Storytelling and oral traditions have been the lifeline of African culture for centuries, serving as a medium for passing down knowledge, values, history, and beliefs from one generation to the next. Oral traditions in Africa date back to ancient times, long before the advent of writing systems.
The late historian and anthropologist Jan Vansina demonstrated half a century ago that oral tradition and history as a method contribute authoritative information toward reconstructing histories in Africa. The collaborators on this project recognize that oral traditions lend deep internally generated perspectives rich with metaphors and symbolism.
A Griot storyteller in West Africa.
The Role of Oral Tradition
In many African societies, history was not recorded in written texts but was transmitted orally through generations. Griots, or traditional storytellers, were the custodians of these histories. Griots used their skills to convey important messages, preserve historical events, and teach moral lessons. Their stories often contained proverbs, songs, and poetry, which added layers of meaning and enriched the narrative.
Storytelling in Africa is not just a form of entertainment; it is a critical tool for education, cultural preservation, and community bonding:
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- Education and Moral Instruction: African folktales are rich with lessons that teach about right and wrong, courage, honesty, respect, and other important virtues. Characters in these stories, whether human or animal, often face challenges that require them to make moral choices.
- Historical Preservation: Oral traditions have been essential in preserving the histories of African communities. In the absence of written records, storytelling has kept alive the memories of past events, heroes, and important cultural practices.
- Cultural Identity and Continuity: African storytelling often reflects the unique cultural practices, beliefs, and values of different communities. By retelling these stories, each generation renews its connection to its cultural roots, ensuring that these practices are not lost over time.
- Community Bonding and Entertainment: Storytelling sessions are often communal activities, bringing together people of all ages. These gatherings are not only occasions for sharing stories but also for fostering a sense of belonging and community.
At the macro-level oral traditions can be understood as the vehicle to recount a given community’s origins. The significance of oral tradition is related to its cultural importance, depth of time it covers, and its uses. In many communities oral traditions reveal how a group of people understand their world and the worlds of their ancestors. Traditions very often educate and socialize community members on values, beliefs, and taboos.
Typically histories recounted in oral traditions telescope many events from the deep past and more recent eras into a single set of events. A large body of research conducted over the last five decades that has correlated oral accounts to archaeological findings and events documented even in written sources show that often, oral traditions reflect events from period stretching back three, four, or five hundred years ago.
Societies that value orality preserve oral traditions quite well. Some guard those traditions carefully by training and sanctioning professional historians to control the oral archives.
Oral traditions and expressions are used to pass on knowledge, cultural and social values and collective memory.
Oral Tradition vs. Written Literature
Oral and written storytelling traditions have had a parallel development, and in many ways they have influenced each other. Ancient Egyptian scribes, early Hausa and Swahili copyists and memorizers, and contemporary writers of popular novellas have been the obvious and crucial transitional figures in the movement from oral to literary traditions. What happened among the Hausa and Swahili was occurring elsewhere in Africa-among the Fulani, in northern Ghana among the Guang, in Senegal among the Tukulor and Wolof, and in Madagascar and Somalia.
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The linkage between oral tradition and the written word is most obviously seen in pulp literature: the Onitsha market literature of Nigeria; the popular fiction of Accra, Ghana; the popular love and detective literature of Nairobi; the visualizing of story in the complex comic strips sold in shops in Cape Town. But the linkage is also a crucial characteristic of more-serious and more-complex fiction. One cannot fully appreciate the works of Chinua Achebe or Ousmane Sembene without placing them into the context of Africa’s classical period, its oral tradition.
To be sure, the Arabic, English, French, and Portuguese literary traditions along with Christianity and Islam and other effects of colonialism in Africa also had a dynamic impact on African literature, but African writers adapted those alien traditions and made them their own by placing them into these African classical frames.
As is the case with the oral tradition, written literature is a combination of the real and the fantastic. It combines, on the one hand, the real (the contemporary world) and history (the realistic world of the past) and, on the other, myth and hero, with metaphor being the agent of transformation. This is the alchemy of the literary experience. Literature is atomized, fragmented history.
Transformation is the crucial activity of the story, its dynamic movement. The writer is examining the relationship of the reader with the world and with history. In the process of this examination, the writer invents characters and events that correspond to history but are not history. At the centre of the story is myth, the fantasy element, a character or event that moves beyond reality, though it is always rooted in the real. In the oral tale this is clearly the fantasy character; so it is, in a complex, refracted way, in written literature.
Myth, which is deeply, intensely emotional, has to do with the gods and creation, with the essence of a belief system; it is the imaged embodiment of a philosophical system, the giving of form to thought and emotion. It is the driving force of a people, that emotional force that defines a people; it is the everlasting form of a culture, hence its link to the gods, to the heavens, to the forever. In mythic imagery is the embodiment of significant emotions-the hopes, fears, dreams, and nightmares-of a people.
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History-the story of a people, their institutions, and their community-is the way one likes to think things happened, in the real world. The hero is everyman, moving through a change, a transformation, and so moving into the myth, the essence, of his history. He thereby becomes a part of it, representative of it, embodying the culture. The hero is everyman with myth inside him. He has been mythicized; story does that.
Metaphor is the transformational process, the movement from the real to the mythic and back again to the real-changed forever, because one has become mythicized, because one has moved into history and returned with the elixir.
In serious literary works, the mythic fantasy characters are often derived from the oral tradition; such characters include the Fool in Sheikh Hamidou Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure (1961), Kihika (and the mythicized Mugo) in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat (1967), Michael K in J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K (1983), Dan and Sello in Bessie Head’s A Question of Power (1973), Mustapha in al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ’s Season of Migration to the North (1966), and Nedjma in Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma (1956). These are the ambiguous, charismatic shapers, those with connections to the essence of history.
In each case, a real-life character moves into a relationship with a mythic character, and that movement is the movement of the hero’s becoming a part of history, of culture. The real-life character is the hero who is in the process of being created: Samba Diallo, Mugo, the doctor, Elizabeth, the narrator, or the four pilgrims. Myth is the stuff of which the hero is being created. History is the real, the past, the world against which this transformation is occurring and within which the hero will move.
The real contemporary world is the place from which the hero comes and to which the hero will return. Metaphor is the hero’s transformation. The image of Africa, then, is that rich combination of myth and history, with the hero embodying the essence of the history, or battling it, or somehow having a relationship with it by means of the fantasy mythic character.
It is in this relationship between reality and fantasy, the shaped and the shaper, that the story has its power: Samba Diallo with the Fool, Mugo with Kihika (and the mythicized Mugo), the doctor with Michael K, Elizabeth with Dan and Sello, the narrator with Mustapha, the four pilgrims with Nedjma. This relationship, which is a harbinger of change, occurs against a historical backdrop of some kind, but that backdrop is not the image of Africa: that image is the relationship between the mythical character and African/European history.
The fantasy character provides access to history, to the essence of history. It is the explanation of the historical background of the novels. The hero is the person who is being brought into a new relationship with that history, be it the history of a certain area-Kenya or South Africa or Algeria, for example-or of a wider area-of Africa generally or, in the case of A Question of Power, the history of the world.
These are the keys, then: the hero who is being shaped, the fantasy character who is the ideological and spiritual material being shaped and who is also the artist or shaper, and the larger issues, the historical panorama. The fantasy character is crucial: he is the artist’s palette, the mythic element of the story.
This character is the heart and the spiritual essence of history. This is the Fool, Kihika, Michael K, Dan and Sello, Mustapha, Nedjma. Here is where reality and fantasy, history and fiction blend, the confluence that is at the heart of story. The real-life character, the hero, comes into a relationship with that mythic figure, and so the transformation begins, as the hero moves through an intermediary period into history.
It is the hero’s identification with history that makes it possible for us to speak of the hero as a hero. This movement of a realistic character into myth is metaphor, the blending of two seemingly unlike images. It is the power of the story, the centre of the story, as Samba Diallo moves into the Fool, as Mugo moves into Kihika, as the doctor moves into Michael K, as Elizabeth moves into Dan and Sello, as the narrator moves into Mustapha, as the four pilgrims move into Nedjma. In this movement the oral tradition is revealed as alive and well in literary works.
The kinds of imagery used by literary storytellers and the patterned way those reality and fantasy images are organized in their written works are not new. The materials of storytelling, whether in the oral or written tradition, are essentially the same.
Challenges and Preservation
Despite their enduring significance, African oral traditions face several challenges in the modern era. The spread of Western education and the increasing dominance of written and digital communication have led to a decline in the practice of oral storytelling. Additionally, many languages in Africa are endangered, and with them, the oral traditions tied to those languages.
Like other forms of intangible cultural heritage, oral traditions are threatened by rapid urbanization, large-scale migration, industrialisation and environmental change. Books, newspapers and magazines, radio, television and the Internet can have an especially damaging effect on oral traditions and expressions. Modern mass media may significantly alter or over replace traditional forms of oral expression.
The most important part of safeguarding oral traditions and expressions is maintaining their every day role in society. It is also essential that opportunities for knowledge to be passed from person-to-person survive; chances for elders to interact with young people and pass on stories in homes and schools, for example. Oral tradition often forms an important part of festive and cultural celebrations and these events may need to be promoted and new contexts, such as storytelling festivals, encouraged to allow traditional creativity to find new means of expression.
However, all is not lost. Efforts are being made to revive and sustain African oral traditions. Cultural festivals, storytelling workshops, and digital platforms are being used to preserve and promote these traditions. For instance, platforms like YouTube, podcasts, and social media are now hosting oral histories and stories, making them accessible to a global audience.
Storytelling workshops help preserve and promote oral traditions.
The Need to Revive African Oral Traditions
Oral traditions signify some of those unique cultural gifts bestowed upon ancient indigenous civilizations not only in Africa but across the whole world. Oral traditions served a pivotal role in society: passing information orally about a people, in their entirety, from generation to generation.
Succinctly, oral tradition and expression encompass a variety of spoken forms employed by a particular people to convey cultural, social, economic, spiritual, and political values and collective memory not only for the present generations but most importantly for future generations. These spoken forms include proverbs, riddles, tales, nursery rhymes, legends, myths, chants, prayers, songs and poems, dramatic performances, epic histories, long speeches, and more. The indispensable importance of oral tradition is that it keeps cultures alive.
Oral traditions and expressions may be commonplace and can be used by entire communities across huge geographical areas, while others are confined to particular social, spiritual, or political groups, for instance, some oral traditions are confined to men or women only; or to the elders only.
The common thread across African communities is that performing oral tradition is a highly specialized occupation demanding extraordinary levels of intellectual prowess. And as such, performers of oral traditions and wisdom are highly revered and held in high regard in the community since they are the reservoirs and bulwarks of cultural collective memory.
The paucity of written records has often led to the outright dismissal of African history and culture, with philosophers such as Hegel from Germany, revelling in his sheer ignorance, completely disregarded the humanity of Africans.
Reclaiming our indigenous oral traditions represents decolonial struggles in a world where Eurocentric epistemology takes centre-stage across all levels of education in Africa. This has resulted in a people feeling alienated, confused, and bewildered by the colonial myth of “modernity”-in essence, without reclaiming our oral traditions as a legitimate form of knowledge, we remain a people without an anchor; a people with no sense of purpose, belonging, and identity.
How Do African Griots Preserve History And Culture? - African Roots And Routes
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