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The Intimacy of Belonging: Literacy and the Experience of Sunjata in Mali1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2014

Jan Jansen
Jan Jansen*
Affiliation:
Leiden University
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Extract

Literacy is a personally acquired skill, and the way it is taught to a person changes how that person thinks. Thanks to David Henige historians of Africa are much more aware of how literacy influences memory and historical imagination, and particularly how literacy systems introduce linear concepts of time and space. This essay will deal with these two aspects in relation to Africa's most famous epic: Sunjata. This epic has gained a major literary status worldwide—text editions are taught as part of undergraduate courses at universities all over the world—but there has been little extensive field research into the epic. The present essay focuses on an even less studied aspect of Sunjata, namely how Sunjata is experienced by local people.

Central to my argument is an idea put forward by Peter Geschiere, who links the upheaval of autochthony claims in Africa (and beyond) to issues of citizenship and processes of exclusion. He analyzes these as the product of feelings of “belonging.” Geschiere argues that issues of belonging should be studied at a local level if we are to understand how individuals experience autochthony. Analytically, Geschiere proposes shifting away from ”identity” by drawing from Birgit Meyer's work ideas on the aesthetics of religious experience and emotion; Meyer's ideas are useful to explain “how some (religious) images can convince, while other do not.”

Type
Literacy, Feedback, and the Imagination of History
Information
History in Africa , Volume 38 , 2011 , pp. 103 - 122
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2011

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Footnotes

1

This article is based on a paper presented at the Annual Conference of African Studies, San Francisco, 18-21 November 2010. I would like to thank Stephen Belcher, Peter Geschiere, Chris Gordon, Dorothea Schulz, and Etienne Smith for their comments and suggestions.

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