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Requiem for the Use of Oral Tradition to Reconstruct the Precolonial History of the Lower Gambia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

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

For the simple truth is that much oral tradition is mutually contradictory, biased, garbled, nonsensical, and essentially codswallop.

In 1974—the same year I ventured into the field to begin collecting oral data for my doctoral thesis, a precolonial history of a Mandinka state at the mouth of the Gambia River—Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman published their now much maligned work on African American slavery, Time on the Cross. With publication of the book, Fogel and Engerman did something few historians had done before or have done since: they made public their evidence—all of it, data and statistical methodology—so others could determine how they had arrived at their conclusions. Perhaps it was because their interpretation of slavery was so different from those preceding it that historians used Fogel and Engerman's published evidence to dismantle, piece by piece, their arguments and the way they had arrived at them.

But making available otherwise inaccessible evidence seemed to me the right thing to do. So, in the field and afterward, I offered up my oral data. (The written evidence I used was already available, either published or in archives at various places on three continents.) I deposited copies of cassette tapes of my interviews, with copies of transcribed translations, in the Gambia and in the United States. Also, within a few years of finishing the dissertation I published two volumes of translated, transcribed, and annotated oral traditions from the collection in an inexpensive series that I thought would be accessible to most interested parties. If people wanted to test my hypotheses, attack my methods, or berate my conclusions, they at least had the materials for doing so.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 18 , 1991 , pp. 399 - 408
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1991

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References

Notes

1. Latham, A. J. H., review of Vansina, Jan, Oral Tradition as History, IJAHS 19 (1986), 153.Google Scholar

2. Fogel, Robert W. and Engerman, Stanley L., Time on the Cross, I: The Economy of American Negro Slavery; II: Evidence and Methods (Boston, 1974).Google Scholar

3. Specifically, the materials are in the Gambia Cultural Archives, Banjul, and the Archives of Traditional Music, Indiana University, Bloomington.

4. Oral Traditions from The Gambia, I: Mandinka Griots; II: Family Elders (Athens, Ohio, 1979, 1980).Google Scholar

5. The monograph is The Early History of Niumi: Settlement and Foundation of a Mandinka State on the Gambia River (Athens, Ohio, 1977)Google Scholar; the reviews are in IJAHS, 11 (1978), 371Google Scholar; Journal of African History, 20 (1979), 154Google Scholar; and Journal of the Southern Association of Africanists, 1 (1979), 14.Google Scholar

6. See “Koli Tenguela in Sonko Traditions of Origin: The Process of Change in Mandinka Oral Tradition,” HA, 5 (1978)Google Scholar; “Can a Blind Man Really Know an Elephant: Lessons on the Use of Oral Traditions from Paul Irwin's Liptako Speaks,” HA, 9 (1982)Google Scholar; “Beyond Migration and Conquest: Oral Tradition and Methodology in Senegambia,” HA, 12 (1985)Google Scholar; and “The Epic of Kelefa Sanneh as a Guide to the Nature of Precolonial Senegambia—and Vice Versa,” HA 14 (1987).Google Scholar

7. Personal communication.

8. Vansina, Jan, Oral Tradition as History (Madison, 1985)Google Scholar; Henige, David, Oral Historiography (London, 1982)Google Scholar; Miller, Joseph, The African Past Speaks (Folkestone, 1980)Google Scholar; Irwin, Paul, Liptako Speaks (Princeton, 1981).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9. The result was “Niumi: The History of a Western Mandinka State Through the Eighteenth Century,” (Ph.D., Indiana University, 1976).Google Scholar

10. Kuyate, Kemo in Wright, , Oral Traditions, 1: 74.Google Scholar

11. Mbalufele Janneh, interview, 18 September 1974, Banjul; Gray, J. M., History of the Gambia (London, 1940), 310.Google Scholar

12. Ndiaye, Lat Grand, interview, 5 February 1975, Diakhao, , Sénégal.Google Scholar For excerpts see Wright, , Oral Traditions, 2: 169–180.Google Scholar

13. See, for examle, Hopkins, Nicholas S., “Mandinka Social Organization” in Papers on the Manding, ed. Hodge, Carleton T. (Bloomington, IN, 1971)Google Scholar, or Quinn, Charlotte A., Mandingo Kingdoms of the Senegambia: Traditionalism, Islam, and European Expansion (Evanston, 1972).Google Scholar

14. Lorimer, George, “Report on the History and Previous Native Administration of Niumiside…with Recommendations as to the Future Administration of Niumi…,” Gambia Public Record Office, Banjul, 2/2390Google Scholar; Black Africa: A Comparative Handbook, ed. Morrison, Donald G., Mitchell, Robert C., and Paden, John N. (2d. ed.: New York, 1989), 466.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15. One can see evidence of this happening in the likes of Lorimer, George, “Report on the History and Previous Native Administration of Niumiside, and more especially of Lower Niumi, together with recommendations as to the future administration of Lower Niumi and suggestions as to the possible future relations of this district with Upper Niumi and Jokadu Districts.” Gambia Public Record Office, Banjul, 2/2390.Google Scholar

16. Black Africa, 466.

17. Wright, Oral Traditions, passim.

18. Wright, “Koli Tenguela.”

19. I have never been certain just how important these Afro-Portuguese groups were in terms of the African society in the lower Gambia. It is possible, of course (though, I think, doubtful), since records of them are solely from the Europeans who were trading in the river, that they were of considerable importance to the foreign merchants but of relatively little significance to the African elites of the time.

20. Bakary Tall, interview, 15 December 1974, Juffure.

21. The most thorough discussion of this office is in Boulègue, Jean, Les Lusoafricains de Sénégambia, xvi-xixe siècle (Dakar, 1972).Google Scholar

22. Gamble, David P., The Wolof of Senegambia: Together with Notes on the Lebu and the Serer (London, 1967), 58.Google Scholar

23. Moore, Francis, Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa (London, 1738)Google Scholar,

24. See, for example, the map in Moore, Travels.

25. Durand, J. B. L., A Voyage to Senegal (London, 1806), 38–39.Google Scholar

26. These issues are discussed fully in Wright, “Beyond Migration and Conquest.”

27. Mbaeyi, Paul Mmegha, British Military and Naval Forces in West African History, 1807-1874 (New York, 1978), ch. 5.Google Scholar

28. The best sources for this are the letters of G. A. K. D'Arcy, written in Bathurst between June and August, 1866, in the Gambia Public Record Office, 1/12 and 1/13.

29. Quinn, Mandingo Kingdoms, chs. 5 and 6. Sometimes overlooked is the role British merchants played in this upheavel. They imported the firearms that made possible the overthrowing of traditional political control. Gambia Blue Books show that between 1830 and 1860 British traders brought firearms worth £192,000 and gunpowder valued at £159,000 into the Gambia. The weapons found their way to both sides in the war, but more went to the victorious marabouts.

30. Of course, I do not want to rule out what would be welcome evidence from archeology, linguistics, or some other field of study to shed light on Niumi's history.