The Politics of Publishing Oral Sources from the Mara Region, Tanzania

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Periodical article

Title:	The Politics of Publishing Oral Sources from the Mara Region, Tanzania
Author:	Bender Shetler, Jan
Year:	2002
Periodical:	History in Africa
Volume:	29
Pages:	413-426
Language:	English
Geographic term:	Tanzania
Subjects:	publishing oral history History and Exploration Education and Oral Traditions Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups) Bibliography/Research
External link:	https://www.jstor.org/stable/3172172
Abstract:	The intense scholarly debate concerning the shift from orality to literacy has not often directly concerned African historians in spite of the fact that many work closely with oral sources. In the process of publishing a series of locally-written histories from the Mara Region of Tanzania, the author discovered that transforming oral tradition into written form is ultimately political. The change from an oral to a written knowledge base takes power out of the hands of community elders and put it into the public domain, where literate men have the advantage and where community security may be vulnerable. In this paper, the author describes how he found out that the oral traditions that he was collecting were not anachronistic and benign relics of the past to be preserved in dusty archives, but powerful political tools for negotiating present-day relationships and authority. He further elaborates why he is still busy making a collection of histories and how he proceeds in publishing this collection of politically-charged written histories. Notes, ref.