This book of twelve chapters, which is divided into four parts, is a synthesis of fifty years of Finnegan’s scholarly work on the verbal arts in Africa. The author draws attention to enduring issues in African oral literature, performance, and action (spectacle). She explores how humans, not just in Africa but across the globe, use words to talk of their environments and situations, and also to link their past and present, a linkage that shows the interrelatedness of peoples in time and space. Africa in the 1960s was of curious anthropological interest to the European researcher, who brought home novel “discoveries” about the quaint practices of African tribes. Finnegan observes a change in the academic landscape within this focus of African studies, one that has seen the shifting of interest from art for art’s sake to verbal art as performance (language-as-action) and recently to an interest in orality studies. Researchers come from all parts of the globe now, giving rise to multiple perspectives on ethnographic research.

In the first part of the work, the question the author sets out to answer is whether preliterate societies can reflect on language and speech in the same way as literate ones do. Finnegan observed that in Sierra Leone the outsider who spoke Limba was identified with being Limba, a process William Labov (1963) and others call speech accommodation, where people try to blend their ways of speaking and narrow their linguistic differences. Early in this part we get hints of “other-ness,” where English and other dialects of Limba are ridiculed. Language (speech) is literature and involves action which brings social order. We are given examples from many other African cultures, which are matched against the European literatures. Are these oral African examples “literature” in the same way as written ones? Misconceptions of the “primitive” other have spawned discrimination and segregation. Yet, more recently, those Western scholars who considered the “exotic” African culture primitive now look at the “lost world” with romantic eyes, as the form that gave people a sense of community vis-à-vis the “secular artificialities and individualities of modern urban life.” Finnegan shows how the Limba do things with words by drawing from many examples of greetings, pledges, declarations, pleas, and folktales. The performative function of language is discussed much in the same way as did John Austin (1962), showing that when formal words are used in the appropriate context, they present or call to mind a form of action.

In the second section of the book the question of orality, oral composition, and what constitutes “literature” is raised. Which is more prestigious, the evanescent, unwritten verbal “text” or its written version? Written literature may have an independent and tangible existence, but it is the live, oral version that has the enviable aspect of being performed, the event giving the performance its shape and texture. Ongoing improvisation, clarifications, and challenges from the audience enrich the oral performance. Finnegan ends the section by affirming that oral African forms are as much literature as their written counterparts. Where the oral-formulaic scholars Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord see a mutual exclusivity between written and oral art and argue that the rapid spread of the former spells the doom of the latter, Finnegan asserts that the two techniques overlap in Africa. Oral art can be composed prior to its moment of performance, just as written literature can be read out loud. Each oral performance is unique. Stock formulae and rote memorization are not indispensible in oral composition. While we cannot have universal definitions of what oral narrative poetry is, we can say the “oral” is produced by each artist who uses specific formulae to aid delivery and creation of an “oral text,” upon which subsequent written texts will be based.

Part three of the work asks if the oral text the scholar transcribes accurately represents the performance event. How accurately do the entextualized words carry the local idiom, especially as they are translated from other languages, and how have the scholars manipulated these to suit their own academic interests?

If the use of language as a semiotic tool actually sets humans apart from animals, placing too much premium on one aspect, the written form, gives a very narrow perspective on the whole human cultural experience. Renderings of oral literature range from the single line of writing through contemporary multi-media forms of enactment. This is what the final part of the book brings out.

There is no one better placed to engage in this discourse on Africa than Ruth Finnegan, as she has had over half a century’s engagement with Africa. She has presented a story from both “insider” and “outsider” positions, for she is indeed an “inside-outsider.” The objectivity with which she attacks issues in this work makes it an invaluable resource for linguists, anthropologists, students of comparative literature, and all students of culture. I would have wanted to see her give more credit to the oral-formulaic scholars, because there is a formula at the core of the song of each performer’s song of a “long tale,” and it is their taking this for granted that leads them into thinking their songs are the exact same ones their mentors handed down to them. As does the Limba folktale, The Oral and Beyond actively formulates and comments on the world. The oral is as much literature as the written, and their boundaries are so blurred now that we are led to realize more commonalities than we once imagined. This work is the sequel that Finnegan (1970) has asked for.

Works Cited

Austin, John L. How to do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962.

Finnegan, Ruth. Oral Literature in Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970.

Labov, William. “Social Motivation of a Sound Change.” Word 19 (1963): 273-307.

--------

[Review length: 963 words • Review posted on March 26, 2008]