Nyama and Heka: African Concepts of the Word

"Speech is not in people's hands. People are in the hands of speech."

—a Mande proverb

Introduction

Knowledge of the West African griot epic has advanced enormously in the last fifteen years with the publication of volumes by Thomas Hale, Scribe, Griot, Novelist: Narrative Interpreters of the Songhay Empire¹ and Griots and Griottes: Masters of Words and Music;² Stephen Belcher, Epic Traditions of Africa;³ and Barbara G. Hoffman, Griots At War: Conflict, Conciliation, and Caste in Mande.⁴ Despite the richness of these studies, the concept of nyama, the Mande word for occult "power" or "means," has remained a secondary concern of African cultural criticism. Fascination with the figure of the griot has tended to overshadow the problem of nyama, or, in some cases, generic considerations have taken precedence over matters of the occult. In the first instance, the critic risks subordinating nyama to a Western idealism, or a Platonic logic, in the second, to an old-fashioned essentialism, or an Aristotelian logic. However, the extent to which nyama may be construed as a force generative of both complexes remains unarticulated. By assuming that nyama flows from the abysmal no-place of the blood-filled receptacle, and not the Platonic simulacrum of the human soul, many hitherto unresolved enigmas about the griot may be resolved. While it is true that the griot must "learn the secret of occult power [or nyama]," to quote John William Johnson, as is true of Sundiata Keita in the Mande Epic,⁵ knowledge of nyama—so that it does not destroy those who wield it—does not necessarily imply Cartesian mastery. I do not refer to a logocentric concept of nyama, but a psychē upon which the logos necessarily depends, a psychē that is blowing wind before it becomes mind. There can be no question of any new master term to anchor African cultural criticism. Instead, nyama must be construed as a word that may be replaced by any number of substitutions. If nyama is rethought as a properly Afrocentric complex, the most obvious candidate would be the Egyptian term heka , but one might also insert the Biblical ruah. in its place (assuming the hypotheses of Sigmund Freud and others that the great lawgiver hailed from Egypt),⁶ or—as Johnson proposes—the Afro-Islamic "equivalent" of barakah might be synonymous with the Mande term nyama.⁷ There are plenty of terms that show the dispensability of the word nyama, including the Greek psychē before the Socratic invention of the soul. While the focus in this essay is on the Mande concept of nyama, and more generally the Mande world of the Bamana,⁸ Soninke, Khassonke, Maninka, and other groups, the argument being made here applies to the larger griot world made up of many other peoples in the region. For instance, equivalent Sahelian terms include the Soninke ñaxamala, the Wolof ñeeño, the Fulfulde nyeenyo, and the Toucouleur-Fulfulde nyaama.

It is difficult if not impossible to discuss the Mande term nyama without subordinating it to Greek metaphysics, a fact that necessarily complicates—without vitiating—the "thesis" of my essay. After years of studying Songhay culture in Northern Niger, Paul Stoller makes a number of important discoveries about Sahelian conceptions of the word, but he ends by rejecting what he calls the "extreme" conclusions of his own research. Instead, Stoller opts for a "reconstruction of ethnography" based on the "imperfect debris" of phenomenology.⁹ In Griots at War, Hoffman observes that "there is no standard grammar or pronunciation [in Mande society] that underlies all others as a Chomskyan-style deep-structure, no monolithic 'competence' to which the analyst can make appeal."¹⁰ Hoffman nonetheless opts for a conventional ethnographic study of the griot's role in Mande society without pursuing the implications of her findings. Hoffman subordinates nyama to a humanist ethnography. The occult word is useful to both Stoller and Hoffman in revealing the...