Difficulty of
Documenting African Culture
Julia Stewart
wrote: “Over many centuries, African people have produced an
abundance of proverbs, legends, fables, riddles, superstitions,
songs, poetry, stories and quotes. Only a fraction of this
creative treasure has been captured in print… Most of it remains
unrecorded as it continues to be passed from generation to
generation”.
Since such
“creative treasure” has been traditionally preserved through
telling, human connection has sustained the stories. However,
years of colonization and slavery by some Western countries have
undone longstanding connections, breaking links within families
and tribes. The Western tradition of print might save the
stories. However, the distrust of many African people regarding
people of the West complicates such a saving. The stories and
songs contain more than plot and characters. They hold values and
theologies. It takes trust to tell the stories and it takes an
un-judging ear to best hear them.
There are
African people who believe that passing stories to people of the
West, even people seeking to preserve the stories, will subject
those stories to Western biases. Some believe the stories will
not pass cleanly into print, for the Western ear will not hear
them in their full and complex context.
Thus,
distrust complicates the saving of stories and songs and poems, a
saving that is already complicated by the size of the task.
Africa, with its thousands of communities, some comprised of
thousands or millions of members, each of whom individually house
their unique interpretations of proverbs, legends, fables,
riddles, superstitions, songs, poetry, stories and quotes, is no
easy thing to bind in a book. Documenting requires massive
resources – resources no Western countries seem willing to
commit.
Rather,
continuing to extract Africa’s
natural resources matters more than extracting and preserving
Africa’s literary resources. Additionally, with the passing of
each year, it is increasingly difficult to reconstruct the life
of the indigenes before the partitioning of Africa.
Documenting
indigenous African cultures requires a lot more than
understanding a few spoken words in an African dialect. Expecting
to decode a culture through language alone is akin to
comprehending a leopard by wearing a leopard skin coat to an
opera.
Paul
Zoungrana wrote: “Beyond refusal of all exterior domination is
the urge to reconnect in a deep way with Africa’s
cultural heritage, which has been far too long misunderstood and
rejected. Far from being a superficial or folkloric attempt to
bring back to life some of the traditions or practices of our
ancestors, it is a matter of constructing a new African society,
whose identity is not confused from outside”.
Perhaps given
the turbulent history between Western Imperialists and African
indigenes, the best hope for preservation of Africa’s
literature lies in those who constitute the cultures. And perhaps
transcribing is not the first step, but rather reconstructing the
old ways, for the stories are predicated upon human interaction.
They were crafted for the tongue and the ear, not the page and
the eye.
It is no
coincidence that the great books that powerfully and poignantly
document indigenous African cultures were written by Africans who
blended traditions, studying in the West and immersing themselves
in the cultures they depicted. African cultures and African
literature commingle, each transmitted from generation to
generation by word of mouth, and each serving and preserving the
other.
For a Western
researcher to comprehend and document a culture accurately, he or
she must be willing to walk into an African village
psychologically naked—bereft of assumptions. Only then might the
researcher comprehend how the culture is received by the
indigenes and to be received by the indigenes, that researchers
must manifest a way of being utterly removed from enslavement,
colonization, and imperialism.
Only recently
have African writers begun the process of documenting African
cultures. There remains a long ways to go. I believe that as more
Africans publish more books on African culture, each book acting
as a brick, in aggregate, they might one day house some semblance
of comprehension.
