African Words, Academic Choices: Re-Presenting Interviews and Oral Histories

Author(s): Anne Reef

Reviewed work(s):
Source: History in Africa, Vol. 35 (2008), pp. 419-438
Published by: African Studies Association
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 AFRICANWORDS, ACADEMICCHOICES:
RE-PRESENTINGINTERVIEWSANDORALHISTORIES1
Anne Reef
University of Memphis

There are many things that it is like, this storytelling business. One of them (so
she says in one of the paragraphs she has not crossed out yet) is a bottle with a

genie in it.When the storyteUer opens the bottle, the genie is released into the

and it costs all hell to get him back in again. Her ... better, on the
world, position
whole, that the genie stay in the bottle.2

So says the narrator of the protagonist of J.M. Coetzee's novel, Elizabeth

Costello. Costello, an aging novelist, philosophizes at a point in the book
where Coetzee has conspired to provoke a moment of ethical reflection on
the process of telling stories. Irony and paradox cleave to this paragraph's
core?clearly, Coetzee, by continuing to write and to publish, does not real
ly believe that the genie should stay bottled. But, while Costello intends to
edit this reflection from her written work, both the narrator and Coetzee
consider itworthy of inclusion in the novel, thus endorsing its importance.
Costello's comment provokes consideration of the nature and effects of
narration in other representations. One such site is academic writing that
uses interviews and oral histories as source material. Such writing necessi
tates at least two levels of narration: first, re-presentation of the primary

1This tide plays on that of a recent collection of essays on African history and its relation
to interviews and oral traditions?this is African Words, African Voices: Critical Prac
tices in Oral History, eds. Luise White, Stephan F. Miescher, and David William Cohen
(Bloomington, 2001). This paper makes no significant distinction between the terms "oral
tradition" and "oral history."
2J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (New York, 2003), 167.

History inAfrica 35 (2008), 419-438

 420 Anne Reef

material and second, the author's analysis, synthesis, and commentary on it.
As in other genres, this distils into two kinds of material: mimesis and die
gesis. Here Elizabeth Tonkin's definitions of these terms are useful. She
describes mimesis as "the representation of direct speech" and diegesis as
"the description of nonverbal events."3 Drawing on G?rard Genette, she
explains that, "[a] story is a mixture of 'a non-verbal matter which the nar
rative must present as well as it can and a verbal matter which presents itself
and which the narrative need simply quote' ."4
But there is nothing "simple" about "quot[ingj," or mimesis, when acad
emics write interviews and oral histories, and the implied injunction to pre
sent diegetic material "as well [the author] can" is of little practical assis
tance to an academic writer seeking suitable discursive strategies.5 Further,
balancing mimesis and diegesis is challenging. This paper focuses on the re
presentation of African oral histories and interviews in books written by and
for academics. Through discussion and close textual analysis, this study
argues that in a postmodern milieu, ethical, efficient, and effective strategies
for titling and then writing interviews and oral histories, as well as talking
about the narrating self, are difficult to establish.
Opportunities to discuss mimetic problems are raised by Kairn Klie
man's "The Pygmies Were Our Compass": Bantu and Batwa in theHistory
of West Central Africa, Early Times to c.1900 CE. (2003), Susan Geiger's
TANU Women: Gender and Culture in theMaking of Tanganyikan Nation
alism, 1955-1965 (1997), and Liisa Malkki's Purity and Exile: Violence,
Memory, and National Cosmology Among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania
(1995). Primarily diegetic issues garner attention in Nwando Achebe's
Farmers, Traders, Warriors, and Kings: Female Power and Authority in
Northern Igboland, 1900-1960 (2005), and Charles van Onselen's The Seed
Is Mine: the Life of Kas Maine, a South African Sharecropper 1894-1985
(1995). Other texts, like Joe Lunn's Memoirs of the Maelstrom: a Sene
galese Oral History of the First World War (1999), are mentioned in these
discussions, and Tonkin's book, Jan Vansina's Oral Tradition as History
(1985), and other material are used as theory.
A caveat before any critical discussion: these books do succeed as acade
mic projects?each addresses a gap or inconsistency in the previously
extant body of research and is successfully persuasive. Several have already
been used as the basis of further academic discussion and historiography.
As such, these texts are in some way useful to those who accept, study, and
teach African oral tradition as history.

3E?zabeth Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts: the Social Construction of Oral History (Cam
bridge, 1992), 7.
4Ibid.
5Ibid.
 Re-Presenting Interviews and Oral Histories 421

II

While anthropologists have long used oral material, historians in the first
half of the twentieth century contested the legitimacy of oral tradition and
testimony as stable evidence; written texts and archeological proof were
privileged. In 1965, however, Vansina published Oral Tradition.6 This text
painstakingly propounds that oral traditions are a rich and unique source of
material that should not be ignored by historians. But while Vansina suc
cessfully endorses the validity of oral tradition as history, he expresses
grave reservations as to its reliability and explains its limitations. For Vansi
na, oral texts are compellingly useful only once they have been verified
through independent "outside sources," and when they are used "in con

junction with writings, archaeology, linguistic or even ethnographic evi

dence, etc."7 Oral tradition "can confirm the other sources and be confirmed
by it [sic]."8 One of Vansina's most memorable arguments is that oral tradi
tions should be treated by historians as a primary hypothesis to be proven,
not accepted "literally, uncritically."9
Vansina's book, reworked and republished in 1985 as Oral Tradition as
History, is now recognized as the most influential academic text that afford
ed oral material legitimacy as a source of historical evidence. Contemporary
historians no longer need to make a case for the essential validity of the
nature of their oral source material. Paradoxically, Vansina's text both
forms the bedrock for subsequent theoretical discussion on oral tradition as
history and the focus of aspects of its criticism. For example, Karen Barber
and Pi7, de Moraes Farias in their introduction to Discourse and Its Dis
guises: the Interpretation of African Oral Texts, discuss their contributor
Graham Furniss' argument that elements of bias in an oral account should
not be identified "in order to set them aside" as Vansina recommends, but
should be recognized as one reason that an oral text may "work" (their
emphasis).10 First the acceptance of oral tradition as valid academic primary
source material, and then the impulse tomodify or reject Vansina's phUoso
phy of using oral material only when its content is corroborated by other
evidence, have been concomitant with a more pervasive postmodern miUeu
and its lodging in academic culture.

6This was first published in French in 1961.

7Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison, 1985), 160.
8Ibid.
^id., 196.
10Karen Barber and PP. de Moraes Farias, Discourse and Its Disguises: the Interpreta
tion of African Oral Texts (Birmingham, 1989), 4.
 422 Arme Reef

Although it eludes crisp definition, "postmodernism" refers to a shift in the

presiding mood discernible in ph?osophy and critical theory during the last
part of the twentieth century. Several notions relating to postmodernism are
important here.
The first is the commitment to restore the voices of people who have
been excluded and thus sUenced because of a life circumstance; postmod
ernism thus has a social justice agenda. Most texts referred to in this paper
try to right (and write) a wrong of race, class, gender, or nation. Klieman,
Lunn, van Onselen, and Malkki primarily use the lens of race in their stud
ies, but allude to class as well. Klieman, for example, aims to create interest
in Batwa (Pygmy) history and to redress Euro-Americans' and Africans'
prejudicial "primordialist paradigms" about the Batwa that are characterized
by a substantial and recalcitrant mythical element that influences the nature
of interactions between Batwa and other groups.11 This, she holds, has led to
the Batwa's ambiguous status of being concomitantly revered and reviled.
Lunn also examines racial prejudice. His overarching argument is that
French conscription of Senegalese men during World War I precipitated
painful social disruption in the colony, resulted in considerable disability
and death among those who served, and concomitantly caused changes in
the nature of interactions between French and Senegalese that resulted in
mutually "altered perceptions."12 He contends that Africans' changed self
images "represented nothing less than an essential prerequisite for all subse
quent redefinitions in the relationship between Africans and Europeans dur
ing the colonial era and thereafter."13 He concludes by arguing that "the
contemporary beUef that Africans and Europeans are united through their
common humanity rather than divided by immutable racial difference
stems, at least in part, from the encounter in the Great War."14
While Lunn focuses on a group's experience of racism, van Onselen is
primarily concerned with an individual's. In The Seed isMine, his project is
to award an identity and to restore for posterity the voice of a man who, in
terms of his state's records, "never was."15 In so doing, he hopes "to set
right a historic wrong."16 As such, this book gives voice to Kas Maine, a

nKaren A. Klieman, uThe Pygmies Were Our Compass": Bantu and Batwa in the Histo

ry ofWest Central Africa, Early Times to c. 1900 CE. (PortsmouthNH, 2003), xx.
12Joe Lunn, Memoirs of the Maelstrom: a Senegalese Oral History of the First World
War (Portsmouth NH: 1999), 226.
13Ibid.
14Ibid.
15Charles van Onselen, The Seed isMine: the Life ofKas Maine, a South African Share
cropper 1894-1985 (New York, 1996), 3.
16Ibid.,ll.
 Re-Presenting Interviews and Oral Histories 423

man of Mosotho origins and Tswana affiliation, as it chronicles Kas's own

and his family's history on South Africa's highveld in the twentieth century.
It is a plough-by-plough account of its protagonist's relationships with his
family and friends, his lovers, his livestock and the land and its produce,
and the politics of pride and place. As such, van Onselen's text allows a rep
resentative of a marginalized race and class in South Africa, that of the
black sharecropping peasant, to speak.
Like van Onselen, Geiger alludes to class issues, although she and
Achebe use gender as their focus, and like Malkki, she is also interested in
nationalism. Her argument that neither the "traditional nationalist historiog
raphy" that delineates the emergence of Tanganyikan nationalism nor "the
scholarly literature critical of that historiography" adequately describes the
social, cultural, and political conditions during the 1950s that provided the
impetus for the rejection of colonial rule and the 1961 creation of Tanza
nia.17 Instead, she holds that "the processes of nationalist movement in Tan
ganyika were embodied in women's gendered understandings and actions"
that "continued to inform nationalism in the postcolonial state whether or
not they informed the nation-state agenda or women's organizing."18 Geiger
takes this position most substantially from the content of interviews with
"'ordinary'" women who had been active in the Tanganyika African
National Union (TANU) in the 1950s and beyond.19 This destabilizes tradi
tional assumptions and "metanarrativefs]" regarding independence move
ments in Africa, especially those that presuppose and inscribe into history
that freedom from colonialism was delivered by Western-educated males,
usually Christians, from an elite class.20 Geiger's goal is to "interrupt" and
to "confront" TANU women's namelessness and to ensure that their contri
bution to Tanzanian history is recorded.21
Achebe is similarly concerned with the history of women. She proposes
that in Nsukka Division of northern Igboland in Nigeria between 1900 and
1960 (but also during other periods), women enjoyed unparalleled power
and authority, and that the Igbo gender system, which rendered women
"complementary" tomen rather than inferior to them, exemplified "flexibil
ity and fluidity."22 This "allowed women to cross over and occupy male
roles" such as those of "farmers, traders, warriors, and In order to
kings."23

17Susan Geiger, TANU Women: Gender and Culture in the Making of Tanganyikan
Nationalism (PortsmouthNH; 1997), 204.
18Ibid.
19Ibid.,15,103,204.
20Ibid.,6.
21Ibid.,64,65.
22Nwando Achebe, Farmers, Traders, Warriors, and Kings: Female Power and Authori
ty inNorthern Igboland, 1900-1960 (PortsmouthNH: 2005), 36.
23Ibid.
 424 Anne Reef

"chaUenge received orthodoxies that characterize African women as subor

dinate; to identify the reUgious, economic, and political structures that
allowed women to achieve measures of power" before colonialism and to
discuss "the effect of colonialism and missionary encroachment on these old
structures and on women's choices," she presents women's oral histories,
especially in the form of case studies.24 These focused examinations support
Achebe's contention that women achieved power and reverence in immater
ial and material realms by being spiritual agents, economic actors, and polit
ical and social rulers.
Malkki, less focused on gender, works at the nexus of race and national
ism. Purity and Exile is an "ethnographic exploration" of Hutu refugees
from Burundi who, in 1972, found themselves semi-permanently in Tanza
nia.25 Malkki compares and contrasts the ideologies and attitudes of such
refugees in an isolated camp,
Mishamo, and a busy Lake Tanganyika town,
Kigamo. She investigates "how and deterritorialization . . .
displacement
may shape the social construction of 'nationness' and history, identity and
enmity."26 It is, rather than a study of place, people, or "a community," "an
ethnography of processes and interconnections" (her emphasis) in "two
quite specific local contexts."27 While the camp proved "a fertile ground for
producing historicity and categorical nationness," the town "inhibited the
production of historicity and nationness."28
Thus several of these books, through the use of oral histories and inter
views, attempt to offer voice and historical presence to those formerly
silenced or absent. But academic techniques of oral information solicitation,
and, by extrapolation, re-presentation of proffered narratives, may harm
even when their declared aim is to heal. In "The Birth of the Interview: the
Thin and the Fat of It," Abdullahi A. Ibrahim indicts the ethnographic inter
view for being "a data-generation technology that instaUs a regime of
truth."29Although Ibrahim does not cite Michel Foucault, he overtly attrib
utes the idea of the "regime of truth" to Foucault, thus confirming that his
chapter title aUudes to Foucault's Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the
Prison (1975). This titular link constitutes a grave charge because Foucault
postulates "a great carc?ral continuum that diffused penitentiary techniques
into the most innocent disciplines"?Ibrahim's title thus suggests that the

24Ibid.,225.
25Liisa H. Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among
Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago, 1995), 232.
26Ibid.,l.
27Ibid.,232.
28Ibid.,233.
29Abdullahi A. Ibrahim, "The Birth of the Interview: the Thin and the Fat of It" in

African Words, African Voices, 104.

 Re-Presenting Interviews and Oral Histories 425

interview is not a benign academic tool, but a part of penal apparatus.30 This
is consistent with Ibrahim's argument that "ethnography, an enterprise that
started on the heels of colonialism, so that the will to know and the will to
surveil and administer intertwined at its birth, used the interview as a tech
nique for the regulation of data in order to better know and govern the colo
nized."31 Nevertheless, Ibrahim's hope is that the interview can be "rein
vent[ed] as a bonding between the interviewer and the interviewee" and
replaced with "a meaningful conversation" when "informants/consultants
are granted their long-denied expertise and acknowledging [sic] their mas
tery over local frameworks of interpretation."32 Ibrahim's chapter thus
reveals a dark side to the practices and purposes of interviewing that is like
ly at odds with the authors' professed aims.
Aside from repairing a wrong, postmodernism characteristically eschews
universal truth and point of view in favor of amultiplicity of truths and per
spectives; the nature of truth and its relation to literal and figurative point of
view is a theme of David William Cohen's chapter, "In a Nation of White
Cars . . .One White Car, or 'AWhite Car,' Becomes a Truth" in African
Words, African Voices.33 Concomitantly, postmodernism privileges subjec
tivity and the presence of the self, and these changes are easily detectable in
texts of all kinds?one example is the acceptability of the first-person narra
tor in academic texts, to be discussed below.
Postmodernism is also deeply implicated with the idea of social con
struction, the notion that many areas of our lives and our selves?identities,
bodies, behaviors, and texts, are the result of social processes and interac
tions. While Vansina does not ignore social context, Tonkin privileges it to
an extent that he does not. She believes that oral histories are socially con
structed and are always dynamic representations affected by "both themate
rial conditions whose importance can be recognized in social theory and the
shaping power of language and form"?she refuses to treat oral testimonies
as "the repositories of facts and errors of facts."34 While Tonkin's book
deals primarily with the social construction of oral history, the effect of her
text is to persuade readers that all narratives are socially constructed.
Accepting the socially-constructed nature of interviews and oral histories

^Michel Foucault, 'The CarceraT from Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison,
translator Alan Sheridan, published in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism,
eds. Vincent B. Leiten et al (New York, 2001), 1639.
31Ibrahim, "Birth of the Interview," 104.
32Ibid.,117.
*
33Cohen, "In a Nation of White Cars . . .One Vftiite Car, or A White Becomes a
Car,'
Truth" in African Words, African Voices.
34Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts, 4,12.
 426 Anne Reef

has enormous implications for academics who seek an effective and ethical
strategy for narration. Further, by breaking down barriers between oral and
written authorship, Tonkin demands of the academic a recognition of the
socially-constructed nature of their own project(s).
Another of postmodernism
characteristic is its acceptance of the appro
priation of material in a way that modernism proscribed in favor of innova
tion. Although this may have had some impact on academic writing, it is
probably the issue that least concerns academic authors?neither deviantly
dramatic narrative innovation nor appropriation are permitted by the acade
my because of the relatively stable contract between the academic writer
and their reader.

IV

Every text is offered and accepted on the basis of an active or tacit pact
between its author and its audience; a writer's challenge is to deliver what
they explicitly or implicitly offer the reader. This understanding is often
implied by the text's genre. Tonkin helpfuUy defines genre as "patterned
expectancy," stating that it, "in this sense labels an agreement between
writer or speaker and reader or Ustener on what sort of interpretation is to be
made. It is a dynamic process and also a situational one."35 Academic
books, like those discussed here, constitute their own genre with their own
peculiar writer-reader covenant.

However, the terms of the agreement between academic writer and read
er are rarely comprehensively articulated; instead, such writers are aware of
their responsibilities to their readers because they are socialized into the
process of writing by others in or peripheral to academia. While the arrange
ment between scholarly writers and their readers is difficult to state, its
overarching expectation is that of honesty. This is more multifaceted, and
thus more of the author, than it appears?it
demanding requires the ethical
collection, handling, and reporting of primary source material, accuracy in
handling data and in representing it, and it implies appropriate disclosure of
the context and content of data collection. It requires revealing sources and
the relative integrity and credibility of these, and explaining a reason for
anonymity where appropriate. While every research and subsequent writing
project is necessarily limited in scope, academics are generally expected to
provide adequate discursive consideration of the complexity of the subject
in the light of their overarching theses, or explanation as to why such dis
cussion is lacking. A scholarly text is written and published because it
addresses a gap or misperception of knowledge and thus challenges or

35Ibid.,51.
 Re-Presenting Interviews and Oral Histories 427

develops the extant body of research on the subject. The reader of an acade
mic text is often an academic reader or researcher, and the author's contract
with that reader/researcher is that the text has been sufficiently well
researched and well-written to afford material for further research. But this
contract and the demands and constraints it places on the scholarly writer
are complicated by a concomitant contract that the academic author is
required to honor?the contract with the "interviewee," "informant," or
"respondent."
The researcher who solicits, collects, and draws on oral material has an
agreement with their respondent that is, though often unstated, ideally ethi
cally as?and perhaps more?inviolable than the writer-reader contract.
When research is conducted under the auspices of an academic institution or
professional body, the collection and handling of data is often governed by
the rules or guidelines of those organizations. Oral material is especially
tricky ethically?it may be offered spontaneously, completely or partially,
freely or conditionally, and it may be tendered in places where recording
technology is unavailable. The academic's contract with the interviewee
necessitates adequate?if not full?disclosure of the researcher's identity
and purpose, as well as their plans for publication. Honoring respondents'
requests for privacy is a paramount concern because the source's safety may
be threatened by disclosure of their identity.
These are some of the conditions under which academics research, write,
and publish books based on interviews and oral histories. But breaches of
the pact between writer and respondent, and more particularly writer and

reader, may occur before the book is even are sometimes

opened?they pre
cipitated by the choice of mimetic and diegetic strategies in the tome's title.

There are two main

challenges in titling academic texts. The first is that
they accurately describe the content of the text; the best titles of tomes epit
omize their main arguments. The second quandary is to how to offer ele
gance. As the bibliography of this paper shows, many academic titles com
prise a brief epithetic caption followed by a colon, with an elucidating
phrase thereafter; ideally, the title is also tonally attractive?it has a "ring"
toit.

Success
here is not impossible with careful word selection and arrange
ment?though relatively brief, Tonkin's Narrating Our Pasts: the Social
Construction of Oral History, works well. Close analysis reveals why: asso
nance of the "s" secures aural and visual consonance and thus style. The
title's present participle is important and effective for three reasons. First, it
 428 Anne Reef

connotes a compelling sense of immediacy that implicates Tonkin as well as

the reader, suggesting that neither she nor her audience is outside of the
process(es) she studies. Second, it conveys her idea that oral histories and
traditions are dynamic and in process rather than static?oral historians are
not "talking books."36 Third, itmakes reference to what Tonkin herself is
doing through this project; she is, as she explains in several places, but espe
cially candidly in her introduction, a narrator.
The implied subject of the title is, of course, "we," as the use of "our,"
indicates. Again, ideas important to Tonkin are conveyed by her word
choice. One is that of the universality and commonality of a concern for his
tory?"across the world, people seem to remember different aspects of the
past"; this occurs in both literate and non-literate societies.37 But in her text
Tonkin demonstrates that "we" or "our," though plural, can be applied to a
singular person or narrator, not only literally, as in the royal "we." This is
because there are multiple selves that may manifest through the process of
narration; they are sociaUy, occasionally, and narratively constructed, and
may not be consistent with the narrator or the personae associated with the
narrator or author.

Although it would have been repetitious for Tonkin to have used the
word "history" twice in her title, it is significant that she chooses the word
"pasts." Throughout the book, she employs the phrase "representations of
pastness" where others might say "history." This allows the reader insight
into Tonkin's philosophy of history and its narration, especially the idea that
history, written or oral, is always a representation and thus mediated. The
plural "pasts" also suggests multiplicity and diversity?one of Tonkin's
important arguments is that oral histories are more diverse in nature and
form than early theorists of the field or many readers realize.
The title of Achebe's book, Farmers, Traders, Warriors, and Kings:
Female Power and Authority inNorthern Igboland, 1900-1960, is similarly
constructive, but is also misleading. As is evident from the title, Achebe is
concerned with female power and authority, and she helpfully and appropri
ately defines these terms in her text: "power" means "the ability to do some
thing; to control, to influence ..." while "authority" is a related term, sig
nifying "the power or the right to give orders, or to take specific actions."38
The flaw in Achebe's title is her use of the plural in "kings"; the "s" was
perhaps added for aural and visual parallelism. However, the text offers
only one examination of female kingship, that of Ahebi Ugbabe. This ren
ders part of the argument implied in the title?that the Igbo had female

36Ibid.,90.
37Ibid.,l.
38 41-42.
Achebe, Farmers,
 Re-Presenting Interviews and Oral Histories 429

kings?a stretch; Ahebi Ugbabe's case, it seems but does not state, was an
aberration.

The core source material of Geiger's book is her interviews with women
in several locations in Tanzania. These interview sections, which contain
some gloss and discussion, are framed with informative and discursive sec
tions that interpret the research of the author and others, and emphasize con
temporary theories of nationalism, especially its performativity. In Geiger's
title, TANU Women: Gender and Culture in the Making of Tanganyikan
Nationalism, 1955-1965, the problem lies with the first conjunction and the
noun that follows. The name of the book refers to "gender and culture"
(emphasis added), but from the text's content, what Geiger means by culture
is unclear. Perhaps she is alluding to the information regarding urban and
rural Tanganyikan society that emerges from the interviews?for example,
how the women placed a premium on acquiring education, and how,
inevitably, female political activity was conflated with prostitution.
The trouble with Lunn's title is more subtle. Memoirs of theMaelstrom:
a Senegalese Oral History of the First World War (1999) is adequately
descriptive of Lunn's work and alliteratively elegant. The book attempts to
emphasize "the African experience."39 For this reason, Lunn felt it "essen
tial to incorporate an African perspective."40 His method is to combine
extensive archival evidence with the oral testimonies of 85 Senegalese
World War I veterans. The book's title, however, disappoints the reader
sensitive to nuance. A memoir is a narrative constructed from personal
experience, implicitly here the consciousness of his confidants. As such, the
reader may assume that most of its historical evidence will derive from oral
history. Actually, much less of this book is the product of oral history than
its title suggests?more than half of Lunn's work relies on documentary
evidence, and when oral testimony does enter the book, it is often incorpo
rated into the body of the text.
Interestingly, three works under discussion incorporate mimetic material
into their titles. The sentences "The Pygmies Were Our Compass" that
begins Klieman's and The Seed Is Mine of van Onselen's are the words of
their interviewees.41 The phrase "a white car" in Cohen's is a fragment of
Selina Ndalo Were's testimony. Such titular quotes reduce mediation and
offer a sense of immediacy. However, these titles are also some of the least
compact, perhaps even the most clumsy, of the book titles on this bibliogra
phy. As such, they provide a sense of how managing mimesis anywhere in
an academic text means making choices about voices.

39Lunn, Memoirs of theMaelstrom, 1.

40Ibid.,9.
41Unlike Klieman, van Onselen does not use quotation marks in his title.
 430 Anne Reef

VI

Two mimetic problems in the texts under consideration are ones that their
authors, Geiger and Malkki, anticipate. Geiger says that while historical
anonymity may be chaUenged by the "particularity" of an oral record, she
warns that "a lengthy string of life history narratives . . .produce[s] a kind
of mental blur, with one woman's story eventually indistinguishable from
the next, especially in retrospect."42 It is unclear whether Geiger hopes to
avoid this or whether this is an admission that her text bears this flaw, which
is perhaps inevitable. Whatever the case, Geiger's many interviews do
unfortunately finally fuse into fuzziness.
Malkki's method was to interview Burundian Hutus in Mishoma and
Kigamo. Her text consists of large theoretical and discursive sections that
draw on contemporary critical theory, especially that related to social con
struction of nationalism, like Benedict Anderson's work. These sections are
punctuated by what Malkki terms "panels," the form in which she cites and
thus reports the oral testimonies of her respondents.43 These comprise indi
vidual narratives or the synthesized stories of different people that represent
"standard versions" of "thematic clusters."44

These narrative panels weaken the effect of this book, paradoxically

stripping voice rather than privileging it, and they are "homogenizing," as
Malkki warns they might be.45 This is exacerbated because so little informa
tion is given about the informants in terms of names, age, gender, and social
status. Despite this, Malkki's text is strong diegetically?Purity and Exile is
most (re)commendable because of the author's ability to synthesize and to
apply large amounts of material from a range of disciplines and texts.
Choosing to avoid mimetic material completely is usually not an option
because a text is less interesting without it. This is the case with Klieman's
book. Certainly, she states that "the collection of oral histories was not an
initial goal of [her] work" and she gleans her historical evidence from
archaeological and linguistic study, as well as oral and ethnographic data.46
But in this text, meaning and method appear to contradict each other. The
book, which is dense, re-presents a dearth of direct oral material. Despite
her concern for what she argues is the socially-constructed sidelining of
Batwa historical importance, a point made by Jeremy Rich in his review of
her book is valid. Neither single Batwa communities nor Batwa individuals

42Geiger, TANU Women, 65.

43Malkki, Purity and Exile, 107.

44Ibid.,107,59.
45Ibid.,58.
^Klieman, "The Pygmies Were Our Compass," xxiv.
 Re-Presenting Interviews and Oral Histories 431

are the focus of Klieman's gaze or reporting?Rich

academic "longed for
more ethnographic detail."47 Ironically, despite her shunning the first-person
singular narrator in favor of the third-person and the first-person plural
("we"), the pervasive and most memorable voice in this text is Klieman's
own. This is, perversely, highlighted when, rarely, a Batwa voice is permit
ted presence in the main body of the text (e.g., p. 138), where a brief but
delightful passage in which (the voice of) the ghevovi (judge) Nzondo-a
Mighino explains what would have happened had the Batwa not brought the
dog to theMitsogho Bokudu. This proves more ironic in view of the direct
speech contained in Klieman's title, which gives voice to the Bantu regard
ing the Batwa, to whom, apparently, they owe literal and metaphoric direc
tion. The effect of Klieman's text is to suggest that rejecting the unmediated
voice of the respondent by withholding direct quotations of interviews or
citations from interview transcripts may be a risky way of managing mime
sis.
is borne out by Lunn's text, which is enlivened when chunks of oral
This
history enter the narrative, as in the section "The Soldiers' Return." Inmany
other places, though, Lunn's mimetic material is fragmented and synthe
sized and thus feels highly mediated. Yet his diegesis feels seamless and
polished. So what, then, comprises ineffective or effective diegesis?

vn

If one accepts Tonkin's argument that oral, indeed all, history is socially
constructed, a thesis supported by Malkki's work, then there are situations
in which some discussion of the narrator's own prejudices and predilections
seems In van Onselen's case, for his admission that
mandatory. example,
his work was not conceived in a vacuum of dispassion, and his explanation
of the tug of both emotional and intellectual curiosity that he felt regarding
his project, enriches the text. It also delivers a poignant secondary history
that is complicated because it is professional and personal as well as politi
cal. The biographer suggests that telling such a story is part of a thorough
historian's job?in the epigraph to Part 1, van Onselen cites and thus
endorses W.H. MacMillan, who suggested in 1919 that the "really signifi
cant" part of South African history was that of "every day" life and its con
stitutive elements.48 Van Onselen also makes it clear that he is committed to
the unalluring southwestern highveld for ideological and pedagogical rea

47Jeremy Rich, review of "371e Pygmies Were Our Compass," IJAHS 37(2004), 185.
48Van Onselen, Seed isMine, 13. The text on which van Onselen draws isWiUiam H.
MacMiUan, The South African Agrarian Problem and Its Historical Development (Johan
nesburg, 1919).
 432 Anne Reef

sons because the microcosm of that region offers lessons for the macrocosm
of the country?"[w]hen an authentic South African identity eventuaUy
emerges from this troubled country it will . . . have come from painful
shared experiences on the highveld."49 Van Onselen admits to his own para
doxical identity, a combination of deracination and belonging, when he
states that "To the extent that I have roots anywhere, I am a son of the South
African highveld."50 This is his admission of his emotional involvement in
the space in which this book is situated, and by the end of the text van Onse
len, although younger than Kas Maine, has been rendered a foil to the high
veld son whose color and class afforded him less privilege.
Earlier discussion suggested that one impulse of postmodernism is to
allow those whom Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak famously termed "subal
terns" to speak. This has bifold implications for the academic re-presenter
of oral material?on one hand, the goal of the academic project may be to
present for posterity the testimony of those who have been misunderstood
or marginalized, especially because their stories have been oral and never
printed. But the academic who acts on such impulse may also feel less
impelled to sUence their own voice in the presentation of any kind of acade
mic material. Both situations create problems for strategies of narrative rep
resentation and talking about the narrative self.
Traditionally, the use of the first-person voice for the narrator was a
diegetic strategy that academic writing discouraged in the interests of objec
tivity and the exclusion of distraction from the scholarly material at hand. In
a postmodern milieu, which welcomes admissions of social construction
and subjectivity, use of the first person for diegetic material is no longer
taboo in academic texts. Tonkin herself uses the first person because she
believes that authors, through literacy or "oracy," establish authority and
concomitantly responsib?ity for their words.51 As such, she supports mean
ing with method by using "I," "avoidfing] impersonal constructions," and
"us[ing] active verbs" that have or imply a subject.52 Though aware that she
is writing within a conventional academic gerne, she deviates from its tradi
tion of "the decent obscurity of learned language" in order to underscore her
content.53

This creates a paradox in that it offers both opportunities and a predica

ment for writers of various kinds. While all the writing discussed here uses
the first person and offers the circumstances of conception and gestation in

49Van Onselen, Seed Is Mine, vi.

50Ibid., v.
51Tonkin, Narrating Our Pasts, 3.
52Ibid., 17.
53Ibid.
 Re-Presenting Interviews and Oral Histories 433

the various introductions, some pieces carry these through to the body of the
text. But how the social construction of the narrative self is showcased and
the extent to which the first-person narrator should appear in the body of
these books can be an issue, as inAchebe's book.
One important concept in Achebe's work is allied with the author's nar
rative strategy; this is that of her "positionality."54 She employs this term to
explain her situation in relation to the society in which she is conducting
research as well as to the individuals that comprise it. She describes her
position with regard to Nsukka society as being constructed by many fac
tors, including her simultaneous insider-outsider stance, and the facts that
she was, at the time she conducted her research, a married, United States
educated scholar who speaks Igbo. Most unusual, though, is Achebe's status
as daughter of one of Nigeria's most renowned writers, Chinua Achebe. In
her own book, the daughter briefly but necessarily describes the privileged
welcome that her father's achievements secured for her in Igbo society.
Achebe's tactics include blending candor about the book's personal and
social construction with a high profile first-person narrator, the most imme
diate and assertive of any encountered in the texts under consideration.
Achebe's textual presence is due as much to her narrative tone as her narra
tive stance; other authors have used "I" less intrusively.
Paradoxically, Achebe's own presence in the text is both its greatest
strength and one of its weaknesses. Her entrance into the book is an
inevitable aspect of her "honest discussion" and "honest self-interrogation,"
and this makes her work unusually engaging and compelling.55 But occa
sionally, especially in the introductory and concluding sections, Achebe's
voice becomes solipsistic and somewhat strident. Also, when she describes
her efforts to interview prophetess Ngozi Ogbu, the author appears to be
manipulatively cavalier, as evinced in her words, "I . . . tossed around the
names of . . .prominent Nsukka women"; perhaps Achebe is being wryly
self-deprecating about her determination to meet with the prophetess, but
such ambiguity risks alienating the reader.56 However, the effect of
Achebe's confident and lively authorial approach is to retrospectively ren
der the traditionally low-profile academic historian-narrator anachronistic
and to further destabilize once inviolable academic authorial approaches.
As a narrator, Achebe employs an interesting diegetic strategy that is not
evident in the other texts discussed here. She not only draws on interviews
and oral histories as primary source material, but endorses orality as a
source for the historian. She does this in three ways. First, she is candid

54Achebe, Farmers, 4.
55Ibid., 18,19.
56Ibid.,63.
 434 Anne Reef

about her commitment to such sources in her discussion because "the life
history medium provides a direct narrative enactment of the ways, the
motives, and the beliefs of a person within a culture"; it gives the female
life-historian an opportunity to present "her totality as a person" rather than
just "political, religious, and/or other sensibilities."57 Second, Achebe
expresses support for this historical medium by employing it widely in her
text. The third way, the most subtle, relates to her narrative strategy through
vocabulary choices. She says, for "allow me," "let us now consid
example,
er," and she uses the word "dialogue," which implies conversation, where
the word "interaction" would have sufficed.58 Most significantly, though,
she often asks the reader to "listen" (emphasis added).59 Such terminology
inAchebe's written text emulates aurality/orality and in doing so, reinforces
some of the unique and compeUing qualities of spoken texts.

vm

Using, but also modifying, the conventions of pattern that regulate genre is
something that Tonkin contends that oral and written historians do frequent
ly. Some of the texts considered here evince successful modifications within
the genre of academic writing. Van Onselen uses two narrative strategies
that are particularly effective in taking account of social construction. The
first is the use of epigraphs. The epigraphs economically add the dimensions
of broader place and time to a narrative that is highly localized, and in doing
so, compellingly expand the book's concerns. Perhaps the best example is
the citation from Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village (1770), which
reads:

/// fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, where wealth accumulates
and men decay; princes and lords may flourish, or may fade?a
breath can make them, as a breath has made; but a bold peasantry,
their country's pride, when once destroyed, can never be supplied.

57Ibid.,7.
58Ibid.,66,112,153.
59Ibid.,116,128,133.
^an Onselen, Seed isMine, 329, emphasis in original. Van Onselen cites this as prose

although, while employing the same wording, another version of the passage, without

italics, (ed.Arthur Barrett, London, [1951]) offers it as poetry with different punctuation:
111fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay:
Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made:
But a bold peasantry, their country's pride,
When once destroyed, can never be supplied. (// 51-56)
 Re-Presenting Interviews and Oral Histories 435

Here, Goldsmith's writing may be read as a pre-Marxist caution to capital

ism, one that effectively reflects the Marxist perception of the capitalist
need to reproduce the conditions of production. However, including these
words is particularly effective for van Onselen, whose narrative constantly
chronicles the "ill-faring" of the land. Goldsmith's words thus suggest
almost metaphysical meaning?punishment for capitalist corruption?in the
random rains, droughts, and other natural disasters that the Maine family
befall in what will become a wasteland of white greed. Thus Kas' struggle
is linked to the struggles of peasants across time and place. Further, the
"princes and lords" personae of the epigraph reappear in the epilogue,
where van Onselen displays a similar strategy. Here he begins with a refer
ence to Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard, in which the Sicilian
courtier warns his prince that, paradoxically, in order tomaintain the status
quo, change must be achieved. Van Onselen views this as analogous to the
apartheid South African government's 1990 decision to dismantle apartheid.
Liisa Malkki's work also shows that she has consulted texts from outside
of her own discipline of anthropology?philosophy, sociology, history, and
literature, for example. She confidently draws on other texts to create and to
support meaning in her own. Two of these add significant texture to her
writing. First, her book's title is, in fact, intertextual. Purity and Exile
inevitably relates to the concepts and arguments articulated by Mary Dou
glas. Malkki mentions the senior anthropologist's book in her introduction,
saying that "[t]he danger or pollution posed by statelessness or refugeeness
to the categorical order of nation states corresponds quite neatly to the
processes studied ... in Purity and Danger (1966)." This implies thatMalk
ki's own study is an application and perhaps an extension of Douglas'
work.61 Although detailed consideration of Douglas' impact on Malkki is
beyond the scope of this paper, it is notable that Malkki inverts Douglas'
title to abbreviate her own title of Chapter 5, "The Danger of Assimilation
and the Purity of Exile," to "Danger and Purity."
Another famous text from outside her discipline informs Malkki's work.
In a bold multidisciplinary move, Malkki employs a poem by William
Blake, "The Tyger," to express the "categorical" thought associated with
nationalism and mythico-histories.62 She also uses the metaphor of the
Blakean "tyger" to argue that even in the face of its compelling brightness
and "symmetry," one should examine it with "denaturalizing eyes" in order
to understand its construction and power.63 Although Malkki fully develops

61Malkki, Purity and Exile, 7.

62Ibid., 258. Some versions of the poem use "tiger," not "tyger."
63Ibid.,255,258.
 436 Anne Reef

this only at the end of her book, she hints at it sooner?as early as page 107,
she calls the "analogy between past and present" a "fearful symmetry," and
she refers to the poet and mystic (though not to his poem) again on page
113. By referring to 'The Tyger," Malkki pithily conveys both danger and
social construction in an extraordinarily economic and effective way.
Another text considered here forms part of a unique intertextual relation
ship?Achebe's work inevitably interacts with her father's, and the reader
seeks to determine if and how the daughter's book corroborates or overturns
Chinua Achebe's oeuvre. This is not in order to disprove him, but in order
to establish whether her view, shaped by the differences of generation, gen
der, and discipline, offers new insights into Igbo life and society.
Intertextuality, then, may be an efficient and effective strategy for an
academic writer. Also an effective but unusual strategy in an academic text
is the use of the cameo, here employed only by van Onselen. Because he
uses the third-person voice and adopts an almost invisible narrative profile
for most of the text, it is surprising to the reader when he does gently mani
fest at the end of the work. In describing Kas's funeral in 1985, van Onselen
writes that, "[a] taUwhite man, one of Kas's friends, slipped into the gather
ing and he, too, spoke."64 The funeral ended:

But not everybody left. The tall white man stayed behind and waited
until the cemetery emptied ... He reached down, picked up a hand
ful of earth and walked across to the grave. With the wind gently
spraying the grains of sand that trickled from his hand, he looked
down, made a silent promise and then turned to leave.65

From the prior content of the book, the reader infers that the "tall white
man" is van Onselen. The context and of van Onselen's unself
placement

promoting cameo contribute lyrical language and

to its effectiveness. His
vocabulary choices
also suggest poignancy, grief, and ephemerality, and the
"silent promise" is surely to tellMaine's story. The weighty printed text that
the reader has in hand is thus proof of the fulfilment of that promise. The
fact that van Onselen spoke at Kas' funeral is an interesting and perhaps a
necessary admission from a point of view of social construction, as is his
graveside promise, because it testifies to his close relationship with his sub
ject. Van Onselen's narrative strategy is thus to admit to the social construc
tion of his project and to elucidate his involvement with it in the front mat
ter of the text, and to reinforce it through his (double) cameo appearances at
its end. Thus van Onselen has successfully moved toward reconciling social

^Van Onselen, Seed isMine, 532.

65Ibid.
 Re-Presenting Interviews and Oral Histories 437

construction with diegetic strategy?the body of the text, like "the seed," is
Kas'.
Inmost compelling texts, form follows function. As such, van Onselen's
book's enormity is perhaps an attempt to redress the indignity of Kas' previ
ous textual non-existence. But van Onselen's book is just too big; while it
strives to be ethical as a project and a paradigm, not many academic pub
lishers regularly consider such extended manuscripts. And a further rub:
few people are likely to read assiduously to the book's last narrative page
(535). If they don't, they will miss the cameos that add so much richness
and so many clues to the social construction of this text.
Similarly low-key as a narrator, David William Cohen successfully rec
onciles diegesis with mimesis. His chapter, "In a Nation of White Cars . . .
One White Car, or 'AWhite Car,' Becomes a Truth" distinguishes itself
from the genre of academic writing and from other texts in the collection
under discussion because of both its narrative strategy and its tone, which is
one of immediacy, urgency, and suspense?it reads like a crime or detective
text. Focusing on Kenyan press reports that Selena Ndaro Were, the house
keeper at the farm of mutilated Kenyan Minister of Foreign Affairs, Robert
Ouko, saw a white car leave Ouko's property on the night that her employer
... an observation or
disappeared, Cohen inquires "how alleged observa
tion?transformed into a statement through oral testimony?acquired and
^
maintained standing, influence, and the status of 'truth'." Cohen carefully
points out thatWere's story "operated as 'a truth' rather than 'the truth'
upon broader fields of contest over the larger story."67
Cohen's text is chunked into eight unequal, untitled, and unnumbered
sections, each made discrete by three small centered asterisks. Such narra
tive fragmentation is unusual in academic writing, but succeeds here for
several reasons. First, the visual rhetoric of the page supports the thematic
concerns of the paper: truth is fragmentary in nature, visual perception may
be fleeting, and both depend on literal and metaphorical point of view. Sec
ond, sectioning allows Cohen to control narrative pace carefully and to be
less concerned with transitions between chunks. Voice and tone need not be
consistent either?in fact, Cohen's narrative compels because his abrupt
breaks allow him to present multiple points of view. Although the first sec
tions contain some metacommentary and discursive material, Cohen is an
informed narrator who maintains a low profile until the last section of the
text, and surfaces there, briefly but confidently, through the use of the pos
sessive pronoun, "my." As such, his control over his narrative is asserted
without his voice becoming obtrusive.

^Cohen, "White Cars," 265.

67Ibid.,278.
 438 Anne Reef

But while Cohen's text succeeds where other academic texts might not,
his methods are perhaps not replicable?the suspense that is so central to
Cohen's narrative and suggests his piece's narrative structure is not perti
nent to most academic texts. Also the space occupied by the oral testimony
on which he relies?just three words?comprises only a miniscule part of
the narrative and is not itself mimetically complicated. Finally, the tension
and control that he masters may be difficult to sustain in book-length texts
such as those considered above.

IX

So, whatever a text's presiding passions, it is difficult for an academic ethi

caUy and effectively to represent interviews and oral histories?here termed
mimesis?and discussion on such primary material and the presentation of
the narrating self, or diegesis. Weaknesses appear inevitable. The existence
of the academy is predicated on the basis that knowledge should be
released, not bottled. History is not just a record of significant events that is
particularly concerned with chronology?it is always also a story or tale,
and narrating it necessitates re-presenting voices and making choices that
may release a genie who works both mischief and magic.