Introduction

At its conference held in Banjul, Gambia on July 11–15, 2004, the International Society for Oral Literature in Africa (ISOLA) took a decision to broaden its horizon and its agenda so as to include the oral literatures and traditions of peoples of African descent outside the African continent. Re-elected president of the society for a second term of two years (2004–2006), I began my new term by exploring possible sites in the African diaspora for the society’s sixth conference sometime in the summer of 2006. Of places in the United States and the Caribbean that came easily to mind—largely because I had had my closest contacts with this area since relocating to the USA for well over a decade—I took a random decision to consult an old Nigerian friend and colleague, the well-known poet and scholar Funso Aiyejina of the University of the West Indies in St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago. Funso lost no time in urging his dean and colleagues to support ISOLA’s diasporic initiative and make an offer to host the 2006 conference. Our society warmly welcomed the offer, setting the conference dates for July 20–23.

In the address that I gave at the opening ceremony on July 20, I took as my point of departure the scene in Derek Walcott’s epic poem Omeros in which the poem’s hero, the St. Lucian fisherman Achille, makes a metaphysical (or dream) journey back to Africa to re-cognize his origins. Confronting the phantom of his father “Afolabe” in a communal gathering at the ancestral village, Achille confesses that though he has forgotten the name he had before the fateful experience of the Middle Passage, he and his kind “yearn for a sound that is missing” (3.25.3). I then informed my audience that

in holding its sixth conference in the Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago, the International Society for Oral Literature in Africa (ISOLA) has been prompted by this noble goal of reconstituting the divided African family and its traditions that were disrupted by the unkind forces of history. Anyone engaged in the study of the oral traditions of Africa and its diasporas, especially in the western Atlantic, soon comes to be struck by the similarities and divergences between them and indeed to realize that the traditions of the diaspora retain certain traits that no longer exist in Africa the way they did in the past. In many senses, therefore, it no longer makes sense to study the oral traditions of Africa without a healthy curiosity about their relationship to parallel forms existing among African-descended peoples elsewhere. So in embracing the African diaspora in its agenda, our society is driven not simply by a political purpose (to re-unify a divided racial outlook) but also by a healthy professional mission.

My relationship with Funso Aiyejina was the immediate reason I set my sights on Trinidad and Tobago as the venue for our conference. An equally compelling reason was the record of the island’s most reputable anthropologist and folklorist, the late Dr. J. D. Elder, who had devoted much of his scholarly career in exploring the roots of aspects of Caribbean culture in Africa. Continuing my address, I spoke of Elder’s pioneering work in this regard:

He may not be the first to explore the links between the traditions of Africa and the New World. He was, it is true, preceded in this connection by black scholars like W. E. B. DuBois and Lorenzo Turner and by other Americans like Melville Herskovits and William Bascom. But Elder threw himself into his researches like an Achille, son of “Afolabe”—a Yoruba man—seeking to retrace his ancestral roots with the combined commitment of a native son and a scion of the folk. Whether in his studies of song games played by children or of the calypso music tradition, Elder was driven by the urge to recapture the “sound that is missing,” as Achille would say, and reassert the compromised achievement of the dispossessed folk.

After a few more remarks about Elder’s research visits to Africa—in one of which...