Doing Oral History as an Outsider

Abstract

Until African women overcome the barriers that separate them from literacy, higher education, money, and power, outsiders will of necessity be an important part of recording their oral history. Theoretically, tape recorders make it possible for nonliterate persons to capture and produce their own oral histories. Realistically, however, educated people will be more likely to collect, process, and disseminate oral history. History departments in African universities have for several years incorporated the gathering of oral history into their curricula. But even in these efforts oral accounts from women rarely have been forthcoming, due to a shortage of women students, a lack of interest in and appreciation for women's contribution to history, or both.1 Thus emerges the role of outsiders: to create from the lives of African women primary documents that are marked only minimally by interference and direction from the outsider. Hopefully, the outsider's efforts will contribute to creating, along with other primary materials, an interest on the part of Africans themselves in women's recollections. So far, several excellent oral histories of African women have been compiled by foreign scholars. Without doubt the most thorough account of a woman's life is Baba of Karo, edited and translated by Mary Smith, which tells of Muslim Hausa society in Northern Nigeria.2 A recent analysis based on oral histories collected earlier is Marcia Wright's in Peril: A Commentary Upon the Life Stories of Captives in Nineteenth-Century East Africa.3 Anne Laurentin's Nzakara Women details the lives of three women from different classes.4 Finally, Monica Hunter tells Story of Nosente, The Mother of Compassion of the Xhosa Tribe, South Africa.5 Though not exhaustive, this list suggests the variety of women, in different times and places in Africa, whose life stories have been made available for social historians and others.