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Myth in the Context of African Traditional Histories: Can it be Called “Applied History”?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2014

S.A. Shokpeka
S.A. Shokpeka*
Affiliation:
University of Benin
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Extract

For the reconstruction of history from oral sources, four broad types are usually distinguishable. These are myth, legend, songs, and what Phillips Stevens calls “popular history.” All of them fall under the generic heading of “folklore”—a term which is so broad in its application that it could include nearly all expressive aspects of culture. The only type that we will concern ourselves with in this study is myth. A comprehensive examination of the issue in question in the study requires a definition of the word myth; an examination of the characteristics of “applied history;” and the application of these characteristics to myth with a view to finding out any point of agreement between them, before a final answer will be given to the question whether “myth in the context of African traditional histories,” can be called applied history.

The Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English defines myth as a “story handed down from olden time, containing the early beliefs of a race.” Vansina identifies myths by their subject matter and talks about them as those stories which “deal with and interpret the relations between the natural and the supernatural and are concerned with all that part of religious life that lies beyond the moral order. “ He says that they “attempt to explain the world, the culture, the society … in terms of religious causes.” McCall, for his part, refers to myths as “stories concerning the supernatural, the activities of deities, spirits and semi-divine heroes on the origin of the world, mankind and cultural artifacts and institutions which usually are said to have been achieved through the instrumentality of these sacred beings.” Afigbo, in turn, considers myths as having the “tendency to explain historical institutions and development by appeal to non-historic factors and forces”—as stories that see “the supernatural acting at times through the agency of man, at times through the agency of the lower animals and other times even through the agency of inanimate object, as the original and continuing causes of motion in a society.”

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 32 , 2005 , pp. 485 - 491
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2005

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References

1 Stevens, Phillips, “The Uses of Oral Traditions in the Writing of African History,” Tarikh 6/1(1978), 2Google Scholar.

2 Vansina, Jan, Oral Tradition (Chicago, 1965), 157Google Scholar.

3 McCall, Daniel F., Africa in Time-Perspective (New York, 1969), 41Google Scholar.

4 Afigbo, A.E., “Facts and Myths in Nigerian Historiography,” Nigeria Magazine 122/23(1977), 83–84Google Scholar.

5 Pender-Cudlip, Patrick, “Oral Tradition and Anthropological Analysis,” Azania 7(1972), 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Ibid.

7 Lloyd, P.C., “Yoruba Myths: a Sociologist's Interpretation,” Odù 2(1955), 22Google Scholar. See also King, Noel Q., African Cosmos: An Introduction to Religion in Africa (Belmont, CA, 1986), 8–9Google Scholar, for other versions of this myth of creation.

8 Lloyd, , “Yoruba Myths,” 22Google Scholar.

9 Ibid.

10 King, , African Cosmos, 27–28Google Scholar.

11 Strides, G.T. and Ifeka, C., Peoples and Empires of West Africa: West Africa in History, 1000-1800 (New York, 1971), 311Google Scholar; Egharevba, J.U., A Short History of Benin (Ibadan, 1968), 6Google Scholar.

12 Pender-Cudlip, , “Oral Tradition,” 12Google Scholar.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid.

16 McCall, , Africa in Time-Perspective, 43Google Scholar.

17 Pender-Cudlip, , “Oral Tradition,” 12Google Scholar.

18 Ibid., 13.

19 McCall, , Africa in Time-Perspective, 43Google Scholar.

20 Afigbo, , “Facts and Myths,” 86Google Scholar.

21 Pender-Cudlip, “Oral Tradition,” 13Google Scholar.

22 H.E. Barnes and Howard Becker, Social Thought front Lore to Science, quoted in Pender-Cudlip, “Oral Tradition,” 14.