Epic Traditions of Africa (review)

Epic Traditions of Africa. By Stephen Belcher. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999. xxii + 276. $19.95.

In the last decade, English language scholars of the griot tradition have made major contributions to the field of African studies, often eclipsing their French-speaking counterparts. Because the Sahel zone has long been under the control of French and French-speaking peoples, the wealth of cultural information gathered by ethnographers, colonial administrators, and French-trained scholars was available only to the rare specialist in the Anglophone world, a linguistic barrier that the French were not particularly anxious to dissolve. Until Alex Haley's Roots aired in the early 1970s, the griot was virtually unknown in North America, despite the United States's large African-American population. In general, the rise of Anglophone expertise in African oral traditions parallels the ascendancy of U.S. hegemony in the former French "protectorate," but it can more specifically be traced to the development of John F. Kennedy's Peace Corps program, which provided numerous young Americans with extended exposure to hitherto "unknown" African societies. In the case of the Sahel, three of the region's most prolific American scholars all served in the Peace Corps, where they learned African languages that became the basis of much of their academic lifework. Thomas Hale, author of Scribe, Griot, & Novelist (1990) and Griots and Griottes (1998), served in Niger, as did Paul Stoller, author of numerous studies of Songhay peoples, while Stephen Belcher, author of Epic Traditions of Africa (1999), joined the Peace Corps after receiving his doctorate and taught at the University of Novakchott in Mauritania. We are only now, perhaps, beginning to appreciate the wealth of Kennedy's legacy, as senior scholars like Hale and Stoller approach retirement age, and the trajectory of their writings on the Sahel can begin to be measured. It is therefore remarkable that, whatever the objective value of this growing body of scholarship--and there can be no doubt that U.S. achievements in this field have been stellar--the political implications of such findings have seldom been discussed (with the notable exception of Hale and Stoller's jointly authored "Oral Art, Society, and Survival in the Sahel Zone"). In two recent studies, Hale's Griots and Griottes and Belcher's Epic Traditions of Africa, the generic impulse in this field has taken a curiously encyclopedic turn, as these scholars seek to synthesize the vast amount of information gathered over the last twenty years. As Belcher puts it, "The traditions of African epic in all their variety offer a wealth of material for the analytic and thematical exploration of general notions of epic" (190, my emphasis). What seems to be forgotten, however, is the latent ideological content embedded in literary forms like the encyclopedia, the fact that genres inevitably "secrete ideology," to quote Louis Althusser. As a new era of U.S. involvement in West Africa dawns, it is perhaps worth pausing to remember that the French conquest of Northwest Africa was baptized by the publication of volume 23 of Description de l'Égypte (1809-1823), an encyclopedia personally commissioned by Napoleon.

My main objection to Belcher's Epic Traditions of Africa is its effort to situate the griot tradition within an ostensibly "neutral" body of knowledge, what Belcher guilelessly refers to as "the larger community of humanities" (190). Belcher does not ask, however, who belongs to this community of English-speaking readers, and what specific uses its members may have for this knowledge. African epics are worth studying because they "portray an African past that is too little known and . . . can evoke the poetry of African languages" (192); but, Belcher elides the question of who will enjoy this "evocative" and "unknown" poetic tradition, nor does he tell his readers what is at stake for West African peoples as this knowledge is disseminated throughout the English-speaking world. Such questions are of the utmost urgency for the citizens of Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and other nations of the Sahel...