The Use of Oral Sources in African Church History

Dr Philippe Denis
(University of Natal)


Africa is no historical part of the world", Hegel is reported to have said. Closer to us, in 1965, a celebrated English historian, Hugh Trevor Roper, made the claim that "Africa has no history, merely the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes".

As one can imagine, such provocative statements have elicited strong responses both in Europe and in Africa. African history has now become a respected academic discipline. But the point remains. How does one write the history of a continent with virtually no written records - at least until the colonial times - and very little archaeological remains?

The view from the mission compound

The answer, until recently, has been to write the history of Africa on the basis of the only written documents that were available, that is, documents produced by Westerners or, at best, by Westernised Africans. This explains why, so often, the history of Africa reflects "the view from the district commissioner's verandah or the mission compound" (Prins, 1992, 217-218).

African church history is faced with the same problem. A relevant, accurate, all-embracing history of the Christian communities in Africa, and particularly in Southern Africa, still needs to be written. One could summarize the limitations of the existing church history literature in the following way:

a) overemphasis on institutional aspects of Christian life

Most writers are excellent at writing, sometimes with great details, the history of institutions: arrival of missionaries, establishment of synodal or episcopal structures, building of churches, schools and hospitals, conflicts of jurisdiction, ecumenical endeavours, etc. At the same time, they tend to write the history of particular denominations, churches or religious congregations. Cross-denominational phenomena are often overlooked. Very little attention is paid to the daily life of the believers. We rarely know how the social, political and economic context impacts the life of the church. Also absent from the history books is the popular culture of the Christian communities: family prayer, grass-roots liturgy, traditional ceremonies, processions, funerals...

b) outsider's versus insider's point of view

The same writers rely, sometimes exclusively, on evidence produced by European or American missionaries or people trained by missionaries. As stated earlier, this is a consequence of the primacy given to written sources. The indigenous point of view is ignored or distorted. Considerable attention is given to the white missionaries' whereabouts and to the development of the settler churches. The indigenous people are seen as the object, rather than the subject, of evangelisation. Little is said about their contribution to the mission of the church and the way they incorporated and reconstructed the Christian heritage to make it acceptable from the point of view of traditional culture.

c) domination and resistance

The great bulk of the archives reflect what James C. Scott calls the public transcript, that is, the "open interaction between subordinates and those who dominate". The written sources document what happens "on stage": how bosses and workers, masters and slaves, missionaries and converts, leaders and ordinary citizens interact. The hidden transcript, that is, what the people in hegemonic position on the one hand and the dominated on the other hand usually hide, escapes attention.

Uncritical writers do not realize that, by only paying attention to the public transcript, they miss half the story. Like any social group, the Christian communities experience situations of hegemony. Church history writers are particularly prone to espouse the views of the dominant elites. They ignore the resistance practices of the indigenous people within the churches themselves. Such practices do take place in the church but they are usually concealed. They take the form of subtle and ambiguous gestures of defiance. It is only in extreme circumstances that conflicts become public. When this happens, as in the case of the formation of the Ethiopian churches at the end of the 19th century, wrong interpretations are often given because the dynamics of hegemony and resistance are misunderstood.

Oral tradition and oral history

The use of oral sources has the potential to enhance the study of church history in Africa. They concern what tends to be hidden - the spoken message, fugitive by nature. But how is this message transmitted? Specialists of orality distinguish here two approaches and two methodologies.

a) oral history

Oral history is based on hearsay or eyewitness accounts about events and situations which are contemporary, that is, which occurred during the lifetime of the informants. Oral historians base their work on interviews. They select witnesses and interview them on recent events. Usually written or printed information is also available. The oral data serve to check other sources as these serve to check them.

b) oral traditions

Oral traditions, by contrast, are not contemporary. They have passed from mouth to mouth, for a period of time beyond the lifetime of the informants. The expression "oral tradition" applies both to a process and to a product. The products are oral messages based on previous oral messages, at least a generation old. The process is the transmission of such messages by word of mouth over time until the disappearance of the message (Vansina, 1985, p.3).

Among traditions, Vansina distinguishes different classes, according to the further evolution of the message:

"A first class consists of memorized messages and within it one distinguishes messages in everyday language (formula, prayer) from messages subject to special language rules (poetry). Memorized traditions behave very differently over time from others. Among the latter, one distinguishes again between formal speech (epic) and everyday language (narrative). Narratives themselves belong to different classes according to the criterion of factuality. Some are believed to be true or false, others are fiction. Factual traditions or accounts are transmitted differently - with more regard to faithful reproduction of content - than are fictional narratives such as tales, proverbs, or sayings (Vansina, 1985, 13)."

The past of precolonial societies is mostly known through oral traditions. But this does not mean that oral traditions play no role in modern society. In their book The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, Ioan and Peter Opie showed that a playground riddle can pass intact through long chains of transmission. Of 137 chants recorded in 1916, they found 108 in use in the 1950's. In one case, a rhyme about a grenadier, they have versions which carry the stable elements back to 1725 (Prins, 1991, p.131).

The diva and the understudy

As we have seen, history as an academic discipline tends to rely almost exclusively on written sources. Critical methodology, conventional historians say, primarily applies to archival material. Oral data appear as imprecise and unreliable. As a result, written sources are always given the preference. Oral sources only come as a second best, when no written evidence is available. Written and oral sources are to one another what the diva is to the understudy. When the star cannot sing, the understudy appears. When writing fails, tradition comes on stage (Vansina, 1985, p.199).

In order to understand the importance given to written sources, one must remember the context in which history became an academic discipline. The historical method, as taught today in universities and academic institutions, first developed in the 19th century. Positivism was then the dominant ideology. Confidence in science was limitless. Historians were convinced that sooner or later a "definitive" history would be written. One of the leading historians of the time, Ludwig Ranke, found a phrase to express this ideal. Our task, he wrote, is to write history wie es eigentlich gewesen ist (as it really was). To achieve this objective, historians had to follow rigorous critical methods. This implied, in Ranke's mind, the use of written sources. Generations of historians were trained along those principles. "The historian works with documents", wrote Claude Langlois and Charles Seignobos in their classic manual, Introduction to the Study of History (1898). "There is no substitute for documents: no documents, no history". Written documents have an undisputable advantage: they are immoveable. One can submit a letter or a diary to a critical examination at different periods of time. This helps reducing the bias that each individual reader inevitably introduces. In history, independent confirmation is conclusive of proof. By contrast, the spoken word is ephemeral. Verba volant, scripta manent. Words fly away, writings stay. There is no guarantee, say the advocates of written documents, that the messages conveyed by oral tradition are transmitted faithfully.

Is this true for Africa? The fact that African culture is predominantly oral questions the primacy given to written sources for the study of the African past. Written sources only reflect the point of view of the people having access to literacy. What about the non-literate people who constitute the majority of the population? Even for urbanised Africans, orality is an essential part of culture. They can read and write, but important aspects of their lives are completely alien to the written sphere.

A history of the church exclusively based on written documents faces the three limitations outlined earlier. Firstly, it overemphasizes the institutional aspects of Christianity, to the detriment of the social and cultural dimensions of church life. Secondly, it reflects the outsider's rather than the insider's point of view. The contribution of the indigenous people to the life of the church is ignored or misunderstood. Thirdly, the dynamics of hegemony and resistance is overlooked. To use Scott's language, history is written in reference to the public transcript. The hidden transcript - what happens offstage - completely escapes attention.

Truly, the use of oral sources raises questions. But written documents also require critical evaluation. History as an academic discipline has developed an appropriate methodology over the years. Historians learn how to assess the authority and the authenticity of the documents that are submitted to their attention. They examine the document itself - internal critique - as well as the context and the circumstances of its production - external critique. As much as possible, they try to cross-check the information by consulting additional texts. The message of a document must not be taken at its face-value. Writers often distort reality. They sometimes lie.

The same critical skills are needed for oral sources. All that is required is a specific methodology, comparable to the one developed by Ludwig Ranke and his disciples for written sources. Jan Vansina's pioneering book, Oral Tradition, opened the way more than thirty years ago. A specialist of precolonial culture in Zaire and Rwanda, Vansina was the first to reflect critically on the use of oral tradition in anthropology. His definition of oral tradition is now widely accepted.

Oral history as a movement

Similar developments affected the historical discipline. Oral history, as a distinctive historical movement, only developed by the middle of the 20th century. But as Paul Thompson pointed out in The Voice of the Past, history has always made use of oral sources. "Oral history is as old as history itself. It was the first kind of history" (Thompson, 1988, p.23).

Historians of the past fully acknowledged the importance of oral sources. In the eighth century for example, Bede the Venerable wrote in his History of the English Church and People: "I am not dependent on any one author, but on countless faithful witnesses who either know or remember the facts, apart from what I know myself" (Thompson, 1988, p.28).

When Jules Michelet came to write his History of the French Revolution (1847-1853), he systematically collected oral evidence outside Paris. His intention was to counter-balance the evidence of official documents with the political judgment of popular oral traditions:

"When I say oral tradition, I mean national tradition, which remained generally scattered in the mouths of the people, which everybody said and repeated, peasants, townsfolk, old men, women, even children; which you can hear if you enter one evening into a village tavern; which you may gather if, finding on the road a passer-by at rest, you begin to converse with him about the rain, the season, then the high price of victuals, then the times of the Emperor, then the times of the Revolution" (ibid., p.22).

Michelet was a renowned historian. He was professor at the Sorbonne and became the chief historical curator of the National Archives in Paris. As we have seen however, academic history gradually turned away from oral history. Ranke, rather than Michelet, became the inspirer of the young generation. After Michelet, oral sources continued to raise interest, but outside the historical profession. In Germany and Scandinavia, thousands of folksongs and popular stories were collected by amateurs of folklore and traditional literature.

This movement is part of what Peter Burke calls "the discovery of the people". We must save the stories of the past from oblivion, wrote Otmar, a German folklorist who collected folktales in the Harz Mountains around 1800:

"In fifty or hundred years, most of the old folk tales which still survive here and there will have disappeared [...] or have been driven into the lonely mountains by the industry of the plains and towns, whose inhabitants play a more and more lively part in the political events of our age of change (Burke, 1978, p.15-16).

In America, the antecedents to the oral history movement also go back to the 19th century. Sociologists conducted interviews on the frontier settlement as early as in the 1860s. In the 1920s the Chicago school of sociology applied to the study of the inner-city slums the techniques of direct interviews and participatory research. W.I. Thomas and F. Znaniecki's pioneering account of Polish immigration, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918-1920) was entirely based on live stories. Their method was introduced in Poland with great success. In post-war Poland, memoir competitions have become a common form of popular culture.

It is only after the Second World War that the historical profession began to show interest in the methods developed by folklorists and sociologists for more than a century. Oral history was established - or rather re-established - as a technique for historical documentation in 1948 when an American historian, Allan Nevils, began recording the memoirs of persons significant in American life. His method proved immensely attractive. Oral projects were initiated in all areas of historical research, such as political history, history of the working class, Indian history, black history and women's history. In 1965, 99 oral history research centres had been opened. By 1973, they were 316. A professional association, the American Oral History Association, was founded in 1967.

Oral history also developed in Britain where a Oral History Society was founded in 1971. Paul Thompson and his colleagues of the University of Essex spearheaded the movement. In their view, oral history is more than a technique of historical investigation. It is a means for transforming both the content and the focus of history:

"By introducing new evidence from the underside, by shifting the focus and opening new areas of inquiry, by challenging some of the assumptions and accepted judgments of historians, by bringing recognition to substantial groups of people who had been ignored, a cumulative process of transformation is set in motion. The scope of historical writing is enlarged and enriched; and at the same time its social messages change. History becomes, to put it simply, more democratic (Thompson, 1988, p.7-8)."

A combined approach

Paul Thompson's vision of a history "from the underside" has a great appeal to African writers, particularly in the field of church history. They all have reasons to share his enthusiasm for oral history. In Africa more than anywhere else the limitations of document-based history are apparent. But a word of caution is necessary. The much-needed enterprise of a church history "from below" has nothing to gain from a dogmatic and narrow-minded approach to oral history. Written sources and oral sources are not in competition. They complement each other. A good interviewer makes the best possible use of the existing written sources. By knowing the background of the informant, he will be able to ask him the right questions. He may challenge his version of the events if it differs from, say, the newspapers or a given correspondence.

Oral and written sources contribute in a different manner to the writing of history. As we have seen, the former are traditionally used as material by historians. The latter only recently became the subject of a critical methodology. The "oral history movement" came as a reaction to the disaffection oral sources had suffered for a long time in the historical profession.

Yet, the distinction between the two types of sources is partly artificial. This is due to the fact that oral sources often end up by being put in writing. In the process, they lose their status of oral sources and join the more conventional category of written documents. Many written documents contain hidden oral evidence. This is particularly true for the ancient times. Our knowledge of precolonial Africa derives, almost exclusively, from oral traditions recorded and transcribed by European travellers and missionaries between the 16th and the 19th centuries.

When David Livingstone visited Zumbo, a former Portuguese feira on the Zambezi river, in 1860, he only found the ruins of a chapel with a broken bell. From that evidence, he concluded that the missionary enterprise had been a complete failure. This was due, according to him, to the missionaries' inability to eradicate slavery (David and Charles Livingstone, Narrative of an expedition to the Zambezi and its Tributaries, 1865, p.203). But two years later, in 1862, Manuel Pacheco, a Portuguese official with a taste for anthropology, also visited Zumbo. The story Pacheco got from local informants was quite different. During the first half of the 18th century, he was told, a priest called Pedro de Trinidade who was also a farmer and a mine owner had saved the population from starvation during a draught. This made him become very popular. It was believed that his spirit was still hanging around in the area ("Uma viagem de Tete ao Zumbo. Diario de Albino Manoel Pacheco", Boletim Official do Governo Geral da Provincia de Moçambique, n$30, 28 July 1883, p.220).

The anonymous account of Maqumusela Kanyile's death kept among the papers of St Guthbert's Mission at Tsolo in the Transkei is another example of hidden oral evidence. Kanyile was a convert of the Norwegian mission of Eshowe, in Natal. A soldier in the army of Cetshwayo, he was executed shortly after his baptism in 1876. The author got his information from interviews with the missionary who had baptized Kanyile, Do Oftebro, and from the martyr's companion (Millard, 1993, p.90-91).

Assessing oral evidence

It would be naïve to think that the testimony represents a pure distillation of past experience. Oral sources, like any sources, must not be taken at face value. They need critical evaluation. A good oral history methodology can improve the quality of the interviews and thus minimize their inevitable shortcomings.

The first problem with oral evidence is its lack of precision. A written document is, by definition, stable. An informant can give different versions of the same events. Particularly worrying is the lack of precision in chronology. Historians think in serial time, as measured by the calendar and the wrist-watch. But serial time is not the only sort of time that people use, particularly in Africa. Very important things may be said to be very old - or very new - telescoping or elongating, depending upon the context and upon present purposes (Prins, 1991, p.125).

But in history chronology is essential. Improved interviewing techniques represent a partial answer to the problem. The interviewer can help the informant to get the right chronology. Another solution is to check the interview by outside sources. Oral testimony is to be evaluated with all the sources pertaining to the theme.

A second difficulty is the descriptive nature of the oral testimony. The historian's function is to advance towards a fuller understanding of the past. The informants usually do not share this preoccupation. They are primarily concerned with issues that, from the historian's point of view, seem marginal. They live in their own world and have their own mental categories. This, of course, contributes to the richness of their testimony. But personal stories can also fall into insignificance. Oral historians need to be aware of this danger. A good interviewer raises the testimony of an individual informant to the status of historical evidence. The interviewee does not have to be an important figure. On the contrary, he can be an ordinary person. The quality of the interview depends on his ability to communicate with the right words the meaning of his life. The interviewer plays a crucial role in the process. Like a midwife, he assists the informant in bringing to light all the dimensions of his life experience.

The third difficulty is the tendency to reconstruct the past. The restructuring of data is the most vexing problem of oral history. Consciously or not, informants often try to embellish the past. They distort their narratives in an effort to justify their past actions post facto. Public figures are particularly prone to such self-indulgence. They are careful not to say anything that could tarnish their image. They minimize or even deny the existence of conflicts in their constituencies. Oral testimonies tend to validate the social institutions of the time. They reflect, to quote James Scott once again, the public transcript of the social actors.

The same difficulties affect the writing of church history. Like any other leaders, bishops and priests are tempted to give the official version of events. They are uncomfortable with conflicts, particularly when these have left painful memories.

Ordinary believers can also, of course, arrange their stories, in accordance with the dominant orthodoxy. The difficulty is compounded when the story involves the founder of a denomination or a religious congregation. It is the very identity of the group that inappropriate revelations could threaten.

The fourth difficulty that must be reckoned with is the unconscious use of literary sources. The informants' memory is filtered through subsequent experience. They think they remember, but in fact they reproduce the version given officially after the event. Instead of sharing their experience, they repeat stories read in the newspapers or in any other written source. The written documents, in such a case, are said to feedback oral tradition. Uncontaminated oral tradition, writes Vansina, simply does not exist (Vansina, 1985, p.156).

The task ahead

These critical remarks should not discourage would-be oral historians. Restructuring and omission of data do happen. One needs to be aware of all the possible distortions the stories he gets from his informants can have. At the same time, the oral testimony offers a freshness and a wealth of details which is not otherwise to be found. Oral history has a better chance to give access to the hidden transcript than document-based history. To get the full story, many conditions need to be met. Oral history is no easy job. But if the interview is well prepared and if it is conducted with all the necessary skills, the informant may accept to share in confidence the story that nobody has ever written. This will open the way to an entirely new way of writing the history of the church. Oral history is the only way to give the Christian people of Africa a role in the writing of their own history.

Bibliography

Burke, Peter, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, London: Temple Smith, 1978.
Millard, Joan, "Some further perspectives on oral tradition", in Studia Historiae Ecclesiasticae, XIX, 1993, p.89-99.
Prins, Gwynn, "Oral History", in Burke, Peter (ed), New Perspectives on Historical Writing, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991.
Scott, James C., Domination and the Arts of Resistance, New Haven and London, 1990.
Thompson, Paul, The Voice of the Past. Oral history, 2nd edition, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Vansina, Jan, Oral tradition as history, London: James Currey, 1985.