The Folktale” he suggested that where similarities existed between European and African folktales, they could be explained by the probability that Europeans brought the tales with them to Africa during the period of the slave trade.
Richard Dorson also thought that the African contribution to the development and growth of folktale is insignificant. He claimed that many of the fictions, notably the animal tales, were of European origin, or from the American white tradition, or from the social conditions and historical experiences of colored people in the South. Richard Dorson argued that only a few plots and incidents could be distinguished as West African. William Bascom, however, disagreed. He was one of the first to acknowledge that, in many cases, Africans influenced the folktale tradition in Europe rather than borrowing it from white peoples.
Storytelling traditions continue to evolve all over all over the world, including in Africa. This evolution has been predicted many years ago by Amanor Dseagu who says: “As African societies rapidly evolve from a completely traditionally oral into a written cultural society, the tales are bound to undergo tremendous change to explain and deal with the modern era we live in.” These changes have therefore not come as a shock but as confirmation of the fact that societies are dynamic and changing.
This is not to say that people from the global North have not contributed to the growth of African literature. People like Ruth Finnegan, Gordon Innes and John Pepper Clark have all contributed in various ways to bring African literature to its current state of recognition. In addition, some lions of scholarship, including S. Adeboye Babalola, Isidore Okpewho, Daniel Kunene, Kofi Awoonor, Kofi Anyidoho, and Kwesi Yankah have started to write the story of the hunt, which has also greatly enhanced interest in African literature.
Today, African literature is blossoming in many universities of repute worldwide. Performance studies, in particular, highlights the contributions of African oral literature as a significant literary form. Despite the emergence of technology which is gradually providing a greater means of entertainment, the storytelling tradition persists especially in most local communities. Still, the possibilities of integrating African storytelling with various forms of social media might help to redefine the politics of African literature in yet new and profoundly significant ways.