Background
to Nigeria IV
There is no shortage of commercially
published collections
of folktales and proverbs. Without exception these tend to be travesties of the real
thing, altering the text
for moralising purposes
Recent years have also seen the rise of
publications (in Hausa
and English) purporting to recount oral history. These are great for anthropologists but
completely unreliable
as historical texts as they are simply restructured to respond to current
political exigencies and have no genuine text behind them