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Oral Tradition and the History of Segmentary Societies*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

A.E. Afigbo
A.E. Afigbo*
Affiliation:
University of Nigeria, Nsukka
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Extract

The field of the methodology of oral tradition has become increasingly specialized and technical. This much is clear from even a casual acquaintance with publications in this area. The fact is that ever since the publication in 1961 of Jan Vansina's epoch-making book, Oral Tradition, the study of the methodology of oral tradition has become a minor academic industry among historians, psychohistorians and anthropologists. Different aspects of the problems posed by the use of this family of historical evidence--dating and chronology, reliability, methods of collection and preservation, techniques of analysis (synchronic, diachronic, and multi-disciplinary)--continue to be probed in monographs, learned journals, and higher degree theses.

This wide-ranging and laudable concern for the methodology of oral tradition has not only helped to underlie the centrality of oral tradition as a source for the history of Africa, especially of Black Africa, in the precolonial period or even in the colonial period; it has also made all would-be exploiters of this source alert to many of the problems associated with its use. Yet it must be conceded that all this feverish, if determined, activity has not established, and there is little likelihood that it will ever establish, a science of oral tradition as exact and universal in its application as the methods of physics and mathematics. Each user of oral tradition, like each user of documentary or other sources of history, still has, and always will have, to decide for himself, and in the light of criteria and parameters acceptable to him, what use to make of each corpus of tradition and of each event or strand in the corpus.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 12 , 1985 , pp. 1 - 10
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1985

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Footnotes

*

An earlier version of this paper was delivered as a lecture to the staff and students of the Department of History, University of Calabar in 1979. This revised version has benefited from the discussions that followed.

References

NOTES

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