Malila [mgq] M24
Mbeya Rural District, Tanzania
10 lightly edited oral texts and 4 written texts: 10 fictional, 4
personal 755 clauses Eaton
2015b
Makonde [kde] P23
Makonde Plateau northern Mozambique
8 lightly edited oral texts: 5 folk tales, 3 personal 585 clauses
Leach 2015
Ekoti [eko] P30
Angoche, Nampula Province,
Mozambique 1 narrative text see Appendix
1 Lyndon and
Lyndon 2004
a
Languages are classified using the ISO 639-3 language code as cited in Ethnologue Lewis, Simons and Fennig 2013 and Maho’s 2003 updated version of Guthrie’s classification of the Bantu languages.
Examples in this paper are numbered consecutively, and so example numbers do not correspond to those used in the published sources. All examples are given in the orthographies used in the published
sources.
2
1.2 Types of narrative texts
For the purposes of this study, a narrative text will be defined as an oral or written account of a series of causally related events involving one or more participants, where a participant is a person or
anthropomorphized creature that is capable of deliberately initiating and reacting to events.
3
Some of the texts investigated here are factual accounts of personal experiences of the narrator or of people known to the narrator, but most are fictional. Fictional narratives told in Africa are almost always
fabulous tales with magical elements. These include stories about mischievous spirits, about animals which speak and outwit humans, and about people with amazing abilities to predict the future and
control the present.
4
Although it is fascinating to explore the worlds which these characters inhabit, and what these stories reveal about different cultures, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how
narrators use the resources of their languages to create coherent and compelling narratives. In the western literary tradition, a distinction is generally made between original, unique works of
fiction and traditional stories commonly known as folktales. Works of fiction, such as novels and films, are produced by individuals authors and directors who are responsible both for the content of a story
and the way in which it is told. Folktales, on the other hand, belong not to individual storytellers but to the community as a whole. Although they can be told in a variety of styles, their content remains
essentially the same from one telling to another. Many of the African stories investigated in this study occupy an intermediate point between works of fiction and folktales. Well-known folktales are told, but
African narrators are free to add embellishments and to make changes; often, African narrators draw on traditions of storytelling with established conventions and characters such the devious Hare and the evil
stepmother to create new stories. In this sense, African narrators are like musicians improvising on a popular theme, so that it is at once familiar and yet fresh.
2
In examples from Jita and Kwaya, the symbol : at the beginning of a verb indicates far past tense and the symbol at the beginning of a verb indicates narrative tense with 3
SG
subjects. This is because the past anterior and the far past, and the 3
SG
form of the narrative and the 1
SG
form of the anterior are only distinguished through tone, which is not marked in the orthography. Thus, these symbols are used to differentiate the forms.
3
This is simply a working definition. The question of whether there are any essential or necessary characteristics of narratives, and if so what these are, is the subject matter of narratology, which looks at narratives from the
perspective of philosophy and textual criticism see for example Currie 2010.
4
Discussions of African oral literature can be found in Finnegan 1970 and Okpewho 1992.
2 Structure of eastern Bantu narrative texts
This section is concerned with the overall structure of narrative texts, that is, with the component parts of a text and the ways in which they are combined to form a coherent whole. Within a text it is possible
to distinguish both episodes and paragraphs. Episodes are dependent on the content of the narrative itself; each episode serves a distinct purpose within the narrative as a whole. Thus, an orientation is
identifiable because it serves the function within the story of introducing the major characters and setting the scene, and an inciting episode is identifiable because it serves the function of initiating the
problem or situation upon which the story will hinge, and so forth. Paragraphs differ from episodes in that their purpose is to help the hearer or reader process the text. This is achieved by grouping together
closely related material into a manageable chunk of information.
5
Although a text consists of different episodes and paragraphs, it forms a coherent whole. Coherence is indicated in various ways, including tail-head linkage which indicates continuity either within or
between paragraphs, and through the use of thematic development markers which help to indicate significant new developments in a story.
2.1 Episodes in eastern Bantu narrative texts
