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Guinea's Other Suns: The African Dynamic in
Trinidad Culture. By Maureen Warner-Lewis. Dover,
Massachusetts: The Majority Press, 1991. Pp. xxii +
207. £9.95, paperback.
Richard Fardon
The Journal of African History / Volume 33 / Issue 03 / November 1992, pp 521 - 522
DOI: 10.1017/S0021853700032898, Published online: 22 January 2009
Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0021853700032898
How to cite this article:
Richard Fardon (1992). The Journal of African History, 33, pp 521-522 doi:10.1017/
S0021853700032898
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SHORTER NOTICES
Images of Africa:
521
The Depiction of Pre-colonial Africa in Creative
Literature.
Edited by MARTIN GRAY and ROBIN LAW. (Centre for Commonwealth Studies,
University of Stirling, Occasional Paper No. i.) Stirling: Centre for Commonwealth Studies, University of Stirling, 1990. Pp. 68. £4.00.
The four brief essays in this volume are all useful and insightful although, for
the most part, not highly ambitious. David Birmingham thus introduces us to two
Angolan novelists, Antonio de Asis Junior and Artur Pestana ('Pepetela') well
worth knowing whether or not they truly represent ' a tradition of fiction which
sheds a richer light than any social science has yet mastered' (p. 21). Robin Law,
at somewhat greater length and certainly with more research, surveys a body of
fictional writing on the kingdom of Dahomey which extends from Aphrah Behn in
1688 to Bruce Chatwin in 1982. The ideological constructions and historical
distortions which Law uncovers are not surprising but the range of black and white
writers included makes for very interesting reading. Angela Smith, the only nonhistorian in the group, also offers the briefest piece, on the ' almost schizophrenic'
narrator's voice in Achebe's Things Fall Apart. The analysis here is trenchant, but
one wishes it had been extended to the historiographic problems presented by what
is - precisely through its literary power - the canonical indigenous account of
Africa's confrontation with colonialism. Finally, T. C. McCaskie's discussion of
'[Ayi Kei] Armah's The Healers and Asante History' represents the most serious
— and thus problematic — contribution to this volume. The problem is that the
writing of both Armah and McCaskie himself tends to very complex, abstruse and
sometimes heavy-handed philosophizing. The meeting of the two in one essay
might thus appear a formula for disaster, which is certainly the case in a few
passages here. Nonetheless, McCaskie does, from his own research, provide an
excellent narrative of the biography at the center of Armah's novel. At a more
abstract level he also makes a good plea for Armah's ambitions (while recognizing
the major flaws in execution) and thus should convince even the most empiricist
of our guild that the act of writing African history cannot be separated from the
dilemmas of power inherent in African experiences of both the past and present.
University of Chicago
RALPH A. AUSTEN
Guinea's Other Suns: The African Dynamic in Trinidad Culture. By MAUREEN
Dover, Massachusetts: The Majority
xxii + 207. £9.95, paperback.
WARNER-LEWIS.
Press, 1991. Pp.
The greatest strength of this book is that it does not address the problem a reader
of its sub-title might expect. As the author notes, the book is rather a collection of
detailed essays each addressing aspects of the Yoruba diaspora in Trinidad.
Thanks to her sojourn in Nigeria, Dr Warner-Lewis was able to pursue researches
in Yoruba language among the oldest people of Yoruba descent alive in the late
1960s and early 1970s. Their family connexions and recollections took the
researcher back to the end of slavery and the period of indentured labour. These
links of 'blood and culture', as she describes them in a chapter heading, give
Warner-Lewis's book its immediacy and detail. Readers of this Journal with
interests in Yoruba history and ethnography will find in Guinea's Other Suns the
detailed discussion of the linguistic legacy of Yoruba diaspora missing from many
recent discussions of the African dynamic in American cultures. Warner-Lewis's
interests are predominantly reconstructive, but it would be interesting to know the
extent to which the Yoruba spoken by her informants was immediately comprehensible as the standard Yoruba she learned in Nigeria.
522
JOURNAL OF AFRICAN HISTORY
The essays were written over the twenty years preceding this collection and have
apparently been revised. However, the references omit some important sources:
including the works of Karin Barber, Sandra Barnes, Henry and Margaret Drewal,
E. M. McClelland and J. D. Y. Peel as well as 'Wande Abimbola's If a Divination
Poetry (New York 1987). These works would have helped Warner-Lewis's
analysis, since language, ritual, poetry and music are the subjects of the majority
of the ten essays.
The strongest essays involve close analysis of tape-recorded interviews and
songs. Chapter 3, a sympathetic portrait of the author's informants, and Chapter
5, on form and metaphor in the Yoruba poetry of Trinidad, are especially
insightful. The full texts of the transcribed songs have been deposited at the St
Augustine Campus of the University of West Indies in Trinidad, and will be an
essential reference for specialists. T h e weaker essays overgeneralize from these
Yoruba sources and occasionally involve errors or contentious interpretation (e.g.
in the description of Fulani as Nilotic, or of African religion as animistic). Rex
Nettleford's introduction cogently situates this volume in relation to contemporary
interest in the 'African presence' in 'Caribbean civilization' to which it is a
welcome and detailed contribution.
School of Oriental and African Studies,
RICHARD FARDON
Univeristy of London
Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts: A Guide to Research Practices. By RUTH
FINNEGAN.
London and New York: Routledge, 1991. Pp. xviii + 284. £12.99,
paperback.
Ruth Finnegan began as an Africanist, but quickly turned her attention to more
general issues concerning orality, about which she has published extensively. The
present work may be regarded as the culmination of this enterprise, even though
it is couched as a textbook. Finnegan herself sees this work as aimed largely at
anthropologists, but hopes that historians will benefit as well. I think they will.
As the title suggests, and as is stressed in numerous ways throughout, Finnegan
regards content and transmission (i.e. performance) as inextricably entwined. The
pioint has been made often, for instance, by Harold Scheub, but perhaps never in
so sustained a fashion. It seems both dazzlingly obvious yet dismayingly
troublesome, so that Finnegan's repeated perorations are well aimed at historians.
T o what extent they will hit the moving target remains to be seen.
Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts is divided into ten chapters, which are in
sum remarkably comprehensive. For historians chapter 4 (' Collecting, recording
and creating texts [note the sequence]: preliminaries and mechanics'), chapter 5
('Observing and analysing performance'), and chapter 9 ('Texts in process:
translation, transmission, and presentation') are likely to be the most relevant,
although the last chapter, on ethics, is a sine qua non as well.
One of the most interesting discussions (pp. 77-80) relates to '"artificial"
settings'. While there may be some slight advantages to this inevitable state of
affairs, Finnegan argues that the very essence of the field research process is
unnatural: in the outsider as interviewer, in the organized and explicit quest for
specific knowledge disembodied from its ordinary context, in the question-andanswer format, and in numerous other ways. She concludes that, when the only
argument available is that this process is better than nothing, then 'maybe the aims
and viability of the research should be reconsidered (perhaps instead focusing on
local practices or concepts relating to writing and dictating)'.