language, power and society: orality and literacy in the horn of africa || editorial introduction...

Editorial Introduction Language, Power and Society: Orality and Literacy in the Horn ofAfricaAuthor(s): Cedric Barnes and Tim CarmichaelSource: Journal of African Cultural Studies, Vol. 18, No. 1, Language, Power and Society:Orality and Literacy in the Horn of Africa (Jun., 2006), pp. 1-8Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25473352 .

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Journal of African Cultural Studies, t\ Routledge Volume 18, Number 1, June 2006, pp. 1-8 t\ ^^^0^

Editorial introduction

Language, power and society: orality and

literacy in the Horn of Africa

CEDRIC BARNES (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London)

TIM CARMICHAEL (College of Charleston, South Carolina)

1. Introduction

The complex relations between orality and literacy have been at the heart of much

innovative Africanist scholarship in the past twenty years, following the pioneering lead of Ruth Finnegan (Finnegan 1970). Some of the best work in the field can be

found in case studies from Southern and Western Africa (Barber & de Moraes

Farias 1989; Furniss & Gunner 1995), most of which has capitalised on increased

inter-disciplinary cooperation. In short, both oral and written 'texts' have become

important for scholars who are not primarily interested in folkloric or philological concerns (White and Vail 1991). Meanwhile the use of texts as mere mirrors of

culture through which anthropologists and historians have often viewed their sub

jects is also increasingly questioned (White 1980; Furniss 1992; Hofmeyer 1994). Instead scholars attend to the context and meaning of texts within the societies that

produce them; to the circumstances in which they are or were produced; and to the

ways they help us understand how and what societies think about themselves.

Rather than reflecting purely structural aspects of society, the varied privileging of texts has brought the agencies and agendas of their producers and audiences

to the fore (Cohen and Odhiambo 1992). The Horn of Africa region is home to (1) sub-Saharan Africa's deepest recover

able literate tradition; (2) robust and living oral cultures; and (3) bitter present-day

struggles over language and political identity. These factors make the region a par

ticularly rich one in which to explore a gamut of both historical and contemporary issues relevant to orality and literacy studies. One example is comprised of the

scholarly shift of attention from structure to agency in the humanities and social

sciences, an approach that thus far has been applied only unevenly to the states

and societies of the Horn. Similarly, despite the obvious prominence of issues of

language and literacy, there has been, until recently, little close critical engagement with text, that is, the textuality of texts. This point applies even to the foundational

ISSN 1369-6815 print; 1469-9346 online/06/010001-8 (( 2006 Journal of African Cultural Studies

DOI: 10.1080/13696850600750236



2 Cedric Barnes and Tim Carmichael

texts upon which the political legitimacy of Horn states has rested. Famously,

Ethiopia's traditional ideological authority derived from the Kebre Negest, prob

ably the oldest of Africa's literary epics, but in this case - apart from the classic

and more recent translations (e.g. Budge 1932; Brooks 1996) - there is no pub

lished 'modern' critical analysis of this core national epic (however see Shahid

1976; Levine 1974/2000; Levi 1992). Despite the theoretical lag, there is certainly a substantial literature based around

the themes of orality and literacy in the Horn of Africa region. Somali studies have

evidenced a sustained interest in oral forms of language (Andrzejewski and Lewis

1964; Johnson 1974; Said 1982; Ali 1996; Suleiman 2001), and Donald Levine's

(1965) classic Wax and Gold noted the importance of oral culture in Ethiopia,

especially the ambiguity that oral culture permits and produces in the context of

bureaucratic (i.e. literate) modernization. The written traditions of the Ethiopian church and monarchy have long been mined for historical and cultural insights

(for the best overview, see Crummey 2000), and the almost equally long period of Islamic literate culture of the region (especially its coastal littoral) is also receiv

ing renewed attention (Hunwick & O'Fahey 2003; Reese 1998, 2001; Hussein

2001; Miran 2005). Furthermore, though members of the Horn of Africa's domi

nant religious-state cultures may understandably be regarded as 'peoples of the

book,' other societies in the region have distinct and powerful oral cultures

through which their identities and daily lives have long been expressed. Over the

last century, the broadening of literacy skills, through state agency or religious con

version, has made a deep impact on many of these historically non-literate societies

(e.g. on Protestant missions in southern Ethiopia, see Donham 1999).

Recent collaborations between historians and anthropologists have encouraged a

critical focus on the relationships between state and society (Donham & James

1986; Baxter-Hultin-Triulzi 1996; Besteman & Cassanelli 1996), and researchers

have started to engage more specifically with issues of power and language, whether

oral or written (James-Donham-Kurimoto-Triulzi 2002; Crummey 2005). A

number of publications have indicated renewed interest in the usages and forms

of language in the making of the modern Horn, including a special issue dedicated

to B.W. Andrzejewski published in a previous incarnation of this journal (Hayward and Lewis 1993) that revealed the potential for cross-disciplinary research. James

McCann has previously and more recently sketched out the potential for work on

the relationship between orality and literacy with reference to Ethiopia's rich docu

mentary sources (McCann 1979, 2001), and Alula Pankhurst (1990), Ali Jimale

Ahmed (1996) and Getie Gelaye (2000) have also renewed focus on the relationship

between state and society as reflected in oral and literate forms of expression. In this

volume, drawing on a career-long study of Ethiopic documents that few living

scholars can rival, Donald Crummey elaborates on these ideas.

The articles that follow take stock of current research into orality-literacy themes in the Horn of Africa, in light of the emergence of new states and the

atrophy or collapse of previous ones, as well as the burgeoning self-confidence

of cultural/national pride(s) and the continuing clamour of both popular and scho

larly voices in the region. They were initially presented at a workshop entitled



Editorial: Orality and literacy in the Horn of Africa 3

'Language Power and Society: Orality and Literacy in the Horn of Africa,'1 attended by participants from the Horn, Europe and the US. In addition to exploring the themes of orality and literacy in their own right(s), the thematic focus allowed a

critical assessment of state, power and society in a region perennially beset by cul

tural, ethnic and national divides. National narratives and local perspectives were

explored fairly equally, and the weight of history in the region was counterbalanced

by attention to contemporary issues. Discussions arising from the papers noted not

only a large degree of cross-cultural and intra-regional influence in the spheres of

orality and literacy, but also the continuing vitality of oral cultures in face of the

pervasive and transforming effects of literacy. Unfortunately not all the workshop

presentations could be included here,2 yet we hope further investigations of orality and literacy in the Horn of Africa will be spurred on and possibly framed by the

concerns advanced in the articles that do appear. The following contributions

discuss the (often overlooked) value of closely investigating the varied natures

and meanings of both oral and written texts in Horn societies, and - helpfully,

for other scholars - most of them situate methodological and practical concerns

at the forefront of their analyses.

2. The papers

Donald Crummey's paper, as the title suggests, underlines the fact that, despite the

tradition of its literate state, highland Christian Ethiopia was largely an oral culture.

Though written records in various forms have been kept since Aksumite times,

literacy and orality remained interdependent and written documents did not

automatically take precedence over oral discourse. Nevertheless Crummey is

right to emphasise that 'literacy was power'. The documents that have survived

show that land and the assertion of rights over land through the institution of

gult were the overwhelming concerns of ordinary and elite Ethiopians alike.

These 'chancery' documents, as Crummey terms them, 'wrote down the land', but their enduring authority was bolstered by oral witnesses. Crummey's investi

gation demonstrates the possibilities and limitations of Ethiopia's literate tradition

for the historian, and despite the permanence of the written, he shows the enduring

interdependence of the oral.

In the same vein Tim Carmichael's paper provides examples of neglected docu

mentary evidence available to scholars of more recent Ethiopian history. He notes

the continuing importance of the oral as well, not least in the production of

1 Convened by Dr Cedric Barnes on 17 and 18 July 2003, and hosted by the Centre of African Studies and the Department of Africa, at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. The gathering was funded by generous grants from the British Academy, Royal Africa Society /African Studies Association UK, and the International Africa Society. 2

We would like to acknowledge the valuable contributions: on Eritrea by Uodelul Chelati Dirar, Francesca Locattelli and Nazereth Amlesom; on Ethiopia by Tsega Endalew and Getie Gelaye; on Djibouti by Suzanne Lilius; on the Somali speaking areas and world wide web by Abdisalam Issa-Salwe; and a stimulating regional overview by I. M. Lewis.




dominant discourses that may waylay the unwary and naive in the quest for histori

cal truth. Carmichael notes the important transition from traditional modes of gov ernance that depended equally on literate and oral means of communication, to the

establishment of a literate professional bureaucracy during Haile Sellasie's reign that subordinated or disguised oral forms of government. Carmichael challenges scholars to move beyond foreign diplomatic sources or local oral reminiscences

influenced by the dominant political discourses of the present, and instead to 'get

dusty' in the Ethiopian archives, pursuing further written records that illuminate

daily 'bureaucratic' praxis of the Imperial regime.

Nevertheless, the idea that dominant political discourses are interesting in their

own 'historical' right is reinforced by John R. Campbell, who investigates aspects of local discourse and Western ethnographic representation. He comments on the

influences of the 'Hamitic Hypothesis' in moulding European assumptions and

understandings about African identities and histories, and focuses on the Luo of

Kenya and Uganda to explore three interrelated issues: (1) the relationship(s) between Anthropology and History as disciplines; (2) the usages to which anthro

pologists and historians have and continue to put oral sources; and (3) how disci

plinary concerns shape different scholars' use and interpretation of oral sources. By

analyzing a few prominent academic texts, he illustrates the varied ways that orality has been transformed into writing in order to represent certain versions of the Luo

past, and how in all likelihood such processes have ultimately obscured as much as

they have illustrated. In this manner, Campbell exposes crucial foundations

of much academic knowledge about the Luo; and by pointing out moments

when such knowledge has been invoked in recent social struggles, including courtroom disputes, he demonstrates the 'real-life' significance of excavating the

epistemological and other structures that underpin scholarship about the Luo.

Also describing various texts and exposing moments of local ethnographic pro

duction for political purposes, this time in Western Ethiopia, Alessandro Triulzi

analyzes various textual interrelationships and explicates the significance of what

they reveal about the orality/literacy relationship in late 1920s and early 1930s,

particularly in terms of how certain Ethiopian regional elites sought to employ

literacy as a tool for personal/family benefit. He proposes that 'the search for

locally-produced written documentation appears to be crucial for a deeper under

standing of the country's internal past about which both Royal Chronicles and dip

lomatic correspondence have little to add.' In general, Triulzi provides historicized

evidence of local perceptions of literacy's increasing importance in an African

society, reminiscent (among other studies) of sections of Sharon Hutchinson's

(1996) historical ethnography of the Nuer in neighbouring Sudan. Like Carmichael,

he also argues that historians should devote more energy towards locating pre

viously neglected internal historical documents, since such sources promise to

expand and deepen our understanding of the functioning of the Ethiopian state,

the central government's associations with various regions and groups, and the

varied and changing relations between different Ethiopian peoples. Lee Cassanelli's paper continues the exploration of how literacy and orality

affect the production of local history, as well as the integration of local historical




discourses into wider national and international literary traditions. Cassanelli ana

lyses the production of Charles Guillain's rich ethnographic account of Somali

coastal economy in the mid-nineteenth century. Not only does Cassanelli show

how Guillain's 'urban' informants presented local knowledge subjectively (a bias that the Frenchman recognised), but he also notes that Guillain's account of

the Somali coast's position in the emerging capitalist world was shaped by the

local literate elite's ('interlocutory') efforts to situate the Somali region within

wider spheres of Islamic tradition and discourse. Indeed, in 1840s southern

Somalia the Sufi orders integrated local 'oral' history into the more universalistic

Islamic 'literary' tradition of hagiography in a manner that is strikingly similar

to the (much earlier) Christian production of hagiographies in highland Ethiopia

(Kaplan 1984). Against this background, Cassanelli actually raises the tentative

argument that oral commentaries on the past only become 'oral tradition' when

they are committed to writing, a form that ensures their accessibility to future

generations of literate historians and others.

The integration of specific (often local) historical memory into national or uni

versal discourses is also important to Richard Reid's contribution, that argues that

memory of war, as well as the act of war itself, has played a fundamental role in the

construction of identity in the region. As Reid notes, the world's greatest literature

has been about conflict and struggle and many communities and even nations have

been formed in the crucible of conflict, and Eritrea conforms to this pattern. Reid

notes that there is no doubt that the Eritrean Peoples Liberation Front (EPLF) used

the narrative of war to great effect and at least in this aspect -

ironically enough -

the EPLF is part of the Ethiopian 'great tradition' of national self-representation in

literate chronicles and popular oral tradition in the realm of conflict. However, cru

cially, Eritrea is far more dependent for its national identity on the tradition of the

'military struggle' than its larger and 'historically' entrenched neighbour. Indeed, in the final section of his article, Reid explores how remembrance of the liberation

war is difficult to sustain among younger generations during the post-independence border conflict with Ethiopia, especially given the roles of the Eritrean diaspora and

increasingly diverse forms of media, not least a free press (which was closed down in 2001) and the internet (which is not so easily censored).

Cedric Barnes' paper also looks at the remembrance of conflict, focusing on a

specific Somali example and its effects on identity formation. A series of

twenty-some Somali poetic commentaries and responses, composed by a dozen

poets from three different clans and known as Gubo, are of potentially enormous

historical significance since they cover the little studied inter-war period in

Somalia and provide otherwise absent local viewpoints on events of that period.

According to Barnes, the Gubo have probably changed little over the decades since they were first recited and they provide indigenous perspectives upon a his torical period often neglected by scholars. Thus, by re-reading the poems with fresh

eyes, Barnes illustrates the potentials for future analyses of such generally neg lected literary-cum-historical sources. If he is correct in highlighting them as

both rich and richly-nuanced local commentaries, then they offer a truly grass roots-level point of view on various phenomena of historical significance. As




such, scholars interested in moving beyond the 'grubby business of 'town-based'

nationalist politics' that have dominated studies of the mid-twentieth century 'Somalias' will delight in (re)considering 'the Gubo series [which] stays deep in

the Somali world of clans, wells, grazing, and Islam.'

John William Johnson also draws on Somali poetry, seeking to push general

thinking on this journal issue's theme to levels that are usually neglected by ana

lysts and theorists alike. Specifically, in commenting on two broad theories of lit

eracy's effects on thought and society, he argues that in Somalia's historically oral

society the spread of literacy has affected the ways that poetry is memorized and

circulated, but not composed. He opens his article with a useful historical overview

of writing systems in Somalia, culminating in the 1972 national-level decision to

implement a Latin-based alphabet throughout the country. After observing the

strengths and weaknesses of the chosen system, Johnson briefly introduces two

theoretical approaches, the first suggesting that the shift from orality to literacy

represents progress, if not an evolution in human mental ability; the second is

the oral-formulaic, or "Parry/Lord" thesis that proposes literacy may or may not affect mentality, but does affect the processes by which oral literatures are

composed. While problematizing the orality/literacy dichotomy, and drawing further distinctions - such as between the processes underlying composition and

memorization - Johnson argues that literacy has not altered poetic composition in Somalia, though it has changed the ways that poems are remembered and

diffused among broader audiences. In this sense, the written word comprises just one tool - not unlike cassette tapes, compact discs, radios, or cell phones

- for

circulating this type of literature.

This blending of electronic technology and oral literature proves the absurdity that oral cultures are somehow stuck in 'traditional' time, a notion that Ben Knight on's article also strongly attacks. Knighton looks at the persistence of the elders'

authority in Karamajong society, and Karamajong's continuing day-to-day

autonomy from the modern state. Knighton uses the example of the 'performance of prayer' emphasizing once again the dynamic aspects of orality and its

myriad roles in effecting consensual political relations. Indeed, despite the best

efforts of the 'literate' state, church and NGOs to rescue Karamajong society from perceived backwardness (e.g. very low literacy rates), 'tradition' and

orality remain strong. In short, rather than weakening Karamajong society as

ideologies of literacy may suggest, orality - and especially the oral performance

of prayer - contributes to the survival and welfare of Karamajong society.

There, as elsewhere around the African continent and the world, the spoken word remains remarkably potent.

Cedric Barnes can be contacted Department of History, School of Oriental and

African Studies, Thornhaugh Street, l^ondon WC1H OXG; email: cb26@soas.

ac.uk

Tim Carmichael can be contacted at College of Charleston, 66 George St.,

Maybank Hall 315, Charleston, SC 29424; email: [email protected]




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