ABSTRACT
An oral account of past events comes from a teller. Since people who tell a tale to others wish to be listened to, their accounts must claim to be authoritative, accounts that they have a right to give, besides offering a possible explanation of what really happened. There will be culturally accepted means of asserting these rights, and having their words accepted. It is easy to see that speakers may use their social status to validate their utterance, but a perhaps less obvious criterion is appropriateness. Gaps are soon noticed when one encounters a discourse built upon unfamiliar conventions. Africanist historians recognize some of these: ‘myth’ is recognized as an unfamiliar code for representing changes and events. It is impossible here to do justice to all the arguments over the characteristics of realism. The importance of historiographical critics like Hayden White and Louis Mink is not that they somehow show that ‘history cannot be true’.
