.jpg)
BEGINNING OF THE NOVEL IN AFRICA
1: ORALITY or oral tradition
General Overview
Africans have a rich oral tradition. Oral renditions existed and still exist
as one of the ways by which African value systems are transmitted into
the upcoming members of a community. African belief systems, attitudes, modes of worship, traditional mores, communal expectations and cultural affinity are transmitted through oral traditional methods like storytelling and other forms of ritual recourse. There are incidences of orature in most written fictions in Africa and the early novels imbibed
the oral traditional art in creating the authentic African fiction from the
African sociological framework. Oral literature (or orature) may be in prose or verse.
The prose is often mythological or historical and can include tales of the trickster character. Storytellers in Africa sometimes use call-and-response techniques to tell their stories. Poetry, often sung, includes: narrative epic, occupational verse, ritual verse, praise poems for rulers and other prominent people. Praise singers, bards sometimes
known as "griots", tell their stories with music. Also recited, often sung, are: love songs, work songs, children's songs, along with epigrams, proverbs and riddles. Examples of pre-colonial African literature include the Epic of Sundiata composed in medieval Mali, The older Epic of Dinga from the old Ghana Empire, and the Kebra Negast or book of kings from Ethiopia.
One popular form of traditional African folktale is the "trickster" story, where a small animal uses its wits to survive encounters with larger creatures. Examples of animal tricksters include Anansi, a spider in the folklore of the Ashanti people of Ghana; Ijà pá or Mbe, a tortoise in Yoruba or Igbo folklore of Nigeria; and Sungura, a hare found in Central and East African folklore. These stories are mostly fictions even though
they tend to embody the belief systems and attitudes of the people. This is called ‘education through entertainment’. They are fictional but they carry the people’s culture. In talking about African literature, there is a tendency to forget that the whole of African art is linked with oral literature which has been the mainstay of both traditional and modern
Africa. Often times, African written literature is a transcription, adaptation, translation or exploitation of oral material, irrespective of the language chosen by the author to write her/his piece.
African Oral Narrative Forms
The oral traditional art of Africans come in various forms. Just like the European literary forms, it has tripartite genres: ‘what is sung’ (poetry), ‘what is spoken’ (prose) and ‘what is acted’ (drama). Under ‘what is sung’ we have oral poetic forms like love songs, marriage songs, work songs, war songs, lullabies and incantations, while under ‘what is
spoken’ we have the storytelling forms like myths, legends, folktales, fables, anecdotes, proverbs, idioms amongst others. Under ‘what is acted’ we have the masquerade forms, rituals, dance, invocation etc.
Sometimes, these three genres tend to overlap in the rendition patterns of oral narratives. In a typical folktale session, the narrator keeps the audience’s attention with songs, responses, chants and demonstrations typical to acting out the actions in the stories. The stories are usually told to be seen.
Each aspect of these genres tends to manifest in the daily experiences of
the growing ones in the community. When a child cries, lullabies are often rendered. When labourers are working, they sing work songs; when there is war, they sing war songs. In the worship of gods, the priests act out encounters with the gods. A typical example is in Chinua
Achebe’s Arrow of God, where Ezeulu is shown knocking staff with Ulu, the god of Umuaro people. At night, especially during moonlight plays, children gather round a village sage who tells them folktales and heroic tales like myths and legends. The elderly one tries to arrest the attention of his audience through all forms of dramatization and songs.
The end result is entertainment and education through orature.
African Myths/Legends
African oral literature, like other forms of popular culture, is not merely a form of entertainment but a medium for commenting on contemporary social and political events. It can also be a significant agent of change capable of storing the people’s historical experiences. This is where myths and legend emerge. Myths are stories of origin or creation. They are stories about the beginning of a people, a race or a community.
Many communities attribute their greatness to their beginning.
Legends are records of a community’s heroes. They are stories about those who founded a community and how brave they were. Ruth Finnegan (1980) expresses that myths and legend capture the most valued history of a people by tracing how they began and how their
beginning affected their situation. It also traces the beginning of traditions, cultural rites, worship and the discovery of food, craft, and other lore. Myths have often occurred in African novels such as the origin of Ulu in Arrow of God, the exploits of the great Umuofia men in
Things Fall Apart.
We also have different forms of myths and legends recounted in most African novels set in the rural backgrounds. Myths and legends are fictional but have traces of reality as each of them has a physical referent in the real world. This referent guides the members of the community in certain observances. Myths and legends help to store or preserve a
people’s cultural beliefs about nature and their natural habitats. This is one of the sources of truly African novels as one of the earliest novels to have come out of Africa called Palmwine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola which is truly an embodiment of African orature in the written form.
Epic narratives also occurred as one of the earliest forms of legendary fictions in Africa. We have the legendary Sundiata: Epic of Great Mali,which records the exploits of the great men in medieval Mali. This oral art is now written as a literary text. Others are the older Epic of Dinga from the old Ghana Empire, and the Kebra Negast or book of kings from
Ethiopia.
Folktales as Fiction
Folktales are animal stories. They are stories about select animals
personified to carry certain human attributes in order to play out a needed role for moral lessons. In folktales, there are heroes and villains.
The heroes are human or animals that play the major roles. A common type of African folktale is also called the "trickster" story, where a small animal uses its wits to survive encounters with larger creatures. Some animal tricksters include Ananse, a spider in the folklore of the Ashantipeople of Ghana; Ijà pá or Mbe, a tortoise in Yoruba or Igbo folklore of Nigeria; and Sungura, a hare found in Central and East African folklore.
One interesting thing about the folktale is the manipulation of animals as
humans playing out their political, sociological and cultural roles in a
fictional community.
We have seen the folktale forms occurring in African novels. In folktales the essence of poetic justice is expressed and this is a recurring feature in some African novels. D.O. Fagunwa’s My Life in a Forest of a Thousand Demons is a pure written folktale, similar to the form in Amos Tutuola’s Palmwine Drinkard. The form of the folktale has a great influence on the present form of the African novels. The folktale form is
arranged in a manner that there is a beginning in a distant land with
different wrongs being committed by a given animal at the end of which poetic justice occurs. This thematic form is often the structure of most African novels. The effects of oral narratives on the written literatures in Africa are mostly structural and thematic.
Metamorphosis of Orature into Literature
In the colonial period, Africans exposed to Western languages began to write in those tongues. In 1911, Joseph Ephraim Casely-Hayford (also known as Ekra-Agiman) of the Gold Coast (now Ghana) published what is probably the first African novel written in English titled Ethiopia Unbound: Studies in Race Emancipation. Although the work moves
between fiction and political advocacy, its publication and positive reviews in the Western press mark a watershed moment in African literature. During this period, African plays began to emerge. Herbert
Isaac Ernest Dhlomo of South Africa published the first Englishlanguage African play, The Girl Who Killed to Save: Nongquase the Liberator in 1935. In 1962, Ngugi wa Thiong'o of Kenya wrote the first East African drama, The Black Hermit, a cautionary tale about
"tribalism" (racism between African tribes). African writers in this period wrote both in Western languages (notably English, French, and
Portuguese) and in traditional African languages.
One interesting thing about these early works is absorption of the oral arts in them. D.O. Fagunwa pioneered the Yoruba language novel. In 1938, Fagunwa wrote his Ogboju Ode ninu Igbo Irunmale, the first novel written in the Yoruba language and one of the first to be written in any African language; Wole Soyinka translated the book into English in 1968 as The Forest of A Thousand Demons. Fagunwa's later works include Igbo Olodumare (The Forest of God, 1949), Ireke Onibudo (1949), Irinkerindo ninu Igbo Elegbeje (Expedition to the Mount of Thought, 1954), and Adiitu Olodumare (1961). Again, Fagunwa's novels draw heavily on folktale traditions and idioms, including many supernatural elements. His heroes are usually Yoruba hunters, who interact with kings, sages, and even gods in their quests. Thematically, his novels also explore the divide between the Christian beliefs of
Africa's colonizers and the continent's traditional religions. Fagunwa remains the most widely-read Yorùbá-language author, and a major influence on such contemporary writers as Amos Tutuola. In Igbo area, Pita Nwana wrote Omenuko which is regarded as the first Igbo epic. The same occurred in the Hausa literature. Western education enabled the African people the opportunity to put down their oral narratives into written words.