From oral to written literature - Llacan

From oral to written literature
The idea for such an issue, after an initial suggestion by Abiola Irele, grew out of the
editors acquaintance and respect for the work of the French protestant missionaries
Thomas Arbousset and Eugène Casalis. The issues- African poetics and oral / written
interface- raised by these pionneers, who were "cultivated minds interested in the
comparative study of languages and literatures" (JME 1842), are still relevant and
their contribution is not well known: it was written in French in countries that had
nothing to do with French colonial expansion; moreover when colonial expansion was
focused on Africa, the work of these pioneers was probablly felt not to be " politically
correct" since they were interested in African poetry and not in Francophonie...
The first book is the Narrative of an exploratory tour, translated in 1846 from the
Relation d'un Voyage d'exploration , published in french in 1842. It is especially
interesting for our purpose since it includes a chapter on the Zulas and gives a longmore than 4OO verses- French translation of Dingaan praises including 27 lines of the
original zulu text in a rather obscure transcription. The English translation by Brown
includes the praise poem of Dingaan ; this translation was often reprinted, the french
edition soon forgotten , without Arbousset being given the credit for his field work,
probably undertaken in I838 in Northern Lesotho . It was followed by Missionary
Excursion by Arbousset, written in 1840, never printed in french before the english
edition . Casalis, also a member of the first group of missionaries who arrived in 1836,
is the author of the first grammar of the Sotho language, Etudes sur la langue sechuana,
and of a comprehensive book on the Basutos, titled The Basutos, published in french in
1859, translated into english in 1861 and reprinted in I992. The Etudes i s an original
book dedicating more than half of his contents to the literature of the Basotho, and to
the study of seven praise poems, including the first praises of Mokachane as well as of
Moshoeshoe. The third book is by D.F. Ellenberger, who arrived in the sixties of last
century,and was to spend the rest of his life collecting sotho genealogies; he died
before he could see his work into print and the whole project was eventually translated
and published by his son in law in I912, and has also been reprinted as History of the
Basutos.
At the same time a scholar, the missionary Jacottet, produced a study of tales and
narratives which has no equivalent in French scholarship in the XIX century. It has so
few equivalent that it has been forgotten and that Jacottet next book was written in
english thus accomplishing the obliteration of this schalarly tradition of French
scholarship in Southern Africa
poetry and performance
Collections of praises were gathered in the field , at the beginning of the missionary
work . D.Coplan in his last book, In the Time of Cannibals, quotes Casalis
remarkable piece on the Sotho praise poet, which is still a relevant description of a
field performance:
As Casalis observe in a now famous description:
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Le héros de la pièce en est presque toujours l'auteur. de retour des combats il se purifie
à la rivière voisines, puis il va déposer religieusement au fond de sa hutte sa lance et
son bouclier. Ses amis l'entourent et lui demandent le récit de ses exploits. Il les
raconte avec emphase ; la chaleur du sentiment l'entraine, son expression devient
poétique . De jeunes mémoires s'emparent des morceaux les plus frappants ; on les
répète à l'auteur enchanté , qui les retravaille et les lie ensemble dans ses longues
heures de loisir ; au bout de deux ou trois lunes ses enfants savent parfaitement le
toko, qui sera désormais déclamé aux fêtes solemnelles de la tribu...
The hero of the piece is nearly always the author. Upon returning from combat he
purifies himself in a nearby river , then he goes to put down , religiously, in the depth of
his dwelling, his lance and his shield. His friends surround him and demand of him the
recitation of his exploits. He recounts them with emphasis; the heat of sentiment
leading him on his expression becomes poetic . the memory of the young takes hold of
the most striking parts ; they are repeated to the delighted author, who ponders over
them, and connects them in his mind during leisure hours; at the end of two or three
months these children know the praises perfectly, which are thereafter declaimed at
the solemn celebrations of the tribe ( Casalis I841, 53; translation mine, but see
Damane and Sanders 1974, 18). ( Coplan, 1994: 48)
If this is not the founding text of performance anthropology in Africa, what else is ?
What Casalis has grasped is the essential feature of poetry: the performance of the
poem is the poem ( "l'exécution du poème est le poème, "according to Paul Valery ,
1960: 1350) . This is what in a different linguistic area is demonstrated by D.Morin
article on Beja poets, struggling against the constraints of Arab prosody to maintain the
oral performative quality of their texts . What is poetic is the qad, what can be thrown
in a contest, the agonstic quality of the discursive exchange, and not the metric
formulas anf the rime patterns. According to Henri Meschonnic rythm is defined by
the presence of the subject ( historical , psychologigical,etc) in the discourse and not by
fixed patterns. This is exactly what was understood by Casalis and Arbousset during
the course of their field work ( 1836 -1840) in the the thirties of the last century ...
Twenty years later, another missionary, Rev Dohne did not believe there was poetry
among the Zulus:
Some have expected to find much poetry among the Zulu Kaffirs, but there is none in
fact . poetical language is extremely rare and we meet only with a few pieces of prose.
The Zulu nation is more fond of Ukuhlabela ie singing and engage more in ukuvula
amagama ezinkosi ie singing the praises of the chiefs , than any other kafir tribe . But
their capabilities in this respect are very limited. the highest song of praise for their
king is composed of a few hyperbolical expressions. Other specimens consist of the
frequent repetition of one sentence ... regarding some object , such as a cowx, a dog , a
dance, a girl , repeated in a singing voice , or they are za mere imitation of a roaring
war noise, that of a wild savage animlal , of the clashing of shields or spears. But
nothing like poetry or dsongs exist....
And as A.C.Jordan points out Rev Dohne knew the language extremely well :
According to his own account of himself, Dohne worked for ten years among the Xhosa
speaking people in Eastern Cape before going to Zululand. his dictionary was
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published after ten years of work amongst the Zulu speaking, that is , after twenty
years of work amongst several people who spoke one or other mutually intelligible
Nguni dialects. there can be no doubt that dduring the period Dohne acquired a
working knowledge of Nguni in general and of Zulu in particular. His flat denial of the
existence of poetry amongst the Zulu speaking people can therefore be attributed not to
a lack of understanding of the language, but to his conception of poetry . this
conception is implied, rather than stated. apparently, on looking for trochoes, dactylic
hexameters, iambic pentameters, rhyme schemes, and not finding them , Dohne should
have forgotten the Zulu bards if at least they had composed some poems dealing
directly with the stars, the moon, and the Milky Way ....
(Jordan, I973: 15-16) .
In other parts of Africa to be poetic the language is forced to fit within the schemes of
the qasida and of the rime: the ideology of the written model permeates all conceptions
of poetry , and viciates the understanding of its essential performative, vocal nature.
Whether conversation accorcing to Elliot and paz, or silence " retranchement" or
praise, it is always the product of a speech community. some of the most interesting
theoretical work deals with the features of oral poetry ( yoruba , in this case) and with
their adaptation to print media ( Olatunji, I984).
The collecting of Zulu oral tradition had to wait and in the meantime the work of
Arbousset was very much quoted . Praise poetry was certainly not a common
missionary interest as the Comaroff are probably right to say , if we do not forget to
make an exception for the French group. Ideas about poetry, ideas about the role of
poetry, of songs, do influence collection and edition of texts. And what is the point of
collecting if no transcription or no translation is produced within a reasonable time?
The first history to be made should be of collecting, of the epistemology of collecting:
writing orality , in other words: writing culture. These collections constitute the first
corpus of African literature at the beginning of the century. Very often they first
include many folktales and narratives and few poems. They were followed by the
development of a literature written directly in African languages which was started in
the full awareness of the the first corpus of texts.
The history of collecting
As a professor of Sotho language and culture with UNISA, Chris Swanepoel, along
with his colleague Professor Lenake, was following directly the footsteps of the two
founders of Sotho linguistic and literary studies. He also had the extraordinary
opportunity to have readily available a corpus of texts that showed in an almost ideal
way the transition from oral to written literature, from the first transcriptions of Sotho
texts to the first hymns composed in sesotho by the missionaries to the beginnings of a
new literate poetry , facing problems of its own ( Swanepoel, 1985, 1989, 1990). The
fade out of orality would, as some have it, signal the fade in of literacy . But nothing
fades out: everything remains , and continues to work within a new media . This
experience of mixity of the media, of a "metissage" within orality, was especially
important for Alain Ricard, who worked for a long time on such a transitional genre,
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concert party. Any thinking which opposes a pure orality to a "pure " literacy is an
absurd reductionism, or a rather sectarian reversal of old missionary conceptions.
The element which provided an impetus for this collection was that, outside the rather
erudite field of Southern sotho studies ( outside south Africa) this work is not well
known and is especially ignored in the French African Studies tradition. Alain Ricard ,
author of the first book in French on the languages and literatures of Black Africa,
feels that the example of the two missionaries is still a valid one for today and provides
an alternative tradition of African studies, a minor one, but a living one. This other
tradition, rarely looked at systematically, is also illustrated by missionary work in the
former Belgian Congo . It was a philological tradition, interested in knowing,
describing and translating African languages more than in teaching French and
working for French colonial expansion, even though , in the Congo it was working for
Belgian expansion. To dicipline and control, linguistic and literary work had to be
done. . We could contrast the work done in West Africa, where little was
accomplished in terms of actual collection of non Fula texts ( no edition of Sundiata in
French existed before Cisse , Kamissoko 1988) and Central and Southern Africa where
the question of the relation between French and African languages was posed rather
differently and had the benefit of producing a very vivid interest for African oral texts.
What has been called elsewhere "une configuration zairoise" (Ricard , 1993) has not
only produced missionary linguists of the first rank, but also a legacy of Zairian
intellectuals working within the paradigms of philology and cultural anthropology such
as V.Y Mudimbe and Clémentine Faik Nzuji. Linguists and ethnographers were not
coming from an hegemonic culture within their own metropolis . After all Arbousset
and Casalis were from Southern France: "Occitans" Hughenots, Jacottet was Swiss,
Hulstaert and Tempels were Belgian Flemish priests, Willy Bal was a Belgian
"Walloon" They came often from cultural minorities, and were in a better position to
understand the plight of African cultures and the essential centrality of philological
work in cultural history, even without questioning the need to change and control
Africa . Of course the lumping together of such a diverse group can lead to
misconceptions. A. Ricard posits however that it is very important to understand the
social and cultural roots of this philological interest, if only to deconstruct the absurd
myth of an homogeneous Francophonie to which so many adhere uncritically (Miller,
I990) . The work of Father Kagame was certainly rooted in this tradition of interest, as
well as the collection of Yaka texts, which are only a few among the many collection
of texts , including several epics, to come out from Zaire.
epistemological consciousness
Collectors are not the writers , but they may know each other, since very often
collections of oral texts are the first texts in the language: Thomas Mofolo was
probably a very avid reader of Segoete stories , which happen to have been among the
first books produced in sesotho (Kunene, 1989). You cannot write books in a language
that has not been studied , written , analyzed, in which no text exist. In yoruba many
collections of proverbs and sories appeared before Fagunwa's first novel: thinking about
the Yoruba language by Yoruba people themselves produced agreements on
transcription as early as 1875. This metalinguistic dimension is an essential basis for
written creativity in the language . The history of collecting should be completed by a
history of the publishing and reading of these collections of oral texts. These were the
first texts in the language: whether in sesotho, setswana , yoruba or igbo.
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History did not stop at that point. "Organic" intellectuals,- to borrow the term used by
Cristiana Pugliese (1995) in relation to Gakaara Wa Wanjau, the first gikuyu writer-,
African intellectuals living among their people in the first half of the century felt that
they had something else to say , that their people had to be introduced to new types of
debates, that within the orality that was being recorded , they were many voices that
had to be heard. This is probably what the novel is all about, what the polyphony of
the genre means: Chaka in sesotho, Mhudi in english are good witnesses of the
conflicts of their times and of the potential of the novel as a genre.
It would be a very misleading caricature not to understand that the literature in African
language is the voice of the debates of the century concerning cultural conflict,
religious, and indirectly, political conflict . The analysis of Fagunwa's book is
especially clear in this respect and we regret that more is not done in this way
following this line of investigation.
As the new writing of African languages develop, research should pursue a new
critique of assumptions underlying work on oral tradition. Texts do not express, by the
mere fact of being recorded and transcribed, a pure or authentic tradition. There is no
standard version of an oral text. There are only performances and editing choices. The
seminal work of J.P.Clark (1977) should be considered again, as a model for a kind of
work that is probably no longer possible, and too rarely examined with some depth. It is
to his immense credit that he spent many years of his life giving a voice to the heroes of
the people of the delta. Part of the ecological disaster brought by the oil boom is also
probably the disappearance of Ijo communities capable of putting on performances of
the Ozidi Saga of the caliber of what J.P. Clark was capable of recording, transcribing,
transklating, commenting: who else has done such a work? Which other African writer
(Ngugi has certainly served his own language but in a very different way) has invested
such an amount of time trying to give an authentic version of what the African lore is
about? It took J.P.Clark several years, almost a decade to do the philological work that
was required of philologist in years gone by and that very few scholars have been
willing and capable of doing in Africa.
The respect shown to the language, even in the most material and minute aspects (
marking the tones for instance) is certainly part of this epistemology of publishing; it is
easier to write esswys and give lecture on what orality is about than to actually brig to
print, which is exposing to the scrutiny of the world, actual examples of the craft of
oral poets. Wole Soyinka has many times encouraged scholars to produce new
versions of the Fa, but so far little has come out while Bascom's work, long out of
print is back in demand, so I hear, among babalawos in new York. Who is ready to
give up a decade of his life to produce an edition of oral texts?
the end of the bards
The stagnation of literature in African languages seems to coincide with the end of the
bards. Creativity in local languages will always exist. But what about the abject
poverty of the children of slimani, mentioned by Mulokozi? It is hardly encouraging
for would be trainees! There seems to be an acceleration of movements and a crushing
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of rural cultures which were conservatories of texts. Wars, refugees, general figures
of life expectancy- usually below 5O- do not plead for the ancestors. It has been
important to record Wa Kamissoko before his death, since there was no edition of
Sundiata of this magnitude (1988). Everywhere the new media, whether sponsored by
private money or by the State are recording, publishing but also controlling.
Demanding long forms such as kasala or mbiimbi or enanga do not have much
breathing space. The floor has to be left to songs, usually much shorter, easier to
perform, or to pseudo ritualized forms such as political praise singing.
What about now? In any language the literature is made of the addition and eventual
cross fertilization , of collections of oral lore with or without an adaptation and of
original written works. In Africa today the disapearance of bards and the passing of
textual production in many languages are potential cultural disasters . Few texts are
there to be recorded . It is up to the intellectuals to produce new texts : but writing is
always a rupture, whatever the text...
Orality and amnesia
Demography is very clear: most people are under 30, which means they were born
after independance... To mention orality in relation to their cultural production is to
operate a conflation of two meanings of orality: the orality of long ancient epics told
and retold by bards and the orality of the media which is a by product of illiteracy and
which is the contrary of memory. Watching tv and video is not literacy, it is an orality
by default. It will certainly produce new forms, and it already has, but these cannot
claim for themselves the eminent dignity of the civilization of orality: they belong to a
new world in which memory has no part since the new media are fundamentaly
amnesic. The question is now the vitality of African languages in new urban
environments: is the new urban poetry going to be produced in english or in xhosa? In
kiswahili or in sheng? The test will be the capacity to textualize these new experiences,
like what Johannes Fabian did with the Mufwankolo group from Lubumbashi (1990) or
what we are trying to do with yoruba opera or ghanaian or togolese concert party.
Despite many papers and some books very few texts have been produced which give a
precise idea of these new genres.
Alain Ricard
Chris Swanepoel
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