The Performance Art of African Tales and Stories
by The classic African performance context, described by many nineteenth-century observers, is of course the family fireside at night, when an older adult may relate a series of tales, or the different members of the audience may make their own contributions. The audience would extend beyond a nuclear family.
Within a culture defined by oral tradition, however, tales have a place beyond that of fireside narration; they are part of the common heritage of the group, and so they can be used, often elliptically or allusively, in the course of ordinary conversation. In some regions, part of the art of public speaking involves the appropriate and apposite use of tales and proverbs in the course of making an argument.
This point raises the question of generic boundaries, which in Africa are far more fluid than the theory of folklore genre classification might wish. Folktales coexist with innumerable other forms of local narrative, from the individual memorate to collective histories, cult stories, and imported religious materials, and particularly what might be called the “high art” of the African oral tradition: allusive praise poetry and more expansive epic recitations. Epics are not found everywhere on the continent, and they represent a distinctive performance genre that is not identical to Eurasian forms (the use of meter and music, for instance, render them far less “textual” than European literary examples). But epics, in their considerable variety, do employ the standard techniques and building blocks of folktale materials: pattern and repletion and hero-centered plots. There are of course significant differences in tone, reference, and sophistication, but the commonalities deserve recognition.
Motifs migrate very freely among these various genres, especially in the historical material that can be considered the common, secular property of the culture (specific cult myths are more restricted in their distribution). So a story of rivalry between stepbrothers (sons of different co-wives), which is part of the epic of Sunjata in the Mande world (Mali-Guinea), becomes an etiologic tale about social relations among the Kuranko (Guinea-Sierra Leone); and the story of the ring found in the fish’s belly (ATU 736A, The Ring of Polycrates) appears as part of the history of the kingdom of Segou.
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