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Can a Blind Man Really know an Elephant? Lessons on the Limitations of Oral Tradition from Paul Irwin's Liptako Speaks

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Donald R. Wright
Donald R. Wright*
Affiliation:
SUNY-Cortland
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Extract

      It was six men of Indostan
      To learning much inclined
      Who went to see the Elephant
      (Though all of them were blind),
      That each by observation
      Might satisfy his mind.

Over a thousand miles separate the Fulbe emirate of Liptako in Upper Volta from the region of the lower Gambia River, where several Mandinka states long held political authority. Fundamental differences between the areas are easy to notice. Besides speaking its own language and following its own set of social customs, Liptako's Fulbe population practiced a mixed pastoral and agrarian mode of subsistence on land where rainfall was only marginally sufficient. The Mandinka were more strictly farmers in an area that receives on average about twice as much rainfall as Liptako. Liptako existed as a unified Fulbe state only since the first decade of the nineteenth century, whereas many of the Mandinka states of the lower Gambia date to at least three centuries earlier. Commerce was important to both regions, but Liptako's commercial focus was toward the Sahara and the desert-side trade, whereas the lower Gambia was a point of contact between savanna merchants and Atlantic shippers. But, despite these obvious differences, there is a remarkable degree of similarity in the way individuals living in the two areas remember their past, and historians find a host of like problems they must confront when attempting to reconstruct the precolonial histories of either region.

I had become increasingly aware of some of the difficulties in working with Mandinka oral tradition during fieldwork in the lower Gambia. But only recently have I become familiar with problems another historian encountered as he studied traditions from Liptako, so many miles from my own area of interest. A Fulbe emirate, Liptako rose in the wake of Usuman dan Fodio's jihad early in the nineteenth century.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 9 , 1982 , pp. 303 - 323
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1982

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References

NOTES

1. John Godfrey Saxe, “The Blind Men and the Elephant.”

2. To date the major results of this fieldwork have been “Niumi: The History of a Western Mandinka State Through the Eighteenth Century,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1976)Google Scholar, a portion of which has been published in revised form as The Early History of Niumi: Foundation and Settlement of a Mandinka State on the Gambia River (Athens, Ohio, 1977).Google Scholar I have published selected oral traditions from in and around the lower Gambia, in Oral Traditions From The Gambia (2 vols.: Athens, Ohio, 1979–1980).Google Scholar

3. Irwin, Paul, Liptako Speaks: History from Oral Tradition in Africa (Princeton, 1981).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Hereafter citations to this work are noted in parentheses within the text.

4. “Subtle biases” and “cultural imprints” are terms Irwin borrows from Vansina, Jan, “Traditions of Genesis,” JAH, 15, (1974), 317–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. Wright, Interview with Demba, Kadi Sekan in Oral Traditions, 2: 94–105.Google Scholar

6. Kanouté, Dembo, Histoire de l'Afrique authentique, trans. Sanogho, Tidiane and Diallo, Ibrahima (Dakar, 1972).Google Scholar

7. Liptako tradition, then, adds fuel to David W. Cohen's argument against Jan Vansina's emphasis on oral tradition as a “chain of testimonies.” For Cohen, “historical testimony” is “the outcome of a variety of processes that essentially constitute the modes of communication of information in the society…” rather than “…a specialized ‘relay’ either in content or mode of transmission.” Cohen, , Womunafu's Bunafu: A Study of Authority in a Nineteenth-Century African Community (Princeton, 1977), 8–9, 188–89Google Scholar; idem, “Reconstructing a Conflict in Bunafu: Seeking Evidence Outside the Narrative Tradition” in The African Past Speaks: Essays on Oral Tradition and History, ed. Joseph C. Miller (Hamden, Ct., 1980), 206ff. The evolution of Vansina's thoughts on oral tradition as a chain of testimonies, open to distortion, can be seen in his Oral Tradition, (London, 1965), 45ff.Google Scholar; “Once Upon a Time: Oral Tradition as History in Africa,” Daedalus, 100(1971), 442–67;Google Scholar and Children of Woot (Madison, 1978), Part II.Google Scholar

8. For information on the Soninke-Marabout wars see Charlotte A. Quinn, Mandingo Kingdoms of the Senegambia: Traditionalism, Islam, and European Expansion, Chs. 5-7.

9. For a brief intoduction on why the story of Kelefa Sanneh is recited so widely in the Senegambia region, see my “Thoughts on the Nature of Mandinka Polity and Society,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association, Bloomington, Indiana, 21 October 1981. See also Innes, Gordon, ed. and tr., Kelefa Sanneh (London, 1978).Google Scholar

10. I was able to read transcriptions of a number of oral traditions about Kombo Silla that are in the possession of the Oral History and Antiquities Division of the Vice President's Office, Banjul, The Gambia. I am grateful to B.K. Sidibe and Winifred F. Galloway for providing me with these and other materials.

11. This is by no means to argue that oral tradition is unique in this respect, for seeing the past (or even the present) from particularistic perspectives is a characteristic of written documentation as well. A good example from the Gambia is the British archival materials that deal with Kombo Silla, whom they viewed as a ruthless and ambitious political leader without ever considering, or even being aware of, his various motives.

12. Winifred F. Galloway, personal communication. John Yoder uses a similar analogy, that of a champagne glass, broad at the base (very early times), narrow at the stem (the long middle period), and wide at the top (the period near the present). He discusses Kanyok tradition in “A People on the Edge of Empires: A History of the Kanyok of Central Zaire,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 1977), 24ff.Google Scholar Cf. Miller's, analogy to an hourglass in “Listening for the African Past” in The African Past Speaks, 36–37.Google Scholar

13. The story of people following a wandering bull seems to be the cliché at the center of the episode that Joseph C. Miller describes in ibid., 7-8. The cliché, Miller suggests, short and easily remembered, is what is handed down through the past. Rather than details of the narrative (of which there are few in pre-jihad Liptako traditions), it is the cliché that carries forward information from and about the past.

14. Wright, , Early History of Niumi, 49ff.Google Scholar

15. Recently historians have begun to question seriously traditions of mass migration from various parts of the African continent. Slow drift of small segements of populations that occurred over long periods of time tend to come through in oral traditions as mass migrations. See Miller, , “Introduction,” 31–34Google Scholar; Birks, J.S., “Migration, A Significant Factor in the Historical Demography of the Savannas: The Growth of the West African Population of Darfur, Sudan,” African Historical Demography (Edinburgh, 1978), 195–210.Google Scholar

16. Boulègue, Jean, “Contribution à la chronologie du royaume du Saloum,” BIFAN, 28B (1966), 657–62.Google Scholar

17. I discuss the Siin list in Oral Traditions, 2: 174–75 and note 26.Google Scholar

18. Wright, Interview with Samba Laoubé and Boubacar Senn of Kahon Senegal, in Oral Traditions, 1: 149ff.Google Scholar

19. Miller says essentially the same thing in The African Past Speaks, 9: “Nor does the degree to which narrative elaborations of a given cliché converge in detail from performer to performer, or from performance to performance by a single narrator, constitute proof of historicity.”

20. For an example of false consensus among the Gambia Mandinka see Wright, Donald R., “Koli Tengela and Sonko Traditions of Origin: An Example of the Process of Change in Mandinka Oral Tradition,” HA, 5 (1978), 257–71.Google Scholar

21. Irwin cites Philip D. Curtin's use of the words “style” and “limited uniformities of pattern” in Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade, (2 vols.: Madison, 1975), 1:xixGoogle Scholar Another African historian who seems to have worked through a welter of oral data, eventually to get a feeling for the “style” of the society she was studying, is Ann E. Frontera. See her Persistence and Change: A History of Taveta (Waltham, Mass., 1978).Google Scholar There are, of course, others.

22. It is probably only fair to point out that it is logically possible that the deficiencies Irwin and I see in the traditions that we collected are really our own, that is, that somehow we happened to be less able than others to mine such data effectively. For instance, it is just possible that we two may be the only field researchers to get different answers from the same informants who were asked the same questions again. However, though this problematical aspect of fieldwork seldom shows through in the available literature, which is pretty relentless in concentrating on the positive aspects of field research, I somehow suspect that Irwin's experience and mine are actually very much the norm.