ABSTRACT
The phenomenon of the African epic, the story no one starts, fi nishes, or even talks, was deeply integrated into traditional African culture. For hundreds, maybe thousands of years, the African epic has been much more than an art form. Indeed, to characterize these traditional epics as long oral poems narrating the heroic exploits of individuals who are facing national threats to their communities diminishes the real vitality they embody. Against the canonical defi nition privileging the individual, heroic ethos operating in the service of great nations or empires, African epics emerge from a variety of sociopolitical contexts, some having nothing at all to do with idealistic notions of an Heroic Age of antiquity. At its most glorious, the African epic has enthralled royalty in the capitols of great empires, large masses at magnifi cent ceremonies, and awestruck youths awaiting their rites of passage. In its less bombastic moments, it has passed time for seasoned veterans wandering far from home in savannah or tropical forest. Its totality, its phenomenology, arises from an epic habitus encompassing all those things African. It can be found wherever there is the simple pluck of the ngoni, hodda, and mvet lutes, the strumming of a kora, a calabash guitar, the living beat of drums such as the jembe, or the ozi master-drum and its kainga-drum accompaniment, and the call of the bugle. At its center is life and death, belief and practice, love and violence, harmony and war, all of which are immanent in the human voice and the perorations, metaphors, allusions, and tropes of the griots and bebom-mvetts, those “vessels of speech . . . which harbour secrets many centuries old” and for whom the “art of eloquence has no secrets” (Niane, Sundiata 1). Along with the
people and cultures they represent, and as part of countless ceremonies and gatherings, the epics these wordsmiths perform even today are part of a larger economy of signifi cation that links the epic habitus to the body biologic and body-politic. Moreover, they are also symptoms in two competing and yet complementary senses: as rich cultural signifi ers deeply embedded in the psyche, en-fl eshed through the body, and evoked as a sociopolitical externality, but also as symptoms of trauma operating at the same levels in response thereto. These epics, in short, as artistic cultural performances, collectively embody the ancient phenomenology of African culture.
