Caring about Africa

[Holbytla]

Most people don't realize that the "recorded history" of many parts of Africa is actually better preserved than that of Europe, even though that "recorded history" comes from an oral tradition rather than a written tradition.

And therefore hasn't been spread as widely or as efficiently.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Thanks for you kind words, Jnyusa and yovargas.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Most people don't realize that the "recorded history" of many parts of Africa is actually better preserved than that of Europe, even though that "recorded history" comes from an oral tradition rather than a written tradition.

And therefore hasn't been spread as widely or as efficiently.

To a certain extent, I agree with you, Holby. It is true that written history can be more easily spread widely than history preserved purely within an oral tradition. But I don't necessarily agree with you about "efficiently". I think that westerners, that have relied on writing things down for so long, have a negative impression of an oral tradition that is not entirely accurate. We tend to think of it as sort of like a game of "telephone" when one person whispers something in the ear of another, who then whispers into the ear of the next person, and so on, and so on, with the information continuously distorting so that it is completely unrecognizable by the end. But in a culture that relies on an oral tradition, it doesn't work that way. History - and for that matter, music -- is preserved remarkably intact from person to person and generation to generation. And there are certain advantages to this system. A person raised in an oral tradition has his or her memory trained to a level that greatly exceeds that of someone who is trained to rely on writing things down. I have gotten a taste of that in my musical studies. When I first started studying West African music, I found that if I didn't write things down, I never remembered them. But I also found that relying on notating the music tended to make my playing stiff and feeling-less. So I tried more and more to train my ears and my mind. I found that the more I tried to rely on my memory, the more I was able to rely on my memory. This reached an unusual apex when I was studying for the California bar exam. I found that my musical efforts had been the best possible training for the type of intense memorization necessary to best that difficult test.

There is something else to be said for the oral tradition, particularly in West Africa (although I believe that there similar traditions in East Africa, central African, and the southern portions of the continent). The way the history is preserved is interrelated with the way people respect each other. I mentioned earlier that at the naming ceremony I attended last weekend, the djeli (or griot) sang songs of praise reciting the history of Mamady's family going back to the 13th century. This whole idea of respect is so important in that culture. For instance, in the initiation ceremony when a child passes into adulthood, one of the most important things they are taught is how much respect to pay different people -- their parents, their siblings, other family members, other elders, a stranger that comes to the village, even their ancestors. I find that this whole concept permeates the people there, even in the cities, and even despite the political and sociological turmoil that exists across the continent (unfortunately, with the influx of western culture, including hip-hop, this seems to changing in the younger generation, but that is the subject for another discussion). That is part of what I was trying so unsuccessfully to talk about before when I was saying that there are things that we could learn from Africa and Africans. There is a directness in the way the people interact (and I have noted this in other Africans other than those I have met in and from West Africa) that I think is very admirable. And a sense of community, and of sharing that seems to be largely lost in the U.S. People in Guinea are so poor, and yet they were inviting us into their houses and offering us food. I have always had more of a culture shock coming back to the U.S. than going to Guinea, because of the intensely materialistic and competitive environment here.

Don't get me wrong. I know that the problems of Africa are huge, and it is far from a paradise. I hope that more attention is paid to solving those problems, and that people come to care more about "Africa". Because there is much to care about.

[solicitr]

That's true whether it started under colonial occupation or only with corporate exploitation.

But that type of corruption- bribery etc by self-interested colonialists or corporations- is only the tip of the corruption iceberg. The underwater 90% is local rulers- many of them barely more than brigands- who regard Western aid as their personal piggy bank, being far more interested in Mercedes-Benzes than helping their people. The most effective aid programs in Africa without exception are those which bypass the government and work directly with the peasant population. And even there corruption takes its toll, since very frequently one can't get a permit for anything, or the electricity turned on, without paying a substantial gratuity to the local thug-in-residence. And of course the limited electricity/fuel/roads/building materials etc are themselves a result of the pipeline Western Aid Program > President's Office > Numbered Swiss Account.

It IS rather arrogant- the inverse, self-flagellating type of arrogance- to assume that Wicked Westerners are the Root of All Evil. Human beings, Africans included, are perfectly capable of coming up with evil all by themselves. Robert Mugabe is entirely homegrown. I'd say the bulk of our culpability lies in the well-intentioned but ill-thought-out rush to break up the old colonial empires without in any way providing for a transition to reasonably honest, competent governments and reasonably stable economies.


Please do NOT fault the United States- not even the current Coprolith-in-Chief- for international inaction in Sudan. We have been leading the -er- sidle against the genocide, but the UN has been completely stymied largely by China, which has a cozy financial relationship with the Khartoum regime. Perhaps we should act unilaterally- but the last time we tried that it proved rather unpopular....

[axordil]

That's the other other hidden cost of Iraq: we blew all our diplomatic capital on it, so we don't have any for far more defensible causes.

[solicitr]

Precisely. When the UN and EU proved incapable of handling the Yugoslav civil wars, the US and UK were able to intervene effectively unilaterally (under cover of NATO, but....) For the forseeable future we just can't do that.


What's truly bizarre is that back in '03 the US and UK had a rock-solid legal argument for unilateral action against Saddam, and chose instead to hype dubious (at best) WMD "evidence."

[yovargas]

Voronwë (or anybody else),

do you know of any books that you could recommend as a good way to start learning about the histories of Africa? For example, this...

Most people don't know that from the 13th to 16th Century, the Mali Empire was both more powerful, and more culturally sophisticated, than any kingdom in Europe.

...fascinated me and I would love to learn more about it.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

yov, the best book to start with, if you can find it, is Camara Laye's The Guardian of the Word. Camara Laye was a Guinean novelist (I could recommend some of his novels, too, but that is another subject) who went to an old Djeli (Griot) and wrote down the story that he told of Sundiata Keita and the founding of the Mali Empire. It is an incredible book.

As for more straightforward histories of the West Africa, probably the best known writer in the field is a fellow named Basil Davidson. I would recommend A History of West Africa to the Nineteenth Century as a good place to start. It's an interesting subject, for sure.

[yovargas]

Awesome, thanks!
Library didn't have either of those (I'll try amazon later) but it does have several other Davidson books. The African Genius; An Introduction To African Cultural And Social History sounds like, um, an introduction. I think I'll check that out.

[solicitr]

While it's ridiculous to deny the accomplishments of Mali, it's I think a disservice to exaggerate them beyond a certain point.

Most people don't know that from the 13th to 16th Century, the Mali Empire was both more powerful, and more culturally sophisticated, than any kingdom in Europe.

Say what? Mali was undoubtedly richer, if one defines wealth = gold. I have no idea how to calculate relative GDP. But culturally sophisticated? Please. Are you really suggesting that Timbuktu was on some objective basis more 'sophisticated' than Notre-Dame or Dante or Botticelli? That its university operated on anything like the level of Paris or Oxford, or produced thinkers on the level of Aquinas or Boniface? Please.

Again- stronger? There may have been a greater pool of warriors available, but (having a certain background in military history) I fail to see how any assemblage of unarmored spear-armed infantry and light horse could match up tactically to the late-medieval combined-arms force of heavy pikemen-crossbowmen/longbowmen-armored cavalry.*

While it's an obvious and necessary corrective to point out the clear empirical disproofs of the old racist notion "blacks = ignorant savages", we shouln't let White Guilt impose a sort of cultural affirmative action upon history.

*This assumes of course that said Europeans were commanded by a competent general and not, as hereditary rule so often provided, an upperclass twit.



EDIT: That should have read "Bonaventure"

[solicitr]

I think that westerners, that have relied on writing things down for so long, have a negative impression of an oral tradition that is not entirely accurate. We tend to think of it as sort of like a game of "telephone" when one person whispers something in the ear of another, who then whispers into the ear of the next person, and so on, and so on, with the information continuously distorting so that it is completely unrecognizable by the end. But in a culture that relies on an oral tradition, it doesn't work that way. History - and for that matter, music -- is preserved remarkably intact from person to person and generation to generation.

And I'm afraid that your romantic view is less accurate than the Telephone image. Any medievalist with a Celtic orientation can tell you that the Welsh and Irish histories and genealogies, passed down orally by a specialized class of highly-trained bard-historians, are hopelessly garbled beyond hope of untangling. Over on the Sassenach side it's been plain for a long time that the early portions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, those passed down orally by the pagan proto-English, are a farrago of historical nonsense. The Athenian playrights had access to mythic traditions quite at variance with Homer. The problem with claims of inerrant oral traditions is that in most cases there's nothing to check them against.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

While it's ridiculous to deny the accomplishments of Mali, it's I think a disservice to exaggerate them beyond a certain point.

Most people don't know that from the 13th to 16th Century, the Mali Empire was both more powerful, and more culturally sophisticated, than any kingdom in Europe.

Say what? Mali was undoubtedly richer, if one defines wealth = gold. I have no idea how to calculate relative GDP. But culturally sophisticated? Please. Are you really suggesting that Timbuktu was on some objective basis more 'sophisticated' than Notre-Dame or Dante or Botticelli? That its university operated on anything like the level of Paris or Oxford, or produced thinkers on the level of Aquinas or Boniface? Please.

Again- stronger? There may have been a greater pool of warriors available, but (having a certain background in military history) I fail to see how any assemblage of unarmored spear-armed infantry and light horse could match up tactically to the late-medieval combined-arms force of heavy pikemen-crossbowmen/longbowmen-armored cavalry.*

While it's an obvious and necessary corrective to point out the clear empirical disproofs of the old racist notion "blacks = ignorant savages", we shouln't let White Guilt impose a sort of cultural affirmative action upon history.

solicitr, you make some good points here. In restrospect, I did exxagerate some in order to support my point, and I appreciate you pointing that out. However, throwing out loaded terms like "White Guilt" is neither accurate nor helpful. In fact, it is downright insulting, and tends to stifle rather than encourage discussion.

[solicitr]

Agreed, "White Guilt" was hyperbolic, and I apologize. However, I think there is a certain oikophobia fashionable in intellectual circles which tends to sneer at the achievements of Dead European Males (a loaded term tossed about by the Other Side with alacrity).

I was very, very pleased to see that Chinua Achebe won the Booker International prize this week- long overdue. Oddly appropriate to this turn in the discussion: once upon a time I spent a summer marking examination papers, and one of the set books was Things Fall Apart. What got me was that not a single one of these students followed Achebe's extremely subtle and nuanced account of culture clash, and automatically fell into that tired trope "native culture Good, white missionaries Bad." I would've given my eye teeth for just one kid to say of the Ibo protagonist, "Hey, wait a minute. This guy practices human sacrifice, for Crissake! He's a frickin' savage!" Not that I would necessarily characterize him that way; but it would have been an encouraging counterpoint to the utterly uncritical consensus.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

And I'm afraid that your romantic view is less accurate than the Telephone image. Any medievalist with a Celtic orientation can tell you that the Welsh and Irish histories and genealogies, passed down orally by a specialized class of highly-trained bard-historians, are hopelessly garbled beyond hope of untangling. Over on the Sassenach side it's been plain for a long time that the early portions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, those passed down orally by the pagan proto-English, are a farrago of historical nonsense. The Athenian playrights had access to mythic traditions quite at variance with Homer. The problem with claims of inerrant oral traditions is that in most cases there's nothing to check them against.

I was happy to see that no less an authority than Verlyn Flieger disagrees with you, about both the West African tradition that I was discussing (and which, frankly, I know a lot more about than you do), and the Irish tradition (which she certainly knows an awful lot about). I was reading along in her (GREAT!) book, Interrupted Music: The Making of Tolkien's Mythology, when I suddenly came across the following quote, which made me think of this exchange:

Other evidence suggest that at least some actual oral tradition, for example in West Africa and in Ireland, although spoken and, therefore, presumably subject tot he performance of the speaker, was nevertheless rigidly set in form, relying on rote memorization and faithful recitation of a set version to preserve not just the content but the exact workding of a story. For example, the coda to the Irish epic Tain Bo Cualnge offers "a blessing on everyone who shall faithfully memorize the Taain as it is written here and shall not add any other form to it" (O'Rahilly 272).

This is a remarkably accurate description of the West African tradition as I understand it as well. This understanding was greatly reinforced for me when I travelled to the village in December and saw for myself the apprentice Jali (or Griot) learning from the master Jali (who in turn had been an apprentice himself when Mamady was a boy to the master who can be seen addressing Mamady in the film Djembefola). And the same process happened with the music, with the rhythms being passed down from master to apprentice unchanged from generation to generation, despite never being written down.

[Jnyusa]

I meant to post an answer to this long, long ago ... and forgot, or something.

Yes, I disagree that one can compare the content of any oral tradition overturned by conquest to the content of oral traditions that have remained intact.

As for written records, there is nothing with which to compare them either, once they are gone. There have been a couple instances in history known to me where an entire written tradition was extirpated, and then it is lost completely, along with the culture and beliefs it described, because there was no back-up system in oral tradition.

Ideally these several modes would work together - oral tales, written documents, paintings, environmental art, music, and dance. Most cultures, I believe, do store their history in more than one form. There is redundancy in the information, and if some information is lost, new forms might be created to preserve it. I would argue, for example, that in some cases fairy tales, proverbs, superstitions, etc. are disguising information that was forcibly extirpated by some conqueror, and then the temporary conveyance became permanent and is no longer understood by us because of the form in which it is presented.

[Jnyusa]

That was a timely bump, Voronwë.

I just heard on the news that Robert Mugabe may be stepping down and allowing the opposition party to have the presidency of Zimbabwe.

[solicitr]

While I'll happily yield on the Irish question, Eire not being my field, I have studied Dark Age Britain rather intensively; and I maintain that the genealogies passed down in the various Welsh kingdoms are massively contradictory and cannot be made consistent; they're a mess (and were when they were written down, centuries before the English conquest). Likewise, the early (oral) history of the English as recorded in the ASC and Bede was broadly accepted as Gospel- until archeology in recent decades revealed a lot of mythmaking and propaganda contained therein.

[ToshoftheWuffingas]

And written history doesn't? De Bello Gallico anyone?

[solicitr]

Oh, written history most certainly does. What I'm addressing is this notion that oral history is somehow any better, less biased or garbled somehow.

[Holbytla]

I was at a 2 week training session a while back, and one of the topics covered was communication.

We did that little exercise where someone told a brief story and we had to write a recap of it. Most of the recaps were fairly close to one another.

Then we tried passing the story on piecemeal. Person A told person B. Person B told person C..etc.

By the time the story reached the tenth person, the story was almost totally different. Generally the gist of the story remained, but the details suffered miserably.