Oral Tradition 9/1 (1994): 162-184 On the Sense and Nonsense of Performance Studies Concerning Oral Literature of the Bulsa in Northern Ghana

The Bulsa are an ethnic group of about 70,000 people in the dry Savannah zone of Northern Ghana, practicing subsistence agriculture and keeping fowl and cattle.1 They live in settlements (so-called “villages ” or “towns, ” teng, pl. tengsa) consisting of dispersed houses or “compounds” (yeri, pl. yie). Every settlement is composed of several exogamous maximal patrilineages, that is, localized clans or clan sections, each of which claims to be descended from an original ancestor. Marriage is virilocal; upon marriage the women move to another clan section into the house of their husbands. Buli, the language of the Bulsa, belongs to the Gur languages of the Voltaïc region. The Bulsa were completely without writing before the coming of the British.2 The Bulsa had, and still have, a copious oral tradition rich in folktales, songs, riddles, proverbs, and historical accounts.3 Together with my Ghanaian and German collaborators I collected a corpus 1 For an introduction to the ethnography of the Bulsa, see Schott 1970