Africa owes its existence to lack of the written word

The American publicly funded National Public Radio (NPR) has an interesting blog called Goats and Soda.

After the release of the now-sensationally successful Afrofuturist film Black Panther, Goats and Soda republished an old article arguing that Wakanda, home of Black Panther, may not be so mythical, after all.

The actor Chadwick Boseman, who plays Black Panther, is quoted to have told The New York Times that Wakanda is a fictional version of “the Mutapa empire of 15th-century Zimbabwe.”

Stretching from modern-day South Africa into Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Zambia, the kingdom of Mutapa thrived from the early 1400s to about 1760, it noted.

Enter Prof Angelo Nicolaides of the University of South Africa.

Like so many other kingdoms that believed in the divine right of kings, “the Mutapan people believed that their leaders were placed in positions of authority by the creator,” says Nicolaides. “The oral tradition tells us that they were involved in ancestral worship to a large extent, and the people believed that the kings had a very good relationship with the spirit world.”

The Black Panther story will be around with us for a while, as the film leads people to explore the black experience more broadly and in new ways. In this case, I was struck by the invocation of “oral tradition,” that most African of things, as history source.

In the Wakandan spirit of re-imagining our world, it is worthwhile revisiting oral tradition and its place in African life.

Some modernists have viewed oral tradition as a limitation: It’s one of the reasons Africa’s critics say we don’t read enough; why we are suspected of not being consistently scientific; and thus why many are still prone to superstition.

One problem with the above scenario is that, again as the Black Panther movie makes the point, many African societies had alphabets. The decision not to record was therefore not a lack of the means to do so for all Africa’s old societies. Apart from how slave trade, and later colonialism, killed all but a few African alphabets like the Amharic (Ge’ez) script, oral history must have been a strategic choice.

Oral history probably lowered the barrier to learning, because it was several times easier to gather children around a fire or under a tree in a village, than to get them to read a tablet or scribbling on a papyrus sheet.

Oral history, however, was — and remains — profoundly democratic. It removed hierarchy in teaching, and created a large pool of those who could carry forward stories.

But it must also have been profoundly subversive, and a genius way of cross-cultural fertilisation.

It was a tough time when, as part of war booty, victorious armies would take women from vanquished enemies. A period when, if your sister was married in far off lands, perhaps you never saw her again.

If they could only carry their history in books or stones, they wouldn’t have. These can be burnt, seized, or forbidden. But they did carry their oral epic histories, proverbs, folktales, and songs. You cannot take all those away even from slaves.

For that reason, oral tradition hasn’t been our bane. Without it, Africa as we know it today wouldn’t exist. Perhaps we are, precisely because we had great oral traditions — not only the written word.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is publisher of data visualiser Africapaedia and Rogue Chiefs. Twitter@cobbo3