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The Myth of the Bagre
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 July 2024
Extract
Dr Jack Goody has over a period of twenty years done extensive fieldwork in northern Ghana, mainly among the LoDagaa (more commonly known as the Dagarti) and the Gonja. In both areas, he has exercised very satisfactorily the normal skills of the anthropologist dutifully recording the size of farming groups, and the ways inheritances are divided. However, farms are cultivated, and inheritances shared by human beings, who use language and live in time; and Goody’s awareness of this has made him responsible for three books which related the history and literature (both written and oral) of northern Ghana to a wider world. In Technology, Tradition and the State in Africa Dr Goody argued that Ghanian history is significantly influenced not only by the means of production, but also by the means of destruction, the horse, associated with Islam and the savannas, and guns, associated with Christendom and the forests. In a contribution to Literacy in Traditional Societies Dr Goody showed in the West African context, but with obviously much wider relevance, that the break-through to literacy may lead not towards secularization, but rather to mythifying and mystifying to a much greater degree than before. In The Myth of the Bagre Goody has not only increased the available corpus of African oral literature by giving us the original texts and annotated translations of the two long Bagre poems, but has also indicated its place in the religion and world-view of the LoDagaa and its relevance to contemporary discussions of myth.
The LoDagaa are not, strictly speaking, a ‘tribe’ in the colonialist sense of an obviously distinctive group, sharply distinguished from their neighbouring tribes. As happens in a number of areas in Africa, this particular area of northern Ghana is marked by a lack of coincidence between cultural and linguistic boundaries, and by the gradual way cultural differences appear with gradually increasing distance. Even the term has been selected for use to cover a given area by Dr Goody, albeit with some justification in local usage.
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- Copyright © 1973 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
page 52 note 1 Oxford University Press for International African Institute, 1971.
page 52 note 2 Cambridge University Press, 1968. This is a collection of essays by several hands. As well as being editor, Jack Goody was joint author of the ‘keynote’ essay, and contributed ‘Restricted Literacy in Northern Ghana’.
page 52 note 3 Oxford, the Clarendon Press. Oxford Library of African Literature, 1972, xii + 381 pp.
page 52 note 4 Dr Goody has introduced this term himself. Literally it means ‘Westerners Easterners’. Earlier anthropologists had used the terms ‘Lobi’ and ‘Dagarti’ as though they referred to distinct units when, in fact, the ‘Lobi’ are the people to my west, and the ‘Dagarti’ the people to my east, whatever my geographical position.
page 53 note 1 See The Drums of Affliction, by Turner, V. W., Oxford University Press, 1968, p. 16Google Scholar.
page 54 note 1 French anthropologists call them ‘genies’. They might be called ‘fairies’, provided we keep in mind the tricky gift‐givers of the Celtic peoples rather than the prettified figures of English pantomime.
page 55 note 1 Father Augustine Dery, a LoDagaa priest, tells me that Bagre initiates readily appreciated much of Catholic symbolism.
page 56 note 1 The French original is ‘les mythes se pensent dans les hommes et a leur insu’. See Leach, Edmund, Livi‐Strauss, Fontana/Collins, 1970, p. 51Google Scholar.
page 56 note 2 For Robin Horton and his critics, see Gillian Ross, ‘Neo‐Tylorianism: a reassessment’, Man, March 1971, pp. 105‐116.