African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History

Roberts, Richard L., 1949-

Biography, Volume 26, Number 3, Summer 2003, pp. 504-506 (Review)
Published by University of Hawai'i Press
DOI: 10.1353/bio.2003.0076
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the selectivity of travelers comments. Greater contextualization is sometimes
needed to appreciate the representativeness and reliability of individual inter-
pretations of China. By ignoring factors such as the motivation of writers,
the writers observations, whether naive or unusually perceptive, have equal
authenticitythe prime criterion for inclusion. According travelers this
kind of latitude attaches great importance to their assertions. In cases such as
the travelers obsessive grumbling about dirt, these assertions need further
examination. Clifford says his purpose is not to judge whether what travelers
thought about China was right or wrong. Though he does not strictly adhere
to this purpose, it does permit him to circumvent difficulties presented by the
nuances in travelers views. The book has extensive referencing of others who
have written about travel, and a valuable bibliography of primary sources.
The works on the Two Chinas will be of special interest to those studying
revolutionary China, and those comparing that period to views of China
after 1949.
Susan Schoenbauer Thurin
Luise White, Stephan E. Miescher, and David William Cohen, eds. African
Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History. Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 2001. 322 pp. ISBN 0-253-33948-0, $49.95 cloth; ISBN
0-253-21468-8, $22.95 paper.
The interview in which the professional historian records an elderly Africans
oral testimony about the past has a central place in the historical practices of
African history as it emerged as an academic inquiry in the immediate post-
colonial period of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The pioneering academic
historians of Africa during this period had to confront the fact that most
African societies were preliterate, and that while there was a several century-
long tradition of Africans writing in European languages, most Africans did
not leave written records, especially not in their own languages. Being with-
out writing, however, did not mean that Africans had no history. All societies
have means of recalling and using the past. The important methodological
breakthrough occurred in 1961, when Jan Vansina, trained originally as a
medievalist and then as an ethnographer, published De la tradition orale; essai
de mthode historique (Teruven, 1961), which appeared in English translation
in 1965. Vansina established a rigorous methodology for the use of African
oral traditions as historical sources. Assuming that all historical sources con-
tain distortions, Vansina argued that some oral traditions are more reliable
than others, but that all historical sources must be scrutinized for distortions
and cross-checked with other sources. Explicit in Vansinas argument and his
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method was the assumption that objective historical fact could be extracted
from oral historical sources.
Vansinas method led to the opening up of vast areas of African history,
especially precolonial history, for which only African oral sources could be
tapped. Vansinas method stimulated a profound and on-going debate about
the historicity of African oral sources. The volume under review is part of
this four decade long discussion about the value and limitations of African
oral sources for the study of African history.
African Words, African Voices emerged from two conferences, held first
in Bellagio in 1997 and then a month later at the University of Michigan.
All of the contributors in the current volume presented their original versions
at Bellagio; the follow-up conference included dissertators, but their work is
not included in this volume. We hear some of the concerns of these junior
scholars in the introduction, when the editors refer to the remarkable set of
polarities that emerged from the two conferences. Many of these younger
scholars, about to conduct field research, seemed remarkably unconcerned
about the epistemological and methodological concerns of the past forty
years, and probably felt like volume contributor Bethwell Ogot, one of the
pioneers of oral historical research in Kenya, when he stated that Africans
know their history and get on with their lives (17).
African Words, African Voices is, however, concerned with the very issues
of what we can and cannot learn from African oral sources. The volume con-
sists of thirteen chapters written by African and Africanist historians and his-
torically minded ethnographers, linguists, and literary scholars. African
authors (including a white South African) wrote six chapters; five of these
authors are based in Africa. The editors are to be congratulated for their
efforts to support and sustain this collaboration between scholars working in
Africa with those outside the continent. Most of the chapters are concerned
with the tensions between the quest to locate authentic African voices that
can provide an objective accounting of history, and the hermeneutics of
transfiguring African words into historical knowledge and meaning.
Chapters by Bethwell Ogot of Kenya, E. J. Alagoa of Nigeria, and Babacar
Fall of Senegal are more concerned with the politics of historical interpreta-
tion, and less with the subjective rendering of the meanings of experiences,
which provide the subject matter for the chapters of several of the younger
Africanist historians in the volume, including Tamara Giles-Vernick and
Stephen Miescher. The chapters by Luise White and David W. Cohen
address the fascinating issues involved in transforming rumor and incomplete
eyewitness accounts into evidence. Readers interested in these issues should
turn to Luise Whites more sustained mediation on rumor in her Speaking
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with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (U of California P,
2000).
Since the interview remains one of the potent tools in the production of
biography, readers of this journal will be especially interested in the chapters
that examine the dynamics of the interview. Chapters by Abduallahi A.
Ibrahim and Corinne A. Kratz are especially valuable in turning upside-
down our long-held assumptions that the power dynamics in interviews
(especially in cross-cultural ones conducted in the field) tend to favor the
researcher. On the contrary, Ibrahim and Kratz argue compellingly that
informants often control the flow of information, and shape the interview by
indirection, silences, and lying. Both argue that scholars should understand
the interview as performance in which the commentary is often more impor-
tant than the text.
African Words, African Voices adds considerably to the important and
dense body of interpretation and analysis of oral historical sources. Most of
the oral evidence examined in this collection (with the exception of the odd
piece by Isabel Hofmeyr on John Bunyan, and Alagoas fascinating discussion
of the communitys reactions to his local history) deals with historical phe-
nomena from the middle of the twentieth century or later. One of the unex-
amined aspects of the critical use of oral historical sources in this volume is
the status of precolonial and early twentieth century oral history. Concern
with the subjectivity of experience leads historians to examine only lived his-
tory, and forecloses the study of the past beyond these firsthand experiences.
Historians of Africa will be facing a major crisis if our use of African voices
is limited to the study of contemporary history. One final note: a map would
have been useful to readers who are not familiar with the sites mentioned in
the various chapters.
Richard Roberts
Robert Desjarlais. Sensory Biographies: Lives and Deaths among Nepals Yolmo
Buddhists. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. 351 pp. + Notes. ISBN 0-
520-23588-6, $21.95.
Written with a sharply focused clarity that is free of academic jargon, Sensory
Biographies compellingly explores the life histories of two elderly Yolmo,
members of a Buddhist ethnicity whose ancestors migrated from Tibet into
Central Nepal three centuries ago. The work juxtaposes these two lives, each
serving as a mirror not only to the other but also to Yolmo society. One is a
hereditary lama, Mheme (Grandfather) Lama, a widower, twice married,
who was eighty-five years old in 2000; the second is a twice married lamini
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