- Key People:
- Meja Mwangi
Hero who surpasses other heroes!
Swallow that disappears in the clouds,
Others disappearing into the heavens!
Son of Menzi!
Viper of Ndaba!
Erect, ready to strike,
It strikes the shields of men!
Father of the cock!
Why did it disappear over the mountains?
It annihilated men!
That is Shaka,
Son of Senzangakhona,
Of whom it is said, Bayede!
You are an elephant!
It is in heroic poetry, or panegyric, that lyric and image come into their most obvious union. As in the tale and as in the lyric, riddle, and proverb, the essence of panegyric is metaphor, although the metaphorical connections are sometimes somewhat obscure. History is more clearly evident in panegyric, but it remains fragmented history, rejoined according to the poetic intentions of the bard. Obvious metaphorical connections are frequently made between historical personages or events and images of animals, for example. The fantasy aspects of this kind of poetry are to be found in its construction, in the merging of the real and the animal in metaphorical ways. It is within this metaphorical context that the hero is described and assessed. As in other forms of oral tradition, emotions associated with both historical and nonhistorical images are at the heart of meaning in panegyric. It is the lyrical rhythm of panegyric that works such emotions into form. In the process, history is reprocessed and given new meaning within the context of contemporary experience. It is a dual activity: history is thereby redefined at the same time that it shapes experiences of the present.
Among the Tuareg of western Africa, a stringed instrument often accompanies the creation of such poetry, and the main composers are women. The Songhai have mabe, the professional bards; they are present at all rites of passage, celebrating, accompanying, and cushioning the transformation being experienced. In Mauritania it is the iggiw (plural iggawen) who creates heroic poetry and who plays the lute while singing the songs of the warriors. The diare (plural diarou) is the bard among the Soninke. He goes to battle with the soldiers, urging them, placing their martial activities within the context of history, building their acts within the genealogies of their family. Drums and trumpets sometimes accompany the maroka among the Hausa. When a king is praised, the accompaniment becomes orchestral. Yoruba bards chant the ijala, singing of lineage, and, with the oriki, saluting the notable. Among the Hima of Uganda, the bard is the omwevugi. In the evenings, he sings of the omugabe, the king, and of men in battle and of the cattle. The mbongi wa ku pfusha is the bard among the Tonga of Mozambique. He too sings of the glories of the past, creating poetry about chiefs and kings.
The images vary, their main organizing implement being the subject of the poem. It is the metrical ordering of images, including sound and motion, that holds the poem together, not the narrative of history.
The epic
In the epic can be found the merging of various frequently unrelated tales, the metaphorical apparatus, the controlling mechanism found in the riddle and lyric, the proverb, and heroic poetry to form a larger narrative. All of this centres on the character of the hero and a gradual revelation of his frailty, uncertainties, and torments; he often dies, or is deeply troubled, in the process of bringing the culture into a new dispensation often prefigured in his resurrection or his coming into knowledge. The mythical transformation caused by the creator gods and culture heroes is reproduced precisely in the acts and the cyclical, tortured movements of the hero.
An epic may be built around a genealogical system, with parts of it developed and embellished into a story. The epic, like the heroic poem, contains historical references such as place-names and events; in the heroic poem these are not greatly developed. When they are developed in an epic, they are built not around history but around a fictional tale. The fictional tale ties the historical episode, person, or place-name to the cultural history of the people. In an oral society, oral genres include history (the heroic poem) and imaginative story (the tale). The epic combines the two, linking the historical episode to the imaginative tale. Sometimes, myth is also a part of epic, with emphasis on origins. The tale, the heroic poem, history, and myth are combined in the epic. In an echo of the tale—where the emphasis is commonly on a central but always nonhistorical character—a single historical or nonhistorical character is the centre of the epic. And at the core of the epic is that same engine composed of the riddle, the lyric, and the proverb.
Much is frequently made of the psychology of this central character when he appears in the epic. He is given greater detail than the tale character, given deeper dimension. The epic performer remembers the great events and turning points of cultural history. These events change the culture. In the epic these elements are tied to the ancient images of the culture (in the form of tale and myth), an act that thereby gives these events cultural sanction. The tale and myth lend to the epic (and, by inference, to history) a magical, supernatural atmosphere: all of nature is touched in the Malagasy epic Ibonia; in the West African epic Sunjata, magic keeps Sumanguru in charge and enables Sunjata to take over. It is a time of momentous change in the society. In Ibonia there are major alterations in the relationship between men and women; in Sunjata and in the epic Mwindo of the Nyanga people of Congo there are major political changes.
But, in Mwindo, why was Mwindo such a trickster? He was, after all, a great hero. And why must he be taught by the gods after he has established his heroic credentials? Central to this question is the notion of the transitional phase—of the betwixt and between, of the someone or something that crosses yet exists between boundaries. There is a paradox in Mwindo’s vulnerability—how, after all, can a hero be vulnerable?—but more important is his nonmoral energy during a period of change. Mwindo is a liminal hero-trickster: he is liminal while he seeks his father, and then he becomes liminal again at the hands of the gods. “Out there” is where the learning, the transformation, occurs. The trickster energy befits and mirrors this in-between period, as no laws are in existence. There is change and transformation, but it is guided by a vision: in the myths, it is god’s vision for the cosmos; in the tales, it is the society’s vision for completeness; in the epics, it is the hero’s vision for a new social dispensation.
The heroic epic is a grand blending of tale and myth, heroic poetry and history. These separate genres are combined in the epic, and separate epics contain a greater or lesser degree of each—history (and, to a lesser extent, poetry) is dominant in Sunjata, heroic poetry and tale in Ibonia, and tale and myth (and, to a lesser extent, poetry) in Mwindo. Oral societies have these separate categories: history, the imaginative tale, heroic poetry, myth, and epic. Epic, therefore, is not simply history. History exists as a separate genre. The essential characteristic of epic is not that it is history but that it combines history and tale, fact and fancy, and worlds of reality and fantasy. The epic becomes the grand summation of the culture because it takes major turning points in history (always with towering historical or nonhistorical figures who symbolize these turning points) and links them to tradition, giving the changes their sanction. The epic hero may be revolutionary, but he does not signal a total break with the past. Continuity is stressed in epic—in fact, it is as if the shift in the direction of the society is a return to the paradigm envisioned by ancient cultural wisdom. The effect of the epic is to mythologize history, to bring history to the essence of the culture, to give history the resonance of the ancient roots of the culture as these are expressed in myth, imaginative tale (and motif), and metaphor. In heroic poetry, history is fragmented, made discontinuous. In epic these discontinuous images are given a new form, that of the imaginative tale. And the etiological aspects of history (that is, the historical alteration of the society) are tied to the etiology of mythology—in other words, the acts of the mortal hero are tied to the acts of the immortals.
History is not the significant genre involved in the epic. It is instead tale and myth that organize the images of history and give those images their meaning. History by itself has no significance: it achieves significance when it is juxtaposed to the images of a tradition grounded in tales and myths. This suggests the great value that oral societies place on the imaginative traditions: they are entertaining, certainly, but they are also major organizing devices. As the tales take routine, everyday experiences of reality and—by placing them in the fanciful context of conflict and resolution with the emotion-evoking motifs of the past—give them a meaning and a completeness that they do not actually have, so in epic is history given a form and a meaning that it does not possess. This imaginative environment revises history, takes historical experiences and places them into the context of the culture, and gives them cultural meaning. The epic is a blending, then, of the ancient culture as it is represented through imaginative tradition with historical events and personages. The divine trickster links heaven and earth, god and human; the epic hero does the same but also links fancy and reality, myth and history, and cultural continuity and historical disjunction.
What is graphically clear in the epics Ibonia and Sunjata is that heroic poetry, in the form of the praise name, provides a context for the evolution of a heroic story. In both of those epics, the panegyric forms a pattern, the effect of which is to tie the epic hero decisively and at the same time to history and to the gods. Those epics, as well as Mwindo, dramatize the rite of passage of a society or a culture: the hero’s movement through the familiar stages of the ritual becomes a poetic metaphor for a like movement of the society itself. The tale at the centre of the epic may be as straightforward as any tale in the oral tradition. But that tale is linked to a complex of other tales, the whole given an illusion of poetic unity by the heroic poetry, which in turn provides a lyrical rhythm.
Storytelling is the mythos of a society: at the same time that it is conservative, at the heart of nationalism, it is the propelling mechanism for change. The struggle between the individual and the group, between the traditions that support and defend the rights of the group and the sense of freedom that argues for undefined horizons of the individual—this is the contest that characterizes the hero’s dilemma, and the hero in turn is the personification of the quandary of the society itself and of its individual members.
Oral traditions and the written word
Oral and written storytelling traditions have had a parallel development, and in many ways they have influenced each other. 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. What happened among the Hausa and Swahili was occurring elsewhere in Africa—among the Fulani, in northern Ghana among the Guang, in Senegal among the Tukulor and Wolof, and in Madagascar and Somalia.
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. But the linkage is also a crucial characteristic of more-serious and more-complex fiction. 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. 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.
History and myth
As is the case with the oral tradition, written literature is a combination of the real and the fantastic. 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. This is the alchemy of the literary experience. Literature is atomized, fragmented history. Transformation is the crucial activity of the story, its dynamic movement. The writer is examining the relationship of the reader with the world and with history. In the process of this examination, the writer invents characters and events that correspond to history but are not history. 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. In the oral tale this is clearly the fantasy character; so it is, in a complex, refracted way, in written literature.
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. 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. In mythic imagery is the embodiment of significant emotions—the hopes, fears, dreams, and nightmares—of a people. History—the story of a people, their institutions, and their community—is the way one likes to think things happened, in the real world. The hero is everyman, moving through a change, a transformation, and so moving into the myth, the essence, of his history. He thereby becomes a part of it, representative of it, embodying the culture. The hero is everyman with myth inside him. He has been mythicized; story does that. 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.
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. 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). These are the ambiguous, charismatic shapers, those with connections to the essence of history. 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. 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. Myth is the stuff of which the hero is being created. History is the real, the past, the world against which this transformation is occurring and within which the hero will move. The real contemporary world is the place from which the hero comes and to which the hero will return. Metaphor is the hero’s transformation.
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. It is in this relationship between reality and fantasy, the shaped and the shaper, that the story has its power: Samba Diallo with the Fool, Mugo with Kihika (and the mythicized Mugo), the doctor with Michael K, Elizabeth with Dan and Sello, the narrator with Mustapha, the four pilgrims with Nedjma. This relationship, which is a harbinger of change, occurs against a historical backdrop of some kind, but that backdrop is not the image of Africa: that image is the relationship between the mythical character and African/European history.
The fantasy character provides access to history, to the essence of history. It is the explanation of the historical background of the novels. 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. 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. The fantasy character is crucial: he is the artist’s palette, the mythic element of the story. This character is the heart and the spiritual essence of history. This is the Fool, Kihika, Michael K, Dan and Sello, Mustapha, Nedjma. Here is where reality and fantasy, history and fiction blend, the confluence that is at the heart of story. The real-life character, the hero, comes into a relationship with that mythic figure, and so the transformation begins, as the hero moves through an intermediary period into history. It is the hero’s identification with history that makes it possible for us to speak of the hero as a hero. This movement of a realistic character into myth is metaphor, the blending of two seemingly unlike images. 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. In this movement the oral tradition is revealed as alive and well in literary works. 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. The materials of storytelling, whether in the oral or written tradition, are essentially the same.
