[In the following comparative essay, Wright examines the use of oral history and mythology in Bound to Violence and Ayi Kwei Armah's Two Thousand Seasons.]

The transmutation of oral literary forms into written ones is an uncertain and unpredictable process, and the survival of the styles and narrative techniques of the oral story-teller into the modern African novel is an especially haphazard affair. The graphic hyperbole of the traditional griot or oral historian is, for example, as pervasively in evidence in novels with contemporary urban settings, such as Soyinka's The Interpreters and Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, as are his other stock-in-trade in historical novels which deal with traditional cultures in an earlier period: for example, Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, where the idiomatic oral wisdoms which carry the main themes are encapsulated marginally in the proverbs, fables and folktales that punctuate the narrative. Some historical novels, such as Yaw Boateng's novel of the Ashanti Wars The Return, use oral devices and ideas hardly at all. Some of the most adventurous experimentation with oral narrative forms is not, in fact, to be found in the historical novel proper, set in a specific and limited period, but in two visionary, half-mythical reconstructions of whole eras of African history: Yambo Ouologuem's Le Devoir de violence,¹ translated as Bound to Violence, and Ayi Kwei Armah's Two Thousand Seasons.² This article will focus on the relative gains and losses of these two exercises in simulated orality—the one largely negative and destructive, the other corrective and constructive—and on their polemical implications for the literary status of oral tradition.

Yambo Ouologuem's idiosyncratic pseudo-history of the barbaric cruelty and oppression of Sudanic Africa incorporates a sardonic pastiche of oral narrative which faithfully reproduces the traditional griot's pietistic formulae and rhetorical invocations along with his occasionally gruesome hyperbole. The novel, which even claims to derive from and to quote the works of individual oral historians, begins at the breakneck pace of the griot who is narrating something for the umpteenth time:

Our eyes drink the brightness of the sun and, overcome, marvel at their tears. Mashallah! wa bismallah! … To recount the bloody adventure of the niggertrash—shame to the worthless paupers!—there would be no need to go back beyond the present century …

What is more interesting, when the elders, notables, and griots, peering wide-eyed into the bitter deserts, speak of that Empire, is the desperate flight, before God's implacable “blessing,” of its population, baptized in torture … torn by internicine rivalries and warring with one another for the imperial power with a violence equalled only by the dread it called forth.

… When the Immortal One makes the sun—diamond of the house of His Power—set, then, along with the tales of the oral tradition, the elders intone the famous epic (the value of which some contest, because they deny Saif's Jewish descent, insisting that he was a plain ordinary nigger) written by Mahmud Meknud Trare, a descendant of griot ancestors and himself a griot of the present-day African Republic of Nakem-Ziuko, which is all that remains of the ancient Nakem Empire …

(pp. 3, 4, 6)

The note of critical dissent from a contestable oral tradition is present from the start. The footnote on the first page of the novel directs the reader towards the traditional definition of the griot as “a troubadour, member of a hereditary caste whose function it is to celebrate the great events of history and to uphold the God-given traditions (p. 3). Ouologuem's re-invention of the Saharan history of “Nakem” is not, however, a celebration of the divinely-sanctioned epic exploits of the hereditary caste of feudal overlords from which the griots come, but a savagely ironic indictment of that caste's vicious despotism. Far from imparting a solemn dignity to the modern griot's discourse, the incongruous juxtaposition of oral rhetorical devices with the Islamic Saifs' sadistic cruelty, duplicity and exploitation brings a devastating irony to bear upon both the events narrated and the mode of narrative:

In reality the nobility, warriors in the days of the first Saifs (Glory to the Almight God), had become intriguers for power: Amen, At the death of the accursed Saif (Blessed be the Eternal One!), conscious of their own need of stability (So be it!), they had flung the people into a bath of pseudo-spirituality, while enslaving them materially. (And praised.)

(p. 23)

The parenthetical exclamations and prayer-tags borrowed from oral narrative are brought into disrepute and their seriousness undermined by the author's sardonic attachment of them to unworthy objects. Ouologuem's mock-heroics are a double-edged sword, which, at the same time as it lays bare the supposed but faulty heroism of the subject, also belittles the narrative form which heroises it and implies doubts about its moral and historical reliability. Thus it comes as no surprise when it is revealed that the myths and legends of many of the tales in the oral culture are no more rooted in indigenous folk-lore than the phoney antique masks collected by Shrobenius and the bogus “mixture of pure, symbolic and religious art” concocted for him by the witch-doctor Sankolo. Like the art and religion, the tales too are mere fabrications designed by Saif al-Heit himself to dupe gullible and suspiciously-motivated European ethnologists into taking a spuriously heroic, “Afrolotrous” view of African culture:

Madoubo … spoke indefatigably of symbols, as did his father, who spouted myths for a whole week … Shrobenius's head teemed with ideas. Reeling off spirituality by the yard, the men paced the courtyard with anxious, knit brows … Saif made up stories and the interpreter translated, Madoubo repeated in French, refining on the subtleties to the delight of Shrobenius, that human crayfish afflicted with a groping mania for resuscitating an African universe—cultural autonomy, he called it—which had lost all living reality … African life, he held, was pure art, intense religious symbolism, and a civilization once grandiose …

(pp. 86–87)

As the farrago served up to Fro/Shrobenius by Saif selects only those elements of the African past which glorify it, Ouologuem's version of history, by hypothesizing an alternative oral tradition which has the Saifs themselves as subjects, selects only those elements of the past which debase it. In the author's self-conscious and partly self-mocking counter-creation of Sudanic history as a chronicle of primitive cruelty and enslaved misery, an acrobatic fancy juggles with one outrageous invention after another, with the result that the response to Saif's cynical inventions itself becomes suffused by a Saif-like arbitrariness and deadly whimsicality. Both versions are imaginative constructs which put biased constructions on the past to suit the political and polemical needs of their authors, and the mirror-image correspondence they acquire means that the story which we are reading raises reflexive doubts about its own authenticity. Ouologuem's counter-fictions—the Semitic origin of the Saifs, the cunning manipulative control of the colonists by the colonized, and the ruling caste's restriction of a French education to the serf-class—are all either of doubtful authenticity or deliberately and grossly unhistorical. The implication is that, given the immensity of the African historical vacuum assumed by the author and the impossibility of historical objectivity, this particular griotatary guess at Saharan history is probably as accurate as the Frobenian version or that celebrated in works like the Malian epic Sundjata. Ouologuem does not share the confidence of Armah, in Two Thousand Seasons, that remembered legends preserved in oral form by the communal memory may be at least as reliable, if not more reliable, than recorded histories of selected “fact” kept by the colonizing powers. The Ghanaian writer sets out earnestly to contest and correct an otherwise valued oral tradition, the Malian writer glibly to undermine it entirely.

In the manner of other projected histories which make use of oral memory and relate the odyssey of a whole people—Armah's novel and André Schwarz-Bart's Le Dernier des justes, the formal prototype of Ouologuem's book—Bound to Violence handles the notion of some kind of racial ancestry and destiny running across the centuries and periodically resurfacing in the lives of selected individuals. In Ouologuem's novel, however, the ongoing continuum is nothing so positive as the indigenous spirit of communalism which is the developing force of Armah's “Way” or Schwarz-Bart's inherited burden of redemptive suffering. It is simply the unchanging and apparently unchangeable feudal order of Nakem which has miraculously survived into the twentieth century: the barbaric tyranny of the hereditary Saifs, on the one hand, and, on the other, the perpetual servitude for which the doomed “Négraille” or “niggertrash” develop a fatalistic “imbecile vocation.” The choice of oral forms is integral to the author's vision of history insofar as these forms, like Nakem's history, are irredeemably bastardized: Koranic parentheses are interspersed with, and finally out-number, the Bantu ones. The flamboyant iconoclasm informing these literary manoeuvres insists that there was never a time when indigenous values and forms were separable from those of the Islamic Saifs: the exploitative habits of the early negro-African overlords anticipated the atrocities of the Arab invaders with whom they were happy to collaborate. In spirit, the appalling Saifs have ruled from time immemorial and are our contemporaries and successors. The hope that “the golden age when all the swine will die is just around the corner” is derided as “a false window offering a vista of happiness” (p. 174). The conclusion declares that “Saif, mourned three million times, is forever reborn to history beneath the hot ashes of more than thirty African republics” (pp. 181–82). The novel dismisses with the same contemptuous zeal the idea of a pristine, pre-colonial value-structure, indigenously and authentically African, prior to the Arab and European incursions: this is regarded as another deluded European myth about Africa. Critics have observed that Ouologuem, whilst disallowing the Arab claim to indigenous antiquity in Saharan Africa, takes no interest in destroyed or corrupted indigenous values outside of the undifferentiated feudal context of overlord and slave and, in Soyinka's words, “still leaves the basic curiosity about black historic reality unsatisfied.”³ For some measure of satisfaction on that score one must turn to a comparable African historical novel. Armah's Two Thousand Seasons.

To approach Armah's daring experimentation with the techniques of African oral narrative from the critical assumptions governing discussion of the European novel is to mistake both the formal design and the spirit of the book. Few novels create deliberately unmemorable characters who are merely functions of a collective will or ramble episodically over vast spans of time in pursuit of racial destinies. Even fewer novels start from the premise that certain groups, nations or races and their colonial underlings have engrossed most of the human vices and are wholly predictable because helpless before the evil of their own natures. Abandoning critical investigation for partisan invective, Armah makes no claim to criticize his “destroyers” and “predators” and their African quislings but simply hurls abuse at them, more after the fashion of the Ewe halo than that of Western satire. These features are, more often, the stock-in-trade of epic, saga and chronicle, both in the African oral tradition of the griot and in its written European equivalents: namely, those Homeric and Norse marathons which similarly trace the migrations of whole peoples and celebrate the founding of nations and empires. Doubtless, some Western scholars would claim, however, that the latter use stock epithets with more ironic discrimination and with a more novel-like, fair-minded openness to the variety of human experience than are to be found in Two Thousand Seasons.

Armah's self-consciously staged griot-like discourse is concerned to correct the method of narrating African history as well as the history itself. There are, therefore, some significant departures from story-telling traditions. The author's avowedly anti-elitist standpoint shuns the griot's customary glorification of the matchless deeds of past heroes which is derisively parodied by Ouologuem and, as Isidore Okpewho has observed, rejects the supernatural along with the superhuman and denies the narrator's single creative personality any domineering proprietorship over the events narrated.⁴ Armah's discourse makes communal and egalitarian ideals not only potentially realizable in the contemporary world but so certain to be achieved that the goals can be described as having already been won. His world-view is essentially secular and humanist. His narrative strategy emphasizes the griot's self-effacing assumption of a common identity with both the specific audience which his tale is designed to educate and the characters of the tale itself. Thus Two Thousand Seasons is not only about reciprocity: its technique enacts reciprocity between the story-teller, his tale and his listeners.

The plural voice of Armah's newly-Africanized narrative form formally announces its agnostic viewpoint in the opening chapter:

We have not found that lying trick to our taste, the trick of making up sure knowledge of things possible to think of, things possible to wonder about but impossible to know in any such ultimate way. We are not stunted in spirit, we are not European. … What we do not know we do not claim to know.

(p. 3)

In Armah's first two novels his scepticism about the differences between the present and an ultimately irretrievable past contributed to an ironic and pessimistic vision. In Two Thousand Seasons, however, he capitalizes on the uncertainty of the past and turns it to positive ends. The narrator does not proceed to a cynical negation of all retrieved “authenticities,” ironically thin though the line may be between the supposed rational ideology of “the Way” and its rivals, those sentimental mystifications and nostalgic hankerings for unreal pasts which are presented as betrayals of the Way's essential aims. His didactic purpose is to cure an errant Africa of its diseased distrust in its own indigenous forms and values, not to reproduce the exact historical origins and developments of those forms and values. It is accompanied by an awareness that the communal memory drawn upon by the “remembrances” of oral narrative is no more unreliable than recorded history, especially when the written record is a European one coloured by colonial prejudices, and that a starkly monochromatic portrait of white devilry and black victimization is at least compatible with Africa's narrow experience of the white man as slaver and colonizer, as material and spiritual destroyer. The dogma of the Way works from the premise that one made-up ethnocentred history, serving one set of ideological needs, is as good as or better than another one which serves different and alien needs. Two Thousand Seasons, as Soyinka has observed, stands in the same relation to the work of black ethnologists and historians such as Cheikh Anta Diop and Chancellor Williams as Rider Haggard and Conrad do to the Eurocentric ethnology of Western scholarship. The Prologue's rhetoric of fragmentation and dismemberment issues a reminder that it is the fragmented part of Africa's history—the colonial period which cut the continent off from its past—that, until recently, has alone constituted “African history” in Western study. Of course, the past is not a total void into which any fiction may be projected. There is a bedrock of verifiable fact to provide yardsticks for authenticity and even Armah's highly postulative, theoretical history, though less concerned with the past than with promise for the future, retains a strong attachment to historical, time-bound reality. The griot's didactic purposes may, however, license historical inaccuracies such as the notions, in Two Thousand Seasons that kings, classes, private property and even adult genesis-fables were all foreign importations (pp. 61, 64, 82, 95, 96), and African hunting skills merely defensive (p. 14). The poet-historian of the African oral tradition is, if only by way of compensation, as entitled to his vagaries of chronology and causation as the Western historian is to his. Armah's story-teller, for example, mixes anticipation and retrospection so freely as to leave less than clear the accounts of those indigenous disruptions of “reciprocity” which appear to pre-date the Arab invasions and of the odd infiltration of the fleeing community by the twisted values of its tormentors.

Armah's innovative, pseudo-oral narrative is, of course, a simulated exercise, a literary affectation. It is rendered in English, not in Akan or Kiswahili, and, since communal readings of novels written in English are rare in Africa, the traditional communal intimacy between the artist and his audience is here a mere fiction of the plural voice. Two Thousand Seasons is the kind of “novel” that a griot would have written if he had had access to literary form. In it Armah artificially resolves the problems of the contemporary African artist by setting his tale in an indeterminate past when the artist was not yet alienated from his society but still immersed in a collective ethos, and then using the griot's voice for the vicarious advocation of communal commitment and popular revolution in a period when this is no longer the case. Since the book's message is aimed not at a traditional audience, however, but at those anglicized Africans who have ventured furthest from what Armah considers to be Africa's true self, there is no necessary inconsistency between its form and its initial African publication. Neither does it matter much that the narrative, in its ideological urgency, draws not upon local tribal memories of a specific community but on the hypothetical race-memory of a fictitious pan-African brotherhood whose names are taken from all parts of the continent: the migrations of the People of the Way suggest the legendary origins of the Akan of Ghana in the medieval Sudanic kingdom of the same name, whilst their acephalous communalism seems to have more to do with the Igbo than the monarchical Akan and the concept of “Reciprocity” would appear, in the light of the book's Tanzanian genesis, to owe something to the ethics of Tanzanian tribal cultures utilized by Nyerere's Ujamaa.

The basic problems created by Two Thousand Seasons are formal, aesthetic ones. The oral tale is designed to be said, not read—to be declaimed, not decoded—and its greatest strengths seldom survive its transposition to written form. In Armah's imitative version, oral in conception but literary in expression, the passage between forms is not helped by an erratic and unhappy assortment of styles, ranging from the oracular and invocatory to the popular and idiomatically American: the harem women effect “the discombobulation of the askaris” (p. 31) and the two mad fugitives from the Arab “predators” have to be kept “from trying more homicide” (p. 47). Armah strains to reproduce an illusion of orality and, specifically, of vatic utterance through a formidable battery of rhetorical questions, lamentations, frenzied alliteration—“This is no hurried hustle hot with sweaty anticipation” (p. 158)—and portentous-sounding adjectivally-launched inversions: “Painful was the groping after lost reciprocity. Fertile had been the rule of women …” (p. 26). The attempt frequently over-reaches itself, however, and produces a lugubrious, almost self-parodying rhetoric which is at home in neither the oral nor the literary form. Traditionally, oral narrative edits itself by recantation and cancellation, never by omission—once something has been said, it exists ineradicably—and is apt to convey emphasis quantitatively rather than qualitatively: by the frequency rather than the manner of expression. This failure in economy, translated into written form, leads inevitably to rhetorical redundancies and to what, in novelistic terms, is some of Armah's most unreadable writing. Here is the Way's crude codification of the subtle phenomenology of perception which, in the first novel, aligns sensory and synchronic continuums with group-consciousness:

The disease of death, the white road, is also unconnected sight, the fractured vision that sees only the immediate present, that follows only present gain and separates the present from the future, shutting each passing day in its own hustling greed.

The disease of death, the white road, is also unconnected hearing, the shattered hearing that listens only to today's brazen cacophony, takes direction from that alone and stays deaf to the soft voices of those yet unborn.

The disease of death, the white road, is also unconnected thinking, the broken reason that thinks only of the immediate paths to the moment's release, that takes no care to connect the present with past events, the present with future necessity.

(p. 8)

The point laboured here, which is more about time than perception or community, is not really given threefold expression but is monotonously restated in the same form without any regard for the chosen vehicles. The narrator does not, after the fashion of the traditional griot, attempt to draw and elaborate upon the peculiar attributes of sight, hearing and thought, which might just as well have been taste, touch and smell. The treatment of the ideology of the Way is similarly marked by a vagueness of definition and a disregard of concrete particulars which are alien to the oral tradition. The obsessive repetition of the Way's sacred trinity of neologisms—“Reciprocity,” “Connectedness’ and “Creation”—is accompanied by so little explication of what they practically involve as a lived social pattern that they eventually become lifeless verbal tags, self-enclosed abstractions which fail to translate into anything beyond themselves (Armah has greater success with the more exploratory treatment of “Inspiration” and “Manipulation” in The Healers). In Two Thousand Seasons the prose too often collapses into a lustreless demagogic jargon—“our way, the way,” “the destruction of destruction,” “the unconnected consciousness”—which is at its most stark in the formulation of the Law according to the Way, the ten commandments as handed down to Isanusi:

One way is reciprocity. The way is wholeness. Our way knows no oppression. The way destroys oppression. Our way is hospitable to guests. The way repels destroyers. Our way produces before it consumes. The way produces far more than it consumes. Our way creates. The way destroys only destruction.

(p. 39)

The scriptural chant suffers from a kind of hermetic banality, a rhetorical stutter which repeats but reveals little and exhorts without enlightening. Only in the Prologue do Armah's poetic powers appear to be at full stretch and to do any real justice to his oral models. Paradoxically, the dazzling inventiveness and exuberant hyperbole of the griot are more in evidence in the author's first novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, than in Two Thousand Seasons, where the literary compromise with oral form, far from being enriched by it, results in a comparatively restricted and impoverished verbal code.

Armah's notion of history, like the largely imaginary model of oral narrative which serves as its vehicle, is theoretical and imprecise. Essentially, the two historical novels are a therapeutic exorcism, at both the private and public levels. On the level of private penance, the alienated individuals of the early novels are implicitly reproved and outgrown in the harsh treatment of Dovi—“The selfish desire of the cut-off spirit was so strong in him” (p. 183)—and the selfless sacrifice of Abena: “There is no self to save apart from all of us. What would I have done with my life, alone, like a beast of prey?” (p. 111). At the public level the therapy is twofold. Firstly, the systematic direction of hatred at Arab and European whites exorcises the sensations of helplessness induced by colonialism and clears the air of negative feeling so that the work of construction may begin: it is a catharsis which prepares the mind for the creation of radical alternatives to the societies left by the imperialists. Secondly, the “destruction” which the whites inflict and which, to the narrator's delirious glee, they eventually draw upon themselves, provides the relief for the oppositional, mainly negative definition of the Way. Whatever the Way is in itself—and there are times when it seems no more than a convenience category for lost virtues—it is initially everything that “destruction” is not: “We are not a people to nurture kings and courtiers. … We are not a trading people” (pp. 95, 98). “Leave the destroyers' spokesmen to cast contemptuous despair abroad. That is not our vocation. That will not be our utterance” (p. xvii). The Way, forgotten and not yet rediscovered, is essentially an unknown quantity. Almost everything that happens in Two Thousand Seasons is a deviation from the Way insofar as it is not engendered by any major weaknesses inherent in the Way itself, and the retention of the mystery enables the author to blame all the evils that befall it on outside forces. Armah has anticipated the problem of definition in his early essay on African socialism:

Negative, anti-colonial feeling is relatively easy to come by. At any rate it does not demand any genius. The development of positive programmes and ideologies is a much more difficult proposition.⁵

In practice, this means that the rather drab and joyless communalism which the novelist, with at least part of his mind, wants to believe was the indigenous African way of life emerges as something that is more non-European, and anti-European, than specifically and recognizably African. In fact, certain features, such as the total rejection of family and kin urged upon Dovi and Araba Jesiwa in the name of a higher ideal and the overriding of territorial instincts by abstract ideological loyalties, would appear to be highly un-African. Here, as in his early novels, Armah is concerned to question received ideas about “authentic” traditional values but without putting anything positive in their place.

In Two Thousand Seasons Armah does not so much record history as re-invent it. The successful slave rebellion is history as it might and should have been, and as it would and will be once the conditions of the Way are adhered to. At the contrived finale of his last-published novel, The Healers, the historical wheel is brought to a figurative full circle by the enforced regathering of the black peoples of the world in white captivity. The reality of that captivity and the persistence of the askaris in the work of the whites make the wishful speculations of Ama Nkroma at the closing dance less than convincing:

It's a new dance all right … and it's grotesque. But look at all the black people the whites have brought here. Here we healers have been wondering about ways to bring our people together again. And the whites want ways to drive us further apart. Does it not amuse you, that in their wish to drive us apart the whites are actually bringing us work for the future? Look!⁶

The ideal society of Densu's dream and the egalitarian mini-Utopias erected around Isanusi's “Way” and Damfo's “Inspiration” in Armah's two histories are essentially imaginative hypotheses which make destruction and alienation the preserve of the present whilst harmonious fulfilment belong exclusively to the past—a notion which, in the author's early novels, is the target of considerable irony whereas, in the histories, it is upheld and celebrated. The socialisms of the fifth grove and the healing enclaves are, self-consciously, reality-negating mytho-poetic systems. They are not experienced life-forms to be retained or restored but ideal projections that must be believed in to be created. Their ethical manifestos belong to a higher, speculative order of reality and provide a frame of reference from which the prevailing destruction in the existing reality can be condemned and surmounted. Armah, as griot-like activist, joins in the struggle between creation and destruction depicted in his tale and paradoxically valorizes his new models for progress by inventing an ancestry for them, thus urging the creation of what does not yet exist by insisting that it has always existed. These two orders of reality—the actual and the postulative—are evident in the naming of the characters in Two Thousand Seasons. The rogues' gallery boasts names and accompanying deeds which refer, directly or satirically, to historical personages—Kamuzu to Hastings Kamuzu Banda of modern Malawi, Koranche to the Portuguese-controlled puppet Kwamina Ansa, “the Golden” to Mansa Musa I of ancient Mali—whilst those who serve in the struggle for African freedom—Dedan Kimathi, Irele, Soyinka—are merely items in a list of names. Projected pan-African virtues are thus vaguely opposed to specific historical villainy. Against the stark reality of the latter, the “Way” remains elusively, and evasively, theoretical.

Notes

1. Yambo Ouologuem, Le Devoir de violence, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1968. Translated as Bound to Violence by Ralph Manheim, London: Heinemann, 1971. Page references are taken from the English Heinemann edition and are given parenthetically in the text.

2. Ayi Kwei Armah, Two Thousand Seasons, London: Heinemann, 1979. Page references are given parenthetically in the text.

3. Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976, p. 106.

4. Isidore Okpewho, “Myth and Modern Fiction: Armah's ‘Two Thousand Seasons',” African Literature Today, 13, 1983, pp. 4–12.

5. Ayi Kwei Armah, “African Socialism: Utopian or Scientific?,” Présence Africaine, 64, 1967, p. 15.

6. Ayi Kwei Armah, The Healers: London, Heinemann, 1979, p. 309.