Future Knowledge

[00:00:00] Vida: Welcome to the Future Knowledge Podcast and our special summer series on vanishing culture, brought to you by me, Vida, and the Internet Archive. We're talking with the archivists, librarians, and creators fighting to preserve our shared cultural history

[00:00:24] Dave & Chris: Hey listeners, I'm Dave Hansen and I'm Chris Freeland. This is Future Knowledge. A note as we start up. We're sharing a special six-part weekly series called Vanishing Culture, exploring what's at risk of being lost in the digital age and why preservation matters. series is inspired by Vanishing Culture, the new book from the Internet Archive.

[00:00:45] You can read it online for free at archive.org or find it in print at your favorite bookstore. And now on with today's episode Today we're talking about African folktales. Why does folk culture vanish, and what can we do to preserve it? How can digitisation help keep folklore alive and accessible?

[00:01:08] Vida: I'm Vida, a musician and an artist. In this podcast series, I'll be finding out more about public access to culture and how to preserve it for future generations. Join me as I learn from the experts about threats to preservation in the digital age and what happens when culture vanishes

[00:01:29] I'm talking to Helen Nde, a writer and researcher who curates the platform Mythological Africans, which explores myths and folklore from the African continent. I'll also chat with Laura Gibbs, a researcher and former university instructor on African folklore, who uses the Internet Archive to continue her research in her retirement.

[00:01:53] First, I was interested to hear about Helen's interest in folklore and why it's relevant today.

[00:02:00] Helen: Well, so I was born and raised in Cameroon, which is a West Central African country, and so I grew up with a fair amount of storytelling, not as much as it might have been if I grew up in a more traditional setting. I grew up in a city. I went to, mission schools and, you know, had the Western-type education that, comes with the aftermath of colonialism.

[00:02:26] however, growing up, when my cousins would visit, we would have story time, and we would tell stories, and a lot of them were, you know, fairy tales from Europe. But there were also quite a few which were fairy tales and folktales that were more, indigenous to the part of the country that I come from.

[00:02:46] And so that always registered at the back of my head, you know, listening to the radio, listening to people talk, that element of how people use stories to make sense of the world was always there, but not as prominently as European-type folktales and European-type myths, including, you know, the Christian mythology.

[00:03:08] I was raised Christian. And so it wasn't until I moved to the US when, as tends to happen when you're an immigrant, you start to look at yourself through the eyes of the other. And, I found myself wondering, "Well, hey, there is a lot of Europe here," you know? And what do I actually come out of?

[00:03:26] You know, what are the stories that have shaped people like me, that have helped us make sense of the world? And so that started me looking, mainly for myself, at, you know, more of the stories, especially, because I am very much into psychology and self-health and spirituality and that type of stuff. And if you have any exposure to any of that, it is infused with mythology and folklore from all over the world.

[00:03:52] if you look at spirituality, there's a lot of, myths and folklore from East Asia. if you look at psychology, there's a lot of myths and folklore from Europe, you know, Greek mythology, Roman mythology, and Norse mythology, and Celtic, you know, European, all over. And so, you look even at popular culture, the whole, you Marvel franchise that has dominated, you know, popular culture for the last decade or so is heavily influenced by myths and folklore, both ancient and more modern.

[00:04:24] And so I found myself kind of wondering, you what else is there? And so I started looking more for myself to understand, okay, how do I fit into this picture as a person of African descent? And, this was also right around the time when there was a strong inclination toward that. You could see more African elements of myth-making and folktales, emerging into popular consciousness.

[00:04:50] And so I kind of rode that wave, but decided I wanted to take it more in an academic research type direction to say, "Okay, it's not just about the stories. What are the implications of the stories in real terms? how are they affecting people? How have they affected people? And how have they shaped society?

[00:05:16] How have they shaped trade? How have they shaped commerce? How have they shaped politics?" And so I started the Mythological Africans platform about 2020, and everything I've talked about up till now was sort of an awakening that started around 2016 and then unfolded over the years. So it culminated in, the Mythological Africans platform in 2020, where I just started putting my thoughts out there, so kind of the public curation work, and so, looking up themes, looking up figures, looking up creatures, and talking about them.

[00:05:50] And what's great is that a lot of people were looking for that kind of information. and so I built a community around that fairly quickly, and the rest, as they say, is history. it's been an interesting journey so far of discovery for myself, but also in getting to share that information with other people.

[00:06:10] Vida: I wanted to hear more about the challenges of preserving indigenous stories and the colonial context that Helen talked about. I asked Lara to give me some background about the history of preserving folktales on the African continent.

[00:06:25] Laura: that's a question that comes up again and again in any kind of collection of, oral folktales that have been written down is what circumstances did that happen in? How much, changed in the transcription? how much changed when the transcription was then published? And one of the big problems with working with older sources that are in the public domain is that many of those older sources had no particular regard for fidelity, in recording those oral stories.

[00:06:55] their purposes were not really cultural preservation for the good of that culture, but instead cultural preservation for the use of colonial officials in order to better manage, the people whose culture was being documented. So many of the folktales were collected by, uh, colonial officials who needed to, train people in languages, so they would collect, folktales and proverbs and riddles, just to use as teaching tools for colonial officials.

[00:07:25] Missionaries would collect these materials in order to be able to better propagate the Christian mission amongst these peoples. and so it's wonderful that the stories were written down and I'm so grateful in a sense to the collectors that they were, and of course, ultimately grateful to the storytellers.

[00:07:43] But as time has gone by, obviously modern anthropologists and folklorists are more aware of the fact that this is about cultural preservation, and great care needs to be taken, to record the stories in a way that's culturally accurate and representative and useful and meaningful. And so The fact that now with the Internet Archive, our access to those more contemporary collections of folktales has been cut off by the publishers is really a problem because it means we're left with the stories that are more dubious, of less value.

[00:08:15] We can still use them, but it's nothing like the kind of material you get from folklorists that have really tried hard to capture that idea of performance. and when you think about it too, many of the ones where colonial officials say we're collecting folktales, and lots of colonial officials did collect folktales, that's not a performance in the same way as an actual performance where someone's performing for a real audience, and there's back and forth and call and response and singing and all the things that went on that made it an incredibly rich experience.

[00:08:44] That dimension of the experience is almost entirely missing in the 19th and early 20th century collections. So, you know, we can get the plots out and the characters, and I love the plots and the characters, so I'm very glad to go and read them and index them and collect them. But it's not at all the same as giving us a sense of how powerful that oral, tradition was.

[00:09:04] Vida: Helen gave me a fascinating example about how this colonial context when recording folktales has led to misunderstandings about the role of queer and neurodivergent individuals in some African cultures

[00:09:19] Helen: in terms of queer histories, it's a bit challenging because what you'll find on the African continent is that people ... That the topic of sex is one that is approached very tactfully. So it's shrouded in a lot of metaphor and, you know, symbolic language. So you would have, you know, back in the day, you would have two adults have a full conversation, erotically charged, and if you didn't know what they were saying, you would think they were talking about calabashes and, I don't know, yams.

[00:09:55] So that's challenging for folklore because a lot of the times you will have the full pillow right there in front of you, and you would honestly think they were talking about farming if you are not clued into the metaphorical language of that particular people. And so This actually struck, I think it was Leo Frobenius was a German explorer and ethnographer, and he, you know, lived amongst different African peoples, and he got very confused.

[00:10:26] He said, "Well, I've lived among a lot of these people, and they're not afraid of the topic of sex. You know, I've observed them, I've seen them. But you listen to their stories, and there's just nothing, absolutely nothing." And so he made a point to find informants who would tell him the more sexually charged stories, and he made a whole collection about them.

[00:10:48] but then that speaks to my point. You have to go asking, and you have to have people who are comfortable telling you. And Frobenius probably had more access to men than he did to women, so the stories that he was able to collect are reflective of that. They can be very homophobic in some cases. they can be very misogynistic in many cases.

[00:11:10] And, when reference was made to queer people, it wasn't necessarily in the most positive light. it reflected a lot of the, prejudices of the time. However, when you look at more anthropological type studies, more ethnographic type studies done by researchers who had informants that gave them good information, what you would find is that there was a s- just a lot of variety in people's attitudes towards, queer sexuality on the African continent if we stick with the topic of queerness, you know?

[00:11:42] And in some places, it was accepted, it was welcome, it was seen as a spiritual gift, you know? and in other places, you'd be dead once people found out that that's, how you moved through the world. and similarly with intellectual processing ability in many, many, many cultures, people with, you know, who would today be on the autistic spectrum, if you called that, were seen as gifts, you know, as God-touched.

[00:12:09]

[00:12:10] Helen: and their ability to move through the world, process the world, understand the world in different ways were seen as valuable, you know, to, to the community, up to a point, right? the more these abilities interfered with your capacity to fit in, that sometimes would determine just what place you held in the society and how much protection you would get.

[00:12:33] And so it's, it's a mixed bag. But what differentiates it from, the way these things tend to be understood in the modern context, especially with, you know, categorization in the Diagnostic Manual for Mental Disorders or whatever you want to call that text. not to be dismissive of it, it's just the name is so long I always forget what order the words go.

[00:12:56]

[00:12:56] Helen: is that, that heavily prejudiced, you know, that immediate othering, that immediate branding as something is wrong here, um, that wasn't the case. That much I can say for a good majority of African cultures. and even if it was seen as not quite right, there were approaches that were taken not to set you apart, lock you away, you know, keep you out of sight, but to bring you in and help you find your place in the community.

[00:13:29] And all of that up to a point, because human beings, at the end of it all are human beings, and if you're too other and you threaten the social structure too much, and then, you know, things go crazy. But ... And so, so that talk was, my effort to look at the work of some writers who I admire quite a lot because of the way they have taken these ideas and woven them into, their fiction, and that's reflective of the society that I grew up in, I'm comfortable with.

[00:13:59] I think it's work that should get a lot of review, you know, should really be looked at as, a way that we can continue that tradition of making things okay, making people be okay, finding ways to bring people in rather than set them aside because what, in many ways Western education has done on the African continent is introduce this idea that if you don't fit, if you're not a square peg in a square hole, then you kind of get pushed to the fringes and you're of no use, and that's just not true.

[00:14:35] Vida: I wondered how this post-colonial power imbalance has developed in the digital era. Can social media, for example, empower communities to tell and preserve their own stories? What is the relationship between social media and oral storytelling traditions?

[00:14:53] Helen: As in other parts of the world, and you probably know this, transmission of folktales was largely oral and following different paths. You had communities where you were expected to remember the stories as they were told, and I believe among the Rwanda in Eastern Africa, their storytellers followed a very regimented structure.

[00:15:13] They had to remember the stories exactly and recite them. And so you had this structured transmission of stories over time, and Many of the, griots of West African culture, so in Mali, in Senegal, in Gambia, followed such a pattern 'cause they were recording genealogies, they were recording, you know, histories.

[00:15:35] And so they were expected to remember, if not word for word, then certain key elements. And then you had the storytelling which was more interactive, which was more, a response to the present situation. And so the themes might be the same, you know, the arc of the story might be the same, but the elements would change.

[00:15:54]

[00:15:54] Helen: especially if that, storyteller was using that opportunity to help the community make sense of something that had happened or was going to happen. And you had, you know, the stories that mothers told their children or older sisters or grandmothers. And so it was this dynamic environment of storytelling being used for different purposes, and often these purposes driving how these stories were told, what was included in the stories, and that was left out.

[00:16:23] And, you know, I am not a teacher, you know, I'm not trained in education but... or psychology or any of that. But I think, you know, it's a fairly reasonable conclusion to say that had implications for how people's intellectual development and their ability to see the world in a certain way and make sense of the world and use their understanding of the world to navigate the world.

[00:16:45] And of course, all of that changed when systems of education and documentation came in, which relied more on one person being an authority figure, books and in that linear type, more emphasis on that linear type, "Okay, this is a story and you can't change it." not that that didn't exist before, but with that becoming the primary means by which people made sense of their lives, a lot was lost in that process.

[00:17:12]

[00:17:12] Helen: especially since for many of us Africans who don't live in villages, and there is massive rural-urban migration, so that's an increasing number of people. And any changes to patterns of living means that the storytelling culture is not as vibrant as it was. And so for many of us, what we have are what, you know, ethnographers, anthropologists, and when, you know, things work out favorably, the African storytellers themselves documented.

[00:17:43] But that we gained a lot through that because at least something was written down. But that came with the added baggage of a lot of the times this was filtered through the per- perceptions of whichever missionary or anthropologist or ethnographer was writing those stories down. And even when they were done by Africans, they lost that dynamic as- that dynamic, aspect of them where that same storyteller, three months from the time when they wrote that story down, might have told that story differently in response to shifting circumstances.

[00:18:13] So writing that story down then suddenly creates this environment where this is the official story. And so you lose a lot, you lose a lot in that, especially if the storytelling culture is not maintained. So it has not disappeared completely, but it has transformed in many, many vital ways. But I am curious to see how social media will change all of that.

[00:18:37] Because in many ways, social media replicates that traditional context where it's a village, it's a group of people, who, you know, belong to clans and tribes and, you know, if you look at how people organize themselves around ideologies or ways of thinking even on the, on the internet, it sometimes replicates, you know, the groupings that less modern societies had.

[00:19:02] And probably not putting this very eloquently. And so what stories emerge from these groupings and how when these stories are touched by myths and folklore from whatever part of the world, you know, traditional or modern, how do these make sense? And so there is, I think there is an interesting dynamic, you know, in digital folklore or digital myth- mythology that will, people digging back perhaps a couple of decades from now will see.

[00:19:33] and I hope I'm around to see it. You know, a lot of my work now is putting information out there that can be used to make this environment richer, to give it something to work with, that is drawing from credible sources and it's not just, you know, what the froth that has risen to the top and, you know, is not grounded in much substance, even though even that has its place in the landscape, if you wanna think about it that way.

[00:20:00] So I, more and more, I find myself, not in despair about how, you know, oh, the traditional storytelling structure has been destroyed. I find myself orienting more towards what possibilities are there that can be, looked at and developed here, and what might that mean for the future?

[00:20:19] 'Cause social media is not going anywhere anytime soon it's just gonna keep transforming into new beasts which will carry us into some strange, strange future that, you know, I don't even know to make of it anymore.

[00:20:32] Vida: I was interested in what Helen said about the importance of credible sources for folklore.

[00:20:39] Why is this so important? And do digital archives have a role to play?

[00:20:44] Helen: yeah. but then part of curating and part of why I think what Internet Archive does is so important is that it creates, a repository of credible sources. 'Cause the thing about myths and folklore is that because they are such flexible instruments, they can be used by anybody to achieve different aims.

[00:21:05]

[00:21:06] Helen: part of what happened in Germany was that this, back in the day with, the, Nazi movement, was that this story about who the people were was told, and it captured the imagination, and they rode that wave to what we now know as the genocides. And that has not only happened in Germany, if you really look at history.

[00:21:27] All around the world, movements, political movements, spiritual movements, economic movements are taking stories which lean on people's understanding of who they are and who they could be, or who they were, who they are, and who they could be to orient things in a certain direction. It's happening in the US with, you know, the Christian Christo-fascist nationalist movement, if you can call it that.

[00:21:50] it's happening with the reaction to that Christo-fascist nationalist movement with, you know, people more saying, "Well, Christianity and its variants are not the only story for the humans." It's happening in the Middle East with fundamental Islamic elements. It's happening on the African continent with some people saying, "Okay, this is who we are, we were in the past, and so this is who we want to be in the future."

[00:22:14] And quite often, whether we're looking at it from the Christian, from the Islamic, from the, pagan in the, world use sense, not in the derogatory sense, in, the African, in the Asian, it happens amongst the Hindu, you know, that, that whole cluster, is people pick and choose what topics, what ideas they want to base that national identity on and orient people on.

[00:22:39] Sometimes that's a good thing, sometimes that's not a good thing. And so what people like the Internet Archive do is that they make a repository of sources available where anyone, anywhere in the world can go and look and say, "Okay, is this idea true, and I use that term very lightly, more in the sense of, okay, what has been said about this idea?

[00:23:01] How has it evolved over time? And is this interpretation of the idea, consistent with how it has been interpreted before, or is it being pointed in a direction for some purpose, which may be for the better, may be for the worse? And so that to me is, you know, in the midst of all these shifts and changes that are happening and the directions they could go, services like the Internet Archive, are sort of the,

[00:23:28] neutral dealer, information dealer, if you wanna use that, place where anybody, anywhere with an internet connection, and that's more and more people in the world, if they are aware that such a service exists, can go to, if a spiritual authority figure is saying, "Oh, this is what this holy book says," well, anybody anywhere can go look at that book and say, "Okay, is this really what the holy book says?"

[00:23:50] They can look at cross-references, if they know how to do this, of course. I need to put that, you know, caveat on there and, you know, have it make sense

[00:23:55]

[00:23:57] Helen: for themselves and for the people that they have contact with. So that's, I'm happy that this exists because otherwise, you know, anybody can say anything and because they seem like an authority figure, it's going to go, and we know as human beings that that doesn't always work out for other people.

[00:24:14] Vida: I asked Lara for her perspective as a researcher on the opportunities of the internet. Why are digital archives important, and what are the opportunities of digitization for anthropological research?

[00:24:28] Laura: To the kind of work that I'm doing, looking for different versions of stories, the fact that I was able to find 60 different versions of this seeing trouble story, and it's not even a major story.

[00:24:39] Like, this is a minor story, and, and I was amazed at how many examples I found. I'm only able to do that because the Internet Archive allows me to search across those millions of books and articles. and I think a lot of academics don't realize that the Internet Archive is a search opportunity unlike anything they've experienced anywhere else because it's got that full text search across all those books.

[00:25:04] So I was literally typing in search queries like, "What is trouble?" And, "What trouble is?" You know, with quotation marks around it so I would only get those strings, and I found, all kinds of examples of that story that were not known to, like say, William Bascom or Richard Dorson, these really important anthropologists and folklorists who worked on African American traditions and really wanted to study and document them.

[00:25:31] and so they would keep their personal libraries, they would circulate bibliographies, they would include abundant footnotes in their own work and they would meet each other at conferences and share information. You know, so they worked really hard and they did all the things that scholars do.

[00:25:45] But for example, I found a brilliant version of this story from Mississippi in an edition of Good Housekeeping Magazine from like 1913 or something like that, right? It was absolutely bizarre. From a very interesting folklorist who was not a specialist in African American folklore, he just traveled around the country collecting stories from anybody, really fascinating person.

[00:26:07] But because he's not an African American folklorist specifically, and his work was not ... he wasn't going to those conferences. It wasn't being published in, in those magazines. That story slipped by, and yeah, it's just one story, but oh, I tell you, I just squealed. I was so excited when I found something from this magazine in 1913, and that's really

[00:26:28] I never would have found that, literally never, except for the Internet Archives.

[00:26:34] Vida: I guess we're always witnessing mythologies as they spread and transform, and perhaps with the internet we get a real time record of that process. Through sharing these stories, the internet becomes a place where we can connect and perhaps deepen our way of listening to one another.

[00:26:53] Colonial projects have always attempted to confine a rich oral tradition into a single story, which makes me think about how creativity, on the other hand, really gets to flourish in oral culture, leaving so much room for personal expression and keeping the stories alive and reflective of the times that we live in. Join us next time when we'll be talking to Peter Scholing about preserving indigenous languages.