The scramble for African orature: The transcription, compilation, and marketing of African oral narratives in the Oxford Library of African Literature, 1964 to 1979

Abstract

This article examines the dynamic between orature and written literatures, a paradigm which, in colonial literary contexts, has been articulated through problematic dichotomies accrediting writing with superior cultural and literary value. Its case study is the Oxford Library of African Literature, edited in the mid-20th century by anthropologists E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Godfrey Lienhardt and W.H. Whiteley, who organized the transcription, translation, and publication of oral narratives from across Africa as hardback books. The first two volumes were commissioned with sponsorship from UNESCO, but few volumes included contributions from academics from Africa – notwithstanding Chinua Achebe’s foreword for the first. By engaging with a rarely scrutinized literary collection, this article suggests that literarity is ultimately a colonialist construct and that orature, within this period, is only valued as gaining cultural capital as literature following its transcription and translation into English by British agents consecrating it into the model of the English book.

Keywords:

• Orature
• African literatures
• Oxford Library of African Literature
• UNESCO cultural heritage
• Chinua Achebe
• postcolonial book history

Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge the kind permission from the Secretary of the Delegates of the Oxford University Press to access the Oxford University Press Archive, Oxford Library of African Literature Files, BLB94/BACKB437 (1960–64) and BLB94/BACKB438 (1962–69) on February 20, 2014, and the helpful assistance of the general archivist, Dr Martin Maw.

The author would also like to thank Elleke Boehmer, Michelle Kelly and Peter D. McDonald for their assistance.

Notes

1. According to Kalliney (2013): “the book sold well, but the publicity and excitement it generated cannot be measured by its sales figures. It was the striking novelty of Tutuola’s work that caught the eye of critics, readers, and rival editors” (146).

2. According to Bourdieu (1996), “the consecration [of a work] will be greater the more consecrated the merchant himself is. He contributes to ‘making’ the value of the author he supports by the sole fact of bringing him or her into a known and renowned existence, so that the author is assured of publication (under his imprint)” (167).

3. Despite this, the series was not particularly lucrative. Although there is limited extant data on its sales figures, according to Sutcliffe (1978), in his history of the press, the OLAL was a “scholarly and unremunerative Clarendon Press series which reflected [an] interest in Africa” (299).

4. Fiawoo’s play, in both Ewe and English versions, had been published earlier as separate works (Fiawoo 1937, 1943).

5. When he won the 2007 Man Booker International Prize, Achebe was valorized by Nadine Gordimer as “the father of modern African literature” (quoted in Burt 2009, 358). Such telling phrasing infers a binary between “modern” and pre-modern, or traditional, forms of African literary production, with Achebe’s institutional consecration as post-oral defining his literary value in and for “the west” (including, for instance, Burt’s own hierarchy of literature, The Literary 100 [Burt 2009], in which Achebe is one of the few “non-European” authors included).