what impact did oral traditions have on africa's history

West Africa has a great oral tradition. The history of Africa is rich with oral tradition. Additionally, Ms. Mutheu and her team will join our oral history workshops via Skype. These traditions are not religious principles, but a cultural identity that is passed on through stories, myths and tales. 3.01: West African Empires -What impact did oral traditions have on Africa’s history? This is a Eurocentric view that the early Africanist historians have always debated Oral history in Africa: A brief review of challenges and possibilities The materials of storytelling, whether in the oral or written tradition, are essentially the same. Unfortunately, however, we are losing members of these past generations far too quickly. The hero is the person who is being brought into a new relationship with that history, be it the history of a certain area—Kenya or South Africa or Algeria, for example—or of a wider area—of Africa generally or, in the case of A Question of Power, the history of the world. To be sure, the Arabic, English, French, and Portuguese literary traditions along with Christianity and Islam and other effects of colonialism in Africa also had a dynamic impact on African literature, but African writers adapted those alien traditions and made them their own by placing them into these African classical frames. Metaphor is the transformational process, the movement from the real to the mythic and back again to the real—changed forever, because one has become mythicized, because one has moved into history and returned with the elixir.  It is therefore essential that we record and preserve the memories and life histories of these people while we still can. According to oral traditions in western Africa, some of the descendants of Bilal ibn Rabah migrated to Mallel, the Arabic name for Mali. The people with viable memories of the transfer of power in the 1960s are now, at minimum, over sixty and surviving members of the founding generation of African nationalists are far older. oral transmission is full of exaggeration, creativity and sometimes the informant may talk of good things only. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K (1983), Dan and Sello in Bessie Head’s A Question of Power (1973), Mustapha in al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ’s Season of Migration to the North (1966), and Nedjma in Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma (1956). At the centre of the story is myth, the fantasy element, a character or event that moves beyond reality, though it is always rooted in the real. Myth, which is deeply, intensely emotional, has to do with the gods and creation, with the essence of a belief system; it is the imaged embodiment of a philosophical system, the giving of form to thought and emotion. Emphasizing the absolute necessity of protecting individual privacy, we will invite our informants to take part in a serious of oral history workshops where they will share their experiences with a public audience of students, faculty, and members of the wider St. Louis community.  In doing so they gave the lived experiences of ordinary people equal weight to “official” state, military, educational, and mission records. For 40 years, there's no written gospel of his life, until after the revolt. The Importance of Oral Traditions in African History. It is the explanation of the historical background of the novels. The oral tradition is a living, and dynamic organism within the … Oral tradition does not maintain the same value of the oral history; instead the values keeps on changing as time goes; Oral tradition may be biased. The transmission is through speech or song and may include folktales, ballads, chants, prose or verses.In this way, it is possible for a society to transmit oral history, oral literature, oral … Oral and written storytelling traditions have had a parallel development, and in many ways they have influenced each other. The image of Africa, then, is that rich combination of myth and history, with the hero embodying the essence of the history, or battling it, or somehow having a relationship with it by means of the fantasy mythic character. In serious literary works, the mythic fantasy characters are often derived from the oral tradition; such characters include the Fool in Sheikh Hamidou Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure (1961), Kihika (and the mythicized Mugo) in Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat (1967), Michael K in J.M. As is the case with the oral tradition, written literature is a combination of the real and the fantastic. Head of library diversity initiatives and outreachrudolphc@wustl.edu, Independent Scholar and Filmmakeraskari.kenya@gmail.com, Teaching Professor and Linguist, African and African-American Studiesmmutonya@wustl.edu, Professor of History and African and African-American Studiestparsons@wustl.edu, Administrative assistant, African and African-American Studiesjstanton@wustl.edu, Copyright 2020 by:Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, African and African-American Studiesafas@wustl.edu, Department of African and African-American Studies, Visit the main Washington University in St. Louis website. Beginning first with older expatriate Kenyans, and then perhaps moving to include Somalis and other diasporic communities, we will commence with a series of simple conversations with older Africans living in St. Louis about the key experiences and perceptions of their youth. The fantasy character provides access to history, to the essence of history. 3.01: West African Empires-What impact did oral traditions have on Africa’s history? The hero is everyman with myth inside him. For example, the Choctaw oral tradition includes two creation stories: One relates to migration from the west and another to … AFAS is assisting this team by helping to research and produce more of these sample interviews with an eye toward a major funding proposal and documentary project. The real-life character is the hero who is in the process of being created: Samba Diallo, Mugo, the doctor, Elizabeth, the narrator, or the four pilgrims. Oral history both corrected the records of the colonial era and filled in the institutional gaps resulting from post-colonial African governments’s inability and unwillingness to continue the bureaucratic record keeping traditions of their predecessors. Often, the responsibility of recording historical information was consigned to professional historians, trusted individuals whose superior wisdom and training equipped them to remember and interpret … What is a griot and why were they so inportant in west Africa? Mindful of these possibilities, Washington University’s Department of African and African American Studies is undertaking an African oral history project. It is also a mode of transmitting feelings, and attitudes. This character is the heart and the spiritual essence of history. Specifically, the Mandinka clan Keita, which is generally credited with founding the great Mali Empire, claims its descent from Bilal ibn Rabah, referred to as Bilali Bunamah in the Mandinka … Oral tradition is important in west Africa because modern writers add to the oral legacy some have turned oral traditions to novels. This collaboration between WU faculty, graduate students and undergraduates and the people who lived through these important historical eras is creating a unique historical record that offers new perspectives on African history while helping individual informants better preserve their own life stories for themselves and their descendants. These are the keys, then: the hero who is being shaped, the fantasy character who is the ideological and spiritual material being shaped and who is also the artist or shaper, and the larger issues, the historical panorama. Societies throughout sub-Saharan Africa have preserved knowledge about the past through verbal, visual, and written art forms. Transformation is the crucial activity of the story, its dynamic movement. He thereby becomes a part of it, representative of it, embodying the culture. It combines, on the one hand, the real (the contemporary world) and history (the realistic world of the past) and, on the other, myth and hero, with metaphor being the agent of transformation. The storyteller speaks, time collapses, and the members of the audience are in the presence of history. African-based oral traditions became the primary means of preserving history, mores, and other cultural information among the people. In each case, a real-life character moves into a relationship with a mythic character, and that movement is the movement of the hero’s becoming a part of history, of culture. In the process of this examination, the writer invents characters and events that correspond to history but are not history. By conventional definition, history is the study of written records.  Consequently, imperial conquerers portrayed Africans as a people without history, which in effect implied that their culture was static, tribalistic, and inherently primitive. They taught people about Africa’s ancient geography, culture, and ancestry. Literature is atomized, fragmented history. Oral and written storytelling traditions have had a parallel development, and in many ways they have influenced each other. Most African societies place great worth in oral tradition because it is a primary means of conveying culture. They have also used linguistics and archaeology to create a more accurate written history of the … These traditions have been passed from one generation to the next. In the San, Black and Afrikaans traditions, people knew how to treat certain illnesses or wounds from what their elders told them. This was consistent with the griot practices of oral history in many African and other cultures that did not rely on the written word. ... Over the past fifty years, historians of Africa have done more to incorporate Africa’s oral traditions into their examination of the ancient past. The fantasy character is crucial: he is the artist’s palette, the mythic element of the story. Victoria Mutheu, Sagwa Chabeda, and Stan Barua have already put together an extremely promising and highly polished series of sample interviews. West Africans did not record written history.instead they recorded their culture using oral history West African oral traditions help to preserve the values and histories of West African societies. The forms of oral tradition cultures are kept alive by being passed on by word of mouth from one … The kinds of imagery used by literary storytellers and the patterned way those reality and fantasy images are organized in their written works are not new. By signing up for this email, you are agreeing to news, offers, and information from Encyclopaedia Britannica. Ancient Egyptian scribes, early Hausa and Swahili copyists and memorizers, and contemporary writers of popular novellas have been the obvious and crucial transitional figures in the movement from oral to literary traditions. How did the location of the Western Sudanic states have an impact on their history? One cannot fully appreciate the works of Chinua Achebe or Ousmane Sembene without placing them into the context of Africa’s classical period, its oral tradition. Be on the lookout for your Britannica newsletter to get trusted stories delivered right to your inbox. This is the alchemy of the literary experience. Their stories were intended to preserve the tribe’s history and educate the young. Ancient Egyptian scribes, early Hausa and Swahili copyists and memorizers, and contemporary writers of popular novellas have been the obvious and crucial transitional figures in the movement from oral … In most ancient societies including those of Africa, legacies, culture and traditions were passed from one generation to other by this … African and African American oral traditions is highly important for K-12 students to learn. Imagine what American historians could learn if they were able to interview the founding fathers (and mothers) of the United States a half century later in 1826? Folktales taught young boys and girls about their culture, and it taught them many morals …  Even more problematically, this Eurocentric bias has complicated the study of African history because, until the western conquest of Africa in the late nineteenth century, most Africans societies relied on memories, transmitted orally, to preserve and recollect their past. Describe how West African history, beliefs, and values were passed down through oral and written traditions. In mythic imagery is the embodiment of significant emotions—the hopes, fears, dreams, and nightmares—of a people. This, in effect, will create a virtual international community of scholars all working on various aspects of Africanist oral history. While historically black colleges in the United States had pushed back against these pernicious stereotypes for decades, most western history departments only acknowledged the existence of African history in the 1960s in response to the end of empire in Africa and the successes of the American civil rights movement. It is the hero’s identification with history that makes it possible for us to speak of the hero as a hero. Many of these cultural elements have been passed from … In most ancient societies including those of Africa, legacies, culture and traditions were passed from one generation to other by this ‘Oral Tradition’. The real contemporary world is the place from which the hero comes and to which the hero will return. This movement of a realistic character into myth is metaphor, the blending of two seemingly unlike images. Visit the Collection Guide below for detailed information about the collection and updates on contents. It is a time of masks. This is … This is the Fool, Kihika, Michael K, Dan and Sello, Mustapha, Nedjma. In the oral tale this is clearly the fantasy character; so it is, in a complex, refracted way, in written literature. ORAL TRADITIONS EVOLVE INTO GOSPELS. dsc01621 copy.jpg Who is involved in the African oral history … It is the driving force of a people, that emotional force that defines a people; it is the everlasting form of a culture, hence its link to the gods, to the heavens, to the forever. History—the story of a people, their institutions, and their community—is the way one likes to think things happened, in the real world. We have also been working with a team of Kenyan filmmakers who are working a documentary on the experiences of surviving African veterans of the Second World War. Oral traditions include medical practices. In the San and Black cultures it was usually the medicine men that knew this, but in Afrikaans it is called ‘boererate’, and anybody was allowed to use them. Walter J. Ong (1982, p.12) puts forward that “thinking of oral tradition or a heritage of oral performance, genres and styles as ‘oral literature’ is rather like thinking of horses as automobiles without wheels”. The linkage between oral tradition and the written word is most obviously seen in pulp literature: the Onitsha market literature of Nigeria; the popular fiction of Accra, Ghana; the popular love and detective literature of Nairobi; the visualizing of story in the complex comic strips sold in shops in Cape Town. This is possible because of nature of transmission itself. But the African oral traditions exerted their own influence on these literatures. Reality, the present, is here, but with explosive emotional images giving it a context. Oral tradition communicates knowledge of pre-colonial Africa to the present generations, whereby it teaches values and beliefs integral to the culture, such as the history of the origins and migrations of particular peoples, and also validates the political and social status quo of the present by providing the history of groups or … Griots were poet-musicians whose job was to memorize everything. From the Azmari in Ethiopia, to the Iggawin in Mauritania, the Halaiqui in Morocco, the Imbongi in South Africa, and the Akewi in Nigeria, Africans have always been an oral people. Technologies such as writing and printing play a vital role in transmitting history, thought and creativity, and such technologies have a long history in West Africa.Existing independently of writing for centuries – yet interwoven with such technologies to the present day – is a wide variety of oral traditions passed down … In this movement the oral tradition is revealed as alive and well in literary works.  This allowed liberal democracies like France and Britain who sponsored the imperialists to legitimize their conquests by portraying Africans as simple tribesmen in need of a guiding hand to achieve “modernity.” Â. The Oral Performance in Africa Storytellers in the African oral tradition do what storytellers in all cultures and in all times have done: they entertain the members of the audiences. Here is where reality and fantasy, history and fiction blend, the confluence that is at the heart of story. Often a griot will memorize the genealogy, or family history, of everyone … Over the centuries, African culture has meshed with cultures from around the world, although much of traditional African customs have remained … The African Oral History Collection is archived at Washington University Libraries. Lesson Summary. But the linkage is also a crucial characteristic of more-serious and more-complex fiction. What Should I Know For Module 3? They were a verbal artist of the mande people they were etertainers that sang songs and riceted poems they were known to spealk for hours. The influence of oral traditions on modern writers, Literatures in European and European-derived languages. Like all Native American tribes, the Choctaw have an oral storytelling tradition going back generations. Oral traditions The nature of storytelling. History of our ancestors and the society they lived in was usually remembered by people and kept alive by word of mouth. The recollections of ordinary African women and men are often the best, and often the only, historical sources for much of twentieth-century African history. We have to remember that Jesus died around 30. Metaphor is the hero’s transformation. The danger in the thought that oral traditions are not a reliable history source material is enourmous that it has skulked into the minds of some students of history. The writer is examining the relationship of the reader with the world and with history. The oral tradition refers to stories, old sayings, songs, proverbs, and other cultural products that have not been written down or recorded. It is the power of the story, the centre of the story, as Samba Diallo moves into the Fool, as Mugo moves into Kihika, as the doctor moves into Michael K, as Elizabeth moves into Dan and Sello, as the narrator moves into Mustapha, as the four pilgrims move into Nedjma. The cultural achievements of West Africans have significantly influenced the culture of the United States, particularly in the areas of art, music, oral traditions… Oral traditions are key features of Africa’s cultural legacy because they bring hope and entertainment to people. JACK GOODY College Cambridge The Impact of Islamic Writing on the Oral Cultures of West Africa In discussing the impact of Islamic literacy on the societies of West Africa one ought to try and separate the influence of Islam from the influence of literacy While total separation is barely possible at least we should have the … Knew how to live the essence of history visit the Collection Guide below for information., those with connections to the essence of history San, Black Afrikaans!, history is the explanation of the story movement of a realistic character into myth is metaphor, blending! Jesus died around 30 an impact on their history person to another, to the oral.! 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