Table Of Content

African Folklore Board of Editorial Consultants Dan Ben-Amos University of Pennsylvania † Daniel Crowley † Gerald Davis Ruth Finnegan The Open University (UK) Rachel Fretz University of California, Los Angeles Micheline Galley Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France) Veronika Görög-Karady Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France) Lee Haring Brooklyn College of the City University of New York (Emeritus) Harold Schueb University of Wisconsin Ruth Stone Indiana University African Folklore An Encyclopedia Philip M.Peek and Kwesi Yankah, Editors Routledge New York London Editorial Staff Development Editor: Kristen Holt Production Editor: Jeanne Shu Editorial Assistant: Mary Funchion Published in 2004 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001–2299 http://www.routledge-ny.com/ Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE http://www.routledge.co.uk/ Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Books, Inc. This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.” Copyright © 2004 by Philip M.Peek and Kwesi Yankah. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data African folklore: an encyclopedia/Philip M.Peek and Kwesi Yankah, editors. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-93933-X (HB: alk.paper) 1. Folklore— Africa—Encyclopedias. 2. Africa—Social life and customs—Encyclopedias. I. Peek, Philip M. II. Yankah, Kwesi. GR350.A33 2003 398’.096’03—dc21 2003007200 ISBN 0-203-49314-1 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-57605-5 (Adobe e-Reader Format) ISBN 0-415-93933-X (Print Edition) To Our Teachers: William Bascom, Richard Bauman, Alan Dundes, Henry Glassie, John McDowell, Alan Merriam, John C.Messenger, and Roy Sieber TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction viii List of Contributors xix List of Entries xxxiii Maps xliii 1 Entries A to Z Appendix : African Studies Centers and Libraries in the USA and Africa 1066 Appendix : Field and Broadcast Sound Recording Collections at the Indiana 1068 University Archives of Traditional Music (ATM) Appendix : Filmography 1091 Appendix : Sample of Earlier Dissertations and Theses on African Folklore At 1101 U.S. Institutions Index 1104 INTRODUCTION The Continent of Africa Most Africanists, and most Africans, consider the continent of Africa and its peoples as a whole and comprehensive entity. There are thousands of different ethnic groups living on this extraordinarily diverse continent, many of which have been affected by the same issues and have thus developed overlapping cultural practices. A consideration of sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa together does not necessarily ignore their individual traits. Rather, such a scholarly treatment simply acknowledges geographical and historical realities. North Africa has long been part of Saharan and sub- Saharan Africa. Commerce and conflict marked ancient Egypt’s relations with peoples to the south for centuries. Since the seventh century, scholars, traders, and administrators have disseminated the Arabic language and the Islamic religion across North Africa and the Sahara and down the East African coast. Today, the Organization of African Unity (OAU) recognizes the common concerns shared by African nations. To non-Africans, the continent can appear impenetrable. Yet for those living on the continent, movement across regions has always been relatively easy. Many peoples have maintained close contact for centuries; consequently, most Africans are multilingual. Coastal, trans-Saharan, and interior trade and travel have ensured that African peoples share and exchange not only language but material goods, intellectual concepts, and cultural traditions. Earlier studies of African peoples exaggerated both their similarities and their differences. Current scholarship does not presume a cohesive, unproblematic “Africanaity,” but it does recognize that African cultures share significant historical and cultural experiences. One can accept a degree of commonality while acknowledging the existence of internal differences. Earlier scholarship made too many broad generalizations about African cultures, but that does not mean that the existence of shared transnational or transethnic traits should be ignored today. Another aspect of this issue is that, periodically, one must submit specific cultures to comparison. One can never know what is or is not unique, or even meaningful, in cultural studies if one never compares among cultures. For example, research has confirmed that many African peoples tell dilemma tales (stories that end with questions, not answers). But the question remains, why are there more dilemma tales told in Africa than anywhere else in the world? The Study of African Folklore For these reasons, we welcome the opportunity to present material that spans the whole African continent and hundreds of cultures in a single volume, thereby emphasizing both the singularities and commonalities of African folklore traditions. The discipline of folklore has been shadowed for too many years by debates over terminology and the scope of the field. Initially, in Europe, the term folklore referred literally to the “lore” of the “folk,” that is, the illiterate members of a literate society; for some, that definition still holds. Folklore studies were essential to the European nationalist movements of the nineteenth century. Folklore scholarship, although perhaps not specifically named as such, is present in the earliest developmental stages of anthropology in Europe and the United States; even the earliest psychoanalytic research of Freud and Jung relied heavily on the study of folktales and other forms of folklore. The scope of folklore study has continued to expand in the United States. In the nineteenth century, European-based scholarship developed the discipline, but since the middle of the twentieth century, research based in the United States has continued to expand the boundaries of folklore study. The editors’ concept of folklore scholarship in Africa is broad, in keeping with current thought in the United States, and this expansive position is reflected by African Folklore: An Encyclopedia. The relevance and impact of contexts such the electronic media, urban settings, and contemporary life in general are considered repeatedly in the entries. The question of who exactly constitute the “folk” is no longer of concern to contemporary folklorists. Although it may be simplistic to respond that “we are all folk,” most scholars do, essentially, assume that position. Nevertheless, folklore study’s traditionally narrow scope when applied to a European context needs some clarification and contextualization when applied to an African setting. Most folklorists presumably consider their position as less comprehensive than the classic anthropologists’ study of “whole” cultures (which even they shy away from today); they focus instead on subgroups within a cultural whole, or, as is perhaps more apt today, on groups within the larger nation state. The traditional focus on rural peoples has given way to an acknowledgement of the necessity of studying folklore in urban contexts as well. Tradition generally signified an uncritical adherence to ancient cultural ways and tended to be considered in opposition to “contemporary” or “modern” practices. Current scholarship appreciates that all human groups are guided by traditions that may have ancient or recent origins. Equally, tradition in contemporary Africa need no longer depend exclusively on oral transmission but may be carried by any and all media, as demonstrated in papers compiled from the 1998 conference on African oral literature, held in South Africa. The conference focused on oral literature within contemporary African contexts (Kaschula 2001). It is generally recognized today that any accepted pattern of behavior, way of speaking, or complex of ideas that shape action can be called a “tradition,” regardless of the length of time it has been in existence. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the “lore” of folklore generally referred to folktales. What little folklore scholarship there was in Africa was largely