The genealogy of Mukama; The methodology of oral tradition

Summary

Sembene’s technique allows for African models of reality that are not solely in opposition to our concept of civilization. We are not presented with Conrad’s single emissaries into the exotic heartland of Africa who then return to us with a message. For Sembene, large numbers of people are characterized in a revolutionary act and large numbers of people are reacting to colonial control not just within the grid of traditional thought that reinterprets new contacts in terms of a concept of “untouched” communalism, but as mirroring cleavages in society that are reflective of historical interaction and of African literature’s basis in oral tradition.

What happens when you get something like a heinneman series (a London publishing concern which controls the literature that reaches a Western audience) is that authors like Sembene move to different mediums. Sembene now writes exclusively in Woloof.God’s Bits of Wood ends optimistically. The “Vatican” is the city’s living compound that is created by the whites, but it is the blacks who name it. The “Vatican” symbolizes the white’s inability to control the blacks. The final confrontation involves Isnard’s wife, Beatrice, who upon realizing that the new order born out of the union member’s solidarity will cause their recall to the metropole, culminates in the black’s destruction of the European’s sanctuary. The fallen wife sybolizes the resistance on the part of the Africans, to European attempts to deny their history “Tell them” she screamed at the terrified woman. “Tell them that you like Monsieur! Say it in the name of God, say it! [86].

I have attempted to present in my examination of one aspect of African literature the idea that when shared symbolic elements are highlighted over time, the units of analysis that have been utilized in the past (e.g., tribes; extrapolated to the concept of the modern nation state) must gain a wider frame for analysis. Class formation has not been seen as a basis of cleavage in Africa’s past. The perspective for Africa has been that of the closed social system; the only perceived basis for cleavage becomes ethnicity, interaction with external forces is that of cultural substitution and ultimately supplication to the steamroller of Imperialism. It is at this level, and at this level alone, that the analysis of Oral and Literate traditions has been seen as dichotomous. But if one perceives the openness in African systems of thought and chronicles the fluctuations of these systems over time as representative of their ability to generate alternative hypotheses, one can obtain a more sophisticated, more appropriate, dichotomy between Oral and Literate traditions, that can become the genesis of creating new cultural forms and new social structures.