Graham Furniss

African Languages, Development and the State

This shows that multilingusim does not pose for Africans the problems of communication that Europeans imagine and that the mismatch between policy statements and their pragmatic outcomes is a far more serious problem for future development

Video and the Hausa Novella in Nigeria

An explosion of Hausa popular fiction writing in Nigeria, from about 1987 onwards, was mirrored in an even greater growth in Hausa video film production from the mid-1990s onwards. A range of themes, reflected in the imagery of book covers, has been dominated by issues concerning the roles of women and the relations between men and women in this predominantly Islamic society, leading to a continuing debate both about Hausa society and about the morality and value of such forms of cultural production. The paper traces the ideological transformation of the stereotypical identities of bora and mowa, the unfavoured and favoured wife, as they move from genre to genre—from tale to play to novella to video film.

On Engendering Liberal Values in the Nigerian Colonial State: The Idea behind the Gaskiya Corporation

This article considers an experiment in colonial race relations in Northern Nigeria of the 1940s, manifest in the creation of a book and newspaper production community, the Gaskiya Corporation in Zaria in 1945. The discussion traces the liberal ideas behind it, the putting of those ideas into practice, and the consequential difficulties encountered by the two main protagonists (Rupert East and Abubakar Imam) in the project as they found themselves on opposite sides of labour relations disputes. A central figure in the establishment of the Gaskiya Corporation, Rupert East, is finally deposed as its Chairman and leaves the colonial service when his view of the primacy of educational and cultural development is overtaken by the view that commercial viability is the first aim of the Corporation. Nevertheless, throughout the remainder of the twentieth century, the Corporation and its successor organisations lay at the heart of the development of Hausa literature and the spread of literacy in Nigeria.

Insertion into the Social — Constituting Audiences, Audience Cultures and Moving from the Private to the Public

‘My words have been taken out of context!’ the politician cries, indignation on his brow and pain in his voice. Usually, of course, he means that, if you were aware of the words that came before or came after the quoted section, you would realize that he was not wholeheartedly endorsing euthanasia, or beef on the bone, or incarceration of minors, etc. The ability of tape-recorders and note-takers to freeze and repeat the spoken word means indeed that pieces can be extracted and in that sense ‘taken out of context’. The unrecorded speech act is always in a context and therefore surrounded by a time, a place, an event and an audience. No sooner is the unrecorded speech act articulated than it is embedded in a history, a real social and communicative context from which it cannot be extracted. It can be remembered and it can be reconstructed by those who were there using the fiction that the reconstruction matches the original, but it can never be reconstituted in its original context. A reified object like a printed text may have constant referential potential and observable presence, but lives only in its current reading as has often been commented upon. The recorded speech act, like the printed text, has all the potential to evoke feelings, reactions, meaning, as had the original performance/reading.

Concluding: On the Centrality of the Evanescent

The issue of analysing and understanding the dynamics and significance of the oral communicative moment is not a new one. The previous chapter has outlined some of the approaches that have been taken in a number of fields of academic investigation. In 1895 one of the founding fathers of sociology and social anthropology, Emile Durkheim, pointed to the significance of a whole range of phenomena (which he was seeking to establist as ‘social facts’) that required their own method of investigation and an acknowledgement of their own disciplinary demands, some of which lay outside the ‘crystallized form’ of established beliefs and practices that were visible in ‘legal and moral regulations, religious faiths, financial systems’. These were no less social facts for Durkheim even though they were more fluid ‘social currents’ rather than social institutions. While his focus was upon establishing ‘rules of sociological method’ at the birth of the modern discipline of sociology, his description of ‘social facts’ that fall outside of the framework of social institutions chimes closely with the concerns that this book has pursued: Since the examples we have just cited (legal and moral regulations, religious faiths, financial systems, etc.) all consist of established beliefs and practices, one might be led to believe that social facts exist only where there is some social organization.

Academic Approaches to Orality

The Great Divide has been viewed as a set of characteristics that, in generalizing about societies, distinguishes between ‘oral societies’ and ‘literate societies’. While acknowledging the very broad-brush nature of such a typology, proponents have seen a grouping of repeated characteristics around these two poles, and have generally concentrated their attention upon the significant changes and ‘advances’ that are made with the introduction of literacy. Along with the polar typology go a wide variety of seemingly natural correlates. Not only are ‘oral societies’ small-scale, community-based, face-to-face societies, but they are, according to Ong, typified by particular ways of thinking — ‘aggregative’ rather than ‘analytical’ thought processes, situational rather than abstract thinking, ‘empathetic’ rather than ‘objective’ relations between thinker and object thought about, and many others (Ong 1982: 36–57). The notion that societies move from such characteristic ways of thinking to another more advanced mode is summed up by Ong as follows: It will be seen that most of the characteristics of orally based thought and expression discussed earlier in this chapter relate intimately to the unifying, centralizing, interiorizing economy of soud as perceived by human being. A sound-dominated verbal economy is consonant with aggregative (harmonizing) tendencies rather than with analytic, dissecting tendencies (which would come with the inscribed, visualized word: vision is a dissecting sense).

Cultural Parameters of Speech: Genre, Form, Aesthetics

In the newsroom of the Hausa language service of the BBC World Service, a service that has been broadcasting for over fifty years, there has long been a replaying of old debates that reflect an underlying tension between two broadly opposed attitudes to language and to culture. There are those whose first reaction, faced with the difficulties of translating a new concept into Hausa, is to search within the resources of the Hausa language for an image, a parallel, an association, that can be drafted in to serve as the new term for ‘genetic modification’ or ‘quasar’ or any of the other terms and associated ideas that pass through newsrooms all over the world. Combined with an explanation, the familiar Hausa word is given a new extension, a new set of connotations, to become the new standard term through repetition and the ripple effect of being taken up and used by others in similarly influential positions, in the Hausa language media in Nigeria and abroad — so dan sama jannati, ‘the name for a particular type of religious zealot who wears a gown the sleeves of which were believed to act as wings that will transport the person to heaven on the Day of Judgement’, is pressed into service to become the commonly used and standard term for ‘astronaut’. These processes go on all the time, all over the world in many different languages.

The Oral Communicative Moment

In the flow of daily life, each one of us lives in an ever-changing chain of experience in which thought, memory and perception interact with our immediate environment of other people and material conditions. Beyond the physical environment of our lives there lies the world of ‘social’ reality — people who have defined roles in relation to our freedom of action: parents, teachers, policemen, judges, tax collectors … In all of these relationships, it is the nature of the interchanges between them and us that give reality to the social roles they play and the imagined structure that lies behind them — behind the policeman lies the idea of the laws and regulations that we must not break or we will be punished. The manifestation of these constructs is in the concrete utterances and behaviour of these categories of individuals; it is when the teacher says, ‘Open your books’ that you are inclined both to do what you are told and to understand something of the institution they represent. The flow of daily life is the succession of such moments of experiential interactions, manifested in words. In contrast with the words lying at rest and undiscovered between the covers of the book, or the relative permanence and immutability of objects, the spoken words in which we swim are always gone as soon as they arrive. The linearity of speech in time obviates the possibility of the constant gaze; while we can contemplate the crystal bowl from above or below, from front or back, the spoken word cannot be viewed from another perspective — it may be repeatable (play it again, Sam!), but in contrast to the written words on the page you cannot read them backwards or upwards; the paradigm can be ‘read’ upwards or downwards on the page, but the living syntagm of the flow of speech cannot be stilled, as no one can still the flow of the river from standing within it.

Ideology and Orality

By what means, then, do ongoing power structures themselves influence their own legitimacy, or condition their own processes of legitimation? Two quite different accounts of this can be given. The first account concentrates on the activity of the powerful in influencing the belief of the subordinate, through their preferential access to the means of cultural development and the dissemination of ideas within society. In other words, among the power any dominant group possesses will be the ability to influence the beliefs of others; and among the most important of such beliefs will be those that relate to the justification of their own power. The origin of such beliefs may be found in the first instance in the need of the powerful for self-justification; but their privileged access to the means of culture and ideological dissemination ensures that their ideas become widespread throughout society, whether as the result of conscious policy or not … The above account is of course the familiar Marxist theory of ideology, which Marxists employ in the context of class relations. (Beetham 1991: 104) The discussion of relations between social classes has, for Marxists at least, led to extensive theorizing of the notion that the ideas and beliefs that underpin the political and economic interests of the ruling class are transmitted to and adopted by subordinate classes, in many societies and at many times.

Power, marginality and African oral literature: List of contributors

1. Introduction: power, marginality and oral literature Graham Furniss and Liz Gunner Part I. Orality and the Power of the State: 2. Oral art and contemporary cultural nationalism Penina Mlama 3. The letter and the law: the politics of orality and literacy in the chiefdoms of the northern Transvaal Isabel Hofmeyr 4. A king is not above insult: the politics of good governance in Nzema avudwene festival songs Kofi Agovi Part II. Representing Power Relations: 5. Igbo enwe eze: monarchical power versus democratic values in Igbo oral narratives Chukwuma Azuonye 6. Tales and ideology: the revolt of sons in Bambara-Malinke tales Veronika Gorog-Karady 7. Images of the powerful in Lyela folktales Sabine Steinbrich Part III. Oral Forms and the Dynamics of Power: 8. Power, marginality and Somali oral poetry: case studies in the dynamics of tradition John William Johnson 9. The function of oral art for the regulation of social power in Dyula society Jean Derive 10. The power of words and the relation between Hausa genres Graham Furniss Part IV. Endorsing or Subverting the Paradigms: Women and Oral Forms: 11. Sexuality and socialisation in Shona praises and lyrics Herbert Chimhundu 12. Nontsizi Mgqwetho: stranger in town Jeff Opland 13. Clashes of interest: gender, status and power in Zulu praise poetry Liz Gunner 14. Jelimusow: the superwoman of Malian music Lucy Duran Part V. Mediators and Communicative Strategies: 15. Power and the circuit of formal talk Kwesi Yankah 16. Praise splits the subject of speech: constructions of kingship in the Manden and Borgu Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias 17. Beyond the communal warmth: the poet as loner in Ewe oral tradition Kofi Anyidoho.