African Art

PPooppuullaarr OOrraall LLiitteerraattuurree

As for the popular oral literature, properly speaking, it is extremely
rich and constantly being renewed. It also has its professionals, the
griots who are singers, poets, narrators, mimes, and mountebanks
as above mentioned. It has equally its amateurs, for many
Negroes of both sexes, without belonging to a special caste,
retell, with modifications, the fables that they have heard from the
griots, or even make up new ones. This popular literature includes
several types: supernatural tales, moral tales, comic stories,
proverbs, riddles, epic poems, satires, love songs, funeral
homilies, drama or farce, and still others that I have forgotten or
that I would be unable to classify. In many of these compositions,
moreover, several types are interwoven; no one better than the
Negro storyteller knows how to pass from the humorous to the
severe with naturalness and ease.

OOr riiggi inn oof f PPooppuul laar r TThheemme es s

Among the supernatural tales that are current from the southern
limits of the Sahara to the Cape of Good Hope, there are certainly
a considerable number that are not of Negro or even of African
invention, that have been imported by the Arabs or drawn from the
original by some Sudanese scholar in a collection of the Thousand
and One Nights or some other oriental work. Sometimes they have
been modified: the tiger becomes a leopard, the beautiful princess
with lily complexion is transformed into a Negro woman, the
palace of multicoloured faience, a modest hut; but they can be
recognised just the same.

There are other stories that recall at the same time the folklore
of the Orient and that of the Occident. This is the case with
many of the moral or satirical tales, of numerous fables with
animal personages. I will not lose time in trying to find out if
these themes come from an old Hindu or Iranian source, from
where they have spread over the entire world, or if they are
simply the multiple and simultaneous product of the human
imagination, which is not inexhaustible and must inevitably
repeat itself, unconsciously, under all latitudes. Furthermore,
whatever be the first origin of the themes, imitation, inspiration,
or invention, it can have only a secondary importance for those
who are content to study the mentality of a people across the
transparent veil of its literature.

GGeenniiuuss ffoorr SSttoorryy--TTeelllliinngg

Only if we wish to get at the meat of these accounts and narra-
tives must they not be read in an interpretation that is more or
less corrupted by the mentality of the European translator. They

must be heard as they are told by the Negroes themselves in one

of their numerous and expressive languages, and especially by

a professional, with the addition of a tone and mimicry that only

figures in the text implicitly. A fable that seems insipid enough to

the reader may be a masterpiece of the imagination, of malice

or of good sense. Another tale which seems at the reading banal

or incomprehensible, brings forth laughter and tears alternatively

in those who hear it recounted and arouses the liveliest interest

in the audience at the same time that they admirably seize the

connections and the moral.

Undoubtedly, there is a mutual comprehension when the narrator

and the audience belong to the same race and speak and under-

stand the same tongue, while the European will always find a veil,

more or less thick or more or less tenuous, between his faculties of

mental receptivity and the story that is told by the Negro.

However, there is a considerable difference between the effect

produced on this European by the reading of even a very good

translation and the hearing of the original, even if recited in a

language that he understands only imperfectly. Pantomime has no

country, and the play of the physiognomy of the Negro storytellers

is such that their thought may be seized even if no words were

used to express it.

I will not speak here of the literary style, properly speaking, of

these popular productions. It varies enormously according to the

talent of the speakers, attaining its perfection only among a few

professionals who are justly renowned. A stranger, in any case,

would have much trouble in appreciating it. What is less difficult

for us to perceive in these tales, fables, proverbs, poems, or

sketches of comedies, are the sentiments that they reveal and the

ideas which are presented. The Negro’s affection for the super-

natural displays itself complacently, at the same time as their

propensity to find natural what, for us only, is supernatural. Their

imagination in this respect, though less fecund in colourful

descriptions than that of the Orientals, is inexhaustible. The lack

of probability does not seem to interest them. At most, when a

Mask (Warka).

Wood covered with copper and bulks, height: 45 cm.

Private collection.

Generally, the Warka masks are covered with copper sheets. This one, with its

elongated features, might have been worn for dances linked to the numerous

societies which rule people’s lives in Mali.