Isidore Okpewho

Oral Tradition: Do Storytellers Lie?

I N O N E O F T H E M A N Y arresting moments of The Ozidi Saga, an epic tale from the Ijo of the Niger Delta in southern Nigeria, the narrator, Okabou Ojobolo, has just finished presenting Ozidis encounter with Ogueren, the formidable monster of twenty limbs. Then comes a new opponent, Badoba, bragging that he will dispose of Ozidi without any difficulty; the heros earlier opponents performed so poorly against him because they lacked the necessary resources for taking him on. Okabou then paints a fittingly terrifying picture of Badobas physique: his head touches the sky and the length of his sword is interminable. In light of the picture Okabou painted earlier of Ogueren, a comparison between him and Badoba becomes inevitable, as we can see in the following exchange between the narrator and a member of the audience:
Spectator: Okabou: Audience: Was he greater than Ogueren? What, greater than Ogueren? The heroes and heroes there how can they be compared? Each had his own might. Right. (Clark-Bekederemo [1977] 1991:14748)1

The episode illustrates well the challenges facing oral narrators in the all too immediate circumstances of their performance before a discerning audience. A careful reading of The Ozidi Saga reveals that Okabou enjoyed considerable empathy from his ethnic fellows among the audience, whose patriotic pride was greatly fired by this performance of their traditional epic in an environment (Ibadan) far from their Delta homeland. But the spectators question clearly indicates the always-present risk of an aesthetic discrepancy between narrator and audience: the latter are less easily drawn than the former into
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the fantastical world of the tale, being frequently inclined to take a realistic view of the images conjured by the narrator. This does not mean that our spectator thinks any the less of the narrator. It may simply point to an effort on the spectators part to come to terms with the highly nuanced outlook the narrator is trying to present with his choice of figures that are not exactly part of the landscape of everyday life; in other words, the spectator is struggling to make a mental switch from objective to mythic reality. Yet these narrators, even the highly skilled ones among them, have been so customized by their training and practice in the craft that they make these aesthetic demands of their audience even in tales located squarely in the world of everyday reality. In this paper, I wish to examine some of the narratives I have collected over the years from my part of Nigeria, the Delta State, in light of the aesthetic discrepancy I have suggested between narrator and audience. For although I agree that the audience, being arguably less subject than the performer to the emotive charge of the tale, are entirely entitled to take a more rational view of its contents, I fear their expectations may not sufficiently address some of the perspectives from which the narrative art endeavors to reorder the often complex signs (cultural, political, and otherwise) of our varied existence. Over the past three decades, I have undertaken an extensive project of recording tales told in areas where I grew up. Although I started out collecting any tales I could find, I decided quite early to concentrate my efforts on the subclass of epic, or heroic narratives. The decision was not hard to make. I come from the section of Nigeriathe midwestern corner of the country, bordered to the east by the River Niger and to the south by the Atlantic Oceanwhere the old kingdom of Benin had flexed its military and political muscle most powerfully. So strong was the influence of Benin in the lives of the people that a safe majority of tales found in any community in this area even tales entirely about animal charactersare likely to be set in old Benin. So I had before me a wealth of stories about the various wars the communities had fought with Benin in defense of their interests and their pride. Their heroes were invariably men endowed with either extraordinary physical qualities or mystical resources, sometimes with a combination of both. I have no tale, in my collection, in which any of these communities lost a war to Benineven though we know

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that given the kingdoms superior military organization, it stood a much better chance of beating each of them in a fight. Most of the narrators from whom I collected the tales have been men, and there are reasons for this gender bias. For one thing, since the old days women have been accustomed to tell tales of a more educational or moralistic qualityespecially tales about animals and humans and the lessons to be drawn from their interactionsrather than tales of military confrontation. This is partly because warfare was considered a male affair but also partly because in many of these confrontations the warriors equipped themselves with certain occult resources that are available only to men. For another thing, in more recent times, as I have pointed out recently, women have become so deeply engaged in the entrepreneurial endeavors of the postindependence economy that they show little interest in some traditional pastimes, like storytelling; hence, if you went to the village enquiring for the best known narrators, you would be as likely to be pointed by women as by men to male ones (1998:14142). The point I make here may not be very convincing to feminist judges of such matters, and I am quite prepared to be challenged for not having tried hard enough to exploit more feminine talent than I seem to have done so far. But the male interest in matters of war, especially in a traditional African society, can hardly be denied. In the particular case of male narrators who may never themselves have fought in any war, the opportunity to experience, even vicariously, the glory that comes from the martial life evidently has an appeal that may be gainfully invested in the narrative performance. Of the several narrators I worked with in the villages, I spent most of my time with Charles Boy Simayi of the village of Ubulu-Uno, whom I first met in June 1980. Now nearing eighty, Simayi grew up, like most men his age, in the conflict-prone atmosphere of the polygynous family and in the hard but chastening life of the rural economy. Thanks largely to his innate industry as well as a keen eye for the valuable examples of enterprising elders, he found himself mastering a variety of skills such as farming, hunting, and herbal and occult medicine, as well as allied traditional arts like carpentry, architecture, craft-making, storytelling, and musicianship. In the 1980s, when I recorded most of my oral tales from him, I observed him on occasions at work on his farm, building a block of the only secondary

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school in his village, and constructing a drum commissioned by one of the orchestral groups in a neighboring village. It was clearly in recognition of his eventful life, as well as his varied skills, that he was appointed to perform not only counseling roles in the internal administration of his community but even diplomatic duties, such as settling disputes between citizens of the village living in faraway places. About ten years ago, he was honored with a highly prized chieftaincy title as paramount herbal doctor of his village. I learned this shortly after I relocated to the U.S. in 1991, and I rejoiced in his good fortune. But the result of his new position is that he can no longer engage in activities like music making and storytelling. So, when I took home a camcorder in 1994, hoping to capture a narrative performance by him on video, I had to content myself instead with a matter-of-fact account of his life. * Of the stories I recorded from Simayi in the eighties, one of the most significant concerns the well-documented war between his people (the Ubulu) and the kingdom of Benin.2 Briefly, an invitation had been announced for herbalists in the Benin empire to offer their services in saving an incumbent Oba (king) from dying, like several others before him, from a congenital disease. All the herbalists who failed the qualifying test (for the opportunity to cure the Oba) had been executed, but the Ubulu expert prevailed and finally brought the Oba to good health. As a reward, the Oba gave him his daughter (Adesua) to take home as his wife. On his way home, Ezemu was confronted by a key imperial official (Ezomo), who questioned the offer of a Benin princess to a chief from the outbacks. Ezemu smiled away the insult, but on getting home he cast a spell that instantly spirited the princess all the way from Benin to his side. When this trick finally came to light, the Ezomo persuaded the Oba to declare war on the Ubulu. Against the entire imperial command, Ezemu simply led seven hunters, fortified with charms, in a redoubt that destroyed not only the army but also a formidable array of Benin witches, who were summoned by the Oba when everything else had failed. In the end, the Oba was forced to sue for peace, by whose terms a territorial boundary was drawn between the Benin and Ubulu nations that Benin was enjoined never to violate. In concluding his story, Simayi is doing his best here to cope with the reactions of some of us around him:

Oral Tradition: Do Storytellers Lie?

Narrator: Okpewho: Narrator: Okpewho: Narrator:

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That was how they fixed the boundary at Abudu. The boundary between the Bini [people of Benin] and And . . . and the Ubulu. I see. Its at Abudu, which is what entitles us to claim Abudu, we of these parts. Thats where Ezemu fixed the boundary. Mr. Enyi [percussionist]: Its the white man that changed it as it is now. Narrator: They didnt change itit remains in the same place till tomorrow. Benin dare not overstep it, and pledged never to kill the Ubulu people again. Okpewho: I see. Narrator: So . . . when that recent war came, And they killed Ubulu people, their kings began to die. They no longer fulfill their days, and they have continued to send emissaries to settle matters. That was where I took my leave of them, and returned.3

As I pointed out above, the heroes of these anti-imperial war tales I have collected from the west-Niger Igbo are invariably men like Ezemu, endowed with either physical or mystical powers, very often both. With respect to Simayis narratives, although he has never fought in a war, the fact that he is himself a distinguished herbalist brings an element of personal interest to his representation of Ezemu and other heroes who undertake these delicate tasks of national defense.4 Although I had no reason to suspect that he had skewed the details of his accounts in an effort to dignify his profession, I thought it might be interesting to see what kind of image he cut of himself in experiences analogous to the kinds his heroes faced. After he told me the Ezemu story, we took an entertainment break, during which we discussed certain details of the story. At an opportune moment, I asked Simayi if there were any difficult encounters he had himself survived that he cared to tell me about. He reflected briefly, and indeed he seemed to have trouble distinguishing between being an eyewitness of an event and being actually involved in it. He then performed a story in which, although he was not a principal agonist (in terms of being directly affected by the outcome of the event), he played some form of a contributory role. The story is about a competition for a chieftaincy title between two young men, Azujionye and his kinsman Odobukwu, in the neighboring town of Ogwashi-Uku, under the paramount rulership of Obi

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Izediuno. These title-taking rituals were courtesies traditionally extended to sons and daughters of the community who had distinguished themselves in some endeavor or service, and they were designed to reward them for raising the image of the community in the eyes of the world. In more recent times, however, there has been fierce competition for these honors in some places by entrepreneurs aiming to boost their image and draw attention to their material success. In this particular case, the competition takes the form of each rival trying hard to outdo the other not only in the size of his entourage (which includes herbalists employed to ensure the candidates victory) but also in the quantity of foodstuffs and game carted to the residence of Obi Izediuno to influence his decision. The ruler, overwhelmed by this frenzied rivalry in wealth, summons one of his ministers, Odafe, to help him settle the issue. In turn, Odafe, whose mother happens to come from Simayis village of Ubulu-Uno, sends for Simayi to join him in the task. In a brazen display of favoritism, achieved by manipulating an officiant at the ceremony (boy in the passage cited below), Odafe and Simayi decide in favor of Odobukwu by determining that he was the first to present himself to Izediuno, when in reality they have succeeded in helping themselves to some of the bounty Odobukwu has brought to the ruler. So Izediuno, scarcely unaware of the intrigue of his advisers, pretends he is merely following their well-considered counsel in awarding the prize to Odobukwu. Simayi concludes his tale with Izediunos feigned irritation at the whole troublesome affair (the first line is spoken in a loud voice):
Narrator: THE KING THEN ROSE UP, SAYING TO THEM, WAIT A MINUTE! Let no one come here to bother me any more. Since, in my first offering of the kolanut [a traditional entertainment], This boy took it and gave to this man [Odobukwu], Those who curse me are only cursing themselves: The clear conscience is free of all indemnity. Thats as far as I went with them, and returned, while [the winner] claimed his chieftaincy. Welcome! Welcome to you all! Er, they say that when a fart gets out of hand, the arse is bared wide for it! (Narrator burst out laughing at the amused satisfaction of Okpewho.)5

Audience: Narrator:

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There was a particularly awkward moment in the performance of this tale. When Simayi reported how he had accepted the invitation to join Odafe in the counseling mission, a member of the audience (Mr. Kifodu), sitting nearby, promptly asked him, O yu nke a? (You meanyou here?), emphasizing his misgivings with a pointed hand. Undeterred, Simayi replied straight away, Mmu agwa i nu! (Im telling you!). Presumably, Odafe had summoned Simayis help in this business because of the latters acknowledged wisdom not only in consultative but also in mystical mattersboth rivals had summoned herbalists to their aid. But for the ruling council of Ogwashi-Uku to admit an outsiderone, for that matter, from a much smaller communityinto its decision-making business, however well-endowed that person may be, certainly taxes the credibility of the narrator a little even for such rural communities. It was no doubt to prevent any more awkward confrontations that Simayis chief percussionist, Mr. Enyi, dropped an aside to the narrator, Jua ajuju nakuku nke o./ Gba nkiti (Ask questions in this regard./ [Or] be silent [about it]). But Simayi brushed him aside, Na-aku if y aaku! (Keep to your striking!). When Enyi urged silence once more shortly after, Simayi simply ignored him. Kifodus presence clearly put some risk, perhaps a political one, on Simayis claims about participating in an affair relating to the politically superior community of Ogwashi-Uku; the percussionist was probably trying to save his leader from any problems that might arise from his interference in such complex matters.6 Although I had found this story a compelling performance musically and otherwiseit was not exactly the kind of story I had in mind: I had asked for one in which Simayi was a central agonist. I therefore put the question a little more pointedly to him, causing him to narrate to me an event that happened in his village during the Nigerian civil war (196770). It is interesting that although he had narrated the Ezemu and Izediuno tales against the background of percussive music provided by his two regular accompanists, the civil war story was totally unaided by music. On the face of it, the incident illustrates the highhandedness for which armies in such war situations are generally notorious, but it had a special relevance for Simayis little community and clearly for himself as its champion. Briefly, the villages grand matron (Omu) was scheduled to be given the most distinguished female honor in the land (Ada) on an appointed day. A day or so before then, the

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village awoke to discover that its entire stock of cattle, from which a few animals were to be chosen for ritual sacrifice and entertainment at the occasion, had vanished; inquiries revealed that the stock had been commandeered by a detachment of the Nigerian (federal) army stationed within the grounds of a high school in Ogwashi-Uku, about five miles away. Nobody in Ubulu-Uno was willing to risk a mission of recovery to the dreaded Nigerian army. Simayi himself flinched when the appeal was made to him; nonetheless, he assumed the task, though not without arming himself with adequate charms for the risks ahead. The soldiers, true to their reputation, put some obstacles in Simayis way, at one point ordering him to stand up in order to be shot. However, intervention always managed to come in the nick of time. In the end, Simayi was allowed by the soldiers to recover his own cow, paving the way for fellow citizens he had brought with him to make their own claims. Although the soldiers continued to prove a menace even when the rites of installation of the Ada had proceeded, the village was ultimately restored to peace, thanks to its prominent son, who had put his mystical powers as well as his self-assurance at its service. Simayi here begins his conclusion of the tale with the angry words of the federal officer in charge, berating his men for retarding the federal war effort with their unruly conduct:
THIS IS NOT THE WAR-FRONT. Its not necessary for you to bring the war to the rear, since we have already left this place behind. So, you dont know what youre taking on. Go to the war-front, if you love fighting, go over there and fight. And stop making war on . . . civilians. That was the order given, and we thus saved our heads. The Ada was installed, And that was where I took my leave of them, and returned. (Okpewho 1992:191)

This story posed yet another test to Simayis credibility in presenting historical reality, but this time he enjoyed ample support from a particular member of the audience. Raphael Ajidoe, a wiry, pint-sized man of about sixty-five, had frequently punctuated Simayis narration with comments that the narrator politely indulged. A member of the party that accompanied Simayi on the rescue mission, Ajidoe was visibly agitated as the story was being recorded; at one point, unable to contain himself, he interjected, We were the ones who

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suffered all this [physical abuse by the soldiers]!causing Simayi to pacify him with a softly spoken, Its all right (Okpewho 1992:191). No sooner had the story ended and we had entered into a discussion of the issues raised, than Ajidoe burst into a quite emotional account he was a stammererof the brutality he had personally suffered from one of the soldiers on his return from the military camp. He felt personally hurt by the experience, because two of his sons had fought on the federal side on a different front in the civil war. Ajidoe caused much laughter when he concluded his testimony by stating that, not long after the event he had narrated, the soldier in question had gone mad on the streets of Ogwashi-Uku: the soldier obviously had not realized what powers he was fooling with! If a member of Simayis embassy had the power to hex one misguided soldier, would anyone doubt that the leader himself had the resources to take on the entire command? Considering how much emotion the memory of this incident aroused on that occasion, I never managed to ask Simayi why he had not used musical accompaniment for the performance. I suppose one could suggest that, although Simayi and his people had triumphed over the risks posed to their lives by the military presence, the civil war remained a sore issue to deal with, even with the best of narrative skills. And, perhaps for the same reason, we could go on to argue that Simayi never really found the impetus to weave the details of his war account into the familiar structure, musical and otherwise, of his performances. The implication of this is that if the war story were performed against a musical background, whether by Simayi himself or by some future narrator taking up where the master left off, it would possibly ride on a wave of artistic assumptions (I believe the classic phrase for this is a willing suspension of disbelief) that would bring it closer to the realm of myth than to that of history. Whether or not such an account would invite the sort of misgivings Simayi faced in his narration of the chieftaincy contest would depend either on how well the narrator told the story or else on the kind of local partisan interest that might be at play thereat. Whatever the case may be, it is clear from the stories I have collected from Simayi that the artistic success of tales in the oral tradition depends, to a certain extent, on the degree to which a narrator can internalize the details of his or her account: notice how steadily Simayi weaves his persona into his narrative events. At one level, this

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explains why male and female narrators, as I pointed out earlier, hardly tell the same kinds of stories. Women would not normally tell war stories because, although they certainly could, they are somewhat limited (by experience, at any rate) in the degree to which they can appropriate the martial imagination.7 By the same token, men are not as skillful as women in narrating tales of moral education because, thanks partly to the traditional systems of role distribution in the domestic economy and partly to the complicated structure of the polygynous household in which the likes of Simayi were raised, they are not as well equipped as women for handling the more delicate aspects of relations, especially between children. * This brings me to a second level of considerations. I have spoken of history and myth as models of representation by which Simayis war account, told against a musical background, might be assessed. In our study of stories in the oral tradition, we seem so often inclined to see these as opposing categories that we hardly stop to ponder the continuities between them or even the validity of our categorizations for the people who tell the stories. In an earlier discussion of Simayis war account (1989), I expressed the faith that personal narratives of this kind would be of immense value whenever the history of the Nigerian civil war came to be written. But even there the interfaces between life and art were hardly lost to me as I reflected how intimately Simayi, in the various tales I had been fortunate in collecting from him, wove his backgrounds and circumstances into the experiences he narrated. The spectator who doubted Simayis role in the chieftaincy contest may have been right. Simayi himself may, in a different context, disclaim participation in that affair. But the poetic assumptions of the narrative act might be all the justification he needs for making his claim; in other words, a well-told tale bears the guarantee of its authenticity. In inserting himself into the event, Simayi may indeed be saying something more: Given the delicate nature of the decision Obi Izediuno had to make between two rivals vying for a title with mystical as well as material resources, he needed the presence of a mystic as well endowed as Simayi for the task; the narrators insertion of himself may be the clinching metonym for the effectiveness by which the ruler resolved the dilemma facing him. The very act of performing a

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story evidently sets the narrator up to take figurative liberties with truth as understood in normal everyday discourse; the more elaborate the apparatus for doing such a performance (e.g., musical accompaniment), the greater the tendency toward figuration. Was Simayi trying to impress mea university professor, with my sophisticated recording tackleby making claims his rural fellows might be inclined to question? Possibly. But evidently self-insertion is accepted practice in oral narrative performance, though it is more prominent in some places than in others. Ruth Finnegan has remarked the habit of one of her narrators among the Limba of Sierra Leone, a blind man, who frequently added to the vividness of his narration by adding in an aside that he had been there at that point, standing silently by and observing with his own eyesblind though his listeners knew them to bethe fantastic doings of animals or Kanu (God) (1967:74). In the Malian epic Kambili, the narrator (Seydou Camara, a hunters bard) often proclaims his sympathies with the hunter hero Kambili and characters allied to his cause by using the possessive pronoun my in referring to them (Bird 1974). Based on performances he recorded from his principal Xhosa (South Africa) narrator, Harold Scheub has observed the storytellers tendency to [move] out of her role as narrator to assume fully the character that she is depicting (1977:354). Finally, Odogwu Okwuashi, one of the most accomplished raconteurs I have had the pleasure of recording among the west-Niger Igbo, frequently ended his tales about ancient Benin by claiming that the heroes, who successfully rebelled against the dreaded kingdom, had personally invited him to record their triumphs for the benefit of the wider world (Okpewho 1998:15469)! The conventional wisdom about these acts of self-insertion is that they are devices that facilitate the narrators imaginative infiltration of, and exit from, the extraordinary worlds of the events they narrate. This is no doubt true. But clearly there is so much political interest invested in many of the tales I have recorded from the westNiger Igboseveral of them anti-hegemonist tales of relations between peoplesthat we must look somewhat beyond aestheticist explanations for the phenomenon of self-insertion. Jan Vansina has cited these intrusions of the narrators personality as a principal problem in establishing the historical value of oral traditions (1965:108, 130). While we question such purist aspirations of conventional Western historiography, we can at least begin to recognize the peculiar

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intersection of aesthetic and pragmatic imperatives undergirding these narrative acts in oral culture. The phenomenon is not unknown in other traditions outside Africa,8 although I imagine each society has its own criteria, within its systems of discourse, for determining the value of any piece of oral evidence. While we cannot stop historians and other social scientists who explore the evidential value of oral narratives from operating within their recognized parameters for dealing with distortions in their texts, I urge that we resist the temptation to use the truth/ lie dichotomy in judging the practice of self-insertion by narrators. I suspect that informants who felt sufficiently committed to a negative cause would hardly offer themselves for a spotlighted performance; if they did, they would hardly do a job of much artistic merit.9 When a narrator inserts himself into his account of an event he may not have participated in or even witnessed, or when he maneuvers his interests, his backgrounds, or personal circumstances into his portraits of favored characters, he is in essence offering a critical perspective on issues relating to his communitys social or political history, or else putting his signature, his seal of approval, on an experience he sees as bearing some relevance for himself or a community of interests he identifies with. Performance becomes the right setting for such an act because it facilitates the transfer of ordinary experience to a larger metaphorical level of signification, within the canons of representation recognized by the culture. * Why do these interventions of the narrators personality and interests matter in our study of oral narratives? There has been a tradition, in cognitionist scholarship, of considering orality a degenerate brother of literacy in the representation of social reality, whereby the former is seen as lacking the capacity for accuracy that is considered a hallmark of the latter (e.g., Horton 1967; Havelock 1976, 1982; Goody 1977, 1986, 2000).10 Other scholars, however, have argued quite differently and persuasively (e.g., Finnegan 1988). Also, anyone who has read Zora Neale Hurstons delightful masterpiece, Mules and Men, is no doubt familiar with her well-meaning portraits of rural folk in Florida as a community where they really lies up a storm on their front porches and in lumber camps. Hurston has shown unexceptionable commitment to that community in her use of the materials

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she collected from it, and Robert Hemenway has done a credible job of demonstrating that these tales should be seen less as quaint fictions created by a primitive people than as profound expressions of a groups behavior (1980:168). Among other theorists on the subject, William Bascom follows earlier scholars like Durkheim and Malinowski in categorizing oral narratives on the criterion of believability, though he takes care to caution that he is referring only to the beliefs of those who tell and hear these tales, and not to our beliefs as outside investigators (1965:7). The division often assumed between fact and fiction, truth and lying, continues to engage scholarly attention. Two of the more recent views on the issue, by Richard Bauman and Elizabeth Tonkin, deserve special mention because they have been based on a careful consideration of the contexts of narrative performance as a valuable criterion for studying storytelling as a factor of the social construction of identity in oral culture. In his seminal work, Story, Performance, and Event (1986), Bauman examines the relevance of performance contexts in the interplay of events and stories told about them; moving beyond the simple divisions erected between truth and falsehood, he explores the ethnographic foundations of storytelling both as a creative tradition and as a strategy for the construction and negotiation of personal and social identities. In her equally incisive Narrating Our Pasts (1992), a study of oral history among the Kru of Liberia, Tonkin abjures the individualistic ideology of Western (literate) historiography by exploring the place of these storytelling events in communal life; again, moving beyond the truth/falsehood dichotomy, she gives due attention to specific performance contexts in interrogating the relationship between personal and collective memory and the ways in which personal identity, social identity, processes of identification and historical representations are so intertwined (132). Even more importantly, Tonkin succeeds in showing that, in recognizing the interplay of personal and social interests, oral historiography is no less authentic or credible in the representation of historical reality. In this sense, self-insertion may be seen as a ploy that achieves, in oral culture, the same effect as an authors critical perspective in literate historiography.11 Like visual artists, perhaps, who inscribe images of themselves into their representation of a wide range of scenes (Salvador Dali, Norman Rockwell, and others), the narrator who weaves his life into his narra-

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tive dramas is less inclined to violate reality than to identify himself with the larger metaphorical relevance of his text. Such an activity is not unlike the situation in autobiographical writing. John Eakin makes the interesting point that autobiographical truth is not a fixed but an evolving content in an intricate process of self-discovery and selfcreation, and . . . that the self that is the center of all autobiographical narrative is necessarily a fictive structure (3).12 By fictive I understand Eakin to imply not so much that writers of autobiography are necessarily engaged in lying as that they have undertaken to install themselves at the center of their narrative universe and to reconfigure that universe in order to validate their place within its structure of relations. A narrator like Simayi is obviously well placed to assume such a reconstitutive role. Living in a militarized polity that placed enormous constraints on individual self-assertion and telling tales of powerful men who won their leadership by employing far from ordinary methods, he is driven to place himself at the center of his narrative world partly under the aesthetic impulse of performance but also partly because he feels committed enough to the interests of his society to take a subjective stand in interrogating them. What is at play in such narratives is not so much an abstract concept of truth as the right of the individual to review the facts of historical experience in the context of contemporary realities. In the process, he reinvents himself even as he redraws the outlines of his peoples cultural history. In the final analysis, the challenges posed to Okabous tale of Ozidi are not radically different from the misgivings raised against Simayis story of the chieftaincy contest, although we are dealing with narratives set in two rather different time frames. Each storyteller finds himself making, in the course of a spotlighted performance, claims he might be hard put to defend in normal daily discourse. And each stands his ground because for him the telling of the tale is not just an act of entertainment. Rather, he sees in his performance an opportunity both to give an account of himself as a skilled man of words and to project to his audience some of the deadly serious, transcendent import of the details of the picture he paints with those words. In appreciating narratives of cultural history, in particular, we need to rethink the all-too-easy lines we draw between truth and lying. Department of Africana Studies Binghamton University

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Notes
1. The Ozidi Saga was recorded in performance in 1963 by J. P. Clark[-Bekederemo], then a research fellow in African Studies at the University of Ibadan. The recording took place at the residence of Madam Yabuku, an Ijo resident in Ibadan, then capital of the Western Region of Nigeria. The narrator, heading an orchestra of fellow Ijo, performed this epic (of the Tarakiri clan of the Ijo) in the Ijo language and in the total of seven days decreed by tradition. The audience comprised many Ijo residents in Ibadan, a Yoruba town, as well as several curious non-Ijo, including some of ClarkBekederemos colleagues who had accompanied him from the university. 2. See Okpewho (1992:192202) for the story (in translation) and discussion, and Okpewho (1998:1518) for a comparative treatment of the story with other versions of it in Egharevba ([1934] 1968:4142) and Sidahome (1964:4572). 3. Although the administrative arrangement claimed here by the narrator is questionable, the Ika tongue spoken in Abudu today is largely an admixture of Igbo and Bini linguistic elements. The point about Benin kings dying again is evidently a reference to the death of Oba Akenzua II not long after the end of the civil war. 4. See, for instance, Okpewho (1990:12735). 5. The metaphor of the unruly fart is meant to capture the irresponsible display by the two rivals for the chieftaincy title: they were simply given the room they needed to make absolute fools of themselves! 6. At my request, my brother-in-law and field assistant, Patrick Arinze, later asked Kifodu why he had questioned Simayis claim, and Kifodu simply said he didnt think Simayi had the kind of influence in Ogwashi-Uku that he claimed to have! 7. I do not mean to simplify the structure of power relations that excludes women, under such circumstances, from participation in the decision-making processes of the traditional society. But I believe that Ifi Amadiume (1987) has demonstrated how well the distribution of roles was worked out between the genders in precolonial times, so that neither of them transgressed the established areas of authority and responsibility without consequences. In her judgment, it was colonialism that brought about the demise of such balanced relationships. 8. See, for instance, Bryce Boyers discussion (1958) of legend distortion among the Mescalero Apache Indians. 9. Oral artists are, of course, frequently hired to promote unpopular causes. But if the careers of such stooges in the troubled days of Nigerias First Republic are any guide, their effectiveness is all too often marred by the face-saving devices they are driven to adopt in their performances. It is comforting to note that the better artists in a community, who have a reputation and an honor to protect, have often resisted the pressure to support unpopular politicians, though they have been made to pay dearly for their forthrightness. Olatunde Olatunjis discussion of this subject (1979) is quite enlightening. 10. Pascal Boyer (1990) has offered some insightful qualifications to the cognitionist conclusions reached by Horton, Goody, and others, but I find aspects of his discussion of the truth-value of traditional statements just as reductionist. On the basis of his field study of ritualists and mvet epic narrators among the Fang, he takes a number of positions on the rationality of beliefs held and claims made by the people. For instance, he thinks that, contrary to what happens in Western scientific culture, the

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Fang have a sense of categories that is based not on theoretical foundations but on an episodic memory of specific situations. The examples he cites convince me, rather, that Fang representations of these specific situations argue a sense of categories (i.e., a theory) that serves to validate specific cases. More pertinently, he is persuaded that whereas the Fang have no difficulty accepting claims made by customized persons (e.g., ritual specialists and mvet bards) as trueclaims like twins are birds or anthills are witch-craftsuch claims would get little credit in their rational thinking, as though the situation were any different with Christian dogmas like the Virgin birth or the Resurrection. However, when Boyer acknowledges the customized situations in which these claims are made as conferring a special truth value to them, his arguments achieve a certain validity in recognizing the context of performance as conferring some metaphoric quality to statements and a more transcendent authority to their customized makers, beyond what ordinary life would allow. As I indicated above, Simayi himself might not so readily admit in daily discourse that he had participated in decisions over the chieftaincy contest in the palace of Obi Izediuno. 11. For an equally valid argument from the ethnography of speaking school, which has put much needed emphasis on narrative contexts and especially ethnographersubject relations, I think that the following from Elaine Lawless is relevant here: A reflexive stance should illuminate the biases and preconceptions that inform our interpretations (where we are) and move us forward, then, in the direction of collectivity in interpretation and a new authentication of a multivocal kind of ethnography, which includes, as well, where others are, but which does not privilege one interpretation over another (1992:302)a position that amply complements Dennis Tedlocks landmark plea for a dialogical anthropology (1983:32138). Although I recognize that generic classification (e.g., fact/fancy, history/myth, etc.) is part of our strategy as scholars to fashion some scheme for resolving challenges posed by the ways of oral culture, the idea of lying or falsehood has no place in my concept of myth. My reflections on it, against the background of Bascoms use of belief as a basis of judgment (Okpewho 1983:5759), finally lead me to a definition of myth which takes full account of the imaginative imperatives of performance and the relevance of oral tradition to cultural history: Myth is not really a particular type of tale as against another; it is neither the spoken counterpart of an antecedent ritual, nor is it a tale determined exclusively by a binary scheme of abstract ideas or a sequential order of elements. It is simply . . . that quality of fancy which informs the symbolistic or configurative powers of the human mind at varying degrees of intensity; its principal virtue is that it tends to resist all constraint to time and experience to the end that it satisfies the deepest urges of a people or of mankind (69, 219). 12. Compare Derek Walcott: every I is a/fiction finally (Omeros 291).

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References Cited
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