from Africa Today Volume 46, Number 2

African Folk and the Challenges of a Global Lore

Kwesi Yankah

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While local scholarship like Africa's attempts to move mainstream, international cultures of scholarship appear to have trouble incorporating academy. The Akan have said, "The poor man's proverb is never quoted."

The power dynamics of the global academy are such that Western researchers and institutions control the dissemina-tion of knowledge, often excluding from recognition and val-orization research by African scholars. This article advocates the reworking of existing fora and the creation of new fora that would provide for the inclusion of African scholars in global academic conversations.

My presentation is in two parts: the first part contests the power base of local folklore and the strategic production, dissemination, and consumption of knowledge. Here I look at the study of African folklore in the local and global academies as well as the crisis confronting the indigenous scholar in attempting to globalize local knowledge. The second part, which maintains the juxtaposition of the local and the global, shifts emphasis from a crisis in epistemology to a crisis in the local ethnography of communication, as Africa gropes its way through what has become known as a "global village."

Let me start with challenges confronting the African scholar within the global academy. Student folklorists from Africa, during my time in graduate school in the 1980s, did not hide their frustrations in attempting to justify the status of their data as belonging to the discipline of folklore (as studied in the United States). Often greeted with responses like "there is no legend in Africa," "there is no folklore in Africa," and "folklorists began looking at Africa only recently" (see Dorson 1972:4), Africans coming to study folklore realized a decade or more ago that they could not possibly survive on a journey that was beginning with self-denunciation. Yet such attempts at defining boundaries in more exclusive than inclusive terms are inevitable in the history of academic disciplines striving to achieve autonomy. They are also an index of ideological undercurrents that shape the genesis of disciplines.

Happily, African scholars today breathe some air of relief, finding themselves on a platform of international folklorists. That in itself tells the story of the tremendous progress in accommodation folklore has made over the years. The reality, though, is that in the past thirty years, the study of African folklore has been prosecuted more in America than on any other continent. The single most important landmark is the African folklore conference organized at Indiana in 1970, on the initiative of Richard Dorson, which was the culmination of a series of events that reinforced the visibility of African folklore to U.S. scholars. Before then, a few doctoral dissertations had been written, one of them, "African Folklore with Foreign Analogues", as far back as 1938 (Klipple 1938). The bulk of African folklore dissertations emerged during the 1960s. Since then dissertations have been written on a wide range of topics, such as folktale, myth, dirge, epic, and legend, at universities including Indiana, Berkeley, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania (see Yankah 1985: Appendix).

In the area of publishing, journals that have devoted some of their pages to African folklore include the Journal of Folklore Research (JFR), whose aim since 1964 has been to bring into focus folklore research being vigorously prosecuted by dedicated scholars throughout the world (Dorson 1964:3). With such an international outlook, it is not surprising that JFR has published nearly fifty articles on African folklore over the 34 years it has existed. On the other hand, the Journal of American Folklore (JAF), published by the American Folklore Society and perhaps largely influenced by its foundation objectives, has carried about the same number of articles on Africa in a century. The journal was originally meant for the collection of the "vast vanishing remains of folklore in America, including relics of English lore, of Negroes in the south, and Indian tribes of America" (Newell 1888:3). It is not surprising that until 1958 no major essay on Africa had been published beyond eighteen notes and brief expositions. Other publishing outlets have included Research in African Literatures, which since its founding in 1970 has published 12 special issues on African folklore. Other journals like Folklore Forum (Indiana University) and Ba Shiru (University of Wisconsin) have also been important outlets.

This modest progress in the dissemination of African folklore is in harmony with the intensification of folklore studies on the continent of Africa over the years. Not only is the field of African studies teeming with African folklorists and associates trained in the United States and elsewhere, there are folklore societies and folklore advisory boards made up of trained folklorists and others in related disciplines in countries such as Sudan, Nigeria, and Ghana.

On the African continent, a sustained study of African oral traditions (oral literature) began in the 1960s under the patronage of institutes of African Studies, and later in autonomous departments of linguistics, African languages and literature, and English (Yankah 1985:2-25). Indeed, materials of folklore have been studied more at the interdisciplinary level, than within the narrow confines of folklore as an autonomous discipline. At a national conference held in Ghana in 1988, for example, participants came from a broad range of disciplines, including political science, language, linguistics, literature, ethnomusicology, sociology, and the study of religions. Significantly, the organizers made sure to also include bearers of the oral tradition such as eminent story tellers and other oral artists, who not only performed, but also shared with scholars their own experiences as well as techniques in composition.

The proximity of African scholars to oral traditions enables us to promote greater artist-scholar interaction through fieldwork and through the presentation of oral artists at universities in order to have dialogue with students. I believe that the close interaction between theory and practice is the only way to avert the sorry situation in social science practice, where the heights attained by theory appear to have little to do with grounded realities.

Among the participants at the conference mentioned were, of course, several trained folklorists who are teaching and doing research in cognate departments. Yet a few countries have taken bold initiatives in establishing autonomous folklore departments. In Sudan, there is now a Department of Folklore at the University of Khartoum, which collects and documents traditional genres and artifacts from different parts of Sudan and offers graduate diploma, bachelor's, and master's degree courses in folklore. In most of these departments, trained scholars in African folklore teach courses on various aspects of folklore theory and research. Furthermore, Sudan hosted conferences in folklore in 1968, 1970, and 1981.

In Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, and South Africa not only are folklore courses taught in universities, sometimes under labels such as "oral literature," but some even have folklore societies. There is, for example, a Nigeria Folklore Society, which holds annual conferences, and a similar one in Ghana, which organized a national conference in 1988 and an international conference on folklore/oral literature in Africa in 1996. Indeed, an international conference on African oral literature that was attended by trained folklorists as well as scholars of oral literature has recently ended in Cape Town, South Africa.

In the specific area of proverb studies, African folklorists have benefited from sponsorships to undertake research and publications. The Pew Charitable Trust has funded an interdisciplinary African Proverbs Project as part of an international research effort steered by African and U.S. scholars. The aim is to promote the research, study, and publication of African proverbs. So far it has published (1) bibliographies of African proverb collections and proverb scholars (see Mieder 1994); (2) proceedings of two international conferences on the African proverb; (3) a CD-ROM containing all the above as well as several out-of-print collections; and (4) two books in the African proverbs series (Opoku 1997). Last year, the third in a series of seminars on the African proverb was held in Pretoria, South Africa, where regional centers for proverb studies in Ghana, Kenya, Ivory Coast, and South Africa were officially inaugurated and encouraged to continue the coordination of research and publications on the proverb. Also in the planning is an international conference on the proverb, scheduled to be held at the University of Ghana in November 1999.

One can discern from this brief review the modest but significant strides Africa itself is making in the study and documentation of its folklore, progress largely pioneered by local scholars. Progress in the study and dissemination of African folklore, however, could have been faster but for a few challenges on the home front, where there are problems in the attempt to access locally produced knowledge. From year to year, a number of good folklore theses and dissertations have been produced in local universities, which scholars unfortunately have not considered. Scholars in African folklore perhaps do not consider these as sources to be explored. Exploration of "previous scholarship" on topics often begins and ends with Western sources, a situation that is not alleviated by the fact that these have not been made easily accessible by African universities.

The task of looking for theses and dissertations in Africa may, of course, not be as easy as when one has a Microfilms International, a central pool where all such material, properly cataloged, published, and copyrighted, can be obtained at the touch a button. African universities should be challenged to facilitate the accessing of local knowledge through the dissemination of theses titles and abstracts. This will eliminate reinventing the wheel and will promote truly pioneering work by scholars. The Akan of Ghana have lamented such wasted labor in their proverb, "The poor man's proverb is never quoted," or, as a colleague has added, "The poor man's proverb is quoted but never acknowledged."


The Global Academy

One cannot proudly and loudly proclaim the achievement of African scholars in their attempt to test local scholarship at the bar of the global academy, partly because of Africa's handicapped geopolitical location within the scheme of knowledge production and dissemination. The notion that civilization must come from abroad pervaded Africa at the dawn of independence. The task of the African elite was to help one another to "find a way out of darkest Africa" (Ahuma 1971:11). Africa had to emerge from the savage backwoods and come into the open where nations are made, and where scholars are made. If independence was to be fruitful, so it was said, Africa needed to modernize its structures (Davidson 1992:39).

In spite of the alluring attractions involved in such an enterprise, though, it is also true that any civilizing or globalization agenda in scholarly discourse is bound to contend with uneasy paradoxes. It shifts the power base of knowledge and intellectual production into the hands of civilizing agents, partly due to the hegemonic power of metalanguage possessed by dominant cultures. To date, three languages of high modernity--English, French, and German--remain the hegemonic languages of scholarship and world literature, the languages in which the discourse of universal science and scholarship is produced (Mignolo 1998: 47).

The situation presents an uneasy crisis of sorts between dominant and marginal cultures in knowledge production and dissemination: the dominant cultures generating a metalanguage, with which the rest of the world must struggle to cope. Additionally, while local scholarship like Africa's attempts to gravitate toward the mainstream, the cultures of scholarship appear to face a huge problem in digesting Africa into the global academy.

Politics of Mainstream

In the area of publishing, African scholars have lamented the marginalization of their manuscripts by Western publishers, who complain of "intrusive" African vocabularies in titles and text, intrusive because they are not mainstream languages. Such "intrusions," it is said, could pose problems for marketing and smooth reading in the Western world. Other times, manuscripts and contributions have been rejected for being rather "descriptive," "too data-oriented," "lacking theoretical grounding," or "not in tune with global jargon and metadiscourse."

These postulations index disturbing trends in the politics of the academy: the domination of global academic discourse and publishing by Eurocentric standards; the subsumption of local intellectual paradigms under received Western hegemonies; the monopolistic control of the center of academic authority; and, subsequently, the marginalization of other intellectuals and their local academic agendas.

The Western academy also controls the strategic outlets of knowledge dissemination. In the final analysis, the outcome of ethnographic inquiry, by accident or design, may never reach Africa, the original targets of investigation. It becomes solely an agenda for esoteric discourse within the Western academy. Even in situations where ethnographies have been meaningfully accomplished and directed at the indigenous consumers, harsh economic realities on the domestic front become a constraining factor, making access to publications impossible. About ten years ago, I had my book on African proverbial discourse published by a Western press. The retail price of the book was so expensive, I could not afford to buy copies for university libraries in my home country.

It is not an accident that international Western journals whose editorial agenda has no specific geographical focus publish very little, if anything, on Africa, or do so only in special editions--implying that Africa and its disciplines are exotic intrusions that are outside of global discourse and require segregation.

Toward a New World Academic Order

Such editorial segregation implies, once again, the existence of sanctified epistemological paradigms with which data and scholarship from all corners of the universe should come to terms if they are to attain "mainstream" recognition. Scholars of the Third World have not only lamented this; they have looked with suspicion on any agenda that subordinates ground data and fieldwork to abstract theory, for it encourages the misrepresentation of low technology cultures by scholars better acquainted with "mainstream" metalanguage, but only superficially acquainted with the cultures they study.

In overdoing emphasis on the quality of global metadiscourse required, as against grounded realities, Western social science appears to have exaggerated the ideas of Clifford Geertz, who asserts, "The claim to attention of an ethnographic account does not rest on its author's ability to capture primitive facts in faraway places and carry them home like a mask or a carving, but on the degree to which he is able to clarify what goes on in such places, to reduce the puzzlement" (Geertz 1973:16 ). My point here is, of course, not to advocate the raw consumption of unprocessed facts. I call for an editorial agenda founded on a new world academic order (Yankah 1995), one in which the indigenous foundations of knowledge are prioritized, or at least given equal attention, in the combined effort to "clarify what goes on" and "reduce the puzzlement." The act of "clarifying what goes on" becomes meaningless if the very subject of clarification is anchored in misrepresentation.

The fault has been partly our own, having neglected to investigate paradigms founded in indigenous academies and to consider them as primary frames of reference, the first building blocks upon which to base future scholarship (Abrahams 1962:70-75; Kashoki 1982:36). Having agreed to dispense with our traditional sources of knowledge and imbibed wholesale the culture of the Western formal academy, we have voluntarily provided a recipe for intellectual servitude and cultural alienation. African scholars can only attempt to learn and work in English; they cannot turn into Anglo-American scholars. The Akan say, "No matter how long a log may stay in the river, it can never turn into a crocodile" (see also Mazrui 1998:53-65).

One scholar has almost wholly blamed our plight on the imitative agenda of African universities, describing it as:

the production of men and women who are in the main equipped intellectually only to reproduce concepts, models, theories, and solutions to human problems conceived, assembled and packaged in Western settings. . . . The result is that Africa is inundated by university graduates with a glittering array of university degrees acquired from local and foreign universities the greater part of whose lives has been spent on rote learning without the cultivation of the necessary ability to question the underpinnings of the knowledge so acquired. (Kashoki 1982:41; see also Sutherland-Addy 1994)

Our plight goes beyond this and includes having to cope with run-down libraries and academic infrastructure in local universities, shattered national economies manned by political dictators, and lack of motivation for university teaching and research. Indeed, less than 30 percent of lecturers in African universities rely exclusively on their official salaries. Apart from indulging in private consultancies, they are sometimes in the retail business, other times driving their own taxis. A good number of folklorists among these have out of frustration decided to become academic refugees in the Western hemisphere. Having found a new home, these scholars become so steeped in Euro-driven theoretical paradigms that their discourse can hardly be comprehended by their colleagues at home. While a few visit home occasionally to renew faith and data, others stay put, quickly run out of field data, and make an entire living out of abstract formulations that have no earthly frames of reference.

No wonder the bearers of our oral traditions have themselves expressed frustration with the alienating impact of Western education. I cite the example of Ghana's leading singer, storyteller, and philosopher, Nana Ampadu, whose father would not send him to secondary school after his elementary education. He explained proverbially why he was denying his son further Western education, even though some of Nana's older brothers had been to famous colleges: "Ndwan a eko adidie mmae a yemfa bi nka ho" [When sheep go grazing in the fields and they have not returned home, you do not add to their numbers].

Further western education given to his brothers yielded nothing but alienation of the mind, disrespect for indigenous values. Should his father therefore add to the numbers of these lost sheep? Should a nugget of gold be tied to the leg of the bush hen, so it would fly to the woods? Another orator who did not go to school told me: "Ose meko sukuu a mewu ntem" [My father said if I went to school, I would die an early death], once again referring to the traditional perception of cultural alienation as a tragedy, a condition of virtual nonexistence (see also Hayford 1969:15).


Modern Communication and the Lore

The crisis I have portrayed above in presenting local knowledge at the bar of the global academy has a bigger counterpart at the national level, where local communities also grope in a frustrating search for cross-cultural norms within a prevailing state apparatus that adjusts itself to cope with the forces of modernity. And this is what I explore in the second part of my presentation.

I refer here to a bigger crisis in Africa's attempt to provide an enabling climate for transition from traditional to modern nationhood (see Gyekye 1997). This transition has involved a key component within the ethnography of communication: channels of knowledge transmission. I refer here specifically to the emergence of modern forms of communication.

The print and mass media and the establishment of literate society in the modern era were considered one means of curing the primitive in the African (McLuhan 1962: 45). Mass media indeed were going to be a source of Africa's salvation, a ray of light in dark Africa. But the role of the media was not just to create a suitable climate for change. Modern media themselves were considered constitutive of development. New technology would create a modern environment, and that was development in itself.

How susceptible is traditional society to such encroaching Western norms and systems of communication, and how have African folk coped with attempts to graft modern communicative norms onto indigenous institutions? Are modern notions of free speech, free press, and free expression, which are already operative in our postcolonial regulative institutions, compatible with ethnographies of communication and social structures in traditional society? Africa itself sees the Western systems of communication as indices of one type of development or the other. At the same time the African folk have not hidden a lingering mistrust for advanced communication systems beyond the spoken word and face-to-face communication.

African cultures have often referred to Euro-mediated communication in derogatory terms. The Akan of Ghana refer to the telephone as ahomatrofo, meaning "liar," "the tale-bearing wire," "string or wire that conveys lies, unverified information," "not to be trusted, unreliable, dealing in falsehoods." This implies that fast travelling news, whose veracity cannot be checked, is not trustworthy.

Similarly, a newspaper is called koowaa krataa, which literally means "loose-tongued paper," "tabloid," "gossip." Koowaa is derived from ka no waa, as in "Mekaa no waa" [I spoke in jest, don't take me seriously]. The general suspicion of, or dispreference for, nonindigenous modes or channels of communication may also be seen in the general word for foreign language, apotofoo kasa, implying a language hurriedly improvised for ad hoc use, lacking permanence or authenticity. To speak a foreign language itself is poto, "mix, craft, improvise."

Thus Euro-mediated language and communication cannot be substituted for pure and pristine indigenous language, revolving around the spoken word and face-to-face communication, which rely on multisensory experience for the encoding and decoding of meaning. Elsewhere in Africa, radio was an object of suspicion, such as in Tanzania (Kivikuru 1989:29). Similarly, among the Yoruba, many refer to the radio as "the machine that speaks but accepts no reply" (Fiofori 1975:50). In Wole Soyinka's Kongi's Harvest, there is a scene where the King and his retinue break into an anthem which laments the emergence of a new technology of communication, which tyrannizes the people, talking to them but accepting no feedback:

Who but a lunatic
Will bandy words with boxes
With Government rediffusion sets

Which talk and talk and never
Take a lone reply
I cannot counter words, oh

I cannot counter words of
A rediffusion set
My ears are sore
But my mouth is agbayun
For I do not bandy words
No I do not bandy words
With a government loud speaker (Soyinka 1979:2)


Interplay of Norms

Of significance, however, are the various strategies by which traditional systems have mediated the onslaught of forces of modernity: the strategies of incorporation, accommodation, and domestication. The drums and the double bell, both talking instruments in Africa, for example, have been integrated within the electronic media. The statue of a man beating the double bell (dawuro) in front of Ghana's premier broadcasting station (GBC) demonstrates this, as does the signature tune of the national radio news broadcast, which closes with a drum signal that speaks the words: "Ghana muntie, Ghana muntie" [Listen Ghana, listen Ghana].

The horns and talking drums indeed constitute the nexus between the folk and mass media in Africa, since like radio, they communicate messages over long distances. In historical times, these served as strategic modes of mass communication, particularly during the times of slavery.

An even more prominent communication functionary who has survived integration within the modern nation state is the okyeame, the chief's orator and counselor, often referred to as the "linguist," alongside his mace or staff of authority. The staff and related items have been icons of diplomacy within traditional states in West Africa from time immemorial. Ambassadors in several states needed to carry symbols of authority and comport themselves as men of dignity, representing respective kings. Significantly, Ghana's parliament continued the use of the staff upon Ghana's independence from British rule on March 6, 1957. In most parts of Africa the staff represents royalty, power, oratory, and authoritative performance of speech (see Yankah 1995). In Ghana's First Republic, Dr. Nkrumah extended the traditional role of the okyeame by appointing a state linguist for Ghana. Even though this position has not been sustained over the years, it demonstrates the recognition by the modern nation-state of the continued supremacy of the spoken word and the traditional communication arts in postcolonial Africa.

These observations point to the existence of a cultural grammar of communication expected to guide public oratory and communication even within the domain of modern governance. But it also means when confronted with competing norms, the modern nation state faces a choice between the wholesale adoption of modern institutions and media with all their associated norms and operating foreign institutions within a local cultural frame of reference.

In Ghana's contemporary history, the indiscreet juxtaposition of modern and traditional norms has sometimes created social and political crises. Major threats to social and spiritual stability have often been caused by the violation of the communication order within the realm of traditional authority, in a situation where the power domains of tradition and modernity are competing for hegemony. Traditional authority has its own norms governing interaction within power space, while the postcolonial nation-state operates through institutions of governance and communication mores which are not entirely in accord with these norms.

Where these two have been indiscreetly juxtaposed, social and political crises have resulted based on the question of priority. Which communication norm takes precedence over the other: the global or the local? This is exemplified in the following public incidents in contemporary Ghana:

(1) In July 1996, the Ashanti traditional state (within Ghana) found itself virtually in a state of crisis over a newspaper allegation, attributing words to a regional minister to the effect that, "Mensuro Otumfuor" [I don't fear the King of Ashanti].

(2) In 1993, a heated public debate ensued on Article 276 of the 1992 constitution, which debars chiefs from participating in partisan politics. The consensus among the regional houses of chiefs, after heated debates, was that the institution of chieftaincy should remain insulated from party politics.

The 1996 crisis in Kumasi over an alleged statement associated with a regional minister underlines the potency and fragility of the spoken word, as well as the constraints that operate on the exercise of free speech in traditional society. The incident also depicts the subtle contest for supremacy between traditional and modern political authority, and the crucial significance of communicative norms of tradition even within the context of modern governance. It is said the spoken word can bring you an elephant; but it can also bring you to the foot of an elephant.

The Kumasi Traditional Council, as a result of this newspaper allegation, gave an ultimatum to the Government to remove the Ashanti Regional Minister or face the consequences over the alleged statement, "Minsuro Otumfour" [I don't fear the King of Ashanti], attributed to the minister. The minister was alleged to have said this at a meeting with butchers at the market place. For this three-word statement (even at the level of allegation), the Kumasi Traditional Council warned that they should not be held responsible for whatever happened to the minister if the president did not remove him. During this period of crisis, chiefs, dignitaries, and high social personages of the Ashanti state clad themselves in mourning clothes to signal state grief, calamity, and a state of emergency.

The force of the alleged statement and its distinctive character as a cultural anomaly could be juxtaposed with the harmlessness of any hypothetical statement such as, "I don't fear my father," or even "I don't fear the President." The latter statements are probably not as aberrant, considering that the authorities for which the two entities stand generate different grammars of verbal and behavioral norms.

In addition to the verbal transgression associated with the utterance, other violations of the communication code regarding traditional power had been observed in the comportment of the minister by the elders. They considered the minister's habitual act of crossing his legs in meetings with the king rude behavior. It was also alleged that he once called the king by his private name.

Based on the considered gravity of these violations of the communication order, the Kumasi Traditional Council slaughtered a sheep to pacify the gods. The minister denied the allegations and, to support his claim of innocence, declared his readiness to pronounce the unspeakable reminiscential oath of the Ashanti, Ntam Kesee [The Great Oath], which summarily marks a major historical calamity, and whose utterance in support of a falsehood is a serious verbal transgression. He then went further in daring his opponents to join him in invoking the unspeakable if they wanted to contest the issues.

Significant in this case are: (1) the existence in traditional society of verbal taboos, unspeakables, such as ntam, denoting a domain of public events and historical tragedies or calamities, which are under strict verbal censorship, and in respect of which one's rights to free speech may be exercised only with extreme caution; (2) the considerable verbal restraint inspired by the very realm of royalty (what I have called power space), often arousing norms of linguistic avoidance and distancing. The private space of the king, an object of utmost veneration and deference, ought to be maintained and protected. The declaration, "I don't fear the king," is a verbal sacrilege, an open verbal affront demonstrating a lack of sensitivity to privileged space (whether symbolic or physical) mutually shared with wielders of power. The swift reaction of the Kumasi Traditional Council brings to mind a proverb once used by a linguist in Ashanti underscoring a felt lack of sensitivity to power space.

Se wone aboa kesee da a
Mma wo were m'ri dee ne tiri da.
Na okom de no a
Wo na obekye
Wo awee.

If you lie beside a ferocious beast
Never forget the position of its head.
For it is you it will consume
When it is hungry.

This is a proverbial capsule of sensitivity to power space mutually shared with wielders of power in Africa. Where shared space is inevitable, prudence requires that interaction be carefully managed to obviate crisis, since, if provoked, destructive forces may be whimsically unleashed by the powerful as a means of self-preservation. The situation here leaves no room for subversive verbal behavior that seeks to erode and demystify the very foundations of royal power.

The second allegation, that the accused was fond of crossing his legs in the presence of the king, demonstrates the significance of paralinguistic modesty within privileged power space. Leg crossing within the domain of power is a political statement of affront, denoting defiance or superiority in a duelling encounter. This would be in contradiction of norms requiring the expression of humility and deference in dress and paralinguistic comportment. Failure to observe the appropriate gestural norms is construed as a poetic act of disdain, an oblique political statement.

The final allegation, that the man had referred to the king by his real name, once again signals that public references to royalty must not be stripped of evocative attributes and appellations that mark the center of power. Free speech in traditional society is constrained by sensitivity to the preservation of social and political order, the responsibility to insulate power-laden institutions from breaches that could spell social chaos.

From the preceding account, one could very well imagine the extent of institutional damage if, in the name of Western democratic norms, chiefs were allowed to engage in partisan politics and consequently relaxed the various distancing norms associated with royalty throughout the world. It is notable that in order to insure royalty against the perils of face-to-face interaction, in which his person could be defiled verbally, physically, or spiritually, various norms of insulation are observed, including the convention of routing royal bound speech through an intermediary, and generally minimizing the availability of royalty for direct social interaction.

In all such transactions of avoidance, a royal surrogate becomes the locus of interaction, ensuring smooth exchanges between the two discrete domains. How would the norms of mass media and parliamentary discourse accommodate such complex rituals of avoidance associated with royalty? How would incidental affront to royalty be handled or repaired during parliamentary or congressional debates, bearing in mind prevailing constitutional provisions of free speech? According to Articles 115 and 116 of the 1992 Constitution of Ghana:

There shall be freedom of speech, debate and proceedings in Parliament and that freedom shall not be (impeached or) questioned in any court or place out of Parliament.
Civil or criminal proceedings shall not be instituted against a member of parliament in any court or place out of parliament, for any matter or thing brought by him in or before parliament by petition, bill, motion, or otherwise. (1992:86)

These constitutional provisions assume that parliamentary discourse may take dramatic turns, where tact, decorum, and rationality may be sacrificed with impunity. Where such unguarded behavior is directed at a sanctified personage within the forum, the defilement of the royal realm naturally extends to the constituency represented. It is not surprising that the various houses of chiefs, upon extensive debates, rejected the call for the amendment of Article 276 of the Constitution, which stipulates that "a chief shall not take part in active party politics; and any chief wishing to do so and seeking election to Parliament shall abdicate his stool or skin" (1992:135).


Free Speech

The above norms in respect of restrained comportment within power domains in no way imply the absence of free speech in the face of authority (see Yankah 1998). One of several symbols embossed on the royal orators' repertoire of staffs is the spider, Ananse. The Ananse image and its meaning summarize the perception by traditional society of speech and its genesis. The Ananse staff symbolism, standing for the proverb "Ananse anton kasa" [Ananse the spider did not sell speech], implies that speech is free and not part of the trickster's, or anybody's, monopoly.

Traditional society itself recognizes that it is unlawful to restrict the speech of any human being, since lives can be saved by the very act of speech. It is said, "Ano na yede wee n etire" [The mouth is used to protect the head]. There are aphorisms like "Yenka obi kasaboa nhye ne yamu" [literally, One does not push another's speaking instinct back into the entrails; in other words, One does not suppress another's instinct to speak. The instinct to speak is depicted here as an enclosed animal; as it attempts to exit, society is forbidden to push it back. The resultant agony when speech has been suppressed in court is such that litigants sometimes break down in tears, and sympathetic remarks are overheard such as, "Amma-manka-m'asem ye ya" [It is painful not to be allowed to speak].

To guard against the undue interference with individuals' rights to freedom of speech in the face of authority, political functionaries advising newly installed chiefs sometimes warn against the persecution of defendants whose freedom of expression has been suppressed. In the following passage, for example, a counselor in a village (in the Kwahu area of Ghana), welcoming a newly installed lineage head with a libation prayer, urges good governance on the new head and cautions him against the restriction of free speech:

It's your turn to hold the gun of your departed brother
Before you pick up the gun
And we demand drink from you
We should first serve the ancestral spirits. . .
We seek long life and prosperity
We seek long life and the statecraft of the female bird,
We seek business prosperity, and love within the lineage
This lineage to be ruled by Opanin Atta
Let him not pronounce guilt on the speechless If the speechless person is pronounced guilty
It's a vain verdict

This piece of advice urges the newly installed head not to pronounce a final verdict until litigants have been given the opportunity to freely express themselves. A guilty verdict without prior opportunities for self-defense is invalid, according to the elder. It recalls the formula used by Akan spokesmen after announcing the verdict in a judicial transaction: "If you had not brought the case here, that we might listen with a just ear, but had instead, seized a stick and clubbed him dead, you would have treated him like a beast." Treating someone like a beast (di n'aboa ) implies not recognizing his right to speech and self-defense. The implication is that only human beings are capable of speech in self-defense; to treat another like a beast means denying him his rights to speak.

The significance of speech as therapy is very well known. In parts of Africa the suppression of speech in certain situations is believed capable of causing ill-health. The Akan make comparable allusion to the unhealthy habit of withholding pent-up emotion, by saying: "Se apeteaso hye atwomaa bo a abofono mpa" [The hen is bound to nauseate if an earth worm lies in its chest cavity]. Repelling the worm then becomes a therapy, restoring good health.

Indeed, in order to institutionalize public and open evaluation of wielders of power, communities in Africa sometimes set aside days on which social norms are frozen and verbal and nonverbal behavior otherwise considered unacceptable are licensed and even encouraged. Ill feelings harbored over the past year may be ritually expunged, and critique of social and political deviants openly verbalized during the period. Children may openly criticize or even abuse elders and the chief; and misdeed, misconduct, and scandals may be the subject of open reference and public ridicule.

Such events include festivals among the Nzema, Bono, and the Ga. In such ceremonies, the deeds of rulers and elders are brought into the open forum of songs and critically assessed in order to check the extent to which they promote the people's collective aspirations over the past year. Principles of leadership, the uses and abuses of power and the relationship between the ruler and the ruled are often evoked in applying the criteria of good governance (Agovi 1995). One celebration of Apoo among the Bono gave the women, who are normally reserved in speech, the opportunity to obliquely point out environmental hazards caused by the careless felling of trees by timber merchants. This situation, however, they blamed on the chief's negligence. In the words of the women,

Nana has destroyed our town.
Nana has destroyed our town.
Here he lies in the river.
Here he is when we go to fetch water.
Here he is when we go to bathe in the stream.
Nana has destroyed our town.

To the women, Nana is a personification of filth and is as guilty as the irresponsible timber merchants. What the women cantors see in the polluted rivers are not residues of felled trees, but the image of the high executive responsible for the filth. To the celebrants of this festival, not to take part in the festival is to court an illness called sipe.

Melville Herskovits earlier in this century drew attention to the Freudian factor often ignored in the interpretation of certain superstitions among the "primitive." He made reference to Negro songs that state grievances against those in power, saying:

There exists both a recognition of the nature of the neurosis as induced by repression, and of the therapeutic value of bringing repressed thought into the open, though the explanation of the phenomenon is usually given in terms of the working of supernatural forces. (1934:77)

This therapeutic healing is often associated with both the speaker and his victim--the speaker relieved to have released pent-up emotion and his target also delighted to hear his social flaws openly aired and criticized. Such compensatory mechanisms, as we find in festivals, appear to be common in most situations of political domination, when a minority ruling elite exercises autocratic powers over the majority.

Critique of authority was not only an annual event in parts of traditional society; ordinarily it was also the province of certain functionaries such as the queen mother, the divine drummer, court minstrels, and so-called praise poets, who occasionally took the opportunity to incorporate, with impunity, critical comment in the high-sounding appellations addressed to the king while he sat in state (Yankah 1983). If traditional society did not put a high premium on open criticism of authority all year round, it means cultural norms put greater emphasis on the nature and style of communication in the face of authority than its mere accomplishment. Public criticism of authority is allowed only when speech has been distilled to obviate crisis. Cultural mores encourage stylized communication that avoids open confrontation with authority.

Largely available to the general public, though, is backstage clandestine discourse ostensibly spoken at the back of the dominant (Scott 1990). This may be veiled rhetoric in the form of indirection, metaphor, proverb, allegory, circumlocution, innuendo, locally called akutia, and related literary devices (Yankah 1997; Piersen 1977; Abrahams 1992). Both in traditional and modern governance then, opportunities for the critique of authority are officially and unofficially created for the exertion of counter and compensatory powers and to mitigate domination. Here, cultural reverence often accorded to elders and the seat of political authority considerably restrains the flow of open, critical discourse. The deployment of verbal indirection then becomes compelling and finds expression in the use of veiled speech and other modes of cultural representation.

Of the modes of folk wisdom specified above, the sung-tale metaphor as used in popular music has been the most important in Ghana's contemporary history. The rhetorical use of the folktale as metaphor also means its major objective of upholding societal values and exposing social flaws can be fully exploited for the purposes of satire, innuendo, or verbal assault. Remarkably, the tale has been effectively utilized to protest, satirize, and transmit "hidden transcripts" in volatile political contexts in Africa's past.

In such instances, the tale's aesthetic function is exploited by the teller, who weaves plot and characterization to reflect the society's values, while at the same time ridiculing social excesses and foibles within the political hierarchy. In societies where tales begin with a disclaiming formula that denies factuality of the narration and highlights its purely artistic and aesthetic intent ("the tale is not to be believed," according to the Akan), it is only natural that a skillful narrator exploits the situation to lampoon real life characters.

Under circumstances of domination, umbrage may be sought under suggestive symbols created by the oral artist within the public sphere, the meanings of which may be reinforced, transformed, or extended by the ordinary man to suit a political purpose. Where the appearance of such protest symbolism within the public sphere coincides with a particularly suitable turn of political events, its efficacy as a weapon (and shield) for veiled discourse is further enhanced.

In several cultures of Africa, the aesthetics of indigenous communication associates critique with obliqueness. This way the socially deprived is not doubly handicapped through verbal deprivation; he can adopt and adapt "ready-made" therapies in situations of stress, and with impunity. Even as he celebrates his group identity, his protest voice constantly resonates and affords him vicarious participation in the political process. The implication is that free speech under the scrutiny of a dominant authority operates on the pedestal of cryptic and stylized discourse: protest and dissident discourse that is paradoxically suffused with tact, politeness, and speech disguises.

Conclusion

It is such norms governing communication that find themselves under threat by communicative norms instituted by the postcolonial state apparatus. The resultant paradoxes further express themselves as follows: (1) postcolonial politicians, who choose to address local constituencies in colonial languages, which none in their audiences understands; and (2) mass media reports and coverage which have evoked public outcry because of "insubordination" shown by youths to elders in television discussion programs. There has also been public uproar against private radio stations that, through phone-in programs, have "allowed" the public to criticize or "insult" the president and other wielders of political power. This has been possible because the original power space of the realm has been considerably diffused through electronic mediation, which partly eliminates the constraining factor of face. Indeed, as communication becomes more and more faceless, the indigenous norms of restrained discourse are bound to slacken, to be taken over by greater candor, where affront is inevitable.

It must be borne in mind then that the adoption of a colonial metalanguage has been partly responsible for this crisis; for along with the linguistic legacy of English, more commonly used in the mass media and official circles, comes an entire cosmology not our own. This linguistic legacy, bequeathed by the postcolonial state, does not facilitate compliance with indigenous norms of speaking.

Like the indigenous scholar confronted by an intimidating global academy, the African folk struggle to digest mainstream systems of knowledge, knowledge transmission, language, and modes of power enactment and representation, which fall outside their domain of enculturation.

The answer, of course, does not lie in complete self-isolation in the interest of cultural nationalism. It lies in a systematic agenda of mutual accommodation: local initiatives adapting the global systems to suit the indigenous matrix, and mainstream academies relaxing Eurocentric posturings to accommodate indigenous knowledge. In the academic realm, this entails a radical revision of the global academic order to accord greater recognition and accommodation of local knowledge, institutionally mediated by local academies. At the local level this can be made easier through the following:

(1) greater cooperation among African academic institutions.
(2) the widening of the local fora for knowledge dissemination, where the mediation of indigenous knowledge can be better fostered and standardized. I speak here of locally grown journals of African folklore and the like, which will closely interact with other journals in the West. Our advocacy here is for indigenous initiatives combined with openness to global concepts, and vice versa. From the position of producing and mediating local knowledge comes the possibility of entering into mutually beneficial alliances with radically reformed global networks.
(3) institutional collaboration between folklore departments in Africa and the West, where visits and local publications can be exchanged.
(4) greater internationalization of "mainstream" academic organizations and publication boards, allowing for platforms which will table the agenda of the voiceless and catalyze the official incorporation of the marginalized within "mainstream" academies.

In the final analysis, it is neither the local nor the global that should seek to control the power base of folklore. An African proverb sums it all up: "Knowledge is like a baobab tree; no single person can embrace it."


NOTE

This is a revised version of a plenary address delivered at the 1998 American Folklore Society Meeting in Portland, Oregon. Reproduced by permission of the American Folklore Society from Journal of American Folklore, 112 (444), Spring 1999. Not for further reproduction.


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