Why Do You Think Africans Liked Tales In Which Smaller Animals Outsmarted Larger Ones?
| African Storytelling |
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"…[I]t is only the story that tin can proceed beyond the war and the warrior.
Information technology is the story that outlives the audio of war-drums and the exploits of dauntless fighters.
It is the story . . . that saves our progeny from blundering similar blind beggars
into the spikes of the cactus fence.
The story is our escort; without it, nosotros are blind.
Does the bullheaded man own his escort? No, neither do we the story;
rather information technology is the story that owns us and directs us."
--Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah (1987)
"I volition tell you something about stories....They aren't merely entertainment...
They are all nosotros have...to fight off illness and expiry.
You don't have anything if you don't have the stories."
--Leslie Marmon Silko, epigraph to Ceremony (1977)
Traditionally, Africans have revered good stories and storytellers, equally take nigh past and nowadays peoples around the world who are rooted in oral cultures and traditions. Aboriginal writing traditions do exist on the African continent, but most Africans today, equally in the past, are primarily oral peoples, and their art forms are oral rather than literary. In dissimilarity to written "literature," African "orature" (to use Kenyan novelist and critic Ngugi wa Thiong'o's term) is orally composed and transmitted, and often created to be verbally and communally performed as an integral role of trip the light fantastic and music. The Oral Arts of Africa are rich and varied, developing with the beginnings of African cultures, and they remain living traditions that continue to evolve and flourish today.
Every homo culture in the globe seems to create stories (narratives) as a style of making sense of the world. Some familiar features of the folktale, a common kind of story around the globe, for example, can be discerned in Tortoise and the Birds, an Igbo folktale recounted in ch. 11 (pp. 68-seventy) of Chinua Achebe's acclaimed 1958 novel Things Fall Apart:
- "'Once upon a time,' she began, all the birds were invited to a feast in the sky,'" as Achebe renders the traditional Igbo folktale opening into English.
- The story explains a cause, origin, or reason for something--gives an "etiological explanation...at the finish" ( Obiechina, "Narrative Proverbs in the African Novel") --in this case, for why the tortoise shell is "'not smooth.'"
- The story dramatizes a moral: greedy Tortoise, '"full of cunning,'" manages to trick the birds out of all the food at the feast, but for his selfishness he is punished. Tortoise falls from the sky and "'His vanquish broke into pieces.'"
- In folktale worlds, such "naughty," simply not "irredeemably" wicked characters, as Achebe describes Tortoise (qtd. in Baker and Draper 22) , are oftentimes restored and/or reintegrated back into society: in this instance, "'a great medicine-man in the neighbourhood'" patches Tortoise'southward trounce together once more.
Despite these universal features, however, the particular narrative meanings, themes, genres, and styles of story telling effectually the world differ from culture to civilisation. Thus, while many features of traditional African storytelling may seem familiar and make sense to U.Southward. students, many others may seem very foreign and strange. To more fully sympathize and appreciate African storytelling traditions, i needs to study them in the context of the cultures which produce the stories.
African proverbs and stories depict upon the collective wisdom of oral peoples, express their "structures of meaning, feeling, thought, and expression," and thus serve of import social and ethical purposes: "The story itself is a chief form of the oral tradition, primary as a mode of conveying civilisation, experience, and values and as a means of transmitting cognition, wisdom, feelings, and attitudes in oral societies"; a primal position is thus "given to the story in the oral tradition…by African writers in the shaping of their literary world and works…" ( Obiechina, "Narrative Proverbs in the African Novel").
One cannot report African literatures without studying the particular cultures and oratures on which African writers draw... for their themes and values, for their narrative structures and plots, for their rhythms and styles, for their images and metaphors, for their artistic and ethical principles. As Solomon Iyasere puts it in "Oral Tradition in the Criticism of African Literature":
"...the mod African writer is to his ethnic oral tradition
as a snail is to its shell. Even in a foreign habitat,
a snail never leaves its beat out behind" (107).
African novelists similar Chinua Achebe often introduce oral stories— such as narrative proverbs, song-tales, myths, folktales, fairy tales, fauna fables, anecdotes, and ballads—into literature. One of many examples from Things Fall Autonomously is Ikemefuna's song, a condensed version of an Igbo folktale, according to Emmanuel Obiechina:
"Eze elina, elina!
Sala
Eze ilikwa ya
lkwaba akwa oligholi
Ebe Danda nechi eze
Ebe Uzuzu nete egwu
Sala"
[Things Autumn Apart Ch. 7, p. 42]
Here is a translation into English language offered by Obiechina:
[the singer calls:]
Rex, practise non consume [information technology], practice not eat!Sala [the audience responds]
King, if you consume it
You will weep for the abomination
Where Danda [white ant] installs king
Where Uzuzu [Dust] dances to the drumsSala [the audience responds]
Even with the English translation--which Achebe does not give in Things Fall Autonomously --it is difficult for U.S. readers to make sense of this song-proverb without learning more about the cultural context of Igbo beliefs and the folktale on which Ikemefuna's song is based. The full tale is the story of a perverse, headstrong king who breaks a sacred taboo by eating roast yam (perhaps the get-go fruits of the harvest) which is reserved for and offered in sacrifice to the gods. "The song is an attempt by the people to warn the rex not to commit an action that would compromise himself...his high function," and the continued prosperity of his people ( Obiechina, "Narrative Proverbs in the African Novel") . So a line-by-line interpretation might become like this:
- The rex is warned not to eat [not to break the taboo—"the abomination"]
- If he does, he will regret information technology ["You will cry for the abomination"]
- The price he will pay is death, a dishonorable death without proper burying rites...
- "Where Danda [White Ant] installs a male monarch" and
- "Where Uzuzu [Dust] dances to the-drums." In decease, only white ants and grit will claim this headstrong king, as Obiechina explains. For breaking such a serious sacred taboo, after his man death the rex will exist denied reunion with his ancestors and his association, and will be forever alienated from the community—believed to embrace all the past, present, and time to come members of his people.
In the context of Achebe's novel, this untranslated song-maxim might suggest to a reader who knows Igbo language (like translator Emmanuel Obiechina) that the protagonist Okonkwo is beingness indirectly warned confronting breaking another serious taboo. Like the king in Ikemefuna's song, Okonkwo is on the verge of committing an "abomination"—the killing of a child who has lived with him for iii years and chosen him father. This is the "'kind of activity,'" his friend Obierika points out, "'for which the goddess wipes out whole families'" ( Things Fall Apart, Ch. eight, p. 46).
"Nnabe and Chineke" ("The Tortoise and the Lord") is another traditional Igbo folktale like "Tortoise and the Birds," but it presents a dissimilar explanation of why the tortoise has a croaky shell. Why the variations? For starters, even traditional oral "texts" are non static or unchanging—there is no reverence for a single, "definitive" text committed to writing and shelved in a library, a Western concept foreign to traditional African oral operation arts. Oratures, like the cultures that produce them, constantly evolve and change across time, culture, place and regional style, performer, and audience for a diversity of reasons. For example, if a story loses its relevance because of changing values and social conditions, it is discarded or modified, and new stories are born. As scholars and transcribers attest, even the same gifted African oral storyteller does not only memorize and echo the aforementioned story the aforementioned way each time. Griots will alternate between gear up text and improvisation. Within open up-ended narrative and poetic formulas, the bard creates, embellishes, adapts to the occasion, and plays to the needs and interests of particular audiences.
Another reason for folktale variation might lie in differences of linguistic communication/dialect and culture. Language is a principal means of learning and transmitting one'due south civilisation, and it is used to help ascertain and distinguish unlike indigenous groups and cultures. Consider the fact that more than 450 languages are spoken in mod Nigeria, i region in which the Igbo peoples are concentrated. As Chinua Achebe has explained, spoken "Igbo exists in numerous dialects, differing from village to village" (qtd. in Gallagher) . There is no standardized formal written or oral Igbo language that all Igbo accept and use in Western Africa, though Christian missionaries tried to create and impose one [called "Union Igbo"] in order to translate the Bible and speed up religious conversion in the late nineteen th century (cited in Gallagher). This situation is non so different for many other oral cultures and peoples of Africa. It is peradventure fifty-fifty more understandable that oral traditions carried by African descendents to other parts of the earth would change and vary. The translated performance of "Nnabe and Chineke" that we will recite in class was recorded on Wadmalaw Island, one of the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia and the Carolinas in the U.S. where many Igbo slaves were forceably and brutally transported during the Atlantic Slave Trade of the xviii th and 19 thursday centuries (Jackson-Jones).
Tortoise and the Birds and "Nnabe and Chineke" are examples of Igbo folktales that explain how animals got their physical characteristics—a genre common in many cultures around the world. (Can you recollect of any similar folktales told in your culture?) Animal stories have many variations and abound in the oral traditions of Africa and the African Diaspora. In animal stories of Due west African origins, smaller, physically weak, and seemingly vulnerable creatures—like Tortoise in these stories, or Spider in the Anancy stories--are frequently endowed with special intelligence and human characteristics, and are answerable simply to God (chosen Chineke in Igbo cosmology). Ironically, large, powerful animals like the lion, elephant, and leopard are oftentimes duped in such animal stories, often through what are considered their centers of thought: the tummy and the heart (Run into Badejo and Jackson-Jones).
Both stories characteristic Tortoise, a trickster effigy in African folklore (called Nnabe in Igbo cultures, Ijapa in Yoruban cultures, Fudugazi in Zulu cultures, for instance). Tortoise is physically wearisome but quick witted, lives a long time and has a long memory, and gains wisdom past studying fellow creatures in society. But like trickster figures in the folklore of many globe cultures, Tortoise sometimes misuses his knowledge. Tortoise can be cunning and malicious, and may dupe or trick others (similar Tortoise tricks the birds in Things Fall Apart , Ch. xi) for his ain greed or selfish gain. (Of form even Tortoise cannot become the ameliorate of God, equally seen in "Nnabe and Chineke.")
Chinua Achebe explains that the trickster Tortoise is a favorite in Igbo children'southward stories , for he "is a graphic symbol that children tin chronicle to. He is a rogue, just he is a prissy kind of rogue. I call back that children don't trust him, but they like to hear that he is around, because they know that he is going to exercise something unexpected and generally he volition be punished too. This is the moral side of it. He'southward not allowed to go abroad with murder. He does something and he is punished, only he still lives to appear again....Tortoise is wicked, simply he is not irredeemably so. Tortoise is not evil. He'southward only naughty" (qtd. in Baker and Draper 22. For a consummate picture of evil, says Achebe, the Igbo might instead point to "Something That Doesn't Even Wear a Necklace"; a matter and so completely alone that it "doesn't even have a necklace to keep it company" [qtd. in Bakery and Draper 23]).
According to Deidre Badejo'southward interpretation, the African tricksters like the Yoruba Ijapa perceive, remember, and report others' weaknesses in social club to apply this knowledge for the trickster's ain self-interest or amusement, or to escape social responsibilities. Tricksters exist on the peripheries of the social order ("liminal" figures at the boundaries of social club). Their individualistic not-conformist behavior creates havoc and disharmony in guild, and can threaten the survival of the community. (Dissimilarity this attitude to the positive means we, in the U.Southward., value individualism.) Secular tricksters like Tortoise often projection the kinds of evil forces and bad behaviors against which the human community must contend to survive and which must be kept in check. This goal is rehearsed and achieved in communal performances of African proverbs and folktales, wherein the trickster'south bad anti-social behaviors are unremarkably punished, and the evil forces unleashed are controlled or defeated. Thus, for instance, recounting Tortoise stories in African communities can function to reaffirm the priority and wisdom of the community, reassure its members that balance and harmony can and should be restored, and that the community will survive and prevail. (Come across as well Ugorji).
Chinua Achebe himself explains that a story "'does many things. It entertains, it informs, it instructs." "If you wait at these stories carefully, you will find they back up and reinforce the bones tenets of the civilisation. The storytellers worked out what is right and what is incorrect, what is courageous and what is cowardly, and they interpret this into stories" (qtd. in Baker and Draper 22). We tin acquire much near a culture by learning its stories.
Oral African storytelling is essentially a communal participatory experience. Anybody in most traditional African societies participate in formal and breezy storytelling as interactive oral performance—such participation is an essential part of traditional African communal life, and basic training in a particular culture's oral arts and skills is an essential part of children's traditional indigenous education on their way to initiation into total humanness.
To get some sense of African storytelling as a participatory communal experience in Hum 211, nosotros try an interactive "telephone call-and-response" operation of "Nnabe and Chineke," as transcribed from an bodily oral story telling operation in Igbo language given by Samuel Onunwa, Bartholomew Amaugo, Kevin Chiedusie, and Francis Mbah ; and and so translated into English language by Victor C. Ihejetoh (rpt. in Jackson-Jones. Again, even with an English language translation, this story will probably seem stranger and harder to interpret to non-Igbo audiences than Tortoise and the Birds without a mediator like Chinua Achebe or Emmanuel Obiechina to explicate it; merely we can use what we have learned most Igbo culture from the groundwork readings to make the attempt).
Call and response forms, found seemingly everywhere in Africa, entail a caller or soloist who "raises the vocal," as the Kpelle say, and the community chorus who respond, or "agree underneath the song" (Mutere, "African Oral Aesthetic"). In the case of the Igbo stories, the storyteller "calls" out the story in lines; the audience or chorus "responds" at regular intervals to the storyteller'due south "calls" with a "sala" (the chorus' response). The Igbo "sala" used in "Nnabe and Chineke" is "amanye," roughly equivalent to American English expressions of understanding like "amen" or "right on!" (Ihejetoh, qtd. in Jackson-Jones).
Traditional African societies take developed high aesthetic and ethical standards for participating in and judging accomplished oral storytelling performances —and audience members often feel costless to interrupt less talented or respected secular performers to suggest improvements or voice criticisms. . (Bear in mind that aesthetic standards of what constitutes "skilful art" in a item club are learned and culturally-determined. Thus, Western learned concepts of what constitutes a good story or great music can differ significantly from the aesthetic ideals of the African cultures.)
In many of these cultures, storytelling arts are professionalized: the most accomplished storytellers are initiates (griots, or bards) , who have mastered many complex verbal, musical, and memory skills after years of specialized training. This training ofttimes includes a strong spiritual and ethical dimension required to command the special forces believed to be released by the spoken/sung word in oral performances. These occult powers and primal energies of creation and devastation are called nyama past Mande peoples of Western Africa, for example, and their jeli, or griots, are a subgroup of the artisan professions that the Mande designate nyamakalaw , or " nyama -handlers" (see, for example, discussions in Johnson et al; and Hale). This sense of special powers of the spoken word--every bit expressed in the following Bambara praise poem--has largely been lost in literate-based societies of the West:
Praise of the Word
The word is total:
it cuts, excoriates
forms, modulates
perturbs, maddens
cures or directly kills
amplifies or reduces
According to intention
It excites or calms souls.
--Praise song of a bard of the Bambara Komo society
(qtd. in Louis-Vincent Thomas and Rene Luneau,
Les Religions d'Afrique noire, textes et traditions sacres; as cited in Gleason xxxvii)
Following a traditional griot performance of a spiritually-charged oral ballsy like Sundjiata, a Malian audience might ritualistically dirge, " Ka nyama bo! " (which could be translated something like, "May the powers of nyama safely disperse!").
I hope some of the recorded professional performances that we mind to in class will demonstrate that African storytelling and orature are highly skilled performance arts. These living traditions continue to survive and adapt to the challenges of modernization facing Africa today, and accept fused, in uniquely African means, with newer creative forms and influences to enrich the global human experience and its creative expressions.
Works Cited and Sources for Further Reading
Achebe, Chinua. Things Autumn Autonomously. Expanded edition with notes. London: Heinemann, 1996.
Afigbo, Adiele E. Ropes of Sand: Studies in Igbo History and Civilisation. Ibadan: Oxford Up, 1981.
Asante, Molefi Kete, and Abu S. Abarry, ed. African Intellectual Heritage: A Book of Sources. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996.
Awoonor, Kofi. The Breast of the Earth: A Survey of the History, Civilisation, Literature of Africa South of the Sahara. 1975. Doubleday, 1976. NOK, 1983.
Badejo, Deidre. "The Yoruba and Afro-American Trickster: A Contextual Comparison." Presence Africaine 147 (1988): 3-17.
Bakery, Rob, and Ellen Draper. "If One Thing Stands, Another Will Stand up Abreast It: An Interview with Chinua Achebe." Parabola 17.iii(Fall 1992): 19-27. Abstract: "Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe discusses the importance of storytelling and the oral tradition in the education of children. Achebe tells a story of Tortoise, the trickster in Igbo tradition, and describes aspects of the traditional Igbo world view. Gender roles among the Igbo and the role of the griots, professional storytellers, are also discussed" (Infotrac 2000 Expanded Academic ASAP Article A12603141).
Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, and Ihechukwu Madubuike. Towards the Decolonization of African Literature. Enugu: Quaternary Dimension, 1980.
Diallo, Yaya, and Mitchell Hall. The Healing Drum: African Wisdom Teachings. Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1989.
Egudu, R. N. "Achebe and the Igbo Narrative Tradition." Research in African Literatures 12.1 (1981): 43-54.
Foley, John G. Oral Tradition in Literature. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1986.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., ed. " Race," Writing, and Difference. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986.
Gleason, Judith, ed. Leaf and Bone: African Praise-Poems. New York: Penguin, 1994.
Hale, Thomas C. Scribe, Griot, and Novelist: Narrative Interpreters of the Songhay Empire followed past the Epic of Askia Mohammed recounted by Nouhou Malio. Gainesville: U of Florida P-Center for African Studies, 1990.
Gititi, Gitahi. "African Theory and Criticism." The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Eds. Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Upwards, 1994. v-ix.
Iyasere, Solomon O. "Oral Tradition in the Criticism of African Literature." The Journal of Modern African Studies 13.1 (1975): 107.
Jackson-Jones, Patricia. When Roots Dice: Endangered Traditions on the Sea Islands. Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1987.
JanMohamed, Abdul. "Sophisticated Primitivism: Syncretism of Oral and Literate Modes in Achebe'southward Things Fall Apart." ARIEL 15.four (1984): 19-39.
Johnson, John William, Thomas A. Hale, and Stephen Belcher, eds. Oral Epics from Africa: Vibrant Voices from a Vast Continent. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1997.
Jones, Eldred Durosimi, Eustace Palmer, and Marjorie Jones, ed. Orature in African Literature Today: A Review. Trenton, NJ: Africa World P, 1992.
Julien, Eileen. "African Literature." In Africa. 3rd ed. Eds. Phyllis M. Martin and Patrick O'Meara. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995. 295-312.
Lindfors, Bernth. Sociology in Nigerian Literature. New York: Africana Publishing, 1973.
Mbiti, John S. Introduction to African Organized religion. 2nd ed. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1991.
[COCC Library has the offset edition, 1975: BL2400 .M383 1975]
Mutere, Malaika. [African Studies, Howard University.] "Introduction to African History and Cultural Life: An African Historical Framework," including the section "African Oral Aesthetic."
Available: http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/aoi/history/ao-guide.html
Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Decolonising the Heed: The Politics of Language in African Literature . Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1986.
Nketia, J.H. Kwabena. The Music of Africa. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1979.
Obiechina, Emmanuel. "Narrative Proverbs in the African Novel. (Special Issue in Memory of Josaphat Bekunuru Kubayanda) Inquiry in African Literatures 24.4(Winter 1993):123(18pgs). Full Text Bachelor at COCC Library: Infotrac 2000 Expanded Academic ASAP Article A14706083.
Abstract: "'Things Fall Autonomously' past Chinua Achebe exemplifies the employ of narrative proverbs in the African novel, reflecting the synthesis of oral and written traditions. Narrative proverbs are stories or other forms derived from the oral tradition which are embedded within the novels and perform the part of proverbs. Achebe's novel incorporates nine embedded narratives, seven of which are folktales or myths. Narratives discussed in relation to the novel include the quarrel betwixt Earth and Sky, the locust myth, Ikemefuna'south vocal, the mosquito myth, the tale of the tortoise and the birds, the Abame story and the kite myth."
Ogede, Ode South. "Oral Performance as Instruction: Aesthetic Strategies in Children'southward Play Songs from a Nigerian Community." Children's Literature Clan Quarterly xiv.3(1994): 113-117.
Ong, Walter J. Orality & Literacy: the Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge, 1982.
Rowell, Charles H. "An Interview with Chinua Achebe." Callaloo 13.1 (1990).
Achebe discusses the African storyteller equally griot in this interview: "the part of the writer, the modernistic writer, is closer to that of the griot, the historian and poet, than any other practitioner of the arts" (18).
Scheub, Harold. The Tongue Is Fire: South African Storytellers and Apartheid. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1996.
Schmidt, Nancy. "Nigerian Fiction and the African Oral Tradition." Journal of the New African Literature and the Arts 5/6 (1968): 10-19.
Shelton, Austin J. "The 'Palm-oil' of Language: Proverbs in Chinua Achebe's Novels." Modern Linguistic communication Quarterly thirty.ane (1969): 89-111.
Soyinka, Wole. 1978. Myth, Literature and the African World. 1978. Canto ed. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. [COCC Library: PL8010 .S64 1990]
Ugorji, Okechukwu K. The Adventures of Torti: Tales from West Africa. Trenton, NJ: African Globe Press, 1991.
Valade, Roger One thousand., Iii. The Essential Black Literature Guide. (Published in assn. With the Schomburg Centre for Enquiry in Blackness Culture.) Detroit: Visible Ink Press, 1996.
Wilkinson, Jane, ed. Talking with African Writers : Interviews With African Poets, Playwrights & Novelists. London : J. Currey ; Portsmouth, N.H. : Heinemann, 1992. [COCC Library: PR9340 .T35 1992]
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