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Historical Discourse: the Achievement of Sieh Jeto

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2014

Elizabeth Tonkin
Elizabeth Tonkin*
Affiliation:
CWAS, University of Birmingham
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Extract

In this paper I consider how an African historian, Sieh Jeto, plotted his narratives. Sieh was a citizen of Jlao/Sasstown, a Kru polity in Southeastern Liberia. Jlao also author and perform other past-oriented accounts in different genres, and I have written on some of these. There is not room here to discuss all the ways in which Jlao refer to their pasts, and scene-setting is equally brief. I also confine myself to Sieh Jeto's plotting of narrative.

I first encountered Jlao in 1972, and spent a year there in 1975/76. The new regime of President Tolbert at first promised reform, but emergent contradictions and rising opposition culminated in the coup of 1980. Kru groups had several times fought against the ‘Americo Liberian’ government, and in the 1930s Sasstown was the focus of a long war (in which the League of Nations at first intervened) which they lost after painful struggles. No history could be neutral there, and some people were very cautious about provoking official wrath by talking about these times. While fanpote, ‘old time business’, of a distant past might be safer, it was denied in the official ideology that indigenous Liberians had a significant history at all.

It now seems to me that the performances I recorded at different times were part of general changes of consciousness in the country. Sieh Jeto was recommended to me by an eminent Jlao man in Monrovia.

Type
Papers from the Conference “Memoires, Histoires, Identites: Experiences Des Societes Francophones”
Information
History in Africa , Volume 15 , 1988 , pp. 467 - 491
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1988

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References

Notes

1. I am indebted to the University of Birmingham, the Nuffield Foundation, and the (then) Social Science Research Council for supporting my Liberian research.

2. See Tonkin, Elizabeth, “Sasstown's Transformation: the Jlao Kru ca. 1888-1918, Liberian Studies Journal, 8 (1978/1979): 1–34.Google Scholar

3. Jlao words appear in a much simplified form in this paper. Not all vowels are distinguished (but see note 9) and tone is not marked.

4. Tonkin's “Sasstown's Transformation.”

5. Bloch, Marc, The Historian's Craft (Manchester, 1954), 22.Google Scholar

6. Paulme, Denise, La statue du commandeur (Paris, 1984), pt. I.ii, “motif ou conte-type? Comment on s'élaborg un conté.”Google Scholar

7. This mountain, which gives its name to Grand Gedeh County, has also been an oracle site; see Tonkin, , “Autonomous Judges: Oracles and Ordeals as Social Phenomena,” paper presented at the Conference on Religion, Magic and Witchcraft, New College, Oxford, 30–31 October 1987.Google Scholar

8. Tonkin, “Sasstown's Transformation;” idem., “Autonomous Judges”.

9. The passage is transliterated in a version of Methodist orthography, but omitting tone marks, and has been set out to show how Jlao syntax is exploited for dramatic phrasing.

10. Robin Horton's account of deities as explanatory models could be applied; see his “Tradition and Modernity Revisited” in Rationality and Relativism, ed. Hollis, M. and Lukes, S. (Oxford, 1982).Google Scholar

11. Compare, for instance, Merran Fraenkel's report on Grand Cess in her “Social Change on the Kru Coast of Liberia,” Africa, 36 (1966): 154–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12. Goody, Jack, Succession to High Office (Cambridge, 1966), introduction.Google Scholar

13. Porter, Dale H., The Emergence of the Past. A Theory of Historical Explanation (Chicago, 1981), lx, 34.Google Scholar

14. Tonkin, , “The Boundaries of History in Oral Performance,” HA, 9 (1982): 273–84Google Scholar; idem., “International Rhetorics,” paper presented at Conference on Oral Texts “Discourse and Its Disguises”, University of Birmingham, 26 June 1987; idem., “History as Myth and the Myth of Naturalism,” paper presented for the International Oral History Conference, Oxford, September 1987.

15. The Jlao evidence suggests that oral lists can be more flexible yet organizationally more powerful than Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge, 1977), ch. 5, suggests.Google Scholar