African Oral Literature: A review of Isidore Okpewho’s publication

By Philip Etyang

About the author

Professor Isidore Okpewho was born in Nigeria, and has a B.A. in Honors Classics from the

University of London, a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Denver, and a

Doctor in Literature from the University of London. He has taught at the State University of

New York at Buffalo (1974-76), University of Ibadan (1976-90), Harvard University (1990-91),

and Binghamton University (since 1991).

Okpewho’s areas of specialization are in African and comparative literatures, with a specialist

emphasis on comparative oral traditions. His major publications in this field include The Epic in

Africa: Toward a Poetics of the Oral Performance (1979), Myth in Africa: A Study of Its

Aesthetic and Cultural Relevance (1983), African Oral Literature: Backgrounds, Character,

and Continuity (1992), and Once Upon a Kingdom: Myth, Hegemony, and Identity (1998). His

edited scholarly volumes reveal an expansion of his academic interests from oral literature (The

Oral Performance in Africa, 1990), to modern African literature (The Heritage of African

Poetry, 1985; Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: A Casebook, 2003) and diaspora studies (The

African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities, 1999). He is currently completing

a book on an African epic under the title Blood on the Delta: Art, Culture, and Society in The

Ozidi Saga, as well as working on a new book project African Mythology in the New World. He

has also published some four dozen journals and book articles in these areas.

Professor Okpewho is also an active novelist with four titles, The Victims (1970), The Last Duty,

winner of the African Arts Prize for Literature (1976), Tides, winner of the Commonwealth

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Writers Prize for Africa (1993), and Call Me By My Rightful Name (2004). He is gradually

developing his fifth novel, Fish Scales.

Recognition

Professor Okpewho's work has come with some of the most prestigious fellowships

in the humanities: from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (1982),

Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (1982), Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral

Sciences at Stanford (1988), the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard (1990), National

Humanities Center in North Carolina (1997), and the Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation

(2003). He was also elected Folklore Fellow International by the Finnish Academy of the

Sciences in Helsinki (1993).

Administrative positions he has held include headship of the Department of English at the

University of Ibadan and chairmanship of the Department of Africana Studies at Binghamton

University. He belongs to several professional scholarly bodies such as the African Studies

Association, African Literature Association, American Folklore Society, Modern Language

Association, International Society for Oral Narrative Research, and International Society for Oral

Literature in Africa, with official stints as member of the Board of Directors of the African

Studies Association, member of the editorial committee of the series Teaching Languages,

Literatures, and Cultures of the Modern Language Association, member of the editorial board of

the journals Okike and Oral Tradition, editor of the Journal of African and Comparative

Literature, and president of the International Society for Oral Literature in Africa.

Okpewho joined the University’s faculty in 1991. His extensive research into oral traditions and

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African tales involves ethnographic investigations and the collection of narratives.

“When you examine a tale from Africa, you must look at the society from which it comes and

study the background of a tale’s transformation,” he said. “Away from Africa, these people have

a way of fashioning their own identity and it’s reflected in the tales they tell.”

A prolific writer, Okpewho is the author, co-author or editor of 14 books and dozens of articles.

He has served on the boards of the African Studies Association and the Guthrie Theater in

Minneapolis, Minn. He is a member of the Research Advisory Council for Harvard’s Center for

the Study of World Religions and is a member of the American Literature Association and the

American Folklore Society. Okpewho also serves on the editorial board of Oral Tradition and

Research in African Literatures and he has served on numerous campus committees.

He served as associate dean of graduate studies at Ibadan University and as chair of the

Department of English there. He has also chaired the Department of Africana Studies at

Binghamton. After publication of his title; African Oral Literature: Backgrounds, Character,

and Continuity in 1992, his study was described by the Research in African Literature as;

“…scope, breadth, and lucidity of this excellent study confirm that Okpewho is undoubtedly the

most important authority writing on African oral literature right now... “Harold Scheub described

it as; “…a breathtakingly ambitious project... “He went on to state that it is "... a definitive

accounting of the evidence of living oral traditions in Africa today. Professor Okpewho's

authority as an expert in this important new field is unrivaled."

Emmanuel Obiechina noted that "Isidore Okpewho's African Oral Literature is a marvelous piece

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of scholarship and wide-ranging research. It presents the most comprehensive survey of the field

of oral literature in Africa."

Mazisi Kunene a notable name in African literature from South Africa, noted "This is an

outstanding book by a scholar whose work has already influenced how African literature should

be conceived.... Professor Okpewho is a scholar with a special talent to nurture scholarship in

others. After this work, African literature will never be the same."

Chapter One; The Study Of African Oral Literature.

In the first sub topic of the book titled; “The study of African Oral Literature” Okpewho,

engages the reader in a discussion on the definition of Oral Literature. He puts across the various

difficulties one may go through in an attempt to define the terms Oral literature and folklore.

Okpewho goes on further to give us the various definitions that have been given by various

scholars such as William John Thoms, Okot Pbitek and his own definition.

Okpewho (1992) in his book, African Oral Literature, defines the term literature as a creative

text that appeals to our imagination, such as stories, plays, and poems). Okepwho in essence is

disqualifying factual texts such as newspapers as not being literature.

Okepwho goes on to suggest that since Literature can simply be referred to as creative texts that

appeal to our imagination, Oral literature is therefore literature that is delivered by word of

mouth. He argues that there are certain techniques which may be used in Oral Literature but

which may not necessarily work in written literature.

Bukenya and Nandwa also define literature and Okpewho captured this definition in his book.

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“…Oral Literature may be defined as those utterances, whether spoken, recited or sung. Whose

composition and performance exhibit to an appreciable degree the artistic characteristics of

accurate observation, vivid imagination and ingenious expression.(Nandwa and Bukenya

1983:1)…” Still under the sub topic “The study of African Literature” Okpewho engages the

reader in a protracted debate on the definition of folklore;

The term folklore refers to much more than just literature and in some quarters underplays the

literary aspect of what the folk do. It was first used by the Englishman William John Thomas in a

letter he wrote to the Athenaeum at a time when the study of traditional culture was attracting a

lot of attention in Britain and Europe.

The Athenaeum Club, usually just referred to as the Athenaeum, is a notable London club

which was long regarded as a clergymen’s club and today includes Cabinet Ministers, senior

civil servants, Peers of the Realm and senior bishops amongst its members. Your pages have so

often given evidence of the interest which you take in what we in England designate as popular

Antiquities, or Popular Literature (though by the bye it is more a Lore than a Literature, and

would be most aptly described by a good saxon compound, Folklore,---the Lore of the people)

that I am not without hopes of enlisting your aid in garnering the few ears which are remaining,

scattered over that field from which our forefathers might have gathered a goodly crop.

No one who has made the manners, customs, observances, superstions, ballads, proverbs,

etc., of the olden time his study, but must have arrived at two conclusions:- the first, how

much that is curious and interesting in these matters is now entirely lost- the second, how

much may yet be rescued by timely exertion. (Quoted in Dundes 1965:4)

INTEREST IN CULTURE

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In the consequent sub topics on the Interest of folklore in culture, Okpewho engages the

reader in another protracted discussion of when Oral literature started in the 19th century in

Europe by European intellectuals who were concerned with the question of human

culture. Okpewho suggests that one group of scholars set themselves the task of answering

questions about the origins of human culture, this group comprised of the evolutionists.

The concept of evolution is rooted in the beliefthat all biological species have over a long

period been undergoing various changes until they have reached the form in which we

find them today. (Okpewho 1992). The pioneer of this study was Charles Darwin (1809-

1882) and Okpewho suggests that his arguments had a great influence on students of

culture such as Edward Burnet Tylor (1832-1917) and James George Frazer (1954-1941).

Interest in Society

Okpewho suggests that after the first thirty years of the twentieth century, scholarly study

had moved from a more general interest in culture to a more specific interest in society.

This is so because more and more scholars were visiting and living in various traditional

societies throughout the world. They became increasingly aware of the danger in making

general statements often ignored certain specific details of life such as language and other

habits which made one society different from the other.

Interest in Literature

Okpewho argues that the champions of the sociological interest (mostly Europeans and

American) wereunable to get down to a proper analysis of the literary merits of A frican

oral Literature chiefly because they lacked a sufficient deep understanding of and feeling

for the indigenous languages in which that literature was performed. Many foreign

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scholars went to the African communities they wished to study, spent about six months at

a time, and had lived among the people for no more than two years by the time they

completed the study.

In many cases the understanding of the indigenous language was at best disjointed. The result

was that when they came t record the texts of the oral literature they had collected, they were

frequently unwilling to publish the original language versions of these texts, partly for fear of

revealing their shortcomings. They contented themselves and their readers with translations in

which gaps in the original texts were carefully and skillfully concealed. (copied from Okpewho

1992:12). Useful work in projecting the literary beauties of African oral literature has in more

recent times been done by African writers who were determined to show the world that though

they have been educated in the Whiteman’s language and are using it effectively in

expressing their literary thoughts, they nevertheless come from a rich cultural heritage.

One of the really interesting collections of traditional African poetry published from this

perspective is the Ghanaian poet Kofi Awoonor’s Guards of the Sacred Word (1974).

Awoonor studies three living experts of Ghanaian poetry, giving us an insight into their

lives and careers as performers; presents selections of their poetry; and provides notes

which use facts from his portraits of their lives to explain the effectiveness of their poetic

styles.

There is an emerging new trend in African literature. The trend is the study of African

oral literature from the various indigenous cultures in Africa. This study is being carried

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out by African scholars within the particular communities they come from and analyzing

the content that they collect. The trend is of beneficial to the realm of African literature.

Benefits of the new trend

1. In giving greater recognition to the literary qualities of African oral literature, we

have no doubt freed African culture to a considerable extent from the prejudices of

the earlier European scholars.

2. The study of and steady growth of modern African literature is a benefit of the

literary interest in African oral literature.

3. African oral literature is studied side by side with modern African literature because

many modern African writers consciously borrow techniques and ideas from their

oral traditions in constructing works dealing essentially with modern life. In Weep Not

Child for instance, Ngugi evokes the image of the ancestor of the kikuyu race (Mumbi)

in his portrait of the struggle Kenyan people against foreign oppression.

4. It has helped us in answering some very fundamental questions about the nature of

literature and of culture. In the final analysis, it seems, all knowledge aims at helping

us understand who we are, the value of what we do, how we have reached the stage of

civilization we have achieved, and what steps we can take to improve our condition.

5. Recent studies in African oral literature are helping us look more closely at the nature

of the creative process in both Africa and the rest of the world and the relationship

between one type of culture and another.

6. The question of the essential differences between European and Black African

cultures can now be tackled because of the increasing interest in the study of African

Oral literature as a subject in its own right.

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WORKS CITED

Okpewho .I. African Oral Literature: Backgrounds, Character, and Continuity.1992.

Indiana University Press.