SA marked “National Archives Awareness Week” from May 5 to 9 with the theme “Digital Footprints: Archives and Records Management in the Digital Era”.
The celebration coincided with Africa Month. While it highlighted archives from a Western viewpoint, indigenous archives were noticeably left out of the discussion. Oral traditions have historically been vital in archiving the social, political and economic aspects of the African people.
African proverbs, folktales, family praises, nomenclature, rock art paintings and riddles are examples of oral traditions. Africans have been able to preserve their histories through storytelling, nomenclature, praise poems, rock art paintings, folktales, and so on The genealogies of past African kings are outlined in their traditional praise poetry.
Praise poems celebrate not just chiefs, famous warriors and prominent members of the nobility, but also ordinary people, including women and herdsmen. Individuals and clans have praise poems about them. Through family praises, one can compile a genealogical family tree and trace their ancestral roots.
The practice contributes to the cohesion of families and the retention of family values. It is also a way of maintaining a family tree. This is done among many ethnic groups, albeit with varying permutations and degrees of rigidity.
While it is important, the absence of an indigenous African archive in archival discourses has alarmed archivists trained in Western pedagogues. As a result, archivists have gone on a documentation binge of oral traditions. Others have even coined catchphrases to describe these decolonisation efforts. Our view is that documenting oral traditions and storing them in archival institutions will not save them but will only worsen their situation.
This is so because the indigenous African archive may only survive through its use and ritual performance, as evidenced by the resilience of African tradition against the onslaught of religions such as Christianity. Archivists should advocate for the indigenous African archive's continued use and performance rather than its documentation and domestication in archival repositories.
Once archived and locked into archival repositories, oral traditions cease to exist as they are no longer indigenous African archives but just something else, as they have lost their saltiness (orality). The indigenous African archive is a living culture that cannot be turned into a record that is fixed in time. The continued existence of the oral traditions of Africans can be maintained through storytelling rather than being archived.
The orality of this verbal legacy remains its preservation strength. This means archivists need to come up with archival theories that promote the management of this orality.
Disruptive technologies as reflected in the archive’s week theme, are providing a platform where this basic provenance of the indigenous African archive, which is orality, can be promoted, used, disseminated and archived. In this regard, the storytelling or narrative nature of the African oral traditions can be maintained through gamification, filming and animation.
Oral traditions, including traditional literature, are didactic, as they have been used and can be used as teaching tools for children and even adults. There is nothing stopping the African government from reintroducing oral traditions into the school curricula, especially for the early education cohorts.
Tapping into the 4IR technologies, oral traditions can be preserved through their use in the modern-day classroom. Gamification can be employed to achieve that. Smart technologies such as mobile apps and social media-centred solutions, including gamification, are likely to revive the use of oral traditions by schoolchildren. The time is now for African countries to focus on transformation in line with Africa’s Agenda 2063 so that archives can reflect the history of Africans as told by Africans.
* Prof Ngoepe is the executive director for library and information services at Unisa, while Dr Bhebhe is a lecturer in the School of Information Studies at Charles Sturt University in Australia
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