1

TERM PAPER LITERATURES OF AFRICA-I

SCRIBE, MOVE ON!-REPETITION, DIGRESSION AND ASSOCIATION IN THE SONGS OF THE MWINDO EPIC

SAMBUDDHA GHOSH PG-II, ROLL NO. 37 DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH JADAVPUR UNIVERSITY

SCRIBE, MOVE ON!- REPETITION, DIGRESSION AND ASSOCIATION IN THE SONGS OF THE MWINDO EPIC

The psychodynamics of orality, as they were called by Walter J. Ong1, were identified at the beginning of the last century due the pioneering work of scholars such as Parry and Lord, Jack Goody, Ruth Finnegan and many such others (not to exclude Ong himself). These patterns, in which the mind of a member of an oral community is accustomed to work, have been seen as different from the workings of a mind exposed to varying degrees of literacy across cultures. Yet, there is a further problem of oversimplifying matters by presupposing such radical differences between the workings of an oral and literate consciousness. Jack Goody and Ian Watt, while searching for a model culture to demonstrate the irrevocable consequences of literacy found that initially they had to reject any dichotomy based upon the assumption of radical differences between the mental attributes of literate and non-literate peoples2. As both Finnegan and Bruce A. Rosenberg3 argue, there has been an inherent continuity, not a dichotomy, between oral and literate cultures for thousands of years:

They shade into each other both in the present and over many centuries of historical development, and there are innumerable cases of poetry which has both oral and written

Walter J.Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Routledge), reprint, 2003, p. 31.

Jack Goody and Ian Watt (ed.), Literacy in Traditional Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1968, p. 44.
3

Bruce A. Rosenberg, The Complexity of Oral Tradition, Oral Tradition, Vol. 2, No.1, 1987, pp. 73-90. I am particularly indebted to the influential Oral Tradition journal, all 25 years of which are now available online at http://journal.oraltradition.org.

elements. The idea of pure and uncontaminated oral culture as the primary reference point for the discussion of oral poetry is a myth.4

What Finnegan argued seemed at variance with enthusiasts like Parry-Lord and Ong, but even if we accept that purely oral folk can nowhere be identified today or studied, a fair amount of inductive reasoning can be used to arrive at what would have been the features of a model, supposedly uncorrupted orality.

The object of the present paper is a study of The Mwindo Epic from the Banyanga (erstwhile Congo Republic, now Zaire), edited and translated by Daniel Biebuyck and Kahombo C. Mateene5, in order to examine some of its most prominent features that would help us ascertain the oral nature of its composition. I have surmised that there are three features in the epic which are most extensive, these being repetition, digression and association. The examples chosen from the text to illustrate each of these features are not so prominently distinct or watertight, so as to illustrate each of the features discretely in each case and there are many occasions where they will overlap. Sometimes repetition leads to digression and digression to association, but this is not a fixed order which can be demonstrated in entirety throughout the text. For economys sake I have kept myself limited to the songs of the epic, for these, to me are most illustrative of these features. However, this is not to say that they do not occur at other parts of the prose narrative. Also, the examples chosen here are only illustrative and by no means exhaustive. Finally, I intend to proceed to an analysis of what functions these features can perform at the level of narrative.

The Mwindo Epic, as performed by the griot Mr. Sh-kri si Candi Rureke could be classified as a kri si -text or an epic narrative. As in other Nyanga epics, the central hero here is Mwindo and the events narrated are mostly his diverse exploits, displays of bravado and courage. Mwindo is a Nyanga name for a male child who is born after a number of girls. There is also a relationship
4

Ruth Finnegan, Oral Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1977, p. 24

Daniel Biebuyck and Kahombo C. Mateene (ed.), The Mwindo Epic (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press), 1971. All further references to the text of the epic are to this edition and have been given parenthetically within the text.

between Mwindo and the Nyanga verb uindo (to fell a tree) which displays his physical strength. However, Biebuyck also states that it is a rarely so that the Mwindo epic is ever recited in its entirety for all performative purposes: The interesting point is that the narrator would never recite the entire story in immediate sequence, but would intermittently perform various select passages of it. Mr. Rureke, whose epic is presented here, repeatedly asserted that never before had he performed the whole story within a continuous span of days.6 (p. 14).

The themes of the epic and its incidents are traditional to the Nyanga who use them freely as the property of the community. The traditional themes are dealt with in many new ways by different griots, but by the time Biebuyck was doing his fieldwork in the Nyanga country, there were not many who were as competent and well-versed as Rureke.

I. REPETITION
Repetition is a recurring feature of The Mwindo Epic, both at the level of epithets or formulaic phrases and at the level of narrative progression. However, this feature is most succinctly observable in the songs of the epic. There are, for instance a number of stock phrases used as epithets for various dramatis personae. Mwindo is designated by the Nyanga epithet Kbutwaknda (the Little-one-just-born-he-walked), which also brings out his identity as a small creature, a child by the use of the ka-diminutive prefix. This is the epithet repeated the most number of times to describe Mwindo, possibly to a degree that irritates the reader. Mukiti, the water serpent, who marries Mwindos paternal aunt Iyangura is called mi n-mri ba (master of the unfathomable) and wbme uker byra (a man, who has his nails cut). As in other epics, epithets and stereotyped expressions are attached to important figures and these are repeated, churned out and re-used by the griot while narrating similar situations and episodes.

Daniel Biebuyck, The Mwindo Epic, Introduction.

However, the most prominent examples of repetition are elsewhere. An important episode in the epic is the imprisonment of Mwindo within a drum by his father Shemwindo, which is thrown into the river to ensure Mwindos death by drowning. However, the miraculous powers of the Nyanga hero ensure that he is able to swim across the river, being within the sealed drum. It is here that he launches into song:

Scribe, move on! I am saying farewell to Shemwindo! I am saying farewell to Shemwindo! I shall die, oh! Bira My little father threw me into the drum! I shall die, Mwindo! The counselors abandoned Shemwindo; The counselors will become dried leaves. The counselors of Shemwindo, The counselors of Shemwindo, The counselors have failed (in their) counseling! (p. 62)

A similar song is repeated two pages later (p. 64), and is followed by another song Mwindo sings during his underwater journey to the realm of Mukiti: Mungai, get out of my way! For Ikukuhi shall I go out of my way? You are impotent against Mwindo, Mwindo is the Little-one-just-born-he-walked I am going to meet Iyangura. For Kabusa, shall I go out of my way? You are helpless against Mwindo, For Mwindo is the Little-one-just-born-he-walked.

Canta, get out of my way! Canta, you are impotent against Mwindo. (p. 65)

The song is a very long one and I have quoted only a small section of it. But the prose narrative which begins at the end of the song explains, Each time Mwindo arrived in a place where an aquatic animal was, he said that it should get out of the way for him, that they were powerless against him (p.66)

One line of prose suffices to explain all that Mwindo has to say as he meets the aquatic animals on his way. Why would then the narrator take the pains of cataloguing the individual cases of various aquatic animals in their encounter with Mwindo? Several reasons can be accounted for this.

Firstly, an epic-text such as Mwindo is performative in all its aspects, accompanied by song, instruments and dance. Therefore it is essential that songs be developed to recount certain episodes. The act of repetition provides similar contexts for the griot to display his skills as verse-maker in his act of oration. Metrically speaking, the qualitative elements (e.g. rhyme) and the quantitative elements (e.g. the number of words) vary themselves as little as possible in case of two similar (and repeated phrases). But there are places where they do vary in bits, and it is the test of the griots verse-making to select a suitable stock phrase or clich to meet the demands of rhythmic verse. This is usually done from a repository of such stock-phrases which the griot has been trained to memorize over the years of his training. For example, Ikukuhi is described as impotent against Mwindo while Kabusa is helpless. This fact could perhaps have been further and better illustrated if Nyanga versification could have been understood and studied, which sadly, is beyond the scope of this paper. However, the basic point is that lines of verse are repeated to serve a definite purpose. Secondly, as Isidore Okpewho points out, repetition is also employed, sometimes profusely, to mark a feeling of excitement or agitation, whether in the sense of utmost delight or deepest

anxiety and fear7. In the quoted lines repetition conveys to the reader a vivid sense of immediateness combined with rapid motion in recounting for the audience Mwindos underwater journey and his encounter with various fishes.

Sometimes, repetition can also be used as an effective way of improvisation by the griot. The rapidity of performance means the griot has to improvise instantly and yet maintain both rhyme and effective expression. In the first quoted song, the lines I am saying farewell to Shemwindo!and The counselors of Shemwindo are repeated twice simply to ensure that the griot has time, either to catch his breath or to think about a suitable stock-phrase for his next line. The act of narration or the flow of it must never stop however; an effective griot must never sacrifice fluency, fulsomeness and volubility at the cost of anything else. Therefore, rhetoricians were later to call it the copia,8 which evolved as an integral part of oration and was even encouraged in times of contingency. The psychological need for repetition is explainable by the trait of redundancy or copiousness which Ong explores in his book Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing of the Word. While discussing this trait, Ong establishes that writing establishes in the text, a line of continuity outside the mind, to which a return (even if an occasional one) is always possible in case of distraction or obliteration of the context from the mind. This process is called backlooping, and in case of writing, it is purely ad hoc.9 However, in the oral discourse, the scenario is different because there is nothing to backloop into outside the mind, for the oral utterance has vanished as soon as it is uttered. It is also relevant here, according to Ong, to conceive of an oral culture as conversing only through sound utterance, which is an action laid across the axis of time. Hence, it is also an event, one in which when a part of the utterance is over, we can only proceed to the remaining part but never get back to that which has bygone. When, for example, our present griot recites Mwindo is the Little-one-just-born-he-walked, by the time he has reached the word Little , the first part of the utterance Mwindo is the is an act of the past. Therefore,
7

Isidore Okpewho, African Oral Literature (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press), 1992, p. 72. Ong, Orality and Literacy, pp. 39-40 Ibid, pp. 38-39.

to return to it and impress upon the audience such phrases and formulaic expressions which the griot thinks are essential to his recital, repetition is indispensable.

This will lead us to our fourth point about repetition. As an act of recital, the griot always has to ensure that his audience can grasp his words and phrases. Even supposing that the audience were to understand every word the narrator recites or sings (which is impracticable from all possible perspectives), acoustic problems are sure to disrupt part of the audibility of the narrators words. Therefore, redundancy is always favoured by the audience, especially in case of a performance, where modes of expression other than pure speech are used. Repetition can also help to bring out the griots encyclopedic knowledge regarding the customs, culture, values and beliefs of the community. Such knowledge is emphasized and highly admired among the Nyanga folk. I shall demonstrate through two examples how repetition works in such cases. The first is Mwindos song on his way to Tubondo with aunt Iyangura: The pastes that are in Tubondo, May the pastes join Mwindo, Mwindo, the Little-one-just-born-he-walked The animals that are in Tubondo, May the animals join Mwindo. The meats that Shemwindo stores, May the meats join Mwindo Mboru, For Mwindo is the Little-one-just-born-he-walked (p.84)

This catalogue of fires, waters, jars, clothes, wooden dishes, beds, wicker plates, chickens and a seemingly never-ending list of belongings go on following the same redundant format of repetition. According to the accompanying note to this song, it offers a short inventory of some of the most significant items in the diet and technology of the Nyanga. (p. 85). A similar catalogue is given in the scene of the resuscitation of Tubondo and his people after Mwindo

emerges victorious in battle against his father. The resuscitation is achieved by the hero with the help of his conga-sceptre and is quoted as follows: each one who died in pregnancy resuscitated with her pregnancy; each one who died in labor resuscitated being in labor; each one who was preparing paste resuscitated stirring paste; each one who died defecating resuscitated defecating; each one who died setting up traps resuscitated trapping; each one who died copulating resuscitated copulating; each one who died forging resuscitated forging each one who died cultivating resuscitated cultivating; each one who died making pots and jars resuscitated shaping; each one who died carving dishes resuscitated carving; each one who died quarreling with a partner resuscitated quarreling. (p.119)

It is needless to say that the only aim of such cataloguing is to impress upon the audience the extensive nature of Mwindos powers. However, this could also be regarded as a classic case of an empty fullness which the critic Babalola calls the great noise of an empty barrel, the effusion of a shallow-minded ijala artist who makes light of the adage that quality is more important than quantity and who erroneously thinks that the merit of his ijala consists solely in its length.10

But it is also essential to remember that any form of repetition, if made in an oral culture, is eventually a form of explanation, the aim of which is either to clarify or to interpret. Ong draws attention to this phenomenon in an essay titled Before Textuality: Orality and Interpretation. In this essay Ong examines the traditional study of hermeneutics or exegesis by questioning the teleological authority of chirographic and printed texts in providing interpretation. He writes that,
10

S.A. Babalola, The Content and Form of Yoruba Ijala (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 1966 quoted in Okpewho, African Oral Literature, p. 76

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The idea of nature as something out there like a text of a booka kind of visible thing to be read and interpreted runs back at least to the Middle Ages. But he proceeds, following David Olson, to a more specific point concerning orality and textuality. The very idea of interpretation as an activity separate from other kinds of statement depends on the existence of writing. Interpretation of the text that is the world would be something of a different order than the text itself if the world is like a text. Before writing, there is no functional or effective distinction between a statement and an interpretation of a statement.11 Ong here points towards a shift in paradigm through which exegesis or interpretation could be approached:

Asked to repeat a statement and an interpretation of a statement that he or she has made, a person from an oral culture commonly gives not a word-for-word repetition of what he or she has said, but an interpretationand with good reason, I would suggest, since the request to repeat the statement establishes a new context for the statement (one which, moreover, suggests that the original wording was not understood). Since the oral mind is holistic, it adapts to the new context with a wording that presumably fits the new context, not the original context, a wording which we would regard as interpretative but which to the oral mind represents in the new context essentially what the original statement represented in the original context. What is the point of repeating verbatim a statement that is unclear enough to elicit a request to repeat it?12

In The Mwindo Epic, many of the repetitions found in the songs of Mwindo perform precisely this function. The quoted lines will illustrate this fact:

The counselors abandoned Shemwindo; The counselors will become dried leaves. The counselors of Shemwindo, The counselors of Shemwindo, The counselors have failed (in their) counseling! (p. 62)
11

Walter J. Ong, Before Textuality: Orality and Interpretation, Oral Tradition, Vol. 3, No. 3, 1988, p. 259. Ibid, p. 260.

12

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If we study the last four lines within this quoted portion, it is easy to see that the last lines merely explicates why the counselors will become dried leaves, while the third and fourth lines help to intensify the suspense before the answer is provided to the question. It is easy for us now to rephrase this section in prose by joining the second and the last lines: The counselors will become dried leaves because they have failed (in their) counseling

In other words, what appeared merely as a recurring, redundant mode of expression has now become an interpretive tool.

II. DIGRESSION
The Mwindo Epic is replete with many forms of digression, but the chief of these is the MukitiIyangura interlude after Shemwindos formal announcement to his seven wives of punishing the one who gives birth to a male child. Biebuyck tells us in his introduction, The action takes place both in the village of Tubondo (courtship, marriage negotiations, gift exchanges, transfer of valuables) and in the village of the Water Serpent (expos of marriage plans, accumulation of matrimonial goods, actual marriage ceremony). This very beautiful and poetic interlude, which is absent from many other versions of the epic, gives a fairly accurate description of marriage customs, and strongly emphasizes the basic Nyanga values of generosity, hospitality and refinement in social relationships. (pg, 23, Introduction)

However the Mukiti-Iyangura interlude does have a number of important narrative functions. Firstly, it sets the scene of future action in Mukitis water-realm. It paves the way for Mwindos underwater journey to his mentor and mother-figure, aunt Iyangura. It also justifies Iyanguras special position of power and status as Mukitis ritual-wife. Living in isolation from her husband, Iyangura can also exercise a certain degree of autonomy than an ordinary wife would be able to.

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The Mwindo Epic traditionally deals with stereotyped themes of the exploits of Mwindo. However, griots freely incorporate other elements and motifs. These topical elements are intrinsically homeostatic13 in nature, which will mean that they will always try to superimpose the present over the past. One of Mwindos songs, sung in reply to Iyanguras apprehension about the possible consequences of Mwindos act of rebellion against his father goes: Ntiriri-liana has become mubanga-rope, And musara-liana has become a mukendo-bag. Scribe, march! I am going over there in Tubondo; I shall fight over there in Tubondo, Even though Tubondo has seven entries. We are saying, oh Bira! Aunt, give me advice To fight with the people downstream; They carry spears and shields, In Ithimbi where dwelt Birori, I shall die (today), Mushumo. On Ntsuri-hill where dwelt Ruronga, In Munongo where dwelt Shecara, Bitumbi-hill of Shemene Ndura, And the old ones fight because of a wind. On Mbare-hill where dwelt Karai, He was the one who gives much tribute of words. Mbare-hill is together with Irimwe-hill, his kinsman. Tunkundu-hill is together with Nteko-hill, his kinsman. May I mention Mabura Banyore,
13

The homeostatic nature of oral societies were extensively researched by Jack Goody and Ian Watt among the Tiv people in Nigeria and the Gonja in Ghana. Goody and Watt called what they saw among the Gonja people of Ghana a case of structural amnesia whereby the past is forgotten to ensure the stability and the security of the present. This feature is particularly relevant during the handing on of genealogies.

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Homeland of my mothers, Kabotoyo Munyangoro Nyabuke Kamwikoti. (p. 79)

Most parts of the song are excellent examples of narrative digression. The present, personal recollections of the griot are easily juxtaposed along with the mythic narrative of the hero. While the main narrative deals with Mwindos impending journey to Tubondo, the narrator takes liberty to interpolate personal recollection and memory within the song. The place of the narrators origin is Ithimbi, and he also describes the characters he met there or whose fame was well established. (p.79). He also talks about Birori, the diviner or the courageous Karai. This is followed by a complex set of double-names or quid pro quos, as Biebuyck calls them. For example, Kabotoyo Munyangoro, Nyabuke Kamwikoti could be the double names of two individuals, a male and female or it could mean Kabotoyo of the Nyangoro group. (p.80). As we progress more and more towards the end of the song, the narrator becomes more and more personal and humorous. He begins to complain that he has not eaten anything extra-ordinary. What he means is that he has had to eat with several others, which also means he did not receive any special hospitality gift as an esteemed griot. For the Nyanga-folk the epic or kri si overlaps with most other know literary forms, being by far the broadest of them. Apart from accommodating rigidly stereotyped clichs, proverbs, improvised reflections, riddles, songs, prayers and blessings, the text is also a broad compendium of entire Nyanga culture. As a repository of cultural heritage the kri si is particularly significant because it is thought to be filled with traditional wisdom, explaining the causes and effects of natural and psychosocial phenomena, imparting local values and morals as well as interpreting present customs; the epic form is functionally paideic for the community. Hence, when the griot recites and performs the kri si , he is also acting as a transmitter of traditional wisdom which has an epistemic function. Digression serves as the most useful tool through which he can transmit such knowledge.

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III.

ASSOCIATION

The Nyanga form of association is by far the most interesting of its oral techniques. The roots of this form of association can be traced back to Nyanga ritual and is perhaps an integral part of the conditioning of the Bantu griot. Here, the feats of the epic hero Mwindo are likened to the arduous task of performance that the griot has undertaken. Songs sung during the performance of the epic manifest this form of dynamic identification between the epic hero Mwindo and the present griot who is recounting his heroic exploits. This will be made clearer with the help of examples.

Let us get back to the first song of Mwindo that I used to illustrate repetition. For convenience I am quoting a relevant part of it again: Scribe, move on! I am saying farewell to Shemwindo! I am saying farewell to Shemwindo! I shall die, oh! Bira My little father threw me into the drum! I shall die, Mwindo!

Within the text, this song is clearly described as having sung by Mwindo. However, it begins with the energetic exclamation of the narrator, who encourages and tries to hasten up his scribe as well as his compatriots within the performance. Biebuyck writes, The exclamation made by the narrator must be considered in the light of the general circumstances under which he sang the epic. We were sitting with him and patiently writing down the words that he sang and chanted. The encouragement is directed towards the assistant singers and percussionists as much as myself. At the very start of a song or dance, there is a moment of disorganization or hesitation, a searching for exact rhythms and words. During such moments, even in important initiatory situations, all kinds of improvised sentences may be

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sung. (p. 62). The feeling of oneness with the hero Mwindo alters the grammar of narration, with the narrator slipping frequently into the first person from the third quite freely, without any need to account for reasons. Ong writes that in the intensity of performance of The Mwindo Epic, it so happens that in the sensibility of the narrator and his audience, the hero of the oral performance assimilates into the oral world even the transcribers who are de-oralizing the text.14 Such improvised words of encouragement are given frequently within the epic. Mwindos song during his underwater journey through Mukitis realm is very revealing: I am going to my Aunt Iyangura, Iyangura, sister of Shemwindo. Kabarebare and Ntabare-mountain, Where the husband of my senior sister sets byoo-traps. And a girl who is nice is a lady, And a nice young man is a kakoma-pole. We are telling the story That the Babuya have told [long ago] We are telling the story. Kasengeri is dancing (wagging his) tail; And you see! (this) tail of nderema-fibres. ..... If I am at a loss for words in the great song, If it dies out, may it not die out for me there. I cannot flirt with I-have-no-name; They are accustomed to speak to Mukiti (with) bells. The tunes that we are singing, The uninitiated-ones cannot know them. (pp.70-71)

14

Ong, Orality and Literacy, pp. 46-47.

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I have deliberately written parts of the song in bold letters to differentiate between the parts of the song where the narrator speaks on behalf of Mwindo and where he speaks as himself. The lines in bold letters represent parts of the song which are related immediately to the present performance. The narrator for example, is expected to dance while singing the song, waving an amulet of dried banana-fibres on his arm. He compares his dancing with Kasingeri, the name of an animal sometimes given to designate a good dancer (p. 71). This is an example of self-praise which the narrator indulges in, asking the audience to observe the movements of his arms adorned with the fibre-amulets. And by doing so, he also silently slips into Mwindos shoe, who also indulges in much self-praise and boasting, owing to his great powers. The implicit invitation to both audience and reader is to compare between the griot and epic hero Mwindo whom the former identifies with. The lines, We are telling the story/That the Babuya have told [long ago] are also reminiscent of the griot Candi Rurekes descent. Though Biebuyck had met Rureke in the village of Bese in the Nyanga country, the origins of the griot were in Ithimbi, in the village of Koutu. However, it would be improper to think of Rureke as a stranger in Bese , since his maternal uncles (the Baheri ) and his in-laws (the Baba people) were based in Bese. Therefore, he alludes to the origins of his version of the epic, which became assimilated into Nyanga lore. Further, the last two lines of the quoted portion of Mwindos song explicitly allude to the initiation and training of a professional bard who recites the epic. It should be remembered that The Mwindo Epic is a form of the krisi -text. In such a text, the identification between the griot and the hero Mwindo occurs at the level of narration but is deeply rooted in the Nyanga ritual of initiation. Daniel Biebuyck writes in his introduction, Krisi is the generic term for the long epic narratives which celebrate Mwindos featsbut for a small group of performers, Krisi is also a male spirit. When asked why he learned the epic, a Nyanga bard replies that he did so as the result of a compulsory message received in dreams from Krisi Young men who are agnatic relatives, affines and/or blood friends of the accomplished bard learn the epic in an informal way by accompanying him as helpers wherever

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he

goes

to

recite.

(pp.

11-12)

In case the learners fall prey to any kind of misfortunes during their period of accompaniment with the bard, or learn the epic too slowly, the oracles declare his misfortunes owing to Krisi s wrath, who has then to be appeased by following either a number of rituals or learning the epic very fast. Similarly, the Sh-krisi or bard believes that a successfully recital of the epic means that, Krisi , deified, wanted him to learn the epic; to perform the drama adequately makes the narrator strong, protects him against disease and death. The narrator believes he will find in his songs the force that Mwindo himself, the hero of the epic derives from them. (p.12) More examples can follow. Mwindos song of joy when he reaches Iyangura is also embedded in such forms of self-reflexive identification. In this song, Iyangura urges Mwindo to dance, in order to test whether he is invulnerable to the traps planted by Kasiyembe, and as a form of mimetic delivery, the narrator too begins dancing: Kasiyembe said: Let us dance together. Shirungu, give us a morceau! If we die, we will die for you. Kasengeri is dancing with his conga-sceptre, Conga-sceptre of nderema fibres. (p. 74)

While at the level of narrative, this song is sung by Mwindo to provoke Kasiyembe, at the level of performance the narrator calls out to one of the percussionists, Shirungu to play a particular tune. He also emphasizes how difficult it is for him (and his co-performers) to go over the entire performance but he promises to accomplish the same if his audience would be satisfied.

The continual process of identification is carried on throughout the narrative and it is indeed unnecessary for me to quote all such songs. But towards the end of the epic, when Mwindo is

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already the King of Tubondo, an incident takes place which gives rise to a set of songs wherein there is an analogy in action between both the narrator and Mwindo. After, Mwindo kills Kirimu, the Dragon and roasts its eyeballs; his friend and ally Nkuba smells of the roasting and decides to carry him to away from Tubondo to the ethereal spheres. Accustomed to boasting, Mwindo slights Nkubas powers to carry him and breaks into song: Eh! Nkuba, you are helpless against Mwindo Mboru ..... Oh, scribe you, You see that I am already going; My mother who carried me, You see that I am already going. (p. 135)

Finally, when the narrator is worn out by the weight of the performance, Mwindo returns to Tubondo learning many new things from the ethereal spheres. He is warned against killing any animals (or choose death) and has learnt his lesson of humility while being away from his kingdom. The song goes: Oh Mwindo, never try again! From now on may you refuse meat. Nkuba said: Never try again ..... My little father, my dearest one, My little father threw me into palavers. Substitute, replace me now! My father believed I would faint away; He threw me into palavers. (p.140)

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There is a three-way association at work here. The first two are related to the main story while the third is not. Nkubas warning of death to Mwindo against killing any animal of the forest is mentally associable for him [Mwindo] to the near-death experience at the beginning of his life when his little father threw me [him] into palavers, with the qualification that while the first was one he got away from, the second is likely not to be so. The third form of association works between the narrator and Mwindo. Just as the child Mwindo, in course of his struggle against his father was in danger of fainting away (more so in an air-tight drum), so the narrator, struggling with the long narrative, is now in danger of fainting. He therefore, urges one of his substitutes to replace him and finish the story on his behalf for the audience.

The oral mind is intrinsically trained to work in an associative rather than an analytic way, because it is always acculturated to work within a given context. A.R. Luria in his book Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations (1976)15 shows the findings of his fieldwork conducted in the remoter areas of Uzbekistan with illiterate and semi-literate persons to conclude that association and situational thinking were the keys to the understanding of completely illiterate (but those who were aware of a script culture) folk, while even semiliterates had appropriated many of the modes of analytic thought which had evolved with literacy.

It should also be remembered that an oral culture is in itself empathetic to other members of the community and keen on participating in all kinds of communal gatherings, feasts or performances. Nyanga folk are no exception. It is the overt context of communal participation which makes the griot Candi Rureke allude to his co-performers and disseminate traditional wisdom to his audience. It is the same impulse which makes him feel at one with the figure of the epic hero, Mwindo. The reason behind this is simply that it is not possible in a primary oral culture to distance the knower from what is known. Indeed, one can never reach the object of ones knowledge without being empathetically close to it. Mwindo, the object of the narrators
15

Aleksandr Romanovich Luria, Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations, translated by Martin Lopez-Morillas and Lynn Solotaroff (Cambridge, Mass.& London : Harvard University Press). Luria found among the oral subjects he interviewed a strong propensity to understand via association. For example, he found that these subjects identified geometrical figures by assigning them the name of objects, viz. circles could be called as plates or squares as mirrors and so on.

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knowledge has to be empathized with by the knower (the narrator, in this case) in order that he fully understands him and successfully narrate his heroic feats to the audience. Havelocks work16 on the pre-Socratic Greeks is particularly helpful in this context. He explores how, with the reworking of the Greek alphabet from around 700-650 B.C., an objective distance between the knower and the known begins to creep in. This, for Havelock, is the main conflict which troubles Plato. Despite his distrust of writing as a new, emerging mode of disseminating knowledge in the Phaedrus, Plato later becomes aware of the philosophical implications of writing which were to restructure consciousness forever. Platos distrust of poetry in The Republic, writes Havelock, stems from this precise point of the audience identifying with the joys and sorrows of Achilles or Odysseus. With the restructuring of consciousness that came with writing, Plato was early to realize that it would be an effective tool of analytic rather than aggregative thinking, which to him was a necessary step towards the technologizing of the modes of philosophical speculation.

Repetition, digression and association are therefore all stylistic qualities of the pre-literate consciousness. For the Nyanga, who had already been well-accustomed to chirographic and script cultures by the time Biebuyck conducted his fieldwork, the survival of these oral methods of conceptualization in performances were essentially the remnants of a fast-vanishing primary orality. However, even with the advent of writing, the influence of orality on these epic performances are undeniable, largely owing to the weight of tradition and the mode of training of new griots which had been going on throughout Nyanga history. It is therefore quite fitting to conclude that however much a newer version of this epic might be steeped in literacy; certain remnants of primary orality will always remain. And it is these remnants which could turn out to be the threads of connection between the past and the present, celebrating the cradles of the epic to posterity. Well might a new griot repeat words akin to Candi Rurekes when he sings about the feats of the Nyanga hero Mwindo (p.142): A Mubuya (today) rainmaker Formerly did not like to remove dew16

Eric A. Hevelock, Preface to Plato ( Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), 1963

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Remover of oil dew, In Ithimbi, in our country, it is fine: From it came out an epic.

_________

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BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Azuonye, Chukwuma. "Oral Literary Criticism and the Performance of the Igbo Epic." Oral Tradition 9, no. 1 (1994): 136-161. 2. Daniel Biebuyck and Kahombo C. Mateene, ed. The Mwindo Epic. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971. 3. Finnegan, Ruth. Oral Literature in Africa. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. . Oral Poetry: It's Nature, Significance and Social Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. 4. Harvilahti, Lauri. "Folklore and Oral Tradition." Oral Tradition 18, no. 2 (2003): 200-02. 5. Havelock, Eric A. Origins of Western Literacy. Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 1976. . Preface to Plato. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963. 6. Heinge, David. "Oral, but Oral What? The Nomenclatures of Orality and Their Implications." Oral Tradition 3, no. 1-2 (1988): 229-38. 7. Hymes, Dell. "Ethnopoetics, Oral Formulaic Theory and Editing Texts." Oral Tradition 9, no. 2 (1994): 330-70. 8. Jack Goody and Ian Watt, ed. Literacy in Traditional Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. 9. Katz, Joshua T. "Oral Tradition in Linguistics." Oral Tradition 18, no. 2 (2003): 261-62. 10. Kuiper, Koenraad. "On the Linguistic Properties of Formulaic Speech." Oral Tradition 15, no. 2 (2000): 279-305. 11. Lord, Albert B. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960. 12. Luria, A.R. Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1976. 13. Okpewho, Isidore. African Oral Literature. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992.

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14. Okpewho, Isidore. "Performance and Plot in The Ozidi Saga." Oral Tradition 19, no. 1 (2004): 63-95. 15. Ong, Walter J. "Before Textuality: Orality and Interpretation." Oral Tradition 3, no. 3 (1988): 259-269. . Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge, 1982, reprint 2003. 16. Rosenberg, Bruce A. "The Complexity of Oral Traditon." Oral Tradition 2, no. 1 (1987): 73-90. 17. Vansina, Jan. Oral Tradition as History. Madison, Wisconsin & London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.

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