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Ideology and Oral Traditions: Listening to the Voices ‘From Below’1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

C.A. Hamilton
C.A. Hamilton*
Affiliation:
Swaziland Oral History Project
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Extract

From the time of the translation into English of Jan Vansina's Oral Tradition in 1965, the use of oral traditions as historical sources has become an increasingly technical exercise. Historians of the non-literate societies of Africa in particular have been alterted to, among others, such things as “floating gaps” and “hour-glass effects” in traditions, elongated and collapsed genealogies, the peculiarities and fallibility of human memory, the overlaying of oral traditions with successive ruling group histories, and the functioning of oral traditions as cultural charters.

Some scholars consider this ‘reification of method’ to have wrought a tool increasingly honed for historical analysis, able to lay bare within oral tradition historical facts, consistent within themselves and with other oral traditions. Others argue that the elaborateness of the methodology reflects the inherently unreliable nature of oral traditions as historical sources. They suggest that, at best, oral traditions are able to provide reliable data only about the interests of a particular group at the particular moment when they were recorded.

This paper addresses the debate over the status of oral traditions as historical sources, with particular reference to the use of traditions in the illumination of the precolonial past. Drawing on some of the insights of the new social historians concerning ideology and first-hand oral testimony, it examines the relationship between ideology and oral traditions in non-literate societies. The argument developed here is that, far from simply representing the interests of a particular group, oral traditions often reflect ideological struggles between the rulers and ruled in a society.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 14 , 1987 , pp. 67 - 86
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1987

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Footnotes

1

I am grateful to John Wright, Phil Bonner, Stephen Clingman, and Kelwyn Sole who read and commented on an earlier draft of this paper, to Harriette Gavshon who first introduced me to Marxist literary criticism, and to her and Jill Arnott for engaging in a lively debate with me on the subject.

References

Notes

2. See, for example, Vansina, , “Traditions of Genesis,” JAM, 15 (1974), 317–22Google Scholar; Miller, Joseph, “Listening for the African Past” in The African Past Speaks, ed. Miller, Joseph (Folkestone, 1980), ix-xii, 1–59Google Scholar; Henige, David, The Chronology of Oral Tradition (Oxford, 1974)Google Scholar; idem., “‘The Disease of Writing:’ Ganda and Nyoro Kinglists in a Newly Literate World” in The African Past Speaks, 240–61; Vansina, Jan, “Memory and Oral Tradition” in The African Past Speaks, 262–71Google Scholar; Thompson, Paul, The Voice of the Past: Oral History (Oxford, 1978), esp. 133Google Scholar; Thompson, , “Report on the Fourth International Oral History Conference, Aix-en-Provence,” Oral History, 11 (1983), 18–22Google Scholar; Spear, Thomas, “Oral Traditions: Whose History?,” HA, 8 (1981), 163–77Google Scholar; Miller, , “Kings, Lists and History in Kasanje,” HA, 6 (1979), 51–96.Google Scholar

3. Acceptance of the literal veracity of oral traditions, once refracted through Vansina's methodological prism, characterizes almost the entire range of papers presented at the 1985 UNESCO Sub-Regional Seminar on Oral Traditions, Lusaka. See in particular, the work of F.B. Musonda, “Use of Oral Traditions in African Archaelogy” and A.H. Mulongo, “Oral Traditions in Historical Writing.”

4. The most ‘theoretically elegant’ of the anthropological assaults on oral traditions as history is the work of Beidelman, T.O., “Myth, Legend and Oral History,” Anthropos, 65 (1965), 74–97.Google Scholar See also Wright, D.R., “Can a Blind Man Really Know an Elephant: Lessons on the Limitations of Oral Traditions From Paul Irwin's Liptako Speaks,” HA, 9 (1982), 303–23Google Scholar; Miller, , “Listening,” 3–4Google Scholar, for a discussion of this position.

5. Oral History, the journal of the Oral History Society, headquartered at the University of Essex, started in 1973. It has carried only a handful of articles on oral history in Africa.

6. See Miller's observations on the capacity of personal reminiscences to transform into traditions and his dicussions of Vansina's comments on traditions using personalized terms: Miller, , “Listening,” 10, 21–24.Google Scholar

7. Irwin, Paul, Liptako Speaks: History from Oral Tradition, in Africa (Princeton, 1981), 30.Google Scholar

8. Ibid., 33.

9. On ‘public’ and ‘personal’ history, see Henige, , “‘The Disease of Writing,’“ 240–61.Google Scholar Terence Ranger in his “Personal Reminiscences and the Experience of the People in East-Central Africa,” Oral History, 6 (1978), 45–75Google Scholar, offers a stimulating challenge to Vansina's rejection of personal reminiscence, and suggests that informal material on African societies can offer historians a great deal that is of historical value. The distinction between ‘public’ and ‘personal’ history is posed in rather a different way in the work of the Popular Memory Group from the Centre for Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham (see Thompson's, Paul discussion in his “Report on the Fourteenth History Workshop, (1980),” Oral History, 9 (1981), 6–8.Google Scholar One work which has attempted to bridge these divisions is Roberts, Andrew, “The Use of Oral Sources for African History,” Oral History, 4 (1976), 41–55.Google Scholar Also see Thompson, , Voice of the Past, x, 5.Google Scholar

10. The Invention of Tradition, ed. Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terence (Cambridge, 1983), 2.Google Scholar

11. Ibid.

12. Popular Memory Group, “Popular Memory: Theory, Politics, Method” in Making Histories (London, 1982), 205–52.Google Scholar

13. See, for example, Beidelman, , “Swazi Royal Ritual,” Africa, 36 (1966), 373–405CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Evans-Pritchard, E.E., Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (Oxford, 1937)Google Scholar; idem., “Divine Kingship of the Shilluk of the Nilotic Sudan” in his Essays on Anthropology (London, 1962)Google Scholar; also see the more recent work of the French Marxist anthropologist, Maurice Godelier, who worked with Bettelheim and Lévi-Strauss in the 1960s, and whose work remains sympathetic to structuralism. (Godelier, , Perspectives in Marxist Anthropology [Cambridge, 177]).Google Scholar

14. Larrain, Jorge, The Concept of Ideology, London, 1979, chapter three.Google Scholar

15. Godelier, Perspectives, chapter 2.

16. Althusser, Louis, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” in Lenin and Philosophy (London, 1971), 152–58.Google Scholar See Laclau, Ernesto, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (London, 1977), 101n32Google Scholar; Thompson, E.P., The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London, 1978), 290.Google Scholar

17. Ibid., 406.

18. Gramsci, Antonio, Selections From the Prison Notebooks (London, 1971), 198-99, 530, 538, 547.Google Scholar

19. Ibid., 79. Gwyn Williams explains Gramsci's notion of hegemony “to mean a socio-political situation, in his terminology a ‘moment,’ in which the philosophy and practice of a society fuse, or are in an equilibrium; an order in which one concept of reality is diffused throughout society in all its institutional and private manifestations, informing with its spirit, all taste, morality, customs, religions and political principles, and all social relations, particularly in their intellectual and moral connotations.” (“Gramsci's Concept of ‘Egemonia,’“ Journal of the History of Ideas, 21 [1960], 587Google Scholar). Hegemony is thus used to refer to “approved” domination. “It has to do with the way one social group influences other groups, making certain compromises with them in order to gain their consent for its leadership of society as a whole.” Approaches to Gramsci, ed. Sassoon, Anne Showstack (London, 1982), 13.Google Scholar See also Mouffe's discussions of Gramscian hegemony (“Hegemony and Ideology in Gramsci” in Gramsoi and Marxist Theory, ed. Mouffe, Chantal [London, 1979], chapter 5).Google Scholar

20. Gramsci, , Prison Notebooks, 79.Google Scholar

21. Mouffe, , “Hegemony,” 193.Google Scholar

22. Laclau, , Politics and Ideology, 161Google Scholar, with emphasis added.

23. Althusser, , “Ideology,” 155–58Google Scholar; Gramsci, , Prison Notebooks, 12.Google Scholar

24. Macherey, Pierre, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Wall, G. (London, 1978).Google Scholar

25. Ibid., 94.

26. Jameson, Frederic, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (New Yrk, 1981), 76–83.Google Scholar

27. Vansina, Jan, “Is Elegance Proof? Structuralism and African History,” HA, 10 (1983), 314.Google Scholar

28. Ibid., emphasis in original. Also see Paul Thompson's comments on seeing oral sources as essentially a means of understanding a society and its culture from within. (“The New Oral History in France” in People's History and Socialist Theory, ed. Samuel, Raphael [London, 1981], 76.)Google Scholar

29. Jameson, , Political Unconscious, 86.Google Scholar

30. Ibid., 95.

31. Ibid., 99–100.

32. Eagleton, Terry, Criticism and Ideology (London, 1978).Google Scholar See p. 53 for Eagleton's discussion of literary production in the “tribal bardic system.”

33. Ibid., 63.

34. Ibid., 72. Emphasis in original.

35. Ibid., 95.

36. Jameson, , Political Unconscious, 109.Google Scholar

37. Thompson, , “Fourth International Oral History Conference,” 20.Google Scholar

38. Feierman, Steven, The Shambaa Kingdom: A History (Madison, 1974), 13.Google Scholar

39. Jameson, , Political Unconscious, 70Google Scholar; Vansina, , “Memory and Oral Tradition,” 262–71.Google Scholar This approach also takes cognizance of the point raised by Elizabeth Tonkin that recall is not purely an individual phenomenon. (“The Boundaries of History in Oral Performance,” HA, 9 [1982], 273–84).Google Scholar

40. Bonner, Philip L., Kings, Commoners and Concessionaires: The Rise and Dissolution of the Nineteenth Century Swazi State (Cambridge, 1982), 22.Google Scholar

41. Godelier, Perspectives, chapter 4; also see Spear, , “Oral Traditions,” 173–74Google Scholar, on “the lack of alternatives in ‘traditional’ thought.”

42. Thompson, , “Fourteenth History Workshop,” 7.Google Scholar

43. Take, for example, the Zulu proverb ‘amabon’ abonen' ashiwo NguGcugcwa' (the seers have seen each other, said Gcugcwa). The aphorism is commonly used by a person in a tight situation, and suggests that those who have an advantage over the person concerned will, one day, find themselves in a similar plight. In a nineteenth-century oral tradition we find an anecdote which indicates the historical origin of the proverb:

Gcugcwa caused trouble in Tshaka's country (in Zululand), others caused trouble in our country (i.e. carried on their evil practices.) Gcugcwa ka Nqabeni… stole Tshaka's cattle. He was chief of the Wosiyana people. Gcugcwa was caught near the Tugela where he usually thieved. He was taken to T[shaka]. T[shaka] said, ‘ We see you, Gcugcwa.' G[cugcgwa] replied, ‘We see each other, Nkosi. You see me now; they will see you tomorrow. ‘ He said this because he knew his death was imminent.

G[cugcwa] was then tied across the gate and T[shaka] directed that all the cattle--those from which he was so fond of stealing--were to be driven over him and trample him to death.”

James Stuart Archive, ed. Webb, C. de B. and Wright, J.B., 3: 81Google Scholar, evidence of Melapi. Emphasis in original.

Nursery tales similarly often contain fragments of historical evidence. The proliferation of cannibal stories with which naughty Zulu children were regaled provide a good illustration of this. Under much ‘fee-fi-fo-fum’(‘Eh, eh! endhlini, yami lapa namhla nje ku nuka zantungwana. Banta bami, n'enze njani na? Leli punga li vela pi na?'--literally, ‘Fee-fi, my house here today smells suspicious. My children, what have you done? Where does this smell come from?’) there are details to be found about the famine which underlay anthropophagy in Zululand-Natal, and about social attitudes to, and the life style of, cannibals.

44. Nyembezi, Cyril L.S., Zulu Proverbs (Johannesburg, 1954)Google Scholar, preface.

45. Grey, Stephen, “Leipoldt's Valley Community: the Novelist as Archivist,” paper presented to History Workshop, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 1984, 5.Google Scholar

46. Ibid., 10.

47. Spear, , “Oral Traditions,” 171.Google Scholar

48. See Thompson's comments on the reliability of testimonies that are not conceived of as ‘history’ in “Oral Evidence,” 65.

49. Hobsbawm, /Ranger, , Invention of Tradition, 9.Google Scholar

50. Vansina, , “Is Elegance Proof,” 307–48.Google Scholar

51. Kendrick, Walter, “What is This Thing Called Hermeneutics?” Voice Literary Supplement, 18 (1983), 7.Google Scholar