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Truths yet Unborn? Oral Tradition as a Casualty of Culture Contact*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

David Henige
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin

Extract

This essay treats the effects of acculturation on oral historical materials. Rather than addressing it as a matter of ‘contamination’, that is, as a question of extraneous data entering and distorting ‘pristine’ traditions, it is considered here to be a facet of the larger question of cultural assimilation – a case of the old and familiar constantly confronting and responding to the new and strange. Seen in this way, oral data continuously adopt and adapt whatever new, relevant and interesting materials come their way in not very different – though decidedly less visible – ways from those that written data have always done. This argument is illustrated by examples from various times and places, largely situations where missionaries, newly literate members, or colonial officials, perceptibly influenced the historical views of societies on their way to becoming literate.

In fact this phenomenon seems widespread enough to justify advancing a model that can be tested against specific cases. For our purposes, this model begins with the first meeting of oral and literate cultures, although we can fairly assume that an infinity of similar but unrecorded meetings of oral cultures also resulted in change. After this initial impetus, the constraints of colonial rule, the exigencies of independence, and the aims of modern academic oral historiography each contributed in some measure to this process of ongoing change. As a result, historians, whether primarily interested in the reliability of oral data, or in the process and effects of changes in them, must look to a wider range of sources than has been customary.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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28 Henige, David, ‘“The Disease of Writing”: Ganda and Nyoro kinglists in a newly-literate world’, in Miller, Joseph C., ed., The African Past Speaks (Folkestone, 1980), 240–61Google Scholar, and the sources cited there.

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37 Bello's attribution of Biblical ancestors by way of the Qur'an exemplified that Islamic variation on Christian genealogizing mentioned earlier with regard to Buganda. The role of Nimrod in Muslim tradition is discussed in Schützinger, Heinrich, Ursprung und Entwicklung der arabischen Abraham-Nimrod-Legende (Bonn, 1961)Google Scholar, and Sidersky, D., Les origines des légendes musulmanes dans le Coran et dans les vies des Prophètes (Paris, 1933), 31–6, 3942.Google Scholar

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40 Law, , ‘Early Yoruba historiography’, 77, 86.Google Scholar It should be noted too that Lamurudu appeared at a time when it had become fairly popular to identify various west African peoples with our old friends the lost tribes of Israel, or at least to give them Jewish antecedents. In the eighteenth century Olaudah Equiano thought that he discerned similarities between his own people, the Igbo, and the ancient Jews: Jones, G. I., ‘Olaudah Equiano of the Niger Ibo’ in Curtin, Philip D., ed., Africa Remembered (Madison, 1968), 7983.Google Scholar In his West African Countries and Peoples, published in 1868, J. A. B. Horton went even farther by bringing the lost tribes into his discussion of west African origins (Horton, , West African Countries and Peoples [reprint ed., Edinburgh, 1969], 167–72).Google Scholar Jewish–west African connexions had also been bruited in the west African press of the time.

41 Simmons, David R., The great New Zealand myth (Wellington, 1976)Google Scholar; France, Peter, ‘The Kaunitoni myth: notes on the genesis of a Fijian tradition’, Journal of Pacific History, I (1966), 107–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

42 Minute of Palmer dated 3 May 1928, National Archives, Kaduna: SNP K 4049. I am grateful to David Dorward for this and other citations from the Nigerian archives relating to Palmer.

43 NAK: SNP 15911, vol. 1, minute dated 19 June 1928.

44 Palmer to Resident, Benue, 21 June 1928. NAK: AR/INT/W./3; minute dated 9 September 1921, NAK: SNP 3847/1921.

45 Meek, C. K., A Sudanese Kingdom. An Ethnographical Study of the Jukun-Speaking Peoples of Nigeria (London, 1931), 178316Google Scholarpassim. At ‘the instance’ of Palmer, Meek spent five months among the Jukun. Although he admitted that the Jukun were ‘peculiarly averse to giving information’, he managed to produce a work of more than 500 pages, with a preface by Palmer in which he repeated most of his by then familiar arguments about Near Eastern origins.

46 Ibid. xvi. Cf. minute dated 9 September 1921 cited in note 44, and Palmer's memorandum dated 28 August 1921. NAK: SNP19: K 2003. Surprisingly little has been done on Palmer's influence on informants and on administrative officers under his authority. For one such example see Cohen, Ronald, ‘The Bornu King Lists’ in Boston University Papers on Africa, ii, African History (Boston, 1966), 47–8.Google ScholarJones, , ‘Social Anthropology’, 285Google Scholar, mentions him in passing and, in a slightly different context, Dorward, David, ‘Ethnography and administration: a study of Anglo-Tiv “Working Misunderstanding”‘, Journal of African History, XV (1974), 457–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar, shows the value of researching the official mind when dealing with colonial source materials.

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50 Deng, , Africans of Two Worlds, 82–4.Google Scholar In his Dinka Cosmology (London, 1980), 57, 341Google Scholar, Deng again rules out the influence of recent Muslim or Christian teachings but does accept the likelihood that some of the motifs may have come from very early contacts of the Dinka with ‘the northern Sudan and Middle East’.

51 It happened, of course, that sometimes local people resented the introduction of printed texts and shunned their use, but it would be injudicious to conclude from this that they were entirely unaffected by their content; after all, word of mouth is nearly as important in literate (not to mention quasi-literate) societies as in non-literate ones.