African Myths of Origin (Penguin Classics) Read online

  READING THE MYTHS

  How, then, should we read the myths? Answering this question leads first to a general discussion of the transmission process behind oral tradition – for Africa is the continent of oral tradition – and next to some specific observations about the texts (and see also Note on the Text).

  A romantic (and discredited) view of mythology portrays the lore embedded in the narratives as the hallowed remnants of a far greater knowledge born in a bygone golden age, and handed down through the years as a dwindling heritage of that past. The logic is that of the myth of the golden age: at the time of creation, people were closer to their divinities and endowed with greater knowledge, and over time that knowledge has been lost. Despite our new appreciation of the history of the human species and its ascent into civilization, this view still has an appeal for many.

  Study of the transmission of information in non-literate cultures does not support this vision of mythology. It is not that people do not respect their pasts. All peoples have strong feelings towards their ancestors, who shaped the world in which we now live. But in traditional societies, the effort involved in preserving the past must be balanced against the cost and the effort involved, and against its practical value. In the industrialized world, these costs take the form of libraries, archives, museums and other forms of information storage. They are relatively invisible. In non-literate economies, the costs are far more directly perceived: someone must make the effort to acquire, retain and transmit the information. Such work rarely contributes directly to the production of foodstuffs, and so, especially in times of famine, it is of secondary importance. Furthermore, the information is reconfigured with every new generation that learns it. Except in very rare cases (such as the Hindu Vedas), information in non-literate cultures is not preserved verbatim; it is reformulated and combined with new elements as they arise. Every teller changes the version he or she will pass on, preserving some details, altering some, and occasionally adding elements. The listeners of each new generation will understand and retain some parts better than others, and they in turn will adjust their own tellings.

  What is transmitted, then, is what is relevant to the present of the tellers. Working with Trobriand islanders in the south Pacific, Bronislaw Malinowski termed this the ‘chartering’ function of mythology: traditions of the past are maintained to explain and justify the institutions of the present, and so they are a reflection of the present, rather than an image of the past (see his essays in Magic, Science and Religion (1954)). As conditions and institutions change, so do the traditions that explain them. This does not mean that material cannot be old, or that it cannot be accurately preserved. But it does mean that one must keep in mind the present function of traditions, and balance present interest against the probable evidence of the past.

  These interpretations focus upon transmission as a passive process. There is also a creative aspect to the process of oral transmission and mythology: these stories are the ways in which the tellers hold their societies up for examination. They are a form of self-image, grounded in the ‘present’ of the societies that produced them, and they serve to identify the features which the society considers the most significant or problematic or informative about themselves. The traditions are thus a dialogue of the present with the past, in which the present seeks to find its roots in what is remembered, or invented, of the past. This interaction has a dynamic quality which is not so visible in literate traditions: Christians and Muslims, for instance, may believe that their past and their dogmas are fixed through the medium of their writings. For them, the dialogue occurs on the level of interpretation, as in debates on the truth of the Book of Genesis, the ongoing quest for Noah’s Ark, and regional explanations of social practices such as polygamy. In oral tradition, the stories respond immediately to the issues that need to be addressed, and can serve as the basis for a group discussion.

  Traditions change in the face of new cultural needs and new information. They define their legitimacy in new ways. In almost all the old kingdoms of the Sahel, noble families now claim a tradition of origin linking them with the Islamic world. In some cases, the tellers seem simply to have realigned an older story: arts and skills that once were brought down from heaven (down a vertical axis) are now brought from Mecca (across a horizontal axis), and figures such as the Prophet Muhammad become a source of blessings and laws comparable to the former sky-gods and demiurges. In other cases, families have adopted narratives: many groups tell a story comparable to that of Jacob and Esau, in which a younger brother by a trick obtains the inheritance due to the elder. The purpose of the story seems to be to confuse questions of primogeniture, or to acknowledge a certain weakness in the root legitimacy of a given lineage. Responding perhaps to intellectual movements such as the Afro-centrism of the Senegalese Cheikh Anta Diop and his followers, tales of an Egyptian origin have gained prominence in the latest interpretations of these traditions. John Thornton informs me that BaKongo traditions, for instance, may now include a claim to Egyptian origin, although this innovation is not reflected in the stories given in this book.

  Christian missionaries (especially in the colonial period) had little trouble discerning echoes of their holy Scriptures in the narratives they heard, or in linking the sky-gods they encountered with the divinity they were promoting. Usually, though, they failed to acknowledge the role of Islam in disseminating stories from the biblical tradition. It is not widely recognized to what extent the Muslim narratives of sacred history are the same as the Judaeo-Christian stories, adopted from that source as part of the Muslim vision of a grand tradition of prophecy and cumulative revelation. There are occasional embellishments: in the Muslim tradition, for instance, Joseph marries Potiphar’s wife, who has remained a virgin, after the death of her husband. Whether the stories are derived from Christianity or from Islam, however, the point should be made that they were adopted to serve a local purpose. Choice was exercised in the selection of the narratives, and in their adaptation. The process should not be seen as passive.

  It is this dynamic and self-reflexive quality that makes myths such potent artefacts within their cultures, and that makes them such valuable keys for the observer from outside the culture. Through myths, people explore what it is to be human in their particular way, and both the implicit questions and the answers supplied in the stories have an appeal and an interest for all of us.

  THE NARRATORS

  As noted above, these stories are not to be considered as artistic creations, especially when retold in English. The reader must also remember that this collection is based on published and written sources, and so exists at some distance from the original narrations made to the men and women who have reported them for us. In many cases, we do not know who the informant was. For accounts before 1900, we depend largely on travellers and other such outsiders: priests visiting the kingdom of Kongo in the seventeenth century, traders on the Gold Coast in the eighteenth, and very often missionaries. There are some local African documents from the past, often written in Arabic – the Tarikh es-Sudan, written in Timbuktu in the seventeenth century, and many documents collected in northern Nigeria about the history of the region around Lake Chad (not counting, of course, the Egyptian and Ethiopian materials, which go back even further). From 1900 on, we have a growing number of accounts produced by African members of the groups, intended to preserve their history and to disseminate knowledge of their people: Sir Apolo Kaggwa, writing about Buganda, the Revd Samuel Johnson, writing about the Yoruba, Jacob Egharevba, writing about the city of Benin, and many others. In some cases, these might count as ‘official’ histories: Sultan Njoya of Bamun oversaw the collection of traditions of his country, and Mwata Kazembe XIV of the Lunda authorized his collection as well. From more recent times, we have a growing collection of texts, recorded in the field and published in translation or in bilingual form. Many of these texts are by specialized and highly skilled performers, and accurate transcriptions allow us to appreciate their
artistry. In this collection, one of the narratives about Rwanda and several of the Mande stories were recorded from such performers, although it must be noted that the versions in the book are retellings, and not a reflection of the original presentation. But the resources are there for anyone who wishes to pursue this dimension of the narrative tradition. A student of the epic of Sunjata now has some forty transcriptions to consult, collected in the last hundred years, and the number increases each year.

  GOALS OF THE COLLECTION

  This book is intended to provide the general reader an accessible collection of myths or traditions of origin for a variety of the major peoples and historical states of the continent. The collection is representative, not comprehensive: a full collection would run to many volumes, for the two thousand and more groups upon the continent (and each of them offers variants in space and time). As much as possible, it looks to a conceptual period before the European conquest of Africa at the end of the nineteenth century, before the establishment of current national boundaries. The versions of the stories presented are generally the oldest versions available. When it has proved possible, versions from different time periods are given to illustrate how a story may change over time. Many stories have changed since they were first written down – readers might consider the different presentations of the figure of Oduduwa in the Yoruba myths – and some have been lost in the era of modernization. In that respect, the aim of the book is to create an image of the past, as seen from within the continent, as a sort of prelude to the history of colonization, modernization and independence.

  ORGANIZATION

  The organization of the book may require some explanation. It starts with general themes, found across the continent (hunters, cattle-herding, and the figure of the trickster). These stories have little to do with history or politics, and often the groups from whom they have been collected have almost no social structures wider than the family. But the themes in the stories do recur in the more localized and functional narratives, as do the characters. Hunters and tricksters abound in African mythology.

  The core of the book is the series of narratives, beginning with stories from ancient Egypt (which are not to be considered historical, but as the oldest evidence for narrative traditions from Africa). The individual chapters are also gathered into groups, each of which has a short introduction; the goal is to assist the reader in recognizing regional patterns and relationships. Each chapter has a short introduction describing the people involved, and some of the stories in turn have their own introductory note. Information on sources and suggestions for further reading are found at the end of the book.

  After the chapters on general themes, the narratives start with Egypt and Ethiopia because they are the oldest available, and then proceed, on a principle of contiguity, south along the eastern part of the continent, and then north along the Atlantic coast. In west Africa, there are some jumps because the concentration of peoples is so great that a linear progression became impossible. Instead, after treating peoples of the coastal areas (the Igbo, the Yoruba, the Akan-language groups such as the Ashanti and Baoule), the line moves back to the region of Lake Chad, so as to consider the various kingdoms and states of the Sudan (or Sahel) in an east–west progression. ‘Sudan’ in this context refers not to the modern nation of Sudan, but is an Arabic term: b’lad es-Sudan means ‘the land of the blacks’. Historians use the term to denote the regions known to, and described in, medieval Arabic historical writings; the central Sudan was the region around Lake Chad (the kingdoms of Kanem and Bornu, the Hausa states of northern Nigeria), and the western Sudan means largely the territory along the Niger river (the empires of Mali and Songhay). Another term used for the region is the Sahel, from the Arabic word for ‘shore’, through which the Sahara becomes a metaphoric sea separating the peoples north and south. The sequence ends in the Sahara, with Tuareg groups.

  HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

  Historical background for the specific regions and peoples is given in the part and chapter introductions; the basic themes are migration and the spread of languages. It may be useful here to provide a quick overview, and to point to some specific regions of greater complexity.

  The history of the peoples of Africa can be inferred, to some extent, from the map of language distribution: it is the story of the expansion of the Niger–Congo family of languages from their homeland, lying to the east of the lower Niger river in what is now Nigeria and Cameroon. The speakers of the languages had developed various crops and had some knowledge of iron-working. One set of groups moved east and south from this homeland, and developed into the Bantu language family. Moving east through the savannahs, north of the great equatorial forest areas, some of the peoples reached the area around the great lakes of east Africa: this region is where all four of the language families of Africa met and traded cultures. The cluster of kingdoms found to the south of that region (Bunyoro, Buganda, Rwanda and others) offer some of the densest layers of mythological traditions to be found on the continent. The Bantu-speakers then turned south, through the fertile lands of the lake system, having acquired cattle. At the same time, other speakers of related languages were moving south-east from the common homeland, through the forests of central Africa; the two groups together, with all their descendants, are now known as the Bantu language speakers, and dominate all the southern third of the continent. Resident groups – largely hunters and gatherers – were assimilated or pushed out into marginal lands. The savannah region south of the forest became home to a number of related kingdoms – Angola, Kongo, Kuba, Luba and Lunda – whose interactions cut across the continent.

  For western Africa, the pattern of migration is not so simple in terms of language, but must be read against the longer geological history of the region. Ten to fifteen thousand years ago, the Sahara was not a desert; it was a well-watered savannah across which many groups spread. As the climate changed, groups moved south, some moving into the forest as hunters, others clustering in the open lands where rainfall and river-flooding allowed agriculture. This region of open lands became the home of great kingdoms, which are known to us through their trade with the Mediterranean: Ghana, Mali, Kanem, Bornu and later Songhay. The lower Niger also witnessed a growth in population, but differing patterns of state formation: among the Yoruba to the west of the river, city-states with divine kings were the rule, while among the Igbo groups to the east there were very few chiefs and little central authority.

  The other language groups, the Khoi-San to the south and the Nilo-Saharan in the north, essentially found themselves surrounded by the expansion of the peoples of the Niger–Congo family, and their languages now exist as isolated members of a once far greater family. The fourth group, the Afro-Asiatic, is found on the edges of the continent north or east of the Sahara.

  While it tells us something of the movement of the peoples, language alone does not explain the spread of populations. For that we must look at the history of food-production and to aspects of technology such as iron-working. Africans have domesticated or adapted different crops in different regions: millets in the savannahs, rice in wetlands, yams and tubers in tropical zones, bananas (brought from the Indies) in east Africa. Iron made the practice of agriculture possible, allowing farmers to work the heavy soils. Agriculture in Africa has almost always been dependent on human effort; diseases such as the sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis) have prevented the use of draught animals such as oxen or horses. The pattern of migration, particularly in the more recently settled southern half of the continent, has been one of the slow movement of peoples into new territories as their old fields became exhausted, or as their population grew high enough to limit resources.

  As well as the internal history of migration, we must also acknowledge external factors, operating from the east and the west. From the east (symbolically speaking) came Islam, beginning in the seventh century AD, and Islam was also the vehicle of trade. For west and central Africa, it was a trans-Saharan trade made possible by
the introduction of the camel in the first centuries AD; in east Africa it was a maritime trade carried by the seasonal monsoon winds. The trading world of eastern Africa included the entire basin of the Indian ocean. The island of Madagascar, off the southern coast of Africa, was colonized from Indonesia around 1,500 years ago; the Chinese were exploring until the thirteenth century. The principal commodities of trade varied by region: in west Africa, gold; in central Africa, slaves; and in eastern Africa, ivory and slaves, followed also by spices. The coasts of east Africa are marked by a fusion of the worlds of Islam and of Bantu Africa. North Africa became largely Arabic-speaking; the original inhabitants were pushed into the desert and demoted in status. The Sahel, the borderlands at the southern edge of the Sahara from Senegal in the west all the way to the Nile, for a long time served as the interface of sub-Saharan Africa with the rest of the world. Contacts through trade were supplemented by contacts through religion: at least two rulers of west African states made the pilgrimage to Mecca, a duty of Muslims, and uncounted believers of lower status followed them.

  This relationship began to change in the fifteenth century, when the Portuguese began to explore the coasts of Africa and to establish new trade routes. The new trade became very unbalanced and largely destructive, for what Africa had to offer that the new traders wanted, besides gold, was slaves: human labour to assist in conquering the new worlds that had also just been opened. The effects of the Atlantic slave-trade which developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were disastrous; states formed to engage in warfare to capture slaves to buy weapons to make war… The resulting turbulence ended only with the European conquest of Africa at the end of the nineteenth century and the imposition of colonial rule. The colonial period (1890–1960 for most of the continent) brought forcible changes and modernization to the peoples of Africa. Most of the continent remains impoverished and underdeveloped in relation to the rest of the world. Independence has not, so far, fulfilled the hopes which its prospect had inspired, and in the last two decades the scourge of HIV/AIDS has threatened to undo much of what progress had been made. The picture of Africa presented in western media is bleak.