Tag Archives: Konkomba

Demarginalising Orature – Translating Minor Forms into the Digital Age (WiSe 22/23)

Posted on by heylivia
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Introduction

In the winter term of 2022/23, I participated in the ‘Demarginalising Orature’ seminar, organised and held by Dr. Eva Ulrike Pirker, Tasun Tidorchibe and Jana Mankau. The seminar aims at “decolonizing knowledge and making knowledge (and primary materials) from a Global South context available in a responsible way” [1]. We, the participants, were “introduced to Ghana’s literary culture and multiethnic society; the problem of major and minor languages and forms of expression; orality, literacy and digital media cultures; power relations in the postcolony and [our] bearing on acts of cultural translation” [1]. In an attempt to help demarginalise orature, we worked on digitising a collection of Konkomba folktales by encoding them with TEI so they can later be transformed into HTML format and uploaded to the Centre for Translation Studies’ github. We also subtitled a number of folktale narrations so the respective videos could be published in the HHU Mediathek and be made available to a broader audience. These documents can also be used for research purposes. Thus, we are contributing to the preservation and demarginalisation of Konkomba oral traditions.

Figure 1 TEI and Konkomba folktale telling session

Orature and Orality

As mentioned above, the seminar aims at demarginalising orature; oral literature. According to Turin et al., orature “broadly includes ritual texts, curative chants, epic poems, folk tales, creation stories, songs, myths, spells, legends, proverbs, riddles, tongue-twisters, recitations and historical narratives” [2]. Orality, in contrast to literacy, is characterised by its “immediacy, ephemerality, unpredictability, flexibility” [3], it is communication by spoken word and it is dependent on the teller’s memory and “occasion-bound” [3]. Furthermore, it is quite difficult to assign any authorship to oral traditions, as, according to Bisilki, they are usually passed on from the older generations to the next [4] and regarded “as communal intellectual property” [2] by the respective communities.

In the past, orality has often been regarded as inferior to literacy. The roots of this assumption lie, amongst other things, in colonialism. Bandia writes that “[m]odernity has ascribed a stigma to the concept of orality which has become synonymous with ‘backward’ and ‘primitive’” [5]. Thiong’o points out that “[t]he hegemony of the written over the oral comes with the printing press, the dominance of capitalism, and colonization. This hegemony, or its perception, has roots in the rider-and-the-horse pairing of master and slave, or colonizer and colonized, a process in which the latter begins to be demonized as the possessor of deficiencies, including of languages” [6].

But oral traditions have a long and rich history and are an integral part of many communities’ cultures all over the world. As Turin et al. point out, “oral literature such as narrative and song often serve as important cultural resources that retain and reinforce cultural values and group identity” [2]. This is the case for Konkomba folktales as well. Folktales (called itiin in Likpakpaln, the language of the Konkomba people) can have various purposes, depending on the context in which they are told, by or to whom they are told, what the folktale is about etc. They often contain moral lessons or offer explanations for why things are the way they are. But what applies to all folktales is that they are “sources of indigenous knowledge” [7].

Figure 2 Performance of kinachuŋ cultural dance

To give an example, one of the folktales discussed in the seminar is called “Why he Wasp has a tiny Waist”. This particular folktale was told by Waja Ngalbu in Chamba, Ghana. To quote the introduction of the folktale: “The following story relates how the wasp’s self-exile from his community eventually deformed him. It presents the wasp as a loner who refuses to participate in communal activities and thus incurs the wrath of his kith and kin. The story, grounded in the communal spirit of Konkomba funerals (particularly the kinachuŋ cultural dance), celebrates teamwork and depicts the centrality of communal living among Konkombas. The storyteller makes this clear at the outset of his narrative when he commences his tale with its moral lesson before relating the tale itself” [8]. So the folktale features an animal character (the Wasp, called ulangben in Likpakpaln) that interacts with human characters, as many Konkomba folktales do. According to Thiong’o, “in the narratives of orature, humans, birds, animals, and plants interact freely, often change into each others’ forms, and share language” [6]. The folktale gives an explanation to a real phenomenon (wasps have tiny waists) and it contains a moral lesson: the folktale highlights the importance of a communal spirit within the community. In Konkomba culture, it is important to attend communal activities like funerals or participate in farm work or other activities such as shelling maize. A folktale therefore transports values and elements of the respective culture, which, again, highlights the fact that oral traditions are an important source of indigenous knowledge and “essential vehicles for transmitting language and culture” [7].

The Konkomba People and Language

I have already touched on some aspects of Konkomba life, values and traditions, now I would like to give some more background information. The Konkomba people live in the area of the “Oti valley in the northern section of the Ghana-Togo border” [9] (see map below). It is estimated that there are a little over 1,2 million Konkomba people in total, about 112,000 of whom are living in the Togo area [7]. According to Kachim, it is widely agreed upon that the Konkomba are “one of the aboriginal groups of northern Ghana” [9].

Figure 3 Map of Konkomba areas in Ghana and Togo

When discussing Konkomba history, it is important to mention the aspect of colonisation. The Konkomba people were affected by this through imperialist Germany’s rule between 1884 and 1914. This is when they occupied Togo (and also Cameroon, Tanzania and Namibia). Eventually, “the German colonial empire was taken over by the French and the British” [10]. But the German rulers were met with resistance, also by Konkombas, for example “[o]n 14 May 1895, a German troop stationed at Katchamba, and led by the German von Carnap-Quernheimb, was violently attacked by Konkomba warriors armed with poisoned arrows” [11].

The Konkomba society is patrilineal, so the male offspring will inherit, a Konkomba community is also structured politically – there are “chiefs, elders, clan heads, family heads” [7] and the Konkomba believe in “God, lesser gods, ancestors, satan, evil spirits, reincarnation, etc.” [7]. Their primary occupations are farming and trading, which is why sometimes, during folktale telling sessions, farming related activities are done simultaneously (like shelling maize etc., an example of this can be seen and heard in this video).

Further information regarding Likpakpaln can be extracted from the image below:

Figure 4 Introduction to Likpakpaln by Tasun Tidorchibe

Final remarks

Participating in the “Demarginalising Orature” seminar was a very enriching experience. Not only did I gain skills in the fields of coding and video editing, I was also able to broaden my horizon by learning about the Konkomba society and language. As folktales are a source of indigenous knowledge, it is very important to preserve them. But this has to happen in a responsible and sensitive way (keeping in mind the colonial history and marginalisation). We have to remember that this is not our knowledge, so we have to give visibility to the original owners / holders of the knowledge (this is why, for example, the narrators of the folktales are always mentioned in the XML / PDF files and videos). Visibility is very important in the field of translation as well. That is why a foreignising mode of translation was used by Tasun Tidorchibe to translate the folktales from Likpakpaln into English. Here, you can see how some words in the text are untranslated. They are also listed at the bottom of the file in a glossary which gives explanations to the Likpakpaln terms. In this way, the source culture and language are not entirely “covered up”, but they are still visible to the reader.
I can wholeheartedly recommend this seminar to any of my fellow students interested in doing something useful and meaningful.

Sources:

[1] Demarginalising orature – Translating minor forms into the digital age. (n.d.). https://lsf.hhu.de/qisserver/rds?state=verpublish&status=init&vmfile=no&publishid=234298&moduleCall=webInfo&publishConfFile=webInfo&publishSubDir=veranstaltung

[2] Turin, M., Wheeler, C., & Wilkinson, E. (2013). Oral Literature in the Digital Age: Archiving Orality and Connecting with Communities. Open Book Publishers, xiiii, xix, xix-xx. https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0032

[3] Tidorchibe, T. (n.d.). Introduction to orality and literacy, 12. https://uni-duesseldorf.sciebo.de/apps/onlyoffice/600532749?filePath=%2FDemarginalising%20Orature%20-%20Course%20-%20Winter%202022%2FPresentations%2FDemarginalising%20orature_introductory%20session2.pptx

[4] Bisilki, K. A. (n.d.): Folktales And Gender Among The Bikpakpaam ‘Konkomba’ Of Ghana, 349.

[5] Bandia, P. (2018). Orality and Translation. Routledge, 108-109.

[6] Thiong’o, N. w. (2012). The Oral Narrative and the Writing Master. Orature, Orality, and Cyborality. In Globalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing. Columbia University Press, 64, 76.

[7] Tidorchibe, T. (n.d.). Folktales as expressive tools for language and culture: the Konkomba context, 7, 12. https://uni-duesseldorf.sciebo.de/apps/onlyoffice/602811744?filePath=%2FDemarginalising%20Orature%20-%20Course%20-%20Winter%202022%2FPresentations%2FFolktales%20as%20expressive%20tools%20for%20language%20and%20culture_by%20Tasun%20Tidorchibe.pptx

[8] Ngalbu, W. / Centre for Translation Studies. (2020). Why The Wasp Has A Tiny Waist, 1. https://github.com/CentreforTranslationStudies/KONKOMBA/blob/main/Why%20the%20Wasp%20has%20a%20tiny%20waist%20Juli%202022.pdf

[9]  Kachim, J. U. (2019). View of Origin, migration and settlement history of the Konkomba of Northern Ghana, ca. 1400-1800, 133. https://journal.ucc.edu.gh/index.php/ajacc/article/view/850/428 p. 133

[10] Blackshire-Belay, C. A. (1992). German Imperialism in Africa The Distorted Images of Cameroon, Namibia, Tanzania, and Togo. Journal of Black Studies, 23(2), 236. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/002193479202300207?casa_token=RNGLUXDq7awAAAAA:Z32APCcmpqVVQzBgWW82t0gqUQPQaNhPS849YfPoJSi5X-QON_rlcetEAkNQOnswybPaJoNdZwKbPA

[11] Müller, B. (2022). The ›Mystery‹ of the Konkomba’s Severed Thumbs: Historical Fact, Colonial Rumour or Legend of the Defeated?. Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften Dezember 2021, 15(2), 96. doi:10.14361/zfk-2021-150208

Figure 1: Tidorchibe, T. (n.d.). Introduction to orality and literacy. https://uni-duesseldorf.sciebo.de/apps/onlyoffice/600532749?filePath=%2FDemarginalising%20Orature%20-%20Course%20-%20Winter%202022%2FPresentations%2FDemarginalising%20orature_introductory%20session2.pptx

Figure 2: Tidorchibe, T. (n.d.). Introduction to orality and literacy. https://uni-duesseldorf.sciebo.de/apps/onlyoffice/600532749?filePath=%2FDemarginalising%20Orature%20-%20Course%20-%20Winter%202022%2FPresentations%2FDemarginalising%20orature_introductory%20session2.pptx

Figure 3: https://www.101lasttribes.com/tribes/konkomba.html

Figure 4: Tidorchibe, T. (n.d.). Folktales as expressive mediums for language and culture: the Konkomba context. https://uni-duesseldorf.sciebo.de/apps/onlyoffice/602811744?filePath=%2FDemarginalising%20Orature%20-%20Course%20-%20Winter%202022%2FPresentations%2FFolktales%20as%20expressive%20tools%20for%20language%20and%20culture_by%20Tasun%20Tidorchibe.pptx

Last Session: Presentations

Posted on by filippa
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For our last session on Thursday, 26th January, we were tasked with presenting the projects that we had been working on throughout the semester. We discussed the coding and video editing process and experience of the folktales of the Konkomba culture, while focusing on the various difficulties we faced and how to avoid mistakes. In the last blog post you can read about our experience and problems while encoding the folktales. This is why I am going to talk about our video editing experience in the following.

Video editing problems 

This was our first experience with video editing and using the video editing programme Davinci Resolve. Therefore, many problems and difficulties occurred while editing the videos and adding the subtitles. In the following, I’ll be sharing the problems we faced and our tips to avoid these mistakes.

If you are working in a group, it is easier to use the same video editing programme. This will avoid issues when merging different parts of the video, which we had difficulties with. Another issue was the length of the subtitles, as ours were often way too long. Therefore, subtitles should not appear for more than eight seconds and each line should not exceed 40 characters.  Additionally, you should always add a title and copyright and it is easier to add the title before adding the subtitles. Using the pyramid form for subtitles with two lines will give a more clear structure.  Furthermore, it is important to subtitle everything and check the timing of the subtitles to ensure they match the content. In the end, when exporting the video, don’t forget to export the subtitles and burn them into the video.

A couple concluding words

Video editing can be a challenging task, especially for those who are completely new to it and have never used a video editing programme, such as Davinci Resolve. However, with some practice and the previous mentioned tips, it will be easier to edit a video the next time.  The course “Demarginalising Orature — Translating Minor Forms Into the Digital Age“ provided us with the opportunity to learn new skills in video editing and coding. However, what was very special about this course was that we learned about the Konkomba culture and its folktales. 

Group Work: Final Edits

Posted on by Michael-Zane
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During the session on the 19th of January, we worked on the finer details of our TEI files in Visual Studio Code.  Because each group received a piece of paper that listed their errors, we spent the session correcting them.  

Examples of Errors:

The gravest mistake my group made while encoding the stories was that we did not format the glossary and notes correctly.

code for the glossary in the story section
code for the glossary in the glossary section

The example from the pictures is our solution. We had previously mixed these two up and used the target tag in the glossary and the xml:id in the text itself. Sadly, this did not work in the same manner as the correct solution. Funnily enough, we managed to get it right in one of the stories we encoded but not the other one. I am still unsure how exactly we managed to do that.

We were also experiencing some difficulties while adding a link to the code. We were supposed to provide a link to the subtitled video of the story, however, we were unsure where exactly in the introduction it was supposed to appear. As could have been expected, we chose the wrong place, as the link is the last element of the introduction of each story. The picture below shows how a link can be added to a code.

link to the video in the code

While we were coding the link into the xml file, we also managed to make another mistake. We were so focused on trying to add this new element that we completely overlooked our spelling. In this case, we forgot the full stop at the end of the introductory paragraph after “click here”. Additionally, we somehow forgot to change one quotation mark in the story itself. As they are not allowed in this file, you need to change every quotation mark to the tag <q> when the quote begins and </q> when it ends. This can be seen in this example.

direct quote from the story

Lastly, we did not know that we each needed a name tag in the copyright information. We put both of our names into one name tag but changed it during this session.

Summary:

All in all, these were mistakes we made because we were not careful enough while we were coding. Many of them could have been avoided if we had read through our code a little more thoroughly; however, now we know what our mistakes were and we will be more careful in the future.

This session was also the last one we had before we held our presentations, so many groups already started to talk about how to organise this.

Introduction to video editing and subtitling

Posted on by heylivia
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Subtitle Example: Bilinyi Chikpaab James narrates “Nachiin Pays for Feasting on Unyii’s Children” / Source: HHU Mediathek

Hello everyone!
In this post I’m going to tell you a little bit about our last “Demarginalising Orature” session. As you may have guessed from the title, we talked about and worked on video editing and especially subtitling. In the past few weeks we have learned about Konkomba folktales, language and culture, we have worked with some of the folktales by encoding them using TEI. And now the next step is editing videos of Konkomba people narrating the folktales. Ultimately, you will find them in the HHU Mediathek.

Our last session

So, what happened in our seminar? Firstly, our tutor Jana gave a presentation, introducing us to a video editing program called DaVince Resolve (DVR). She also introduced us to some of the basics of subtitling. E.g. the length of a subtitle, which should be no more that 30 characters per second. The ideal length is 15-20 CPS but as Jana pointed out, this is quite difficult to achieve. Futhermore, a subtitle should always start synchronously with the speech (defining a subtitle’s start and stop point is called spotting). If the subtitle comprises 2 lines, it should be presented in pyramid form, so the upper sentence should ideally be shorter than the lower one. There are many more rules and conventions regarding subtitling but naming them all would go beyond the scope of this blog entry.

DaVinci Resolve and SubtitleEdit

“Edit” page in DaVince Resolve / Source: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve

Then, a fellow student, Lisa, also gave a short presentation on DVR and also introduced us to another program. According to both Jana and Lisa, DVR can be a bit difficult to work with, especially in the beginning. But luckily Lisa is familiar with another subtitling software, which she introduced to us as well. It is called SubtitleEdit. You can find a very useful step by step tutorial for DVR and SubtitleEdit in her blog entry. Some “fun facts”: According to their website, DaVinci Resolve is Hollywood’s #1 post solution. Apparently, many films and TV-shows are edited in DVR. It was first released in 2004. SubtitleEdit, on the other hand, is a free open-source subtitle editor.

SubtitleEdit interface / Screenshot by Lisa

Conclusion

To sum it up, in our last session we learned about subtitles and subtiling tools. During our session, DaVinci Resolve made my laptop crash and there were definitely some initial difficulties. But SubtitleEdit is a bit more beginner-friendly and in the end we will manage to subtitle all our folktale videos, I am sure! Yet another step to conserving orality and making Konkomba folktales accessible to a broader audience!

Group Work: Encoding folktales

Posted on by nadinedor
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In today’s session we did a presentation of our group work: Every group of two to three people encoded a folktale into TEI. We shared our experience with encoding itself, issues that occurred while working on the stories, and problems we had with the program Studio Visual Code.

Issues while encoding

The groups used different approaches to highlight the Likpakpaln terms: some just tagged them with <term>, others additionally highlighted them as superscript. There were also struggles with placing the end-tags at the right spot, but Jana revised our TEI-documents and made us aware of and helped with our issues and mistakes.

Livia and I had problems with the Live Sharing within Studio Visual Code, but worked our way around it. Our group also highlighted the headers with <hi rend=”bold”>, but Jana reminded us of the fact that by using the <head>-tag alone around the header it will already be visualized in bold writing, so after revising we took out the <hi>-tags to not overcrowd the document unnecessarily. Jana also pointed out that there was a little inconsistency in our xml:ids, since we had a little mix-up when tagging the terms with the appropriate ID.

One way to appoint an ID in the glossary …
… and referencing it in the text.

There was a slight confusion in class about when to use the xml:id and the target attributes, since an ID must be unique within a document. Livia and I tried the solution of using the xml:id attributes within the <gloss>-tags in the glossary and referencing the IDs by using <term target=”#term-id”> around the terms within the text. As it turns out, this is working, so we were quite happy with finding a solution.

New folktale, new issues

Moving on, or rather continue practicing, the groups chose new folktales to work on. We were instructed to take on a story that contains a song, so we could practice the use of tables in a TEI-document for presenting the original Likpakpaln songtext next to its translation. The <table>-element is a tricky one, because you need to build a table with its rows and columns, which can be very hard to envision, when there is no spreadsheet in front of you, but instead something like this:

The first cell of a row always contains the line in Likpakpaln, the second the English translation.

Unfortunately (or luckily?), the folktale Livia and I chose contained a very simple song that only consisted of names and so it didn’t need a translation, ergo no table. Instead, we used the <l>-tags – l standing for ‘line’ – for each row.

The instructions in parenthesis might create a new problem:
Should they be part of the song division or outside of it?

By encoding various folktales, I think all of us realized that TEI and XML are a bit complicated, but actually very logical in their use. Although it seemed abstruse and confusing when learning about the tags and attributes in the beginning, everything makes sense when practically working with it. Encoding is definitely a practice that needs a lot of exercise and revision to understand it. And our work within the sessions really helps here by applying the universally known phrase: learning by doing!

Aesthetics of Konkomba folktales

Posted on by annapri
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The issue of library catalogues and classification

We started the session by discussing this question: In which category can we sort Konkomba folktales? We watched a video of one such folktale. The storyteller uses gestures, imitates sounds, sings alone and with the audience, and uses intonation to create drama. So, which category fits the Konkomba folktale? Prose, drama, or poetry? Konkomba folktales display elements of all these categories. Hence, we need a new classification: oral narratives, or oral fiction.

Screenshot from HHU Mediathek showing storyteller Bilinyi Chikpaab James narrating.

We students also learned that the ways in which libraries catalogue works is restricting: As far as folktales are concerned, there is no authorship. Instead, the folktales are communal knowledge. The storyteller is a vessel to deliver that communal knowledge. However, as current-day library cataloguing requires an author, the project Demarginalising Orature uses three words to fill in the information – Konkomba Oral Tradition.

Who tells the story?

The shortest answer may be everyone. Let us go into a bit more detail. Our lecturers taught us that a storyteller does not need to have a specific age or gender. Anyone may tell a story – and, importantly, the audience is a crucial part of the telling. They chip in with parts that the storyteller has forgotten, give answers, ask questions, and join the storyteller in singing. Generally, storytelling is voluntary but there is also competitive storytelling, in which groups battle over which group has the best storytellers. The telling of folktales is a communal activity where communal knowledge is shared.

When do storytelling sessions take place?

We learned that storytelling sessions usually take place in the evenings. In fact, stories must not be told during daytime. Why? The easiest answer is superstition. Especially children are often warned not to tell stories at daytime. However, there may be some more practical reasons. For instance, people should not become too distracted from day-to-day activities which must be carried out during daytime. Moreover, children may discuss the previous night’s storytelling session during the daytime.

Screenshot from HHU Mediathek showing storyteller Wumbein and his audience singing.
How are the storytelling sessions structured?

The beginning of each storytelling session begins with a rhyme called tiin kulb or tiin kolb, depending on the dialect/regiolect. The rhyme consists of questions and answers. Storyteller and audience perform the rhyme together. The rhyme metaphorically explains what storytelling is. It also reminds the community that the stories should be fun. The rhyme is only performed in the beginning of the session but not in-between the individual tales.

After the rhyme, the storyteller who has initiated the rhyme starts telling a folktale. There are four types of commencing the story: Storytellers may dive directly into the story, ask permission from the audience, declare their intent to tell a story, or they may ask a question that creates suspense for the story to follow. After the first storyteller has finished, the next storyteller may voluntarily come forward and commence once again with one of the four opening techniques. There is no formal way of ending a storytelling session – the session ends whenever interest in the session ceases.

What are the folktales about?

Storytelling sessions are often funny – laughter, after all, is therapeutic. Yet, community members also use storytelling sessions to communicate wishes for change with the community. Women may re-tell stories, pushing for societal change by changing some aspects of the story. For instance, a woman may become a chief in their re-telling of a story, or a story may implicitly suggest that monogamy may be better than polygamy. This works as people have a right to change the stories to match their personal condition. Because the characters in the folktales are usually animals, it is a discreet way of pushing for change.

Takeaways

Both the discussion on the classification of Konkomba folktales and the introduction to the aesthetics of Konkomba folktales were incredibly interesting. The discussion demonstrated that library cataloguing must change to accommodate more literary forms. I find particularly interesting that the folktales can also be a way of communicating wishes for change.

The Homestretch of our TEI Introduction

Posted on by anneschu
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Last week we finished our introduction to TEI and started our group work of this semester.

TEI Introduction III

For the TEI part of the class we dealt with common mishaps that occurred in our TEI documents of the folktale “Why the Python’s Skin has Dark-Brown Blotches” which we worked on the week before. None were major mishaps, but they are still parts of the code that are important for the document to come together. These mishaps included: forgetting <head type=”subTitle”> to indicate subtitles in the document, closing divisions too soon, and – which wasn’t really a mishap at all – that we don’t need to use the <q>-tag anymore if we use a division for ‘song’.

Then we talked about how best to encode notes and glossaries by using a <list>-tag.

An example for <list>.

Another thing before we started with our group work was, that we talked about the issue that XML:IDs need to be unique, meaning that they can only be used once in the whole document, which proves difficult, if we want to ID the same term throughout a folktale. The work-around we decided on for this problem is that we will only ID the first instance a term comes up in a folktale, and only that one time. This also works great with our aim to foreignize the folktale for its readers, as only having an explanation for the first time an unknown term comes up means that the reader will have to engage with a folktale on a close level to understand it completely.

Just before starting the group work, we were shown a website that changes TEI documents to PDF (or other formats) so that we can check – after having finished with the code – whether everything has been correctly transferred or not. (You can find the link to the website here.) This is quite useful because we can avoid mistakes that we might not have seen with the preview feature in Visual Studio Code.

Group WOrk

And lastly for last week’s class we got together in our groups, decided on a folktale to work on, and started with that. Working on our own folktales was really doable thanks to the introduction to TEI the previous three weeks, and therefore I want to thank Jana and Tasun again for providing us with so much in-class information and answering our questions!

[Addendum] Folktales, language and culture

Posted on by heylivia
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Introduction

Performance of kinachuŋ cultural dance
Source: “Folktales as expressive mediums for language and culture” by Tasun Tidorchibe

Hello everyone! This blog entry was meant to be published a while ago – sorry for the delay! Luckily, Anne also published a blog entry on that lesson of the “Demarginalising Orature – Translating minor forms into the digital age” seminar. I hope you have all read it, it was very informative and I can only add a few things.

The lesson was about Konkomba folktales in relation to language and culture. (For my fellow students: you can find the presentation on the respective lesson on Sciebo, it is titled “Folktales as expressive tools for language and culture_by Tasun Tidorchibe”). As I already mentioned, you can find a concise summary of the lesson and presentation in Anne’s entry (Folktales: On the Preservation of Culture and Language).

Why the Wasp has a Tiny Waist

Something Tasun said in the seminar that stuck with me was how folktales in general have multiple important functions. In fact, they do not only have entertainment qualities but also contain moral lessons and are used as pedagogical tools. They can teach the values and customs of a specific culture. One example for this would be the folktale “Why the Wasp has a Tiny Waist”, which we have also talked about in the seminar.

You can watch a video here, in which Waja Ngnalbu recounts the folktale. In addition to this, you can find more information on the folktale, including a translation into English and a glossary with Likpakpaln words and phrases, here. Since the wasp does not contribute to communal life, it has to perform the kinachuŋ dance by itself. This dance is usually performed in a large group. But the wasp is all alone, thus has to carry all the kinachuŋ instruments by itself around its body. This is what gives the wasp its tiny waist. By now, you can surely tell what the moral of this story is?

Conclusion

To sum it up, the lesson successfully conveyed the cultural importance of Konkomba folktales and the Likpakpaln language. Therefore, it is important to preserve them (e.g. by making them accessible to a broader audience). Hopefully, this blog entry can play a tiny part in this.

Folktales: On the Preservation of Culture and Language

Posted on by anneschu
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In our last session in the course “Demarginalising Orature – Translating minor forms into the digital age” we talked a lot about culture and language, their relation to folktales, and also how important folktales are in order to preserve them. Almost every folktale comes from an oral source, having been passed down through generations by word of mouth, and carries a lot of cultural meaning and importance for the communities that they are told in. They are also region-specific or community-specific, varying between various languages and dialects that therefore also hold cultural meaning.

By passing on folktales, whether in the written or oral form, the cultures and languages they derive from are preserved. We were shown a map of the world, its languages, and how many were believed to go extinct soon. 

As the map shows, almost half of the languages from today – spanning all continents – might go extinct soon, and one way of documenting them for the future is by preserving them through the documentation of folktales. Folktales are a source of indigenous knowledge and hence transmit the culture and language of a community. This is, because folktales include lessons about moral and values, often very specific to the culture they are deriving from. The example we had for this in class was a Konkomba folktale called ‘Why the Wasp Has a Tiny Waist’. It is a folktale that gives lessons about communal activities and the cultural traditions after someone, especially an in-law, has died in the Konkomba community. Without the knowledge of the culture a listener might not fully understand the folktale and its moral and values, but by telling it this aspect of the culture is preserved. 

And language, of course, is also a part of culture. But when it comes to languages that are not institutionalized, the best way to make it accessible, visible and preserve it is by translating it into an institutionalized language. But for the original language to still be preserved and made visible – because by hearing a folktale the listener also gets a feeling about the language – to foreignize the translation and thereby giving visibility to the original language and culture is the best way of doing so. 

Hence, folktales encompass cultures and languages and by documenting and preserving them, their cultures and language will be accessible for forever. A difficulty in trying to preserve languages and cultures is, that there needs to be someone to go to these regions, record these folktales, translate them, and preserve them in some way. This project on Konkomba folktales is a step in this direction, but there are so many regions, as shown in the map, that it will need a lot of dedication from many different people for this preservation to happen on a broader scale.