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.
African History, Anthropology, and the Rationality of Natives
The following exploration of social scientific thought as applied to Africa is an exercise in ethnography, not in debunking. At one level the argument, referring mainly to social change in western Zaire in the last hundred years, offers a descriptive interpretation which I assert is better than others. At another level I seek to establish what kind of phenomenon, in an ethnographic sense, historiography really is. At this level, I apply the methods of social science to a body of work in “social science” which is, in fact, myth, and which itself deals, in part, with a body of “myth” which is, in fact, social science. In “African Traditional Thought and Western Science,” Robin Horton first shows the ways in which the first is like the second in producing model-building explanatory schemes, and then argues that the difference between the two is essentially that “in traditional cultures there is no developed awareness of alternatives to the established body of theoretical tenets; whereas in scientifically oriented cultures, such an awareness is highly developed ” He elaborates this difference between “the open and closed predicaments” in terms of such factors as unreflective versus reflective thinking, mixed versus segregated motives, absence versus presence of experimental method; these factors he finds superior in explanatory power to “most of the well-worn dichotomies used to conceptualize the difference between scientific and tradition religious thought. Intellectual versus emotional; rational versus mystical; reality-oriented versus fantasy-oriented …” Only occasionally does Horton refer to social science, however; he seems to assimilate it to natural science.