Background
African Storytelling
"I will tell you something about stories. . .They aren't just entertainment. . .They are all we have. . .to fight off illness and death. You don't have anything if you don't have the stories." 3 Despite the attempt to include more information about non-European countries in our children's history texts over the last two decades, many of us, as educators, feel that this information continues to remain highly Eurocentric in focus. Some primary materials by Africans appear in textbooks and the accuracy of information has improved, but, as yet, relatively few school districts have been able to mobilize sufficient support to overcome entrenched structures and introduce African perspectives into curriculum units in order to study Africa from the inside. Stereotyped textbooks, picture books, films, and curriculum guides continue to litter the classroom. African reality is certainly more complex than this, but most of us lack access to a wide range of resources from which to make selections. Very few towns and cities have comprehensive collections of materials on Africa, and fewer still have collections which include materials published in Africa. However, preconceptions and stereotypes disappear with the discovery of resources like those at Yale and the power of African produced films. They are a strong reminder to professionals to be thoughtful in how we teach about this amazing continent.
Traditionally, Africans have revered good stories and storytellers, as have most past and present peoples around the world who are rooted in oral cultures and traditions.
Ancient writing traditions do exist on the African continent, but most Africans today, as in the past, are primarily oral peoples, and their art forms are oral rather than literary. In contrast to written "literature," African "oralture," to use Kenyan novelist and critic Ngugi wa Thiong'o's phrase, is orally composed and transmitted, and is often created to be verbally and communally performed as an integral part of dance and music. The oral arts of Africa are rich and varied, developing with the emergence of African cultures, and they remain living traditions that continue to evolve and flourish today. As has been noted by those who have observed African storytelling firsthand, the full beauty and force of the stories are inevitably diminished when they are written down and divorced from their contexts, from the bodies and voices of the storyteller.
"Storytelling makes a community of us, enabling us to experience ourselves at out best. . .and at our worst. It is an art form that richly remembers and celebrates our finest impulses, as it recalls and commemorates our cruelest proclivities. Storytellers remember the past, and use that past to shape the present and the future. For better or for worse, storytellers forget nothing; they scrutinize our history, they plum the most ancient depths of our human experience. Storytellers remind us that we continue to be motivated by emotions as deep as humanity itself. It is profoundly true that, as far as our emotional lives and histories are concerned, there is nothing new under the sun."4
African proverbs and stories draw upon the collective wisdom of oral peoples, express their structures of meaning, feeling, thought, and serve important social
and ethical purposes. The fact that one sees the universal features of traditional narratives in African stories is comforting to the American student; however, other features may seem very foreign and strange. To more fully understand and appreciate African storytelling traditions, one needs to study them in the context of the particular African culture and orality on which the story draws for their themes and values, structures and plots, rhythms and styles, artistic and ethical tenets. African novelists, like Chinua Achebe, have introduced oral stories, such as narrative proverbs, song-tales, myths, folktales, fairy tales, animal fables, anecdotes, and ballads, into African literature. Chinua Achebe's acclaimed 1958 novel Things Fall Apart includes features of the African Igbo folktale which are representative of common kinds of stories around the world. "Once upon a time,' he begins, all the birds were invited to a feast in the sky.'" To continue, the story explains a cause, origin, or reason for something, as why the tortoise shell is "not smooth." There is a trickster here as well. Is he/she not prevalent in worldwide folktales? Greedy Tortoise, "full of cunning," manages to trick the birds out of all the food at the feast, but for his selfishness he is punished. Tortoise falls from the sky and "His shell broke into pieces." Tortoise, called Nnabe in Igbo cultures, is physically slow but quick witted, lives a long time and has a long memory. He gains a kind of wisdom by studying fellow creatures in society. But like the trickster figures in the folklore of many world cultures, Tortoise misuses his knowledge. He is cunning and malicious and dupes or tricks others for his own greed or selfish gain.
Tortoise is a favorite in Igbo children's stories, for he is a character that children can relate to, as will my students in New Mexico. He is a rogue, but he is a nice kind of rogue. The students may not trust him, but they'll like to hear that he is around because they know he is going to do something unexpected and he will generally be punished too. This is the moral side of it that he can't get away with murder. He does something, he is punished, but he still lives to appear again. Tortoise is mischievous but not irredeemably so. He's just naughty. My students will totally identify and demand to hear more about Tortoise, as all tricksters exist on the peripheries of the social order. Their individualistic, non-conformist behavior creates havoc and disharmony in society and can threaten the survival of the community. Society must keep them in check. In African storytelling, this goal is rehearsed and achieved in communal performances of proverbs and folktales to ensure that his bad anti-social behaviors are punished and that the evil forces unleashed are controlled or defeated. Picture, please, the effect of recounting Tortoise stories in African communities: functioning to reaffirm the priority and wisdom of the community, reassuring its members that balance and harmony can and should be restored, and determining that the community will survive and prevail. African cultures often encourage audience members to feel free to interrupt oral storytelling performances, voicing emotions or opinions. My students can learn much about the African culture by learning its stories, as they glean that what constitutes a good story can differ significantly depending upon what constitutes good storytelling in a particular society and culture.
In folktales, worlds are different, and such wicked characters as Tortoise are often restored and/or reintegrated back into society. In this case, a great medicine-man in the
neighborhood patches Tortoise's shell together again. If told by an African storyteller with intonations, song, and possibly dance, this would certainly elicit an audience response. Despite these universal features of folktales, however, the particular narrative styles of storytelling around the world differ; some may feel very foreign and strange to U.S. students. Consider the challenging fact that more than 450 languages are spoken in modern Nigeria and picture just one region in which the Igbo peoples are concentrated. Chinua Achebe explains that the Igbo language exists in numerous dialects, differing from village to village. There is no standardized formal written or oral Igbo language that all Igbo accept and use. The complexities of literal translation and subtitles for African cinema are enormous.
In many African cultures, the storytellers are professionalized, the most accomplished being the griots, who have mastered many complex verbal, musical, and memory skills and possess the strong spiritual and ethical dimension required to control the special powers believed to be released by their spoken word. It is their inheritance to provide continuity between the generations, to maintain and keep alive the essential images of African humanity as they provide explanations for life's great rites of passage. They do not memorize stories; they always remember them, always extemporize. The basis of the griot's orality is an ancient, often symbolic image around which the patterns of the story are constructed. The listener responds emotionally as the images are built and repeated, as they bond the past to the present, the real to the fantastic. The sense of the special powers of the spoken word, as expressed in the following Bambara praise poem-has largely been lost in literate-based societies of the West:
Praise of the Word
- The word is total:
- It cuts, excoriates
- forms, modulates
- perturbs, maddens
- cures or directly kills
- amplifies or reduces
- According to intention
- It excites or calms souls.
- —Praise song of a griot of the Bambara Komo society5
This unit will center upon the storytelling traditions of the griot, normally trained by his father or by an older brother, and his representation in African film.
Film Essentials
The use of film in the classroom enhances the learning process in ways unavailable in other media; as a means of communication, this medium is an uncommonly powerful resource for teachers at all levels. For middle school purposes, this unit will address the essentials that will enable seventh and eighth grade students to critically view and appreciate the skills of the filmmaker. Film characteristics which include lens techniques, camera movements, camera angles, framing of shots, and film editing can create astonishing views not found in reality. Close-up shots allow a director to show the viewer dramatic emotions that might go unnoticed with ordinary vision, and long shots place the image and its behavior within a larger context. Looking at shots is a logical place for students to begin their work, moving next to the focus of the shot, the point in the image which the camera most clearly defines.
As the camera moves, slowly or at a varying pace, the audience peruses the landscape, gleaning how the culture works, as they are transported to an unaccustomed place and time. Rerunning the scenes allows the teacher to ask students to analyze what they see, with the theories and concepts discussed. Sounds, foreign languages, dialogue and music enhance the visual image and increase a film's effects on the viewer. The tempo and loudness of the film's music foreshadow coming events, emphasize a specific scene, or heighten the viewer's emotional response. Viewers should not simply be passive observers of images on a screen. Students will have many different responses to the numerous facets of cinematography, and that is an essential part of the film experience. As commented by Professor Dudley Andrew, "A novel is a world cut out of a story. A film starts with a world which then builds a story."7
African Film
The existence of African film dates back to 1924 when the short film La Fille de Carthage, by Tunisian filmmaker, Chemana Chikly, was produced. Following de-colonization, after the 1960's, it developed significantly, notably thanks to the world festival of Black arts in Dakar, 1966. This is not to say that Africans during the colonial era were not involved in film. Perhaps they were not the filmmaker, nor the cameraman, nor the screenwriter, but, as technicians, cashiers, ushers, and assistants, they indeed played the essential roles necessary to the distribution in Africa of films produced by Europeans and Americans. For example, the projectionist's job was, literally speaking, to project images onto the screen in order to entertain an enthusiastic indigenous audience. In reality, however, he acted as a conduit or illusionist to convey the politics and social and moral behaviors of cultural outsiders. Today, distancing from Euro-American cinema paradigms, African film de-colonizes the mind, entwines the political and the imaginative, and faithfully transmits a country's heritage to its audience. It is the duty of the African cinematographer to tap into the audience's consciousness: memory, ideology and cultural meaning. The past must be preserved.
African filmmaker, Dani Kouyate, produced Keita, The Heritage of the Griot, in 1994. The film is based on the epic tale of Sundiata Keita, emperor of Mali. Produced in Burkina Faso, it uses the West African storytelling griot to link the present, main story, to the past. It is fascinating to view the griot's style of narration. Keita, a very simple story about the education of children in contemporary Africa, takes on an epic dimension when the director connects the life of the protagonist to that of Sunjata Keita, the founding father and emperor of old Mali in the thirteenth century. 'Griotism' in African storytelling ties everyone's fate to everyone else's, and to history. Does it not feel, for a moment, that our lives, as well as the protagonist's, depend on the outcome of the film?
Keita opens with an old griot, Djeliba, who appears in a far-off village, set to leave home to venture alone on a long walking journey to the city of Ouagadougou to the modern home of the Keita family and their young son, Mabo. It is his mission to initiate the young Mabo into the history of his ancestors and thus the meaning of his family name, Keita. The mission is explicitly immediate. This family of griots has served the Keita lineage as advisers and praise-singers since the thirteenth century, when Sundiata Keita founded the empire of Mali. It is the epic of Sundiata that Djeliba seeks to relate to Mabo. His presence soon divides the household into opposing factions; Mabo's mother becomes concerned that the griot's stories are distracting her son from school work, as, in opposition, his father insists on the importance of passing on the Keita heritage. The boy's modern education, with its strict calendar schedule, clashes with his thirst to be educated by the griot about both his origin and his future.
In Mabo's school, French and English are emphasized at the expense of African languages and cultures. The boy's parents, a bourgeois couple, speak French, while the griot speaks a local African language to him. In fact, Mabo is perfectly bilingual, comfortable and adept in both languages. A rigid structure in Mabo's classroom contrasts with the intimate relationship Djeliba develops with him. Mr. Fofana, Mabo's schoolteacher, visits the home and comes into direct conflict with the griot, demanding that Djeliba's mission wait for school vacation. Tradition conflicts with modernity. Sitting in a tree with two friends, Mabo narrates the griot's teachings. As the family crisis deepens, Djeliba decides to return to his village without completing his mission. The young Mabo is now trapped between two worlds.
The second African storytelling film in this unit is Gaston Kabore's Wend Kuuni, meaning gift of God, 1982. In pastoral, calm scenes, there is a balance among humans, animals, and the land. At the beginning of the film, a woman in a hut sobs over her half-asleep son, distraught at being forced to remarry because of the extended absence of her husband. She plans to escape and thereupon unveils this plan to her son. The following sequence shows the child in the bush taken in by a merchant who shortly afterwards entrusts him to the care of a family in a distant village. Sheltered, then adopted, this young boy, who has become mute, bears the name Wend Kuuni, signifying gift of God. The movie then portrays Wend Kuuni's daily life among the members of his new family within his new traditional village. His life continues until an important flashback in the film where a connection is made between the mother's scene in the hut and Wend Kuuni, abandoned in the African bush.
The domestic scenes of the village family comprise the daily life of individual members of Wend Kuuni's foster family: the father weaving, the mother taking care of the household chores (sweeping, preparing butter and bread cakes), the daughter Pongnere assisting her mother (in preparing the fire, setting up the millet, getting water, and delivering orders), and Wend Kuuni tending to the watering and pasturing of the goats, as well as helping his foster father in his chores as a weaver. The film shows the daily repetition of activities within the family group. Different from the domestic life is the scene at the market in which there are negotiations between men and women. Wend Kuuni bargains with a young woman in order to sell his father's piece of cloth. A young woman, Timpoko, bargains less honorably where she rejects her husband, whom she judges to be too old and impotent.
Although Wend Kuuni really has no one to confide in and must bear his grief alone, he finally tells his story to Pongnere when she disobeys her mother's orders and runs into the bush to talk to her foster brother. Skillful film techniques account for the young boy's wanderings until he recovers his speech. The absence of human discourse in the bush scenes allows the viewer to focus on the beauty of the landscape and the sounds. This will be a lesson in and of itself for my students who live in a T.V. centered existence, in apartments with family members. Silence is golden. Two film shots relate to Wend Kuuni's past, one that shows a bow behind a tree, representing his father, as well as the recollection of his mother during the flashback. The first shot symbolizes his control of speaking, as he is the only one able to recover and bring back the image of the father, and the other shot shows his mother under a tree. This second shot actually suggests that the mother as she dies recollects the absent husband so that when the young boy can recover the image of his mother, who holds the image of his father, he has regained a sense of his parentage and can thereafter speak again and tell his story.
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