Orature is here and everywhere, healthy, equal and always alive

Recently, the self-serving British art establishment, as its own literature suggests, “shocked the art world” by nominating a spoken word artist, Tris Vonna-Michell, for the prestigious Turner Prize.

Shocked? I doubt it. True, the Turner works well to annually ask, “What is Art?” This necessary question has been posed since time immemorial, often being answered with an open-ended, “No one can say”. 

But the establishment Turner seems to exist merely to make art saleable, and it does this by predictably nominating a wider, gimmicky clutch of artists each year.  Its annual debate increasingly seems affected and cynical, leading us to conclude: “Art is that which makes money for business-type investors, and its market is annually expanded by this very prize, which forcibly extends the definition of art as Nakumatt might extend its branches”.

Art that truly pushes the boundaries of creativity happens elsewhere, despite the establishment, with no desire to be appropriated by this establishment.

But, perhaps the Turner’s inclusion of a spoken word artist does do something a little different.  Even if it’s just a stunt, perhaps we may nevertheless read it more interestingly than it deserves, to make a point about oral and written literature, those supposedly contrasting forms that have featured as antagonists in postcolonial African debates from at least the 1960s to today.

Colonised divide
Oral literature, or orature, is old and indigenous; written or scriptal literature is imported.  Or so we are told.  There is a major problem stemming from the manner in which colonial-era types falsely contrasted these ‘two’ forms: written literature as modern; orature as traditional. 

The perceived absence in East Africa of the former and the prevalence of the latter suggested to the early settler that colonised African lands were ‘primitive’. 

More than any other perceived lack, the absence of written texts in colonised countries betrayed their inferiority to a country, Britain, that was performing imperialism during the height of national pride in its own literature.  These invaders constructed a binary between the oral and the literate; then, they tipped it to form a bigoted hierarchy.

Inevitably, the British didn’t consider the highly literature cultures of coastal Kenya to be “indigenous”, even though they’d been here for hundreds of years.  Instead, such problematic cultures were identified as “alien” to the region and themselves imported, bringing a form of civilisation that tried but failed to penetrate the inland. 

The British would succeed in spreading their “superior” Word (in all its written incarnations, through the Bible and exploitative written laws) where the “Arabs” failed. 

Nothing, not even the Swahili epic Al-Inkishafi or other classics, would shake the fixed oral/literate hierarchy set up by the British, a hierarchy that reinforced the coloniser/colonised divide.   

It’s only recently that Western scholarship has accepted that literate cultures in Africa (say, the Tamazight, Nubian and Ge’ez) are as “indigenous” as oral cultures, not aberrations. 

Such studies conclude that there is no predictable temporal progress from oral to literate cultures, but rather that both have existed contemporaneously for centuries, with, in addition, certain African societies having become literate prior to several Western cultures. 

A few African scholars had been arguing this for years, but the ears of the Western Academy were closed.  The falseness of the Imperialist oral/scriptal hierarchy has therefore been revealed; it was established for ‘reasons of political expediency’, to help justify the exploitations of Imperialism.

Profoundly sexist
This recent scholarship demands a new respect for (African) orature from the West and a new self-reflection on the part of African commentators. 

When orature was denigrated in often racist fashion by colonial anthropologists, those early African liberationists who rightly played the anti-colonialism card could do so by strategically reversing the terms of the oppressor’s argument, by calling orature ‘good, authentic and pure’, as opposed to written literature, which was supposedly everything opposite.  

Things remained antagonistic and confrontational.  But now, orature, due to this new acceptance of its equality and coevality with the written word, can no longer be set up by African scholars as ‘only good’. 

Many African scholars are consequently studying our orature more critically; our own brightest, Evan Mwangi, has pointed out how oral literature can be profoundly sexist and otherwise prone to enforcing conformity from minorities, meaning it’s as likely to oppress its own putative community members as any other form of textuality. 

Moreover, the Kenyan habit we still have of publishing works of orature as ethnically pure (as Kamba Oral Literature or Kikuyu Oral Literature, and so on) works not to liberate, but rather to erect ideological boundaries between peoples who are not as perfectly separate as certain leaders might have us believe. 

The dangers of this neocolonial publishing convention in an ethnically and politically divided region, are obvious.
 Oral literature is no better or worse, and no more authentically ‘African’, than written literature. 

To believe otherwise would be to fall into the colonial trap of hierarchies and (racial) purities, which achieves nothing good. 

There is resilient orality not only in new popular song forms from our region, but also in every written text, including the West’s own literate poetry, the sound devices of which (from alliteration to vocalic rhyme) echo those of the ancient bards. 

Indeed, orature and scriptal literature are historically, linguistically entwined, like non-identical twins. 

Perhaps the Turner’s nomination of a spoken word artist is symbolic of this previously-suppressed fact of equality and kinship. 

Perhaps we can read it as Britain’s late, dullard realisation that (our African) orature is, and always was, something as fine and admirable as literate poetry. We always knew this. 

Britain is catching up. Of course, those who nominate folk for the Turner have no idea this is what they are doing; chauvinistically, they probably have no awareness of African orature at all.  It is we who can perceptively read this into their nominations. 

For the Turner judges, their move just makes it easier for the art world to make money.  For us, their move proves we’ve always been right: orature is here and everywhere, healthy and equal. 

And it always will be.