Voices from Africa—FamilySearch Oral Genealogy

David Ouimette, CG, CGL [email protected]

Across sub-Saharan Africa, we see the rising generation migrate from the village to the city and forget who they are. The strong desire of tribal leaders is to reconnect children in the city with their fathers in the village. When FamilySearch meets with village elders, they guide us to villagers who have committed to memory the precious ancestral record. We put the oral genealogy to paper, ensure its accuracy, and share it with the rising generation, fulfilling the will of the tribal elders. With this calling, FamilySearch canvases rural sub- Saharan Africa, documenting the lives and family relationships of hundreds of millions of people, living and deceased, via oral interviews.

Dearth of Written Records in Sub-Saharan Africa

Compared to Europe and the Americas, African nations have relatively few written records documenting the existence, identity, and familial relationships of their people. Where such records exist in Africa, they tend to be of recent origin with sporadic population coverage.

• “The births of around 95 million children under age of 5 (slightly more than half) in sub-Saharan Africa have never been recorded” (UNICEF, December 2017). • In most countries in sub-Saharan Africa, national registration of births, marriages, and deaths began only recently and even now only documents a fraction of these vital events. • The director of civil registration in Tanzania told the author that 18% of births are now documented by the government, a great improvement over previous years; the documented children live primarily in the capital city, Dar es Salaam. • With few exceptions, national censuses are either nonexistent, destroyed, or name people from only select segments of the population. FamilySearch seeks to digitally preserve all nominal censuses in sub-Saharan Africa. Most extant censuses are recent records.

Richness of Oral Traditions in Sub-Saharan Africa

Most indigenous cultures in sub-Saharan Africa pass along their traditions—including knowledge of their ancestors—through oral recitation and song. Oral traditions may include folktales, origin stories, proverbs, chants, narrative histories, stories of heroes, genealogies, and other cultural traditions transmitted by word of mouth, traditions that bind together and strengthen a people.

In particular, oral genealogies carry great power as they provide evidence of family relationships, moral character and suitability for marriage, legal inheritance status, and even the right to rule. As a record type, oral genealogies in sub-Saharan Africa extend generations earlier than the written record, providing unique evidence of family connections. Some oral genealogies extend well over a dozen generations. The deepest known lineage extends back thirty-seven generations as recited by an eighty-five-year-old informant in Ghana.

FamilySearch Documents Oral Genealogies of Indigenous Peoples

The Genealogical Society of Utah (now known as FamilySearch) began transcribing oral genealogies in the Pacific islands half a century ago. In the 1970s, we conducted interviews to capture in writing the oral genealogies of Tonga, Samoa, and Tahiti. In the 1980s, we conducted oral history interviews in , transcribing generations of ancestry through hundreds of interviews of the of , the Toraja people of , and the and people of . FamilySearch also microfilmed manuscripts of a Malaysian oral genealogy project led by Benedict Sandin, who had documented the ancestry of the of Sarawak and Sabah some decades earlier.

In 2003, FamilySearch began transcribing oral genealogies in Africa with a small pilot project in the Gambia. In 2004 and 2005, pilot projects began with the Ga-Adangbe people of Ghana and the Ibibio people of Nigeria. FamilySearch documented the oral genealogies of 300 informants in Ghana and Nigeria between 2004 and 2006. In subsequent years, these efforts continued in Ghana and expanded into Ivory Coast.

By 2015, FamilySearch had amassed 5.7 million names over more than a decade of field work. At that point, we acknowledged the need to modernize and streamline the process of gathering oral genealogies in anticipation of expanding the work across West Africa and beyond. We attempted a number of technology solutions ranging from computers to audio recorders to cell phones. Meanwhile, the number of interviews grew annually:

• In 2016, we gathered 638,362 names • In 2017, we gathered 2,709,676 names • In 2018, we gathered 16,219,564 names

By 2018, we had upgraded and scaled the technology and processes sufficiently to handle many countries simultaneously, including Benin, Congo, DR Congo, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Togo, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. We developed standardized forms in English, French, and Portuguese, supporting the lingua franca of each country. We document oral genealogies using this interview template:

Between 2019 and 2023, FamilySearch will accelerate its African oral history project. We will

• Interview 700,000 more informants with substantial knowledge of ancestry; • Preserve audio recordings of 700,000 origin stories of those who settled the land; • Take 2.1 million photos (with GSP coordinates) of informants and their villages; • Document the lives of 200 million more people within their families; • Trace lineages from the initial settlers to the present generation; and • Preserve the genealogy of rural villages across these fifteen nations: Angola, Benin, Cameroon, Congo, DR Congo, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Togo, Uganda, and Zimbabwe.

A Census of the Living and the Dead

In essence, we are creating a census of the living and the dead of rural populations across these fifteen nations. We canvas countries village by village, covering all rural areas where we can safely visit. For example, this map of Nigeria shows where FamilySearch was actively gathering oral genealogies in July 2019:

In the future we may expand to more countries—perhaps Mozambique and Madagascar, for example—based on the extent of the oral tradition.

The Oral Interview Process

FamilySearch hires and trains local people to conduct oral genealogy interviews in the local language. We follow these steps to commit oral genealogies to paper in each village:

1. An interviewer, often with a local companion, approaches village leaders in council to gain permission to conduct oral interviews, seek guidance on whom to interview, and describe the purpose, nature, and anticipated results of the interview process. 2. Village leaders guide the interviewer to the head of the clan who then introduces him to those entrusted to remember the ancestry of the people and their stories. 3. The interviewer describes the interview process to the informant who in turn signs a release form. 4. The interviewer takes photographs of the informant and family members, recording the name and GPS coordinates of the village. 5. The interviewer asks the informant to tell the origin story of the people who originally settled the village. The informant might also share what he or she most desires to impress upon the younger generation. The interviewer creates an audio recording of these initial remarks. Recordings may last fifteen minutes per interview. 6. Beginning with the first generation, the informant names a father and mother, along with their children, identifying if possible the year and place of birth, marriage, and death for each person. The interviewer writes down these details, repeating back the information to ensure that what was spoken and what was written agree. 7. The informant continues to the next generation, documenting the family groups of the children. This step is repeated generation after generation.

Hundreds of names are documented per interview, far beyond the memory of the average person. Each interview generally occurs in multiple sessions lasting 2-3 hours. Often, family members join the conversation and suggest additional names, details, or corrections. The interview concludes once the informant has named descendants to the current generation, using 1990 as a cutoff date for births. Ideally, the oral genealogy overlaps with written records such as censuses and civil registration of births, marriages, and deaths.

Steps are taken to ensure the accuracy of the transcription process. The consent forms, photographs, and interview forms are given to the leaders of the village council. Digitized copies, along with audio recordings of origin stories and the family trees, are published on FamilySearch.org as a permanent record of the ancestry of the village.

In Summary

The FamilySearch oral genealogy project in Africa will preserve the names and family relationships of almost a quarter of a billion people, living and deceased, in fifteen countries. This project will produce the most extensive documentation of African families ever assembled. Our five-year plan to preserve this extensive oral genealogy comes at a time when the current generation is migrating to the city and the oral tradition is in danger.

References

Bonsu, Osei-Agyemang and Melvin P. Thatcher, “African Oral Genealogy: Collecting and Preserving Yesterday for Tomorrow.” (Durban, South Africa: World Library and Information Congress: 73rd IFLA General Conference and Council, 2007.) https://archive.ifla.org/IV/ifla73/papers/108-1.Bonsu_Thatcher-en.pdf

FamilySearch, “Save African Heritage: Support FamilySearch’s Oral History Program,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qex2HQX4QZc

Hansen, Brent M. and Sydney Bjork, “Voices Bridging Families of the Past and Present: Collect and Preserve Oral Histories in Africa,” (unpublished paper from Enslaved: Peoples of the Historic Slave Trade, March 2019.)