African Oral Literature & the Environment

Summary

Over the years, I have, in introducing my students to the study of African oral literature, striven to explain to them the concept of the form and also given them background lectures on the African environment, including the people's cosmology. I have been conscious of the fact that the idea of the environment is all-encompassing and includes the African climate, vegetation, ecosystem, demography, economy, politics and the various dimensions of social relations. These constitute the African milieu which yields African literature, including its oral forms, and the environmental sensibilities the literature naturally articulates.

All literature is about its milieu: the flora and fauna of the human communal location which yields food, shelter and the abundant offerings nature makes to existence; the community, in the fullness of its culture, world view, customs and tradition, laws, social, economic and political relations in the fullness of their manifold manifestation. Literature as a vehicle and a reflection can only articulate, at a time, a few of the dimensions of the sensibilities arising from the manifold projections of the all-embracing milieu. This is understandable, given its formal limitations and the profundity of the milieu which the limited capacity of the artist as a human person can carry, comprehend, or articulate in a single creative endeavour.

What then is the basis for the choice the artist makes in terms of what themes to, or not to, address in a given creative endeavour? The answer (often) is fashion, dictated by the trajectory of a combination of, at least, social, political and economic experiences. These throw up immediate concerns for society and constitute contemporary issues – the trend of thought, the fashion of the time. This explains the preponderance of given concerns in the reflection of the social trend of thought at various stages and periods of social/human development. It explains the nature of the sensibilities expressed in pre-colonial, colonial, negritude and post-colonial African literature; in renaissance, romantic, Harlem renaissance and such other literature.

As in fashion, these periodic shifts in concern are driven by a few people who start them off; others follow with conviction; still, some others follow for the mere sake of currency (a sense of ‘belonging’, ‘being among’, or the desire for the ‘cool’ feeling of ‘amongness’). Yet, there are those who just stand aloof, and others who adopt a critical or cynical attitude.