The value of storytelling

Historians often tell us that the main way through which African history was transmitted across generations was through storytelling, and that one of the ways in which African cultures were constituted and bound was through the myths of common ancestry that these stories contained. In this way, storytelling in many African communities was about more than just passing time or entertaining after a long day of work. It was a way of drawing and keeping people together, a way of situating oneself in the community and at large as well as a record of key events in that community’s history. Orality simply meant that histories in African contexts were more malleable to interpretation by the storyteller, but because in most cases there was no single custodian of an entire community’s history, storytellers could fact-check against each other and come up with a somewhat comprehensive narrative of that community’s past and account for its present.

Storytelling is not just a vital part of African communities. I would argue that storytelling continues to be a vital part of any modern society and the stories that we tell about who we are in relation to other people draw certain groups together and attempt to keep them so. In modern societies, the storytellers are the journalists and politicians that dominate the airwaves and therefore tell us what our priorities as communities are. Events happen, and the media picks on those facets of that event that they think are most important and put those together in short, punchy pieces. When we look back on these articles or journals, or refer to them in order to explain our present, it follows that we remain ignorant about what has been left out of those stories and focus on what is emphasised.

This isn’t a revolutionary observation but it struck me as I read accounts of the violence in Norway that today’s storytellers are slowly losing sight of the vital role they play. Almost as soon as the news of the attack emerged, accusations of Islamic terrorism flew fast and frenzied on some of the most relied upon news outlets in the world. A BBC story was claiming that it was a jihadist attacks while over at the Washington Post, an article was written asserting that the attack was definitely the work of jihadists and that Western governments had an obligation to avoid ‘cuts in defence ... or withdrawing from Afghanistan’. The storyline caught hold and spread like a wildfire – as stories are wont to do in the age of Twitter and the Huffington Post. This was the height of irresponsibility; not only running off with an unverified storyline but failing to take into account the impact that it would have on the key characters in the plot.

A key mistake of the storytellers was first in forgetting the power that their definitions and observations have in constituting communities. The community in this story was defined in a negative sense – the ‘us’ in the narrative is everyone who is not a jihadist and is therefore a target for Islamist attacks. Predictably, the story’s audience proceeded to define this negative characterisation in its most restrictive sense, and on the blogosphere and the comment boards the ‘why do they hate us’ trope reared its ugly head. ‘Us versus them’, a handy if analytically deficient dialectic provided a ready-made frame within which to understand the genesis and methodology of the attack in Norway. For the less erudite commentators, it was inevitable that ‘them’ would degenerate from ‘jihadists’ to ‘Muslims’, perpetuating the exact kind of hatred that Breivik – neither jihadist nor Muslim – had in mind.

A second mistake that the storytellers made is that they failed to consider a subplot that has been playing out while our attention was primarily focused on the Al Qaeda plot. Although jihadist groups like Al Qaeda do in fact pose a threat to many European nations, the cancer within – increasingly heated rightwing rhetoric, the rise of anti-Semitism, anti-Islamism, xenophobia and neo-Nazism in the West has never really been adequately addressed. Here in the UK, rather than expressing concern that immigration policy and the rhetoric around it has grown excessively poisonous, politicians have harnessed it into political clout, capitalising on the economic disenfranchisement to argue that reducing immigration would somehow save the UK from it’s economic demise, as if it was migrants and refugees who caused the global financial crisis. By failing to consider the entirety of the story, the storytellers have obscured some key elements of history – that hatred knows no race and religion.

Storytellers accounting for the role of terrorism in defining modern societies have chosen to tell a story in which communities are constituted and bound by an irrational fear of difference. Especially in Europe, storytellers have over the last few decades poisoned Europeans’ understanding of who they are in relation to the world – defining them in a negative sense (we are not Muslim, black nor poor) and thereby focusing on excluding rather than including, meaning that European communities cannot define themselves beyond identifying that which they are not. Coupled with the impatience to understand or explain it was perhaps only a matter of time before the storytellers were caught perpetuating a myth of common ancestry that has no resonance with reality, or telling a story of a people fighting an enemy of their own imagination.

"African societies recognised the value of the storyteller – many of them were acclaimed within their societies and awarded special status, but they were also expected to conduct their work with integrity and good faith. It may serve the storytellers of modern societies to consider living up to the high expectation that their role in society entails and attempt the same."

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