It’s time to revive critical studies in oral literature

Mukurwe-ini Boys High School students perform a traditional Kikuyu dance titled, ‘Ruhia’, which is performed during circumcision. PHOTO | FILE

What you need to know:

  • There was an active scholarly movement started by Owour Anyumba, Jane Nandwa, Taban Lo Liyong, Okot P’Bitek, Bole Odaga and those of that generation who believed that oral literature was dying with old people and that there was need to collect oral literature material before it was gone with the old people.
  • There, is of course, a category of those young scholars with no passion for abstractions, but ready to engage their mouths rather than brains at the slightest provocation. They have not mastered academic vocabulary, but are well grounded in social media verbiage.
  • Folklore study, within the context of a given theory, has to rise above the simple, the mundane and the usual. We have to formulate concepts and theories that should guide critical folklore discourses that reveal social relationships.

While under the pupilage of Prof Muigai wa Gachanja at Kenyatta University in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was introduced to critical scholarly studies in oral literature. At that time, there was an active scholarly movement started by Owour Anyumba, Jane Nandwa, Taban Lo Liyong, Okot P’Bitek, Bole Odaga and those of that generation who believed that oral literature was dying with old people and that there was need to collect oral literature material before it was gone with the old people.

Operating within this school of thought, Prof Nyambura Mpesha, Dr Waveney Olembo and Prof Austin Bukenya, who were my teachers, took the whole of my class to a voyage of coastal and northeastern Kenya to collect data among the Pokomo people. Admittedly, I thought we were engaged in an important national enterprise to save oral literature.

But Prof Muigai wa Gachanja was critical of this school of thought. His argument was that oral literature can never die and will never die. For him, the rush to collect oral material was not an urgent exercise. “Egara, oral literature is part of folklore and as long as human beings are alive, they will continue to create folklore and there is no time they will stop,” he told me in one of our classes.

He had just graduated with a PhD degree in Folkloristic studies from Emory University, USA, and had interacted with the best brains in folklore studies, including Allan Dundes, Bettelheim Bruno, William Bascom, Arewa E.O, Beidelman T, Ruth Finnegan, Richard Dorson, Levi Strauss, and Vladimir Propp. He was bubbling with enthusiasm to make an impact.

Over the years, I have come to believe in Prof Muigai wa Gachanja’s ideas on folklore. 

Our oral literature is part of our folklore, which is a national asset and a powerful socialising agent. A community’s folklore enables it to identify itself for what it is. It enables a people concretise their thought processes and convey the values they cherish into their children.

AGE OF CRITICISM

Folklore, significantly, reveals a people’s philosophy of life and expresses their fears, hopes aspirations and technological innovations. It provides a means through which we share the moral precepts and principles guiding our social interaction. That is why oral literature was introduced into our curriculum.

Through folklore we are able to predict how human beings respond to social pressures and contradictions within their environment. Folklore texts also enable us to experience reality in a special ways that releases tension. Besides, it is a means through which we satisfy our aesthetic sensibilities.

It is through the humour and witticism, buffoonery and amusement so typically expressed in a variety of folklore texts that we see ourselves and our own follies, foibles and whims.

Folklore can be mined in order to solve modern day challenges and create wealth. But we can only mine it through critical studies in folklore. Some of the answers to conflict resolution, management, leadership and technology are buried in folklore. It is also the fodder required for the production of media content. 

It is with this in mind that I have of late been wondering where enthusiasm for the study of oral literature and folklore generally dissipated to.

We live in the age of criticism in which everything must be subjected to critical introspection, but this faculty seems to be extinct. We have no single journal in all our universities dedicated to folklore studies. No university has a department of Folkloristic Studies in Kenya!

Essentially, we need to create the spaces and platforms for folkloristic studies. Every utterance, FM radio discourses, comedies, writing, object, body, myth or image in the realm of folklore has to be subjected to critical evaluation. It is, however, possible to identify a number of voices that represent categories of scholarly orientations in folklore albeit at a minimal scale.

There are those in academia who are trapped in a time frame that regurgitates old mundane positions and, therefore, uninspiring. Secondly there is a category of those fascinated with ideas, but not insistent enough to create an impact.

There, is of course, a category of those young scholars with no passion for abstractions, but ready to engage their mouths rather than brains at the slightest provocation. They have not mastered academic vocabulary, but are well grounded in social media verbiage. Occasionally, they display glimpses of enthusiastic fodder, but are yet to concretise their thought processes on any cultural subject. They have not mastered critical theory and have no meaningful ideological leaning.

CONSTANT TRANSFORMATION

Folklore study, within the context of a given theory, has to rise above the simple, the mundane and the usual. We have to formulate concepts and theories that should guide critical folklore discourses that reveal social relationships.

We can only develop critical theory in the study of folklore through informed contestation and debate. Each perspective should contest others while making specific claims to truth.

As a matter of fact, theories develop through the constant transformation and transgressions of both the traditional and common sense. The meanings we create should become sites of struggle in which antagonistic, incompatible ideas compete.

This is enough reason why we need to set an agenda for critical study of folklore and mining of the same for digital content for the media. I wish to interact with critical discourses that shift meaning from the familiar to the unfamiliar. It would be interesting to subject political utterances as folklore to scrutiny as we move towards the election date.

We have to engage political discourses to understand perspectives of power, ideology and history that emerge. If folklore is a kind of discourse, which is an instrument of power, control, and ideology as well as an instrument of social construction of reality, then critics should endeavour to engage it in order to determine its nature and purpose.

We have to examine how meaning is constructed through folklore and how relations of power in our society affects and shape the way we communicate with each other as a nation of nations.