How Truly Traditional Is Our Traditional History? The Case of Samuel Johnson and the Recording of Yoruba Oral Tradition
1984; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 11; Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/3171634
ISSN1558-2744
Autores Tópico(s)Race, History, and American Society
ResumoThe precolonial history of Yorubaland, and especially of the most powerful Yoruba kingdom of Oyo, is still dominated by the influence of the Revd. Samuel Johnson, the Yoruba clergyman whose History of the Yorubas was published in 1921. Especially for the period before continuous written documentation of Yoruba affairs begins with the arrival of the first Christian missionaries in the area in the 1840s, Johnson's History remains a source of overwhelming importance, and the framework within which we study Yoruba history is still very much that established by Johnson. But despite its great importance and persisting influence, Johnson's work has still not been subjected to much critical evaluation. In particular it has commonly been assumed, implicitly rather than explicitly, that Johnson's History can be mined as a source of ‘oral tradition’ in the belief that what he wrote down is unproblematically identical with what he heard, and what he heard with what had been retained and transmitted orally down to the time that he made his enquiries. Johnson's History is a somewhat complicated work to characterize, since it makes use of rather different sorts of sources for different periods of Yoruba history. The history of its publication was also complex. It was originally completed in 1897, the date of Samuel Johnson's “Preface,” but the manuscript was lost. Samuel Johnson having died in 1901, it was left to his brother Obadiah to reconstitute the work from Samuel's notes and drafts, a task which he apparently completed only in 1916.
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