Not the magic talisman: rethinking oral literature in South Africa.

Hofmeyr, Isabel

Toward the end of Dambudzo Marechera's House of Hunger an old man wanders into the narrative, where, surrounded by flies, he sits telling "stories that were oblique, rambling, and fragmentary" (79). The story he narrates comprises a jumble of dislocated "folktale" images of chameleons, dwarves, and fantastic happenings - in short, an already-disillusioned 1970s anticipation of 1980s "magical realism."

With his characteristic chutzpah, Marechera uses the episode to upend a series of deeply ingrained stereotypes regarding oral literature. Unlike the archetypal African oral storyteller who normally inaugurates a novel, this one concludes it. The interlude also provides subversive rereadings of oral narrative, a form often assumed to be traditional in theme, premodern in literary style, and order-affirming in its ethical orientation. The type of narrative we see here is in fact postmodern, grotesque, and subversive. In terms of style, it is decentred, open-ended, and has no narrative closure. As regards ethics and theme, it subverts all forms of authority. Marechera also slices through the stereotype of oral literature as discrete from literacy and other media, existing in some mythical "traditional" sphere removed from international space and literate time. The storyteller is, after all, perfectly capable of subverting literacy to oral ends: he shreds a newspaper for rolling cigarettes. He also refers in passing to the novel as a minor and dangerous genre: "A writer drew a circle in the sand and stepping into it said 'This is my novel,' but the circle, leaping, cut him clean through" (81).

Marechera raises provocative questions regarding oral literature and globalisation, a pair of issues which are seldom put alongside each other, since oral literature is generally confined to the airless space of local tradition. Yet Marechera is a writer who consistently asks us to stitch together those things that we normally keep apart, and in this instance he takes the most perversely original instance to instantiate the problem. In effect, the concluding section of the novel asks us to consider what the globalisation of Shona oral forms might look like. We are all familiar with the globalisation of written metropolitan forms. A bold reversal of this pattern does much to throw light on the hidden imperial assumptions of much globalisation theory, which can tell us about the impact of metropolitan forms on "peripheral" areas but little about the reverse.

In the final paragraph of the story, Marechera, through the vagrant storyteller, pulls off another inversion, a fablesque trick through which the biter ends up being bitten. The biter is Harry, a township character and police informant. The old storyteller encounters Harry and directs him to a brothel used by Rhodesian soldiers, who beat him to a pulp. The old man discovers a packet of photographs that Harry has dropped. These are all of the protagonist and his friends and include notes clearly intended for the police. The old man returns the packet to the Marechera-type protagonist. Since much of the book has comprised annotated "portraits" of the protagonist and his friends, the storyteller in effect gives back the story, but in another medium, and so asks us to reimagine all that we have read. Marechera simultaneously raises questions about his novel - and indeed all other novels - as a form of surveillance. What this final paragraph does is to cross-hatch a range of media and genres: "oral" fable, written novel, and photograph. This interleaving in turn points to Marechera's subversion of simple binary oppositions of oral and written, text and picture.

My brief analysis of these passages from Marechera underlines his reputation as a writer who asks us to crash through the mental barriers which normally police our thinking. As such, his writing provides us with a useful framework for thinking about oral literature in South Africa. It also lays out a rough map for hazarding the acute difficulties of the task that I was asked to carry out for this special issue: namely, give an overview of oral literature in South Africa. In undertaking a task of this kind, one is first expected to provide a panorama of the crowded world of oral literary genres that would include anything from migrant women's songs, to sermon traditions, chiefly praises, riddling sessions, political performance poetry, regional narrative forms, and so on. The difficulties of the expectation can perhaps best be grasped if one imagines trying to write a short essay on "Written Literature in South Africa."

At the same time, however, the project is politically important, since oral forms do remain marginalized at all levels, and profile-building exercises of this type are important. But to do this requires that one first surface a range of powerful stereotypes and frameworks of expectation that govern much thinking about oral literature. Taking the lead from Marechera, I will begin by outlining some of the major stereotypical frameworks that currently shape our view of oral literature. At the same time, like Marechera, I will attempt to liberate the subversive potential of oral literary forms and furthermore place them, not in some "traditional" space, but in a contemporary globalized world in which oral forms compete with, circulate alongside, and mutate with other cultural forms.

As scholars like Ruth Finnegan ("What Is Orality?") and Karin Barber ("Literacy") have ceaselessly shown, much thinking about oral literature and orality in general is shaped by an analytic watershed which funnels thinking into two separated domains: the one labeled oral, traditional, rural, and popular; the other written, modern, urban, and elite. The ideas of the spoken and the written are in effect yoked as ideological opposites, with orality often being projected as anything which writing is not. Arising partly out of commonsensical views of language which portray speech as immediate, authentic, and intimate in contrast to the supposed alienation and deadness of print (Derrida), these views have also been boosted by various forms of cultural nationalism (Julien). This latter set of ideas has often privileged orality as the pure and authentic essence of national cultures, and in this guise it has done signal service as an alibi for various types of "nativism." As Barber says:

Romanticism still surrounds the notion of 'orality'. Even in post-colonial critical discourses informed by a destabilising irony, 'orality' sometimes remains the last unexamined, essentialist concept, projected as an imagined antithesis of writing. It is a highly value-charged term, which can be accorded almost talismanic authority. ("Literacy," 6)

The implications of this view can be felt in a number of realms. The first is that it obscures the bulk of contemporary cultural production in Africa, which falls between these two poles. To illustrate, let me take a well-known South African example, the performance poet Mzwakhe Mbuli. A "struggle" poet of the political rally who came to prominence in the 1980s, he was taken up locally and internationally as the "voice of the people" whose craft drew on a continuous "oral tradition." His presence at the inauguration of President Mandela alongside a "traditional" praise poet reinforced this popular perception of him as the voice of a continuing oral tradition. However, what such an analysis does is to obscure the more interesting "hybrid" elements of his work, and as others have pointed out, Mzwakhe's style owes more to various rap and dub styles than it does to "traditional" oral poetry (Kuzain). Even a brief look at the texts of his English poetry indicates that other influences on his style include biblical and archaic language and contemporary political rhetoric. Take, for instance, the opening stanzas of "The Spear Has Fallen."

God has given life unto man, And man has taken life from man, Let me say no unto slavery and mutilation, Let me say yes unto victory and harmony.

God forgives I don't, For the heart of Africa is bleeding, Bleeding from the wounds knifed hollow, Brutally knifed alone in the night.

The forces of inhumanity and subjugation, Have arisen against the forces of change, Criminals hire criminals, To assassinate the butcher comrades, Knives and swords are also weapons of war. (21)

The point of making these stylistic observations about Mzwakhe is not to rob him of some imagined authenticity. Indeed, such a notion simply takes us back to binary ideas of oral/authentic, written/inauthentic. What such stylistic observations do is draw attention to the innovative parts of the work: namely, the way in which he has appropriated and changed existing English registers to signify different ends. Much of the total effect of the poem does of course depend on performance, and it is in this context that one can appreciate the extent to which these registers have been recontextualized for very different purposes.

Another deleterious consequence of the binary framework is to imagine orality as traditional and hence static, while writing is seen as concerned with modernity, change, and progress. That these perceptions exist powerfully can be seen from a set of assumptions regarding gender and oral literature.(1)

One of the most enduring stereotypes of oral literature is that it is primarily women who tell oral stories, preferably a granny seated by a fire. This image has dominated much thinking about oral literature. If we take for granted this idea of the granny by the fire, a series of assumptions follow. We will almost certainly assume that it is natural or traditional for women to tell stories. Parenthetically, in associating women and tradition, we will also be underwriting one of the major presuppositions regarding gender and nationalism. As McClintock has shown, nationalism solves the contradiction of appearing both ancient and modern by portraying the past and tradition as female and the political future as male.

Returning to our granny, one will also assume that oral literature tends to flow smoothly and unproblematically into written forms, and so the work of contemporary women writers will automatically be seen as part of an ongoing stream. One side effect of these views will be to portray women as passive recipients of tradition, which they simply inherit and artlessly reproduce. What this view obscures are a number of central questions regarding cultural agency, and if one takes this approach, one runs the risk of missing out on perhaps the most interesting feature of contemporary African women writers: that is, their manipulation of the politics of tradition. This manipulation can be seen in a number of spheres, the most obvious of which concerns the invention of oral tradition by largely middle-class African women writers who often have not done a serious oral-storytelling apprenticeship. This invented tradition will then be used on the one hand to claim a publishing space, since it is after all "traditional" for women to tell - and hence publish - stories. On the other, very contemporary class-gender concerns such as struggles around family structure and the right to choose a spouse can be ventriloquized and made to appear very ancient through clothing them in traditional garb. Some of these processes are illustrated by the politics of publishing children's books, an area controlled by women, who do so on the basis that women traditionally told stories to the young.

One feature to note about this apparently traditional claim is that, like so many others, it is of recent provenance. The idea that oral storytellers narrate only to children has much to do with the intervention of missionaries, who played a crucial role in writing down oral stories. One result of their activities was an increasing infantilization of oral storytelling. Part of this came from the colonial belief in the childlike nature of African societies and their cultural products, but part of it also came from existing ideas in Europe regarding a literature especially for children. This phenomenon of a children's literature formed one part of the complex process of inventing childhood, and the sources of these newly invented children's stories were often European oral traditions that were written down and made suitable for children.

In parts of Europe such as France, this process took off in the early 1700s; in other parts the process began later. In Germany, for example, the Brothers Grimm published their first collection of stories in 1813. The idea took some time to catch on, and it was only by the 1830s that their books became really popular (Ellis, Tatar, Zipes). Parenthetically, it is interesting to note that this process of writing down oral traditions in some parts of Europe happened at much the same time as in Africa, where missionaries with a similar agenda and influenced by these ideas of appropriate reading and schoolbooks for children undertook the same task. This idea is of course quite striking, because all of us probably imagine that the writing down of European folk traditions is extremely ancient, whereas in Africa the process is recent. That we should think this says a lot about the hold of binary ideas regarding Africa as oral and Europe as literate. Be that as it may, the net result of mission intervention in the process of storytelling was to infantilize a form that had previously been directed at both adults and children. Today many people will tell you that it is traditional that so-called folktales are told only to children. This tradition is quite probably of recent provenance, but it is one that women writers have been quick to capitalize on. Far then from being passive recipients of tradition, women, like any other cultural agents, are active manipulators of it.

What all this information suggests clearly is the extent to which oral literature changes, and any serious study needs always to historicize oral forms. However, one of the major legacies of a nationalist approach to oral literature is to see it - and indeed all tradition - as static. As a result of this perception, there is a tendency to read the past off from the present and roll this present back into the past. What this perception does is narrow both our possible understanding of the past and our research agendas. Let me again illustrate this with the example of the woman-as-storyteller stereotype. Since this appears to be the prevailing situation, many have projected it back into the past, and as a result the question of whether men told stories is seldom posed. If one were to travel to rural areas in South Africa today and pose the question of whether men tell stories, one would most probably get a negative answer. However, if one asks the question of whether men told stories, then the answer will be very different, and it will start to emerge that at one stage men were active storytellers who tended to tell historical stories, whereas women told fictional ones.

This active tradition has in many areas become passive. The circumstances behind this are extremely complex, and I will outline them briefly, in part to indicate the kinds of journeys we need to make beyond the text in order to understand it properly. Like most issues of contemporary South African life, the story goes back to patterns of land dispossession. While nineteenth-century dispossession and migrancy clearly played some part in changing male performance traditions, the major catalyst in this change has occurred comparatively recently and concerns what is generally known as betterment. A phenomenon of the 1930s, this policy had its roots in a nineteenth-century faith in technicist solutions to social problems and formed the basis of the Native Affairs Department's policy in the countryside. Here they attempted to intervene directly in the internal organisation of chiefdoms in a vain effort to alleviate the effects of chronic land shortage by regulating where people lived and farmed. The bundle of measures involved in this process and the policy underlying it became known as betterment. However, partly because of the exigencies of a World War II economy and partly because of resistance to these schemes, the policy was haphazardly introduced.

By the 1950s, with the National Party in power, this administrative faintheartedness began to disappear as coercive social engineering in the countryside was speeded up and the state undertook a policy of sustained forced removal in the homelands that prepared them for their impending barracoon role of absorbing all those evicted or from "white" South Africa. While anthropologists and historians have documented the consequences of these removals, little has been said of their cultural costs, and one victim of this process was male storytelling. Generally associated with the central courtyard area that characterized the cluster-style housing of preremoval settlements, this storytelling tradition could find no equivalent place in the grid-style settlements of the new villages. Obviously the concept of the courtyard as a meeting place remained and was reconstituted in some form, but neighbours now often lived far from one another and discussion mainly focused on solving pressing family problems rather than storytelling. Female storytelling, which was associated with the kitchen and hearth area, transplanted quite well.

Without carefully historicizing oral forms, one runs the risk of consigning them to a monolithic and undifferentiated time and space. One also runs the risk of projecting the present into the past. This latter tendency is apparent if we consider the stylistic criticism that has accreted around praise poetry, one of the subcontinent's major genres. Like other genres, this one has been subject to different critical paradigms. Where nineteenth-century approaches relied on ideas of diffusionism and evolutionism, twentieth-century thinking has shifted through motif analysis, formalism, structuralism (used mainly in relation to narrative), and performance studies (Finnegan, Oral Literature, 26-47, 315-34).

While performance studies have been the form of analysis that has predominated recently, the influence of formalism lingers in a number of quarters. In essence, formalist analyses have sought to examine praise poems in line with the expectations of the lyric poem: namely, that it should possess unity, balance, wholeness, and that each part should have a determinate role in driving the piece toward closure. As Barber has indicated, this trend is apparent in the Oxford Library of African Literature, which focuses heavily on Southern African praise poetry.

In their commentaries, they tend to play down the fluidity and irregularity which is evident in the texts. Cope, on Zulu izibongo . . . and Kunene, on Sotho praise poetry . . . focus on the formal regularity and internal coherence of each 'paragraph' or stanza, paying less attention to the indeterminacy of the relations between units. Damane and Sanders, also writing about Sotho heroic poetry, declare their preference for 'poems' which are 'logical and straightforward . . . balanced and well-rounded,' and observe that though the ordering of stanzas often appears arbitrary, sometimes, 'with a little imaginative effort, it can be seen to follow a definite train of thought.' (Barber, I Could Speak, 308n)

Overall, such analyses create the impression of a staid traditionalism in both form and content.

However, as Barber has again shown in relation to Yoruba oriki, praising is a form that resists closure (I Could Speak, 1-9, 21-24). Indeed, most praises are extravagant exercises in hyperbolic excess that depend on a heaping up of naming units - the basic building block from which praises are constructed. These units attempt to pin down the distinctive identity of a person or thing, and just as this has infinite dimensions, so too does praise poetry create the impression of piling up an infinity of attributes. Identity is also fluid, and its expression in praising is labile, allusive, elliptical, and given to rapid shifts of perspective. Take, for example, the following short self-praise, translated from isiZulu.

I am she who cuts across the game reserve that no girl crosses. I am the boldest of the bold, outfacet of wizards. Obstinate perseverer, The nation swore at me and ate their words. She cold shoulders kings and despises mere commoners.

(Gunner, "Songs," 246)

In this poem, in which a woman praises her bravery, she begins by enumerating three naming units for herself: "I am she...," "I am the boldest...," and "Obstinate perseverer." In the fifth line the poem shifts from the initial vocative voice into narrative mode, and she refers to an episode in her life. In the sixth line, she returns to heaping up praise names, except that this time she shifts personae and speaks about herself in the third person. These complex and rapid "gear changes" in the poem succeed in putting across a supremely intricate and labile model of identity which is shifting, decentred, and entails rapid shifts in perspective and subject position. It is almost a post-poststructural literary form that is conceptually and generically miles away from the quiet traditionalism and closure which formalism asks us to find in praising.

Consider as a further example the extravagance of the following excerpt from possibly the most famous praises in South Africa, those of the nineteenth-century Zulu leader, Shaka.

Dlungwana son of Ndaba! Ferocious one of the Mbelebele brigade, Who raged among the large kraals, So that until dawn the huts were being turned upside down. He who is famous without effort, son of Menzi, He who beats but is not beaten, unlike water, Axe that surpasses other axes in sharpness; Shaka, I fear to say that he is Shaka, Shaka, he is the chief of the Mashobas. He of the shrill whistle, the lion; He who armed in the forest, who is like the madman, The madman who is in full view of the men. He who trudged wearily the plain going to Mfene; The voracious one of Senzangakhona, Spear that is red even on the handle . . .

(Mapanje/White, 25)

While much existing scholarship has focused on royal praises of this type, some recent work has turned to examining commoner praises. Two recent volumes are Musho! Zulu Praises, compiled by Elizabeth Gunner and Mafika Gwala, and David Coplan's In the Time of the Cannibals: The Word Music of South Africa's Basotho Migrants. The latter book examines difela, the sung praises of migrants, which can stretch from deep pathos to wry humour. Take, for example, the migrant Serame Thuhloane, bemoaning how illiteracy affects him.

Illiteracy is a sad matter: Your letter is read by someone at the chimney. You know what? He laughs in front of the letter owner. He remarks, 'As for your news, I understand it, sir: They report starvation, Lack of clothing, corn worms in the fields over there.' Gentlemen, the hawk of Maboloka cliff, It prevents the little chicks [children] from foraging; It swoops on them continually. (134)

Another migrant takes a different tack: "What do I say to you, gamblers? / I was the clerk of the toilet - / Man, I was serving people [toilet] papers; / I was forever viewing the backsides of people; / I was counting out beer pots as if at a work party" (136).

The thematic range and textual complexity of these poems easily outstrip limiting notions of praise poetry as sober traditionalism. Scholarship of the type undertaken by Coplan is doing much to unseat the often fuddy-duddy image of oral literature. As Landeg White - himself a major scholar of Southern African oral literature - noted in a recent review of Coplan's book:

Marvellous things are happening in the study of African oral literature. The days are gone when the subject was dominated, in Ruth Finnegan's words, by the 'study of detailed stylistic points or formulaic systems leading to statistical conclusions.' Students have dug wax out of their ears and begun to attend to the intellectual content of performance. ("Going," 7)(2)

Research of this type is of course doing much to erode the existing understandings of oral literature. At the moment, however, the impact of these texts remains relatively limited, and popular understandings of oral literature are still funneled along the binary channels of oral/traditional and written/modern. Unless these binaries are shattered and then stitched together in imaginative ways, our understanding of oral literature and hence the value we attach to it will remain - innocent and hence powerless - in what Marechera terms "the golden age of Black Arcadia" (24).

University of Witwatersrand

1 The following account of oral narrative is drawn from Hofmeyr, "Review," "Wailing," and We Spend.

2 In addition to Coplan, White cites Barber and Hofmeyr (1993). White's own work has been pathbreaking in the field. Other texts include Gunner and Gwala (1991) and James.

WORKS CITED

Barber, Karin. I Could Speak Until Tomorrow: Orikis Womens and the Past in a Yoruba Town. Edinburgh. Edinburgh University Press. 1991.

-----. "Literacy, Improvisation and the Public of Yoruba Popular Theatre." In The Pressures of the Text: Oralitys Texts and the Telling of Tales. Stewart Brown, ed. Birmingham, Eng. Centre for West African Studies, University of Birmingham. 1995.

Coplan, David. The Time of Cannibals: The Word Music of South Africa's Basotho Migrants. Chicago. University of Chicago Press. 1994.

Derrida, Jacques. "Signature, Context, Event." Glyph, 1 (1977).

Ellis, John M. One Fairy Story Too Many: The Brothers Grimm and Their Tales. Chicago. University of Chicago Press. 1983.

Gunner, Elizabeth. "Songs of Innocence and Experience: Women as Composers and Performers of Izibongo, Zulu Praise Poetry." Research in African Literatures, 10:2 (1979).

Gunner, Elizabeth, and Mafika Gwala, comps. Musho! Zulu Popular Praises. Johannesburg. Wits University Press. 1991.

Hofmeyr, Isabel. "Review Article: Feminist Literary Criticism in South Africa." English in Africa, 19:1 (1992).

-----. "'Wailing for Purity': Oral Studies in South African Studies." African Studies, forthcoming, 1995.

-----. We Spend Our Years as a Tale That Is Told: Oral Historical Narrative in a South African Chiefdom. Johannesburg. Wits University Press. 1993.

James, Deborah. "Mmino wa Setso: Songs of Town and Country and the Experience of Migrancy by Men and Women from the Northern Transvaal." Ph.D. dissertation, University of the Witwatersrand. 1993.

Julien, Eileen. African Novels and the Question of Orality. Bloomington. Indiana University Press. 1992.

Kuzain, Rustum. "Contemporary English Oral Poetry by Black Poets in Great Britain and South Africa: A Comparison Between Linton Kwesi Johnson and Mzwakhe Mbuli." M.A. thesis, University of Cape Town. 1994.

Finnegan, Ruth. Oral Literature in Africa. Nairobi. Oxford University Press. 1976.

-----. Literacy and Orality: Studies in the Technology of Communication. Oxford, Eng. Blackwell. 1988.

-----. "What is Orality - If Anything?" Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 14 (1990).

Mapanje, Jack, and Landeg White, comps. Oral Poetry from Africa: An Anthology. London. Longman. 1983.

Marechera, Dambudzo. The House of Hunger. London. Heinemann. 1978.

Mbuli, Mzwakhe. Before Dawn. Johannesburg. COSAW. 1989.

McClintock, Anne. "Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family." Feminist Review, 44 (1993).

Tatar, Maria M. The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales. Princeton, N.J. Princeton University Press. 1987.

Vail, Leroy, and Landeg White. Power and the Praise Poem: Southern African Voices in History. Charlottesville. University Press of Virginia. 1991.

White, Landeg. "Going to Debeers." Times Literary Supplement, 2 June 1995.

Zipes, Jack. The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood: Versions of the Tale in Sociocultural Context. Massachusetts. Bergin & Garvey. 1983.

ISABEL HOFMEYR holds the Chair of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. She has published widely on South African literary and cultural history. Her book We Spend Our Years as a Tale That Is Told: Oral Historical Narrative in a South African Chiefdom appeared in 1993.