Les epopees d'Afrique noire (review)

Les épopées d'Afrique noire, by Lilyan Kesteloot and Bassirou Dieng. Paris: Karthala/UNESCO, 1997. 626 pp. ISBN 2-86537-677-X.

Students of the African epic now have two major anthologies available to them, one in English by John William Johnson et al. (hereafter Johnson) and the present volume in French. Both books were published in 1997, they present European-language selections from many of the same epics, and one scholar (Stephen Belcher) provides translations in the appropriate directions between English and French for each of them.

In other respects, however, the collections are very different. The Kesteloot-Dieng volume is nearly twice as long and although, like the Johnson work, privileging the Western Sudan, it gives far more attention to Central, South, and East Africa (while omitting the Arabic-speaking North). The English-medium anthology also makes use of various specialists on the epics in question (including the present reviewer) for editing and commentary, while its French counterpart relies far more upon its main editors for such tasks. In neither of the volumes are the texts themselves extensively annotated.

It is difficult to imagine many pedagogical situations in which an instructor could actually choose between these two books, so there is little point in speculating about which one would teach better at the secondary school or undergraduate level. More committed Africanists, who are quite likely able to read both, will probably see the comparison as a toss-up. The editing, and particularly the historical context, of the Johnson collection is somewhat more sophisticated (at least when Kesteloot and Dieng get outside their specialities of Bambara and Wolof culture), but the French collection does offer fuller coverage, not only of African regions but also of textual samples from the epics it chooses. This latter advantage may derive from the fact that most of Africa's "epic belt" lies in countries formerly under French or Belgian colonial rule, thus providing many more translations of such texts from their original language into French than into English.

In contrast to Johnson, Kesteloot and Dieng also provide a lengthy introductory essay on the African epic and this discussion is worth examining not only in its own right but as a key to the strengths and weaknesses of the entire work. A major goal here is "to lift it [the epic] out of the dense field of 'African Studies' so as to integrate it into that of literary studies" (12). This effort produces very valuable results, even casting light on a problematic selection in the Johnson anthology, "The Epic of Sara" (114-23; see also Jansen). This love story performed by a female griot is far better understood in the way Kesteloot and Dieng rather innovatively suggest for such long oral narratives, as a "romance" "in the medieval [European] sense of the term" (50).

On the other hand, the authors go a bit too far in distinguishing the public from the domestic in defining the epic realm, in part because they make no use of Bird and Kendall's seminal essay that points out the identification of the Mande hero with the concept of fadenya, linking his public deeds tot he household conflicts between husbands, co-wives, and sons. One may also feel unease at Kesteloot and Dieng's own insistence on linking epic and myth, especially when they use the very problematic "Mande Creation Myth," posited (invented?) By Germaine Dieterlen, as a master motif for Sunjata.

While almost all of the texts in this book are based on direct transcriptions from oral performances, Kesteloot and Dieng do include lengthy excerpts from Masisi Kunene's Emperor Shaka the Great, a work which they acknowledge to be a modern written composition. The introduction to the anthology gives a well-informed explanation for this choice, as well as the general links between literacy and orality in African epic performance; but such issues could be inserted more effectively into the commentaries on the individual selections.

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