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Malawian SUITOR STORIES : SOME COMMENTS
Wim van Binsbergen
paper Africa Seminar, African Studies Centre, November 1979, as a
commentary upon a paper by Matthew Schoffeleers: ‘Malawiaanse vrijersverhalen’
[ Malawian suitor stories], African Studies Centre, November 1979
Introduction
In his paper on ‘Malawian Suitor stories’
Matthew Schoffeleers (1979) presents an admirable attempt to penetrate as deeply
as possible into the formal syntax and the symbolic structure of a limited
number (10) of twentieth-century folk stories from Malawi. He himself regards
this attempt as preliminary, and ‘patently inadequate’. The purpose of the
present comments is therefore emphatically not to stress such deficiencies in
Schoffeleers’ approach as he himself is already keenly aware of, but to try and
contribute to the further development of his working paper, on the basis of my
personal acquaintance with Central African symbolic and social systems, and my
own (limited) experience with similar types of analysis. The things I am going
to say are at best helpful, at times probably rather irrelevant, end certainly
do not pretend to offer the key for which Schoffeleers (after grappling with
his extensive collection of folk tales for more years than I have spent days on
them) is looking. My comments on his uncommonly stimulating and
though-provoking paper fall into three parts: (a) wider theoretical issues; (b)
a close reading of (parts of) his analysis, in the light of additional evidence
from the literature on Central Africa and from my own Zambian fieldwork’ (c)
some suggestions for alternative or further interpretation.
Wider Theoretical
Issues
Somewhat
unfortunately, Schoffeleers presents his analysis as primarily emanating from
two sources: 1. a common-sense analysis of the texts themselves; 2. a general
knowledge of the social and symbolic world of eastern Central Africa. For the
reader who has no background in modern symbolic anthropology, structuralism,
etc., his decoding of the Malawian material may seem, therefore, much more
idiosyncratic and gratuitous’ than, in fact, it is. The tradition within which
this tentative analysis becomes meaningful, is only very slightly indicated,
e.g. by reference to Hertz and Durkheim, and the use of Turnerian phrases as
‘betwixt and between,’ ‘liminality’, etc. I suggest that the paper would be
much more convincing to the open-minded but uninitiated reader, if its problematic,
and the methodology by which this problematic is confronted, were spelled out
much more explicitly and in detail. The wish to ‘understand’, ‘explain’, the
‘deeper’ content (the deep-structure, perhaps) of a collection of folk taller
may be legitimate but if this produces an argument which on the one hand points
to fundamental moral issues, attitudes towards achievement and the conception
of community, and which on the other hand reflects on the interpenetration
between domestic and mercantile capitalist modes of production - then the
reader has to be lured into a state Of mind where the theoretical choices
necessitating such an approach rather than myriads of other alternatives,
become explicit. I happen to be a reader who subscribes to those choices; most
readers will not.
One
major problem that has to be faced in this context, is that of the relationship
between a literary product (such as a folk tale), and the society In which it
is found. Schoffeleers implicitly suggests that this relationship may be
indirect in this sense that the stories reflect a certain time lag: although
told in the 1960s, e.g., they may relate to a past phase in the history of
Malawi, when mercantile capitalism, long-distance trade etc. were still in the
process of gradually penetrating towards the interior, and when trading
relations still represented the major links between local communities and the
outside world. However, a much more profound and comprehensive analysis of the
relation between story and society is called for, Under what conditions can we
assume that such fundamental symbolic and normative elements as are found in
society, penetrate into the story without marked transformation? Or, to put it
differently, what is the nature of the transformation of reality, that justifies,:>
or even necessitates the existence of the story in itself ? If the story is a
comment, reflection, transformation, inversion, judgement, morale for reality,
it is precisely because of some subtle admixture between real-life elements
(people who live in village, pound maize, go mice-hunting etc.) and elements of
systematically controlled imagination (white men posing as snakes, women giving
birth to heads only, etc.). Without a rather sophisticated theory on this
point, it is impossible to arrive at a ‘common-sense. close reading of folk
stories, in an attempt to ‘explain. their ‘deeper meaning’. And when we develop
such a theory, we shall probably have to admit that the literary product has a
lot of leeway, allows for free variation;, for transmission across cultural and
structural boundaries within and across geographical regions, and across
historical periods, for individual alterations that tell us more (if anything)
about the individual narrator than about his time and society, etc.
Perhaps
underneath all this there exist fundamental contradictions, archetypal themes
that are perennial and universal, but the problem is how to unearth these, and
how to attach a meaning to them when they finally appear before us, stripped of
their anecdotal trappings. The question is not very different, in the case of
folk tales, fro. the implications of attaching meaning and explanation to
ritual and myths. Obviously these elements from the symbolic order are not just
a set of simple and easily-decoded statements about the economic and political
reality. What is interesting about the. is not 90 much the ultimate message
which they may be shown to contain in the end, but the very process of coding,
decoding and transformation by narrators and participants, that becomes barely
visible even when we try to analyse the stories. In Schoffeleers’’ paper I
found the section on ‘The ultimate message’ (p. 13f) the least exciting, and I
wondered why such a simple (and contentious) message had to be concealed under
so much narrative beauty and skill as the folk tales betray. Even if his
reduction of the symbolic structure of these stories, along his complicated
argument, to the simple formula of
‘males can only
achieve high status by being virtuous’ females by being non-virtuous’,
would stand up against critical scrutiny, one
yet has the feeling that there is something much more essential about these
folk tales, that is left entirely untouched by this type of analysis. How is
such a content possible in a society that respects, if not actively propagates,
high status, and whose value system certainly tries to embrace both men and
women? What is the point in concealing and coding such a content, only for the
anthropologist etc. to come along and dig it out? I would suggest that these
stories (and probably all art) are more about form, about the manipulation of
recognisable elements, than about content. This does not imply that looking for
a deep-structure of content is a waste of time. But it ignores what perhaps
needs most analysed: the relation between a stylised, man-created symbolic
content, and 1. the reality from which this content wee borrowed; 2. the
reality in which this content subsequently functions, as embodied in a work of
art.
In
other words, folk tales are not field notes, they are not document e, and we
must be aware that the glimpses of social life which they seem to contain, are
moat likely the skilful artefacts of a /imagination that may be more creative
than systematic.
The
approach Schoffeleers presents in this paper implies a number of theoretical
decisions on these points. By groping for common deep structure, he claims that
there is in these stories an underlying systematic structure which may be so
fundamental that it even eludes the individual narrator. I think he is right
(to a certain, limited, extent) but (even while admitting that he does not have
to re-invent the whole of symbolic anthropology, for the purpose of a short
paper) I would like to see his theory written out.
Towards the Deep-Structure
Searching for a common deep-structure,
Schoffeleers at time. gives the impression of not haven’ probed deeply enough -
of having bean too easily satisfied with apparent similarities and systemic
oppositions which, on closer scrutiny, may turn out to vanish, The set of 10
folk tales, 4 having female protagonists (not counting the one alluded too,
with an albino suitor), 6 male protagonists, is too readily treated as one
corpus; and the same applies to the subsets, or to subsets of subsets (e.g. the
two ‘base’. female stories, as against the two female variants). Many of the
tentative generalisations Schoffeleers comes up with, to my mind do not fit the
material before us. The males, Schoffeleers tells us, invariably receive local
wealth (e.g. cattle), along with a local black woman, at the end of their
quests. Yet Kansabwe ends up with fine clothes’ (cloth was, with guns and
slaves, the major trade good in interregional trade) ; and the Cattle-Swallower
temporarily appropriated local wealth (cattle) prior to his marriage, but only
to surrender this wealth again as payment of bride-wealth. Males, we are told,
invariably display exemplary behaviour as suitors; yet the same
Cattle-Swallower steals cattle, which he exchanges for 8 local wife (80 that he
gets her practically for nothing), whereas (perhaps less relevant) Matola’s
loyal young brother physically attacks the white man who has emanated from the
head she married. Likewise it is not true that males always take the initiative
in courting. Snake-man takes the initiative in courting,, but Matola’s
head/husband is dependent on his mother, and only shows his full sexual
intentions when prompted by Matola’s brother. This extreme emphasis on
similarity can also be detected on the female aide. I just wonder how
pre-marital promiscuity can be said to represent ‘a confusion (such as in the
case of the mushroom-collecting girl[1])
of social categories, between married and unmarried women.’ as if married women
are more likely to be so inclined? In Western Zambia sexual adventurism was a
rather accepted pastime of unmarried girls, and in parts still is (cf. Melland
1923). Likewise, I don’t see how a woman whose only stated vice is that she
went mice-hunting rather than pounding her maize, and who in the course of her
expedition is forced to enter into a relationship with a snake,[2] can
be said to exhibit something as serious as disrespect of the moral order
(defying her mother’s instructions as to pounding), subsequently taking this
disrespect to its extreme’ (mating with the unmatable).
It
looks as if Schoffeleers is in some hurry to reach the deep structure, and
believes (perhaps somewhat at variance with e.g. Levi-Strauss) that it is the
easier reached, the earlier we attach an abstract and comprehensive label to
the elements we are analysing Mice-hunting/disrespect of moral order; this is
still acceptable in the light of the significance of parental authority
Unmarried girl takes hunting initiative, widow/ all examples of ‘betwixt and
between.? This is somewhat more debatable, in the light e.g. of the fact that
also a young married woman remain a under the authority of an elder woman (her
husband’s mother, senior wife, etc.). Inability to meet extravagant demands of
bride-wealth, illness of the chief’s daughter/ examples of a disturbance of the
moral order, of the ‘proper functioning of the community’ (p 6; cf.
Schoffeleers 1978). Of course, these two situations reflect community processes
which are likely to be strained and full of conflict, but since the stories (in
their condensed fore as presented by Schoffeleers) do not indicate such
conflict, it may be exaggerated to read into such simple situations indications
of improper community functioning Yet Schoffeleers may have a point here.
One
also gets the impression that the stories show marked differences in the extent
to which they are realistic Even in its condensed form, the hunter story
appears much more realistic, involving no extra-human freaks and wonders, as
compared to the Cattle-Swallower or the head-bearing woman Is this perhaps a
reason to place this story in a different category? The question becomes
crucial in the case of the hunchback and the blind man Only by virtue of
considerable power of imagination can one transform such physical defects into being
‘one-aided in the front/back sense’ The point is not that such a suggestion is
not daring, or is too preposterous. But if the reader is not persuaded by the
presentation of some more general method and theory, such ad hoc manipulation
of the material may easily seem too gratuitous Just as it is not very
convincing that the Ibo are capable of depicting even greater deformities in
some of their masks (p 12) The great danger in this sort of argument is that
one stumbles from one ad hoc inspiration to another Even if this. helps us to
understand this collection of stories, it is never going to help us to
understand human society and symbolism in general.
One
major problem in the analysis is the relation between the stories with male and
with female protagonists Repeatedly Schoffeleers claims that they are on a
different plane, at cross angles yet at other times he compares them as if they
are within the same dimension. (I shall return to this on p. 9.) This leads him
to overlook certain formal characteristics of the female stories. E.g. it is
not true that all female protagonists are depicted as physically inside the
community) in contrast with the men). That is only true for Matola. All three
others go mushroom collecting, i.e. roam around outside the boundaries of the
village, much like the males on their quests. A further exploration of the
symbolic meaning of mushroom (masculinity? kingship?) seems necessary here.
Additions and Possible
Alternatives
Reaching so readily for common, abstract,
general meanings behind the symbolic elements in the stories also has the
danger that one overlooks the subtle power elements that are built into them,
and that render a human element to them. Schoffeleers rightly wonders why the
white men in the story should have a secret, which can be revealed, betrayed or
violated. But an equally important point is that in some of the stories
(female-variant) the white man actually put a himself at the mercy of his black
wife: she gains power over ; him, by knowing his identity and being able to
disclose it publicly. The ‘base’ female stories leave the wife successful, but
helpless; the variants depict the wife as more powerful, but failing. In the
Matola story it is the younger brother who forces the secret into the open; in
two of the other stories it is a sister or young female friend who tries to
infringe on the privacy of the snake/white man, and i8 therefore severely
punished. But what IS the white man’s secret? That he ‘can fall in love as an
ordinary human being’ (p. 14) ? Or is the white man in himself only a symbol,
and does he stand for something even more fundamental than race relations?
Personally, this element of subtle power games leads me to suspect that the
stories are less about black and white, than about female power, creative and
procreative functions, and the battle between male and female in general. But
the point is not whoever is right or wrong in his interpretation. It is that we
do not have the theory to decide, on good empirical and methodological grounds,
in the favour of one interpretation or another. (I am aware of the fact that
Schoffeleers dose mention power relations (p. 12), but then only in a context
of the acquisition of high status and wealth, i.e. on a macro scale, where
husband/ wife tend to operate as one unit.)
I
am impressed by the unexpected peeling-off of the symbolic content in its
intermediate stage, i.e. where one-sidedness becomes merely a vertical axis,
and the head/python a horizontal axis. The zebra-woman in the hunter story 1a very
convincing indeed. Yet I would like to dwell a little longer on the level where
the ‘halfling’ (a term coined by Tolkien for a quite different purpose) is
still a being of flesh and blood, albeit drastically reduced to one side only.
I don’t know about Malawi, but in Western Zambia this halfling is one of the
major spiritual beings, whose names (e.g. Mwendanjangula - ‘Treetop-Walker’ -
or Lube) are frequently mentioned in any context having to do with the deep
forest, mysterious experiences, chance luck, healing and divinatory power, the
status of priest-healer (nganga), and
the sudden o accidents and mutilation during hunting expeditions. Echoes of his
presumed existence can be heard in Reynolds (1963), Melland (1923), Turner
(1952), McCulloch (1951) and my own work (especially 1979, ch. 4). If would be
interesting if this mythical being was not part of the religious notions of the
Malawian peoples, and only featured in their folk tales’ but I would be very
surprised if this were the case. If Malawians believe in his and know him just
like Western Zambians, this would throw a very different light on the stories
of the mutilated male suitors. Rather than having been mutilated, they passed
onto a different, and by and large higher, order of existence, they became a
local manifestation of Mwendanjangula himself (and as such not entirely
incomparable, b the way, to all those white men/snakes/heads). Little wonder
that the narrators (p. 8) do not tell us that these transformed male suitors
did not return to their normal physical condition. Having [ check being? ] a halfling sums up, rather than destroys, their
state of bliss. But if this is the case, then it becomes difficult to see in
these halflings a standard symbol of liminality, of ‘betwixt and between’, Rather,
or in addition, they seem to stand for the hidden, but hideous and capricious
powers of the deep forest, out of which all vitality springs and which is the
realm/ in and through which all extra- human forces manifest themselves. If
these stories are about male and female conditions, the halfling as a symbol of
vital force (restored to or tapped off by deprived en through expeditions
through the forest - the very place where some women meet white men/snakes/ h
ads when mushroom hunting) fit into this remarkably. Bat again, the point is
not which interpretation is superior, but which theory and method make it
superior.
Drawing
on the same cultural material from Western Zambia, I think more could be done
with the snake element that playa ouch a prominent part in most of the stories,
Just as the halfling is n) t automatically a symbol of liminality, and may
stand for a complex and widely-known body of ideas referring to the
supernatural, and to Man’s relations with Nature, it would seem meaningful to look
at the significance of the snake in a wider cultural context than these stories
alone. Snakes are feared, regardless of their being poisonous or not, They
have, in addition to the connotations of masculinity and the sky which
Schoffeleers mentions, connotations of sorcery. An important form of sorcery
which people of Western Zambia believe to exist, is the raising of a snake with
a human head in some hidden, dark place near a river; out of a secret
combination of elements, to which the sorcerer gives his daily attention on
secret visits to that place, develops a snake with a human head, who after a
diet of eggs and chickens develops a taste for human flesh, and to whom the
sorcerer (increasingly dominated by the ever growing serpent) has to feed human
babies and ultimately adults from his or her own village, in order to save his
or her own life. The snake is the moat common sorcery familiar, and
particularly married women are reputed to engage in this sort of sorcery (lilombo) when they want to get rid of a
hated husband. (Some discussion on this in: Melland 1923; my own field notes
are much more extensive.) This seems to conform Schoffeleers’ ideas on the
symbolic equation between snake and human head; it also suggests that in fact
there is considerable continuity between the symbolic material employed in the
folk tales, and that pervading real, contemporary life. Yet the sorcery
connotations which are very manifest here, suggest that something more is
involved than vertical or horizontal axis, as indicative of morality versus
power. In the idiom of Schoffeleers’ approach, the head/snake symbolism would
mean power; but the sorcery connotations now add, to the dimension of wealth,
trade, achievement, one of wilful, reckless manipulation of human material, for
evil individual aims.
Here
again I get the feeling that these stories are really about universal aspect of
male/female relations, where non-human or extra-human elements, and black/white
relations, only come in to stress certain more universal aspects in a coded
form. Here the roles of the younger brother (Matola’s case) or the rival
sisters/ age-mates may be further analysed. I would submit that the younger
brother of Matola represents that side of her being that is male- orientated;
the boy plugs her successfully into the made world, i.e. the world of female
desires that can only be satisfied by men. Matola is psychologically prone, not
to marrying a white men, but to experience the secret of male/female relations
in a way remarkable enough to be worth a story.
In
this respect I am not convinced by Schoffeleers’’ diagnosis that ‘communities
which invent and/or enjoy such stories show quite a crack in their moral
armature’.. The rules of propriety and restraint he seems to refer to, may be
primarily male rules, which men try to impose on the women (without observing
them themselves, as any research on Central African male patterns of sexuality
may reveal). These rules define a cosy men’s world, full of liberty, respect
for being male, rights to women’s sexual and labour power,. products, children,
etc. There seems to be considerable variation, within Central Africa, in the
extent to which the males can uphold this system in an unchallenged fashion. In
Western Zambia, there is a very strong counter- ideology among the women, who
try and forge their own lives and to manipulate such claims and skills as their
being female in that society accord them. They may be loyal to individual
males, but certainly do not identify with the male world and its ‘moral armature’.
The image of the loose females as against the virtuous males, to some extent
(as I said before) an artefact of Schoffeleers over-generalising approach, may
for the rest be simply an aspect of the confrontation between male and female
elements.
Yet
I agree with Schoffeleers that the contents of these stories must also be
discussed on a concrete historical level. Schoffeleers does not succeed, yet,
in tying the universal (the ultimate message) to whatever i8 regionally and
historically specific: the articulation between domestic and
mercantile-capitalist modes of production, I have no suggestion as to how the
transition between the relevant paragraphs (p. 13) could be made smoother. But,
if we agree that there is some historical residue in these stories, I do have
some suggestions as to how to bring that out. First, we should look at ways of
dating the stories. Perhaps some of them contain words that are of only recent
origin, or that definitely refer to archaic layers of the old hunting and
gathering communities; linguistic evidence along the lines pursued by Ehret
c.a. might help us here. Yet, since the stories are being told by contemporary
narrators, I would rather try to date them schematically, by looking at the
sort of relations of production that dominate them. Here we discover that, by
and large, the stories with male protagonists refer to a fundamentally
different process of articulation between modes of production, than the
female-protagonist stories do. The penetration (in itself suggestive of sexual
symbolism) of mercantile capitalism, into the domestic communities of Malawi,
seems to relate to the female stories, as Schoffeleers rightly observes. Here
perhaps the significant differences between the variants (in the extent to
which the females are passive, are assimilated to the status of their white
partners, live happily ever afterwards with him, etc.) may reflect regional
variations in this penetration process, so that the area of origin of the story
may be yet more important than Schoffeleers suggests. On the other hand, the
male-protagonist stories are about a very different sort of articulation: about
the superimposition of a tributary mode of production upon tee domestic
communities of eastern Central Africa, whose economies revolved on hunting,
gathering, agriculture and animal husbandry. It is amazing how strongly some of
these male-protagonist stories resemble the myth of origin of the Luvale and
Lunda peoples in Western Zambia (cf. Turner 196, Papstein 1978). Once this
parallel has become obvious, it is difficult to read the stories of Kansabwe
and of the Cattle-Swallower in any other way than as mirror-images of the same
process: a chiefly dynasty trying to link up organically, and in accordance
with locally prevailing notions concerning morality, the land, the
supernatural, wits’ a local domestic community. Kansabwe playa a major role in
the sealing the relationship between the chief (via his daughter) and the
community. Cattle-Swallower himself acts as a raiding chief, who is accommodated
within the local community at no other coat, ultimately, than a marriageable
girl (the cattle is returned as bride-wealth).
From
this perspective it is also clear why the male-protagonist stories must
emphasise morality, whereas this is just not an issue in the female-protagonist
stories. As I have argued elsewhere (van Binsbergen 1979a, 1979b), the rulers
who tried to impose themselves upon the domestic communities of Central Africa
from the 15th century onwards, often (in Zambia: invariably) did so within the
limits of the cosmology and ritual already prevailing locally at the time. The
chiefly cults they created were enlarged cult a of ancestors. They did not deny
that political authority ultimately depended upon ritual links with the land;
instead, they claimed such links, in rivalry with pre-existing land priests.
However violent, exploiting, amoral the tributary mode of production might have
grown at times (cf. Schoffeleers 1978i, it needed an ideological basis in the
morality of the local community.
Such
a situation did not obtain in the case of the penetration of capitalism. Here
the two confronting and articulating modes of production were too different,
and the penetrating mode wee to. self-contained and self-reliant. Why this
should be so requires much further analysis, which then will have to look into
the nature of a money economy, the circulation of trade goods, the competition
for monopolies, the reasons why domestic communities adopted the outside
commodities and allowed themselves to be pillaged fro. local products and human
personnel. But certainly the penetration of capitalism did not lean on local
cosmology, and morality to the extent the penetration of the tributary mode
did, and that is why women representing domestic/mercantile-capitalist
articulation, can shed all moral qualms. The circle closes itself, to some
extant, since it is here that sorcery, with all its snake symbolism, comes in.
It
does not look as if with these suggestions I have substantially advanced the
analysis from where Schoffeleers left it. At the same time they betray my
ambivalence: I doubt whether searching for the meaning of these stories is a
meaningful and scientific undertaking, yet I get easily absorbed in it myself.
We may yet sort it out.
References
Turner, V.W.
1952 The
Lozi Peoples
196
(ed.) A Lunda love story
1974 Dramas,
fields and metaphors
McCulloch, M.
195 The
Southern Lunda and related peoples
Papstein
1978 Ph.D.
thesis, UCLA
Schoffeleers 1978a Guardians of the Land
1978b in: African Perspectives
1979 Malawian
suitor stories, paper Africa Seminar, Leiden
Reynolds
1963 Magic,
witchcraft and sorcery
Melland
1923 In
witchbound Africa
Van Binsbergen, W.
1979a In Schoffeleers 1978a
1979b Religious change in Zambia
[ for fuller texts,
cf. SCHOFFELEERS, J. M. & A. ROSCOE, 1985, Land of Fire, Oral Literature
from Malawi. Limbe: Montfort Press. ]
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[1] I propose we might explore the sexual
connotations of the mushroom, as a symbol of the glans penis.
[2] In Ancient Mesopotamian and Ancient Greek
mythology, Gilgamesh and Glaukos accidentally hit upon a snake in the course of
t heir respective exploits, typically at a liminal point where they seem to
enter the realm of the underworld. Are we tempted to think in a similar
direction here?