Grandmother's Footsteps. Oral tradition and south-east Angolan narratives on the colonial encounter

Title: Grandmother's Footsteps
Subtitle: Oral tradition and south-east Angolan narratives on the colonial encounter
Editors: Inge Brinkman; Axel Fleisch
Series: History, Cultural Traditions and Innovations in Southern Africa, Vol. 7
Publisher: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag
Cologne, Germany 1999
ISBN 3896450565 / ISBN 3-89645-056-5
ISBN 9783896450562 / ISBN 978-3-89-645056-2
Softcover, 16 x 24 cm, 255 pages, several maps and imgages

About: Grandmother's Footsteps. Oral tradition and south-east Angolan narratives on the colonial encounter

When discussing the concept tradition, Robin Horton compares it to the game of Grandmother's Footsteps, in which children are only allowed to move when one child facing a wall is not looking. As soon as the latter turns around, all stand still. So it is with traditions, while watching them they appear frozen and static, but looking again after some time, changes have occurred which render them similar and yet different. Such a perspective has also been explored in Jan Vansina's seminal Paths in the rainforests, where tradition is likewise linked to both continuity and change. In an apparently contradictory process, Vansina explains, traditions can continue to function by renewing themselves, transforming new elements, and adapting to changing circumstances. In Paths in the rainforests Vansina uses the concept tradition only for 'massive phenomena lasting for millennia.

They have no beginning, although they do come to an end.' He distinguishes this kind of tradition from oral traditions in general, the latter being 'verbal messages which are reported statements from the past beyond the present generation'. Oral traditions can also be small in scale and they do begin: they are generated when a process of transmission is started. In this book we would like to give an example of such a process. The narratives edited here all have the arrival of the Portuguese and colonialism in Angola as their subject. It is a subject which has been treated in different ways in oral literature among people from south-eastern Angola. This variety not only depends on the individual creativity of each narrator, but also reveals how different sets of oral traditions become embedded and intertwined in local culture.

In the process of interaction between existing traditions and traditions introduced from outside new oral traditions are constructed, marked by both change and continuity. Scholars have long discussed the verifiable character of oral tradition and its limits as historical evidence. Yet oral traditions can not only be used as sources for history, they are also part of history and as such can be studied as a historical subject in their own right. The narratives in Grandmother's Footsteps: Oral tradition and south-east Angolan narratives on the colonial encounter together suggest a direction into which a history of oral tradition in the particular context of colonial south-eastern Angola may be written.

Content: Grandmother's Footsteps. Oral tradition and south-east Angolan narratives on the colonial encounter

Maps, figures and tables Introduction
The intersection of language and history
Narrative 1. Chief Diogo Cao, the one who brought slavery and colonialism
Narrative 2. Hearken to the suffering the Portuguese inflicted upon you!
Narrative 3. How the Angolan people acquired wisdom
Narrative 4. The history of Angola
Narrative 5. Alleluia Angola!
Narrative 6. We stayed with Lady Njinga
Narrative 7. Grandfather and his pigeons
Narrative 8. Then they came with priests and guns
Narrative 9. They did this to strengthen us
Glossary and abbreviations
Interviews
Literature
Index

Maps, figures and tables: Grandmother's Footsteps. Oral tradition and south-east Angolan narratives on the colonial encounter

Map 1. Angola
Map 2. Kavango area and south-eastern Angola Map 3. Greater Rundu
Figure 1. Kalai (Kuando-Kubango province)
Figure 2. Dominga listening to a group of narrators
Figure 3. Diogo Cao and the King of Kongo
Figure 4. A mango in a Cokwe homestead (Menongue)
Figure 5. Woodcarving of two Angolans carrying a hammock
Figure 6. A caravan passing the Kuatiri
Figure 7. An anonymous chief during the Mbunda rebellion
Figure 8. 'The history of Angola'. The narrator's written text
Figure 9. Maria Eugenia Neto unveiling a statue in honour of her late husband
Figure 10. Audience given to Queen Njinga by the Portuguese Governor of Angola, 1622
Figure 11. A chiefly grave in Citembo
Figure 12. Queen Njinga
Figure 13. Civilians and guerilla fighters (Moxiko province, 1970)
Table 1. Classification of south-eastern Angolan Bantu languages
Table 2. Comparative indices of south-eastern Angolan dialects