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Studying the History of Those Who Would Rather Forget: Oral History and the Experience of Slavery1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 October 2013

Martin A. Klein
Martin A. Klein*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Extract

Research on oral history tends to be concerned with two very different types of sources. I would refer to them as oral traditions and oral data. Oral traditions are formally preserved, not always as narratives, but in some fixed form. They can, for example, be passed on as songs, as drum names, or as proverbs. They are part of the collective memory of the group and get passed on from generation to generation. They serve a legitimating function and must of necessity be analyzed in terms of who and what they legitimate. There is also a large body of data at any time which individuals hold in memory, data about individual experience, data that consist essentially of things that people have seen and experienced. It is not preserved in any formal way because it is not deliberately structured for legitimation or communication. Popular writers in western countries have tapped this rather rich treasure trove in recent years to write about the Depression, two World Wars, and the Spanish Civil War among other things. Oral tradition is limited in what it passes on, and once the transition from generation to generation is made, the amount of data is forever circumscribed.

Oral data are largely concerned with people describing things they experienced. They are valid primarily during the lifetime of those being interrogated. They are absolutely essential for the reconstruction of the history of peoples without history, those low down in any social order who have little to legitimate.

Type
Research Article
Information
History in Africa , Volume 16 , 1989 , pp. 209 - 217
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1989

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Footnotes

1.

I am grateful to Joseph Miller, Richard Roberts, and Bogumil Jewsiewicki for comments on an earlier version of this paper. I am also indebted for years of support to the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and to the Woodrow Wilson Center for a fruitful stay, where some of these ideas germinated.

References

NOTES

2. The different kinds of tradition are most fully explored in Vansina, Jan, Oral Tradition as History (Madison, 1985).Google Scholar

3. See, for example, two popular practitioners, Terkel, Studs, Hard Times. An Oral History of the Great Depression (New York, 1970)Google Scholar or Broadfoot, Barry, Years of Sorrow. The Story of Japanese Canadians in World War II (Toronto, 1977).Google Scholar

4. A lot of excellent work is being done now in the field of immigrant studies, where even the study of the ethnic press cannot pick up the richness of the data that lie in memory. My thoughts on this subject have profited from conversations with Robert Harney of Toronto's Multicultural History Society and with some of his students.

5. See the journal History Workshop, and Samuel, Raphael, ed., People's History and Scoialist Theory (London, 1981)Google Scholar; Thompson, Paul, The Voice of the Past (Oxford, 1978).Google Scholar

6. See, for example, McNaughton, Patrick, The Mande Blacksmiths: Knowledge, Power and Art in West Africa (Bloomington, 1985), esp. ch. 1 and 5Google Scholar, and Irvine, Judith, “Caste and Communication in a Wolof Village,” Ph.D., 1973.Google Scholar

7. On memory see Vansina, Oral Tradition, ch. 1. “It is in a way amazing,” Vansina writes, “that the relation of a memory to what actually happened can be so close.” Vansina, , “Memory and Oral Tradition” in Miller, Joseph, ed., The African Past Speaks (Folkestone, 1980), 275.Google Scholar

8. A number of years ago, when I was trying to date the decline of the leatherworkers' caste, I decided to see if people could remember their first pair of shoes. I was quite startled when the first person I asked gave me a precise answer: It was in 1937. In fact an event that seemed trivial to me may well have been more important to this man than the events I normally study.

9. My Senegalese interviews are available at the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University and at the Archives Culturelles in Dakar. The Malian interviews are available at the Institut des Sciences Humaines in Bamako.

10. Moitt, Bernard, “Peanut Production and Social Change in the Dakar Hinterland: Kajoor and Bawol, 1840–1940,” Ph.D., University of Toronto, 1983.Google Scholar

11. Roberts, Richard, “Maraka Historical Texts: Transcripts of Oral Data Collected in the Middle Niger Valley of the Republic of Mali,” 3 vols., unpublished texts, 1976–1984.Google Scholar See also his Warriors, Merchants and Slaves (Stanford, 1987).Google Scholar

12. The former slave was justly proud of his accomplishments. By accident we also interviewed a number of the man's “master's” family. The old man had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. By tradition, freed men are not supposed to make the pilgrimage until they have bought their freedom under traditional law. The former master complained that the old man did not ask the “master” to set a price. He simply put on the table what he thought was the right price and announced that, he was going. At the same time, it is striking that a man who had founded a hamlet and accumulated enough cattle to pay for such a trip was till so bound by custom.

13. At one point I became convinced that a young man who had helped us a lot and had become a friend was a slave origin. I thought it might be interesting to talk to him about the meaning of servile origins today, but the issue is one that younger and better-educated Senegalese want to set behind them. My assistant refused either to confirm or dispel my suspicions. As I became aware that the proposed interview would be unpleasant for both my assistant and our friend, I dropped the idea.

14. Pawning was widespread in the region and increased dramatically during the depressions. See Roberts, Richard and Klein, Martin, “The Resurgence of Pawning in French West Africa During the Depression of the 1930's,” African Economic History 16 (1987), 23–38.Google Scholar In general, informants talked much more freely about the resurgence of pawning than about the persistence of slavery.

15. Robertson, Claire, “Post-Proclamation Slavery in Accra: A Female Affair?” in Klein, M.A. and Robertson, C., eds., Women and Slavery in Africa (Madison, 1983), 230Google Scholar; Lovejoy, Paul and Hogendorn, Jan, “Oral Data Collection and the Economic History of the Central Sudan,” Savanna, 8 (1978).Google Scholar

16. The continuing work of Paul Lovejoy and Jan Hogendorn on northern Nigeria should be interesting in this regard. See their article in Roberts, Richard and Miers, Suzanne, eds., The End of Slavery in Africa (Madison, 1988).Google Scholar

17. These terms come from the brilliant works of Genovese, Eugene, The World the Slaveholders Made (New York, 1969)Google Scholar and Roll Jordan Roll. The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1972).Google Scholar

18. One successful exploration of slave tradition is de Sardan, Jean Pierre Olivier, Quand nos pères étaient captifs. Récits paysans du Niger (Paris, 1976).Google Scholar Olivier de Sardan's success may have been that it was an old slave village, where a sense of community had coalesced. Then too, he clearly worked a long time in a single community.

19. The case was an interesting one. I was not yet researching slavery, and in fact was just beginning to experiment with oral sources. Soon after I started asking questions in a Mandinka village in the Gambia, two men started arguing. It turned out one was a descendant of the leader of a slave revolt, essentially a refusal of slaves to continue working, in the last years before conquest. The other descended from the chief at that period. The case was interesting because it indicated how servile communities could function as corporate entities. I never did get a full history of the revolt, though I later found references to it in the archives.

20. Freedom in Fulani Social Life. (Chicago, 1977)Google Scholar; Original French edition published in 1974.

21. Anthropologie de l'esclavage. Le ventre de fer et d'argent (Paris, 1986), 173–74.Google Scholar

22. Roberts, Richard and Klein, Martin, “The Banamba Slave Exodus of 1905 and the Decline of Slavery in the Western Sudan, JAH, 22 (1981), 375–94.Google Scholar

23. Roberts, , Warriors, 127Google Scholar; Klein, Martin, “Women and Slavery in the Western Soudan” in Klein, /Robertson, , Women and Slavery in Africa, 80–84.Google Scholar

24. See here again Olivier de Sardan, Quand nos pères.

25. Henige, David, The Chronology of Oral Tradition (Oxford, 1974), 95–120Google Scholar; idem., “The Problem of Feedback in Oral Tradition: Four Examples from the Fante Coastlands,” JAH, 14 (1973), 223-35.

26. See Atlas National du Sénégal (Dakar, 1977), 76–79.Google Scholar

27. Diouf, Mamadou, “Le Kajoor au XIXe siècle,” (Thèse du 3e cycle, Université de Paris I, 1980), 391–97.Google Scholar

28. Klein, , “The Slave Trade in the Western Sudan During the 19th Century,” paper presented to the Workshop on the Long-Distance trade in Slaves across the Sahara and the Black Sea in the 19th Century, Bellaggio, Italy, December 1988.Google Scholar

29. Commercial repots, Medine, Archives Nationales du Mali, 1 Q 70.

30. Renault, François, L'abolition de l'esclavage au Sénégal. L'attitude de l'administration française, 1848–1905 (Paris, 1972).Google Scholar See also Archives Nationales. Section Outre-Mer (France), 15 c, 15 d, 17, and Archives du Sénégal, K 11.

31. Report on slavery, Dagana, by R. Manetche (1904), ARS, K 18. See also Comm. Medine to Comm. Kayes, 14 Aug. 1898, ARS 15 G 116 and Political Report, Kayes, 2 March 1899, ANM 1 E 44.

32. Comm. Kaedi to Dir. Affaires Indigènes, 30 Dec. 1889, ARS, Fonds Sénégal, 2 D 136. At this time, it was legal to import slaves into Senegal for use, but not for sale.

33. Moitt, “Peanut Production.”

34. Most Senegalese will tell you that most of the Mouride converts were of servile origin.