his do storytellers lie

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215 Isidore Okpewho Oral Tradition: Do Storytellers Lie? I N ONE OF THE MANY arresting moments of The Ozidi Saga, an epic tale from the Ijo of the Niger Delta in southern Nigeria, the narrator, Okabou Ojobolo, has just finished presenting Ozidi’s encounter with Ogueren, the formidable monster of twenty limbs. Then comes a new opponent, Badoba, bragging that he will dispose of Ozidi without any difficulty; the hero’s earlier opponents performed so poorly against him because they lacked the necessary resources for taking him on. Okabou then paints a fittingly terrifying picture of Badoba’s physique: his head touches the sky and the length of his sword is interminable. In light of the picture Okabou painted earlier of Ogueren, a comparison between him and Badoba becomes inevitable, as we can see in the following exchange between the narrator and a member of the audience: Spectator: Was he greater than Ogueren? Okabou: What, greater than Ogueren? The heroes and heroes there— how can they be compared? Each had his own might. Audience: Right. (Clark-Bekederemo [1977] 1991:147–48) 1 The episode illustrates well the challenges facing oral narrators in the all too immediate circumstances of their performance before a discerning audience. A careful reading of The Ozidi Saga reveals that Okabou enjoyed considerable empathy from his ethnic fellows among the audience, whose patriotic pride was greatly fired by this perfor- mance of their traditional epic in an environment (Ibadan) far from their Delta homeland. But the spectator’s question clearly indicates the always-present risk of an aesthetic discrepancy between narrator and audience: the latter are less easily drawn than the former into Journal of Folklore Research, Vol. 40, No. 3, 2003 Copyright © 2003 Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Indiana University

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Page 1: HIS Do Storytellers Lie

215

Isidore Okpewho

Oral Tradition: Do Storytellers Lie?

I N O N E O F T H E M A N Y arresting moments of The Ozidi Saga, an epictale from the Ijo of the Niger Delta in southern Nigeria, the narrator,Okabou Ojobolo, has just finished presenting Ozidi’s encounter withOgueren, the formidable monster of twenty limbs. Then comes a newopponent, Badoba, bragging that he will dispose of Ozidi withoutany difficulty; the hero’s earlier opponents performed so poorlyagainst him because they lacked the necessary resources for takinghim on. Okabou then paints a fittingly terrifying picture of Badoba’sphysique: his head touches the sky and the length of his sword isinterminable. In light of the picture Okabou painted earlier ofOgueren, a comparison between him and Badoba becomes inevitable,as we can see in the following exchange between the narrator and amember of the audience:

Spectator: Was he greater than Ogueren?Okabou: What, greater than Ogueren? The heroes and heroes there—

how can they be compared? Each had his own might.Audience: Right. (Clark-Bekederemo [1977] 1991:147–48)1

The episode illustrates well the challenges facing oral narrators inthe all too immediate circumstances of their performance before adiscerning audience. A careful reading of The Ozidi Saga reveals thatOkabou enjoyed considerable empathy from his ethnic fellows amongthe audience, whose patriotic pride was greatly fired by this perfor-mance of their traditional epic in an environment (Ibadan) far fromtheir Delta homeland. But the spectator’s question clearly indicatesthe always-present risk of an aesthetic discrepancy between narratorand audience: the latter are less easily drawn than the former into

Journal of Folklore Research, Vol. 40, No. 3, 2003Copyright © 2003 Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Indiana University

Mary Botto
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the fantastical world of the tale, being frequently inclined to take arealistic view of the images conjured by the narrator. This does notmean that our spectator thinks any the less of the narrator. It maysimply point to an effort on the spectator’s part to come to termswith the highly nuanced outlook the narrator is trying to presentwith his choice of figures that are not exactly part of the landscape ofeveryday life; in other words, the spectator is struggling to make amental switch from objective to mythic reality.

Yet these narrators, even the highly skilled ones among them, havebeen so customized by their training and practice in the craft thatthey make these aesthetic demands of their audience even in taleslocated squarely in the world of everyday reality. In this paper, I wishto examine some of the narratives I have collected over the yearsfrom my part of Nigeria, the Delta State, in light of the aesthetic dis-crepancy I have suggested between narrator and audience. For al-though I agree that the audience, being arguably less subject thanthe performer to the emotive charge of the tale, are entirely entitledto take a more rational view of its contents, I fear their expectationsmay not sufficiently address some of the perspectives from which thenarrative art endeavors to reorder the often complex signs (cultural,political, and otherwise) of our varied existence.

Over the past three decades, I have undertaken an extensive projectof recording tales told in areas where I grew up. Although I startedout collecting any tales I could find, I decided quite early to concen-trate my efforts on the subclass of epic, or heroic narratives. The de-cision was not hard to make. I come from the section of Nigeria—themidwestern corner of the country, bordered to the east by the RiverNiger and to the south by the Atlantic Ocean—where the old king-dom of Benin had flexed its military and political muscle most pow-erfully. So strong was the influence of Benin in the lives of the peoplethat a safe majority of tales found in any community in this area—even tales entirely about animal characters—are likely to be set in oldBenin. So I had before me a wealth of stories about the various warsthe communities had fought with Benin in defense of their interestsand their pride. Their heroes were invariably men endowed with ei-ther extraordinary physical qualities or mystical resources, sometimeswith a combination of both. I have no tale, in my collection, in whichany of these communities lost a war to Benin—even though we know

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that given the kingdom’s superior military organization, it stood amuch better chance of beating each of them in a fight.

Most of the narrators from whom I collected the tales have beenmen, and there are reasons for this gender bias. For one thing, sincethe old days women have been accustomed to tell tales of a moreeducational or moralistic quality—especially tales about animals andhumans and the lessons to be drawn from their interactions—ratherthan tales of military confrontation. This is partly because warfarewas considered a male affair but also partly because in many of theseconfrontations the warriors equipped themselves with certain occultresources that are available only to men. For another thing, in morerecent times, as I have pointed out recently, women have becomeso deeply engaged in the entrepreneurial endeavors of the post-independence economy that they show little interest in some tradi-tional pastimes, like storytelling; hence, “if you went to the villageenquiring for the best known narrators, you would be as likely to bepointed by women as by men to male ones” (1998:141–42). The pointI make here may not be very convincing to feminist judges of suchmatters, and I am quite prepared to be challenged for not havingtried hard enough to exploit more feminine talent than I seem tohave done so far. But the male interest in matters of war, especially ina traditional African society, can hardly be denied. In the particularcase of male narrators who may never themselves have fought in anywar, the opportunity to experience, even vicariously, the glory thatcomes from the martial life evidently has an appeal that may be gain-fully invested in the narrative performance.

Of the several narrators I worked with in the villages, I spent mostof my time with Charles “Boy” Simayi of the village of Ubulu-Uno,whom I first met in June 1980. Now nearing eighty, Simayi grew up,like most men his age, in the conflict-prone atmosphere of thepolygynous family and in the hard but chastening life of the ruraleconomy. Thanks largely to his innate industry as well as a keen eyefor the valuable examples of enterprising elders, he found himselfmastering a variety of skills such as farming, hunting, and herbal andoccult medicine, as well as allied traditional arts like carpentry, archi-tecture, craft-making, storytelling, and musicianship. In the 1980s,when I recorded most of my oral tales from him, I observed him onoccasions at work on his farm, building a block of the only secondary

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school in his village, and constructing a drum commissioned by one ofthe orchestral groups in a neighboring village. It was clearly in recogni-tion of his eventful life, as well as his varied skills, that he was appointedto perform not only counseling roles in the internal administration ofhis community but even diplomatic duties, such as settling disputesbetween citizens of the village living in faraway places. About ten yearsago, he was honored with a highly prized chieftaincy title as paramountherbal doctor of his village. I learned this shortly after I relocated tothe U.S. in 1991, and I rejoiced in his good fortune. But the result ofhis new position is that he can no longer engage in activities like musicmaking and storytelling. So, when I took home a camcorder in 1994,hoping to capture a narrative performance by him on video, I had tocontent myself instead with a matter-of-fact account of his life.

*

Of the stories I recorded from Simayi in the eighties, one of themost significant concerns the well-documented war between hispeople (the Ubulu) and the kingdom of Benin.2 Briefly, an invitationhad been announced for herbalists in the Benin “empire” to offertheir services in saving an incumbent Oba (king) from dying, likeseveral others before him, from a congenital disease. All the herbal-ists who failed the qualifying test (for the opportunity to cure theOba) had been executed, but the Ubulu expert prevailed and finallybrought the Oba to good health. As a reward, the Oba gave him hisdaughter (Adesua) to take home as his wife. On his way home, Ezemuwas confronted by a key imperial official (Ezomo), who questionedthe offer of a Benin princess to a chief from the outbacks. Ezemusmiled away the insult, but on getting home he cast a spell that in-stantly spirited the princess all the way from Benin to his side. Whenthis trick finally came to light, the Ezomo persuaded the Oba to de-clare war on the Ubulu. Against the entire imperial command, Ezemusimply led seven hunters, fortified with charms, in a redoubt thatdestroyed not only the army but also a formidable array of Beninwitches, who were summoned by the Oba when everything else hadfailed. In the end, the Oba was forced to sue for peace, by whoseterms a territorial boundary was drawn between the Benin and Ubulunations that Benin was enjoined never to violate. In concluding hisstory, Simayi is doing his best here to cope with the reactions of someof us around him:

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Narrator: That was how they fixed the boundary at Abudu.Okpewho: The boundary between the Bini [people of Benin] and—Narrator: And . . . and the Ubulu.Okpewho: I see.Narrator: It’s at Abudu, which is what entitles us to claim Abudu, we of

these parts.That’s where Ezemu fixed the boundary.

Mr. Enyi [percussionist]: It’s the white man that changed it as it is now.Narrator: They didn’t change it—it remains in the same place till to-

morrow.Benin dare not overstep it, and pledged never to kill theUbulu people again.

Okpewho: I see.Narrator: So . . . when that recent war came,

And they killed Ubulu people, their kings began to die.They no longer fulfill their days, and they have continuedto send emissaries to settle matters.That was where I took my leave of them, and returned.3

As I pointed out above, the heroes of these anti-imperial war talesI have collected from the west-Niger Igbo are invariably men likeEzemu, endowed with either physical or mystical powers, very oftenboth. With respect to Simayi’s narratives, although he has never foughtin a war, the fact that he is himself a distinguished herbalist brings anelement of personal interest to his representation of Ezemu and otherheroes who undertake these delicate tasks of national defense.4 Al-though I had no reason to suspect that he had skewed the details ofhis accounts in an effort to dignify his profession, I thought it mightbe interesting to see what kind of image he cut of himself in experi-ences analogous to the kinds his heroes faced. After he told me theEzemu story, we took an entertainment break, during which we dis-cussed certain details of the story. At an opportune moment, I askedSimayi if there were any difficult encounters he had himself survivedthat he cared to tell me about. He reflected briefly, and indeed heseemed to have trouble distinguishing between being an eyewitnessof an event and being actually involved in it. He then performed astory in which, although he was not a principal agonist (in terms ofbeing directly affected by the outcome of the event), he played someform of a contributory role.

The story is about a competition for a chieftaincy title betweentwo young men, Azujionye and his kinsman Odobukwu, in the neigh-boring town of Ogwashi-Uku, under the paramount rulership of Obi

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Izediuno. These title-taking rituals were courtesies traditionally ex-tended to sons and daughters of the community who had distinguishedthemselves in some endeavor or service, and they were designed toreward them for raising the image of the community in the eyes ofthe world. In more recent times, however, there has been fierce com-petition for these honors in some places by entrepreneurs aiming toboost their image and draw attention to their material success. In thisparticular case, the competition takes the form of each rival tryinghard to outdo the other not only in the size of his entourage (whichincludes herbalists employed to ensure the candidate’s victory) butalso in the quantity of foodstuffs and game carted to the residence ofObi Izediuno to influence his decision. The ruler, overwhelmed bythis frenzied rivalry in wealth, summons one of his ministers, Odafe,to help him settle the issue. In turn, Odafe, whose mother happensto come from Simayi’s village of Ubulu-Uno, sends for Simayi to joinhim in the task. In a brazen display of favoritism, achieved by ma-nipulating an officiant at the ceremony (“boy” in the passage citedbelow), Odafe and Simayi decide in favor of Odobukwu by determin-ing that he was the first to present himself to Izediuno, when in real-ity they have succeeded in helping themselves to some of the bountyOdobukwu has brought to the ruler. So Izediuno, scarcely unawareof the intrigue of his advisers, pretends he is merely following theirwell-considered counsel in awarding the prize to Odobukwu. Simayiconcludes his tale with Izediuno’s feigned irritation at the wholetroublesome affair (the first line is spoken in a loud voice):

Narrator: THE KING THEN ROSE UP, SAYING TO THEM, “WAIT AMINUTE!Let no one come here to bother me any more.Since, in my first offering of the kolanut [a traditional en-tertainment],This boy took it and gave to this man [Odobukwu],Those who curse me are only cursing themselves:The clear conscience is free of all indemnity.”That’s as far as I went with them, and returned, while [thewinner] claimed his chieftaincy.

Audience: Welcome!Narrator: Welcome to you all!

Er, they say that when a fart gets out of hand, the arse isbared wide for it! (Narrator burst out laughing at the amusedsatisfaction of Okpewho.)5

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There was a particularly awkward moment in the performance ofthis tale. When Simayi reported how he had accepted the invitationto join Odafe in the counseling mission, a member of the audience(Mr. Kifodu), sitting nearby, promptly asked him, “O yu nke a?” (Youmean—you here?”), emphasizing his misgivings with a pointed hand.Undeterred, Simayi replied straight away, “Mmu agwa i nu!” (I’m tell-ing you!). Presumably, Odafe had summoned Simayi’s help in thisbusiness because of the latter’s acknowledged wisdom not only inconsultative but also in mystical matters—both rivals had summonedherbalists to their aid. But for the ruling council of Ogwashi-Uku toadmit an outsider—one, for that matter, from a much smaller com-munity—into its decision-making business, however well-endowed thatperson may be, certainly taxes the credibility of the narrator a littleeven for such rural communities. It was no doubt to prevent any moreawkward confrontations that Simayi’s chief percussionist, Mr. Enyi,dropped an aside to the narrator, “Jua ajuju n’akuku nke o./ Gba nkiti”(Ask questions in this regard./ [Or] be silent [about it]). But Simayibrushed him aside, “Na-aku if’ y ’ aaku!” (Keep to your striking!). WhenEnyi urged silence once more shortly after, Simayi simply ignoredhim. Kifodu’s presence clearly put some risk, perhaps a political one,on Simayi’s claims about participating in an affair relating to the po-litically superior community of Ogwashi-Uku; the percussionist wasprobably trying to save his leader from any problems that might arisefrom his interference in such complex matters.6

Although I had found this story a compelling performance—musically and otherwise—it was not exactly the kind of story I had inmind: I had asked for one in which Simayi was a central agonist. Itherefore put the question a little more pointedly to him, causinghim to narrate to me an event that happened in his village during theNigerian civil war (1967–70). It is interesting that although he hadnarrated the Ezemu and Izediuno tales against the background ofpercussive music provided by his two regular accompanists, the civilwar story was totally unaided by music.

On the face of it, the incident illustrates the highhandedness forwhich armies in such war situations are generally notorious, but ithad a special relevance for Simayi’s little community and clearly forhimself as its champion. Briefly, the village’s grand matron (Omu)was scheduled to be given the most distinguished female honor inthe land (Ada) on an appointed day. A day or so before then, the

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village awoke to discover that its entire stock of cattle, from which afew animals were to be chosen for ritual sacrifice and entertainmentat the occasion, had vanished; inquiries revealed that the stock hadbeen commandeered by a detachment of the Nigerian (federal) armystationed within the grounds of a high school in Ogwashi-Uku, aboutfive miles away. Nobody in Ubulu-Uno was willing to risk a mission ofrecovery to the dreaded Nigerian army. Simayi himself flinched whenthe appeal was made to him; nonetheless, he assumed the task, thoughnot without arming himself with adequate charms for the risks ahead.The soldiers, true to their reputation, put some obstacles in Simayi’sway, at one point ordering him to stand up in order to be shot. How-ever, intervention always managed to come in the nick of time. In theend, Simayi was allowed by the soldiers to recover his own cow, pav-ing the way for fellow citizens he had brought with him to make theirown claims. Although the soldiers continued to prove a menace evenwhen the rites of installation of the Ada had proceeded, the villagewas ultimately restored to peace, thanks to its prominent son, whohad put his mystical powers as well as his self-assurance at its service.Simayi here begins his conclusion of the tale with the angry words ofthe federal officer in charge, berating his men for retarding the fed-eral war effort with their unruly conduct:

“THIS IS NOT THE WAR-FRONT.It’s not necessary for you to bring the war to the rear, sincewe have already left this place behind.So, you don’t know what you’re taking on.Go to the war-front, if you love fighting, go over there andfight.And stop making war on . . . civilians.”That was the order given, and we thus saved our heads.The Ada was installed,And that was where I took my leave of them, and returned.(Okpewho 1992:191)

This story posed yet another test to Simayi’s credibility in present-ing historical reality, but this time he enjoyed ample support from aparticular member of the audience. Raphael Ajidoe, a wiry, pint-sizedman of about sixty-five, had frequently punctuated Simayi’s narra-tion with comments that the narrator politely indulged. A memberof the party that accompanied Simayi on the rescue mission, Ajidoewas visibly agitated as the story was being recorded; at one point,unable to contain himself, he interjected, “We were the ones who

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suffered all this [physical abuse by the soldiers]!”causing Simayi topacify him with a softly spoken, “It’s all right” (Okpewho 1992:191).No sooner had the story ended and we had entered into a discussionof the issues raised, than Ajidoe burst into a quite emotional account—he was a stammerer—of the brutality he had personally suffered fromone of the soldiers on his return from the military camp. He feltpersonally hurt by the experience, because two of his sons had foughton the federal side on a different front in the civil war. Ajidoe causedmuch laughter when he concluded his testimony by stating that, notlong after the event he had narrated, the soldier in question hadgone mad on the streets of Ogwashi-Uku: the soldier obviously hadnot realized what powers he was fooling with! If a member of Simayi’sembassy had the power to hex one misguided soldier, would anyonedoubt that the leader himself had the resources to take on the entirecommand?

Considering how much emotion the memory of this incidentaroused on that occasion, I never managed to ask Simayi why he hadnot used musical accompaniment for the performance. I supposeone could suggest that, although Simayi and his people had triumphedover the risks posed to their lives by the military presence, the civilwar remained a sore issue to deal with, even with the best of narrativeskills. And, perhaps for the same reason, we could go on to argue thatSimayi never really found the impetus to weave the details of his waraccount into the familiar structure, musical and otherwise, of hisperformances. The implication of this is that if the war story wereperformed against a musical background, whether by Simayi himselfor by some future narrator taking up where the master left off, itwould possibly ride on a wave of artistic assumptions (I believe theclassic phrase for this is “a willing suspension of disbelief”) that wouldbring it closer to the realm of myth than to that of history. Whetheror not such an account would invite the sort of misgivings Simayifaced in his narration of the chieftaincy contest would depend eitheron how well the narrator told the story or else on the kind of localpartisan interest that might be at play thereat.

Whatever the case may be, it is clear from the stories I have col-lected from Simayi that the artistic success of tales in the oral tradi-tion depends, to a certain extent, on the degree to which a narratorcan internalize the details of his or her account: notice how steadilySimayi weaves his persona into his narrative events. At one level, this

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explains why male and female narrators, as I pointed out earlier, hardlytell the same kinds of stories. Women would not normally tell warstories because, although they certainly could, they are somewhat lim-ited (by experience, at any rate) in the degree to which they can ap-propriate the martial imagination.7 By the same token, men are notas skillful as women in narrating tales of moral education because,thanks partly to the traditional systems of role distribution in thedomestic economy and partly to the complicated structure of thepolygynous household in which the likes of Simayi were raised, theyare not as well equipped as women for handling the more delicateaspects of relations, especially between children.

*

This brings me to a second level of considerations. I have spokenof history and myth as models of representation by which Simayi’swar account, told against a musical background, might be assessed.In our study of stories in the oral tradition, we seem so often inclinedto see these as opposing categories that we hardly stop to ponder thecontinuities between them or even the validity of our categorizationsfor the people who tell the stories. In an earlier discussion of Simayi’swar account (1989), I expressed the faith that personal narratives ofthis kind would be of immense value whenever the history of theNigerian civil war came to be written. But even there the interfacesbetween “life” and “art” were hardly lost to me as I reflected how in-timately Simayi, in the various tales I had been fortunate in collectingfrom him, wove his backgrounds and circumstances into the experi-ences he narrated.

The spectator who doubted Simayi’s role in the chieftaincy con-test may have been right. Simayi himself may, in a different context,disclaim participation in that affair. But the poetic assumptions ofthe narrative act might be all the justification he needs for makinghis claim; in other words, a well-told tale bears the guarantee of itsauthenticity. In inserting himself into the event, Simayi may indeedbe saying something more: Given the delicate nature of the decisionObi Izediuno had to make between two rivals vying for a title withmystical as well as material resources, he needed the presence of amystic as well endowed as Simayi for the task; the narrator’s insertionof himself may be the clinching metonym for the effectiveness by whichthe ruler resolved the dilemma facing him. The very act of performing a

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story evidently sets the narrator up to take figurative liberties with truthas understood in normal everyday discourse; the more elaborate theapparatus for doing such a performance (e.g., musical accompani-ment), the greater the tendency toward figuration.

Was Simayi trying to impress me—a university professor, with mysophisticated recording tackle—by making claims his rural fellowsmight be inclined to question? Possibly. But evidently self-insertion isaccepted practice in oral narrative performance, though it is moreprominent in some places than in others. Ruth Finnegan has remarkedthe habit of one of her narrators among the Limba of Sierra Leone,a blind man, who “frequently added to the vividness of his narrationby adding in an aside that he had been there at that point, standingsilently by and observing with his own eyes—blind though his listen-ers knew them to be—the fantastic doings of animals or Kanu (God)”(1967:74). In the Malian epic Kambili, the narrator (Seydou Camara,a hunters’ bard) often proclaims his sympathies with the hunter heroKambili and characters allied to his cause by using the possessive pro-noun “my” in referring to them (Bird 1974). Based on performanceshe recorded from his principal Xhosa (South Africa) narrator, HaroldScheub has observed the storyteller’s tendency to “[move] out of herrole as narrator to assume fully the character that she is depicting”(1977:354). Finally, Odogwu Okwuashi, one of the most accomplishedraconteurs I have had the pleasure of recording among the west-NigerIgbo, frequently ended his tales about ancient Benin by claiming thatthe heroes, who successfully rebelled against the dreaded kingdom,had personally invited him to record their triumphs for the benefitof the wider world (Okpewho 1998:154–69)!

The conventional wisdom about these acts of self-insertion is thatthey are devices that facilitate the narrators’ imaginative infiltrationof, and exit from, the extraordinary worlds of the events they nar-rate. This is no doubt true. But clearly there is so much politicalinterest invested in many of the tales I have recorded from the west-Niger Igbo—several of them anti-hegemonist tales of relations be-tween peoples—that we must look somewhat beyond aestheticistexplanations for the phenomenon of self-insertion. Jan Vansina hascited these intrusions of the narrator’s personality as a principal prob-lem in establishing the historical value of oral traditions (1965:108,130). While we question such purist aspirations of conventional West-ern historiography, we can at least begin to recognize the peculiar

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intersection of aesthetic and pragmatic imperatives undergirdingthese narrative acts in oral culture.

The phenomenon is not unknown in other traditions outside Af-rica,8 although I imagine each society has its own criteria, within itssystems of discourse, for determining the value of any piece of oralevidence. While we cannot stop historians and other social scientistswho explore the evidential value of oral narratives from operatingwithin their recognized parameters for dealing with “distortions” intheir texts, I urge that we resist the temptation to use the “truth”/“lie” dichotomy in judging the practice of self-insertion by narrators.I suspect that informants who felt sufficiently committed to a nega-tive cause would hardly offer themselves for a spotlighted perfor-mance; if they did, they would hardly do a job of much artistic merit.9

When a narrator inserts himself into his account of an event he maynot have participated in or even witnessed, or when he maneuvershis interests, his backgrounds, or personal circumstances into hisportraits of favored characters, he is in essence offering a criticalperspective on issues relating to his community’s social or politicalhistory, or else putting his signature, his seal of approval, on an expe-rience he sees as bearing some relevance for himself or a communityof interests he identifies with. Performance becomes the right set-ting for such an act because it facilitates the transfer of ordinary ex-perience to a larger metaphorical level of signification, within thecanons of representation recognized by the culture.

*

Why do these interventions of the narrator’s personality and in-terests matter in our study of oral narratives? There has been a tradi-tion, in cognitionist scholarship, of considering orality a degeneratebrother of literacy in the representation of social reality, whereby theformer is seen as lacking the capacity for accuracy that is considereda hallmark of the latter (e.g., Horton 1967; Havelock 1976, 1982;Goody 1977, 1986, 2000).10 Other scholars, however, have argued quitedifferently and persuasively (e.g., Finnegan 1988). Also, anyone whohas read Zora Neale Hurston’s delightful masterpiece, Mules and Men,is no doubt familiar with her well-meaning portraits of rural folk inFlorida as a community “where they really lies up a storm” on theirfront porches and in lumber camps. Hurston has shown unexcep-tionable commitment to that community in her use of the materials

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she collected from it, and Robert Hemenway has done a credible jobof demonstrating that these tales should be seen less as “quaint fic-tions created by a primitive people” than as “profound expressions ofa group’s behavior” (1980:168).

Among other theorists on the subject, William Bascom followsearlier scholars like Durkheim and Malinowski in categorizing oralnarratives on the criterion of believability, though he takes care tocaution that he is referring “only to the beliefs of those who tell andhear these tales, and not to our beliefs” as outside investigators(1965:7). The division often assumed between fact and fiction, truthand lying, continues to engage scholarly attention. Two of the morerecent views on the issue, by Richard Bauman and Elizabeth Tonkin,deserve special mention because they have been based on a carefulconsideration of the contexts of narrative performance as a valuablecriterion for studying storytelling as a factor of the social construc-tion of identity in oral culture. In his seminal work, Story, Performance,and Event (1986), Bauman examines the relevance of performancecontexts in the interplay of events and stories told about them; mov-ing beyond the simple divisions erected between truth and falsehood,he explores the ethnographic foundations of storytelling both as acreative tradition and as a strategy for the construction and negotia-tion of personal and social identities. In her equally incisive Narrat-ing Our Pasts (1992), a study of oral history among the Kru of Liberia,Tonkin abjures the individualistic ideology of Western (literate) his-toriography by exploring the place of these storytelling events in com-munal life; again, moving beyond the truth/falsehood dichotomy,she gives due attention to specific performance contexts in interro-gating the relationship between “personal” and “collective” memoryand the ways in which “personal identity, social identity, processes ofidentification and historical representations are so intertwined” (132).Even more importantly, Tonkin succeeds in showing that, in recog-nizing the interplay of personal and social interests, oral historiogra-phy is no less authentic or credible in the representation of historicalreality. In this sense, self-insertion may be seen as a ploy that achieves,in oral culture, the same effect as an author’s critical perspective inliterate historiography.11

Like visual artists, perhaps, who inscribe images of themselves intotheir representation of a wide range of scenes (Salvador Dali, NormanRockwell, and others), the narrator who weaves his life into his narra-

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tive dramas is less inclined to violate reality than to identify himselfwith the larger metaphorical relevance of his text. Such an activity isnot unlike the situation in autobiographical writing. John Eakin makesthe interesting point that “autobiographical truth is not a fixed butan evolving content in an intricate process of self-discovery and self-creation, and . . . that the self that is the center of all autobiographi-cal narrative is necessarily a fictive structure” (3).12 By “fictive” I un-derstand Eakin to imply not so much that writers of autobiographyare necessarily engaged in lying as that they have undertaken to in-stall themselves at the center of their narrative universe and toreconfigure that universe in order to validate their place within itsstructure of relations. A narrator like Simayi is obviously well placedto assume such a reconstitutive role. Living in a militarized polity thatplaced enormous constraints on individual self-assertion and tellingtales of powerful men who won their leadership by employing far fromordinary methods, he is driven to place himself at the center of hisnarrative world partly under the aesthetic impulse of performance butalso partly because he feels committed enough to the interests of hissociety to take a subjective stand in interrogating them. What is at playin such narratives is not so much an abstract concept of truth as theright of the individual to review the facts of historical experience in thecontext of contemporary realities. In the process, he reinvents himselfeven as he redraws the outlines of his people’s cultural history.

In the final analysis, the challenges posed to Okabou’s tale of Ozidiare not radically different from the misgivings raised against Simayi’sstory of the chieftaincy contest, although we are dealing with narra-tives set in two rather different time frames. Each storyteller findshimself making, in the course of a spotlighted performance, claimshe might be hard put to defend in normal daily discourse. And eachstands his ground because for him the telling of the tale is not just anact of entertainment. Rather, he sees in his performance an opportu-nity both to give an account of himself as a skilled man of words andto project to his audience some of the deadly serious, transcendentimport of the details of the picture he paints with those words. Inappreciating narratives of cultural history, in particular, we need torethink the all-too-easy lines we draw between truth and lying.

Department of Africana StudiesBinghamton University

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Notes1. The Ozidi Saga was recorded in performance in 1963 by J. P. Clark[-Bekederemo],

then a research fellow in African Studies at the University of Ibadan. The recordingtook place at the residence of Madam Yabuku, an Ijo resident in Ibadan, then capitalof the Western Region of Nigeria. The narrator, heading an orchestra of fellow Ijo,performed this epic (of the Tarakiri clan of the Ijo) in the Ijo language and in thetotal of seven days decreed by tradition. The audience comprised many Ijo residentsin Ibadan, a Yoruba town, as well as several curious non-Ijo, including some of Clark-Bekederemo’s colleagues who had accompanied him from the university.

2. See Okpewho (1992:192–202) for the story (in translation) and discussion,and Okpewho (1998:15–18) for a comparative treatment of the story with other ver-sions of it in Egharevba ([1934] 1968:41–42) and Sidahome (1964:45–72).

3. Although the administrative arrangement claimed here by the narrator is ques-tionable, the Ika tongue spoken in Abudu today is largely an admixture of Igbo andBini linguistic elements. The point about Benin kings dying again is evidently a ref-erence to the death of Oba Akenzua II not long after the end of the civil war.

4. See, for instance, Okpewho (1990:127–35).5. The metaphor of the unruly fart is meant to capture the irresponsible display

by the two rivals for the chieftaincy title: they were simply given the room they neededto make absolute fools of themselves!

6. At my request, my brother-in-law and field assistant, Patrick Arinze, later askedKifodu why he had questioned Simayi’s claim, and Kifodu simply said he didn’t thinkSimayi had the kind of influence in Ogwashi-Uku that he claimed to have!

7. I do not mean to simplify the structure of power relations that excludes women,under such circumstances, from participation in the decision-making processes ofthe traditional society. But I believe that Ifi Amadiume (1987) has demonstratedhow well the distribution of roles was worked out between the genders in precolonialtimes, so that neither of them transgressed the established areas of authority andresponsibility without consequences. In her judgment, it was colonialism that broughtabout the demise of such balanced relationships.

8. See, for instance, Bryce Boyer’s discussion (1958) of legend distortion amongthe Mescalero Apache Indians.

9. Oral artists are, of course, frequently hired to promote unpopular causes. Butif the careers of such stooges in the troubled days of Nigeria’s First Republic are anyguide, their effectiveness is all too often marred by the face-saving devices they aredriven to adopt in their performances. It is comforting to note that the better artistsin a community, who have a reputation and an honor to protect, have often resistedthe pressure to support unpopular politicians, though they have been made to paydearly for their forthrightness. Olatunde Olatunji’s discussion of this subject (1979)is quite enlightening.

10. Pascal Boyer (1990) has offered some insightful qualifications to the cognitionistconclusions reached by Horton, Goody, and others, but I find aspects of his discus-sion of the truth-value of “traditional” statements just as reductionist. On the basis ofhis field study of ritualists and mvet epic narrators among the Fang, he takes a num-ber of positions on the rationality of beliefs held and claims made by the people. Forinstance, he thinks that, contrary to what happens in Western scientific culture, the

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Fang have a sense of categories that is based not on theoretical foundations but onan “episodic memory” of “specific situations.” The examples he cites convince me,rather, that Fang representations of these “specific situations” argue a sense of cat-egories (i.e., a theory) that serves to validate specific cases. More pertinently, he ispersuaded that whereas the Fang have no difficulty accepting claims made by “cus-tomized” persons (e.g., ritual specialists and mvet bards) as “true”—claims like “twinsare birds” or “anthills are witch-craft”—such claims would get little credit in theirrational thinking, as though the situation were any different with Christian dogmaslike the Virgin birth or the Resurrection. However, when Boyer acknowledges the“customized” situations in which these claims are made as conferring a special “truth”value to them, his arguments achieve a certain validity in recognizing the context ofperformance as conferring some metaphoric quality to statements and a more tran-scendent authority to their “customized” makers, beyond what ordinary life wouldallow. As I indicated above, Simayi himself might not so readily admit in daily dis-course that he had participated in decisions over the chieftaincy contest in the pal-ace of Obi Izediuno.

11. For an equally valid argument from the “ethnography of speaking” school, whichhas put much needed emphasis on narrative contexts and especially ethnographer-subject relations, I think that the following from Elaine Lawless is relevant here: “Areflexive stance should illuminate the biases and preconceptions that inform ourinterpretations (where we are) and move us forward, then, in the direction of collec-tivity in interpretation and a new authentication of a multivocal kind of ethnogra-phy, which includes, as well, where others are, but which does not privilege one inter-pretation over another” (1992:302)—a position that amply complements DennisTedlock’s landmark plea for a “dialogical anthropology” (1983:321–38). Although Irecognize that generic classification (e.g., fact/fancy, history/myth, etc.) is part ofour strategy as scholars to fashion some scheme for resolving challenges posed bythe ways of oral culture, the idea of lying or falsehood has no place in my concept of“myth.” My reflections on it, against the background of Bascom’s use of “belief” as abasis of judgment (Okpewho 1983:57–59), finally lead me to a definition of “myth”which takes full account of the imaginative imperatives of performance and therelevance of oral tradition to cultural history: “Myth is not really a particular type oftale as against another; it is neither the spoken counterpart of an antecedent ritual,nor is it a tale determined exclusively by a binary scheme of abstract ideas or a se-quential order of elements. It is simply . . . that quality of fancy which informs thesymbolistic or configurative powers of the human mind at varying degrees of inten-sity; its principal virtue is that it tends to resist all constraint to time and experienceto the end that it satisfies the deepest urges of a people or of mankind” (69, 219).

12. Compare Derek Walcott: “every ‘I’ is a/fiction finally” (Omeros 291).

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