Oral Tradition in Changing Political Contexts: The Kisra Legend in Northern Borgu
Until the mid-1950s all the received traditions in Nigerian Borgu were unanimous that Bussa was established by Woru, the eldest son of Kisra (alhough some versions claim that it was Kisra himself), while Shabi and Bio, his younger brothers, established Nikki and Illo respectively. These traditions were recorded in the early period of colonial rule by colonial anthropologists and most of these accounts are deposited at the National Archives in Kaduna. From the 1950s new traditions began to emerge challenging certain aspects of these earlier versions. One such aspect that has attracted attention is the order of the establishment of the principal Borgawa states. The new traditions denied any link between Kisra and Bussa, and also condemned the prominent role assigned to the Emir of Bussa. The principal objective of the present paper is to explain the political situation that gave rise to the emergence of these new traditions, and to show how suspectible oral tradition, especially traditions of origin, is to political manipulation. Edmund Leach and J.A. Atanda have demonstrated this in different works. In his work on highland Burma Leach shows how traditions of origins “change with clock-like regularity in response to shifts in the political constellation.” In his turn Atanda shows how oral tradition “undergoes revisions when regimes change, care being taken that materials ‘useless’ to the new regime are expunged and new ‘useful’ materials added to evolve to an acceptable ‘standard version’.”
Oral Traditions: Whose History
Historians rarely pause to reflect on the history and theory of our own discipline, but it is a salutary exercise, particularly when the discipline is as young as African history. Twenty years ago a majority of African peoples emerged from colonial domination and acquired their independence. In that same year their history was also symbolically liberated from domination by the activities of Europeans in Africa through the inauguration of the Journal of African History. And one year later the new African history was given what was to become one of its dominant methodologies with the publication of Jan Vansina's De la tradition Orale. African history was to be the history of Africans, a history that had begun well before the European ‘discovery’ of Africa. The problem was sources. Western historiography was firmly based on written sources which could be arranged in sequence and analyzed to trace incremental changes and establish cause and effect relationships in evolutionary patterns of change. Unlike written documents which were recorded in the past and passed down unchanged into the present, oral traditions had to be remembered and retold through successive generations to reach the present. Their accuracy was thus subject to lapses in memory and falsification in the long chains of transmission from the initial report of the event in the past to the tradition told in the present. To overcome these problems Vansina established an elaborate and meticulous methodology by which traditions should be collected and transcribed, their chains of transmission traced and variants compared, and obvious biases and falsifications stripped off to produce primary documents suitable for writing history within the western genre.
Ideological Quietism? Ideology and Party Politics in Britain
Ideology and political parties are frequently depicted as disparate entities, with scholars citing a range of exogenous and endogenous changes to demonstrate the decreasing relevance of ideology to party politics. This article moves away from such accounts by looking at the role of actors, and specifically party leaders, in contributing to perceptions of ideological decline. Through an examination of the rhetoric of Labour and Conservative Party leaders in Britain between 1946 and 1997, this article contends that politicians have engaged in, what is termed here, ‘ideological quietism’. In this sense, parties have not abandoned ideology but have made rhetorical shifts indicative of ideological decline.