The late historian and anthropologist Jan Vansina demonstrated half a century ago that oral tradition and history as a method contribute authoritative information toward reconstructing histories in Africa. The collaborators on this project recognize that oral traditions lend deep internally generated perspectives rich with metaphors and symbolism. At the macro-level oral traditions can be understood as the vehicle to recount a given community’s origins. On the micro-level they are also often a means to preserve generational genealogies and family histories.
Significance of Oral Tradition
The significance of oral tradition is related to its cultural importance, depth of time it covers, and its uses. In many communities oral traditions reveal how a group of people understand their world and the worlds of their ancestors. Traditions very often educate and socialize community members on values, beliefs, and taboos. Typically histories recounted in oral traditions telescope many events from the deep past and more recent eras into a single set of events. A large body of research conducted over the last five decades that has correlated oral accounts to archaeological findings and events documented even in written sources show that often, oral traditions reflect events from period stretching back three, four, or five hundred years ago. Societies that value orality preserve oral traditions quite well. Some guard those traditions carefully by training and sanctioning professional historians to control the oral archives. In our own work as historian linguists, we deploy oral tradition to illuminate words’ meanings not just in their literal connotations, but also in the imbued and deep metaphors and contextual significance. (Jan Vansina, The Children of Woot: A History of the Kuba Peoples(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978).
How to Use Oral Tradition
Oral traditions are often used on their own to make sense of individual communities. They may also be employed comparatively to get a sense of commonalities, differences, and synergies across related communities. To use Oral tradition, one must read deeply to make sense of the symbolic elements. Often it also requires reading multiple traditions to identify patterns. Data in oral traditions should be used not for their literal stories, but rather to identify patterns, trends, metaphors, and symbols that convey cultural meaning.
Historian linguists apply a comparative approach with oral traditions to provide contextual meaning. We identify expressions of social values in language data and correlate those concepts expressed in vocabularies with ideas expressed in oral traditions. Individual words and clusters of words reveal what people know. However, words alone do not always reveal precisely how, when, or why people used the ideas that the individual words signify. This is where oral traditions become incredibly useful by shedding light on how, when, and why.
Sample Collection of Oral Traditions
This link connects you to a spreadsheet of oral traditions. We have organized the oral traditions by subject matter, tabbed on the bottom of the spreadsheet. Each entry includes the source and bibliographic citations, a brief summary, the location and the original language. Where possible we have mapped similar oral traditions.
The Kikuyu are one of the larger communities of Bantu speakers in Kenya. According to one notable oral tradition, there was a period of time when women held more power and authority than men and thus ruled society. Yet in time, men wearied of this situation. They plotted to disrupt and transform societal organization in their own favor. According to the tradition the men accomplished their goal by holding a party to seduce the women. Each Kikuyu woman who attended the party was seduced and conceived a child.
According to the narrative, in the later stages of pregnancy, Kikuyu women were unable to exert power or influence and could not defend their positions. Men seized upon the opportunity and exploited women’s pregnancies to take control. What is particularly striking is that the Kikuyu men attempted to use this moment of power to change the original clan ancestors from female to male names in the oral records. In response, the women refused to have any more children if the men changed the names of the ancestors to male names. despite the tensions, the women ultimately prevailed. (Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya (London: Secker and Warburg, 1938).
Analysis
The important cultural information embedded here is the importance of matrilineages and women’s authority. While the current project is primarily concerned with matrilineal societies, it has been important to also identify Bantu speaking communities where matrilineal remnants emerge in seemingly patrilineal communities. To this day, although Kikuyu people observe patrilineal descent and inheritance, Kikuyu remember their original clan ancestors in oral traditions as women. This is highly significant since original ancestors might be expected to reflect the social values and patterns of authority prevalent in a society. As this oral tradition indicates, a shift occurred at some historical moment from a matrilineal tradition of tracing descent and inheritance in earlier eras to a patrilineal system of organization. Oral traditions reflect these kinds of changes in worldviews. This oral tradition could provide context to a whole range of words and their varied semantic meanings.
Sources
- Vansina, Jan. Paths in the Rainforest Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.
- ———. Oral Tradition as History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.