Mark Turin, Claire Wheeler and Eleanor Wilkinson

“ Similar tensions traverse the scientific arena, as cooperation between researchers, technicians and people from business enterprises also generates concerns on intellectual property and authorship. The point is to understand the breadth and depth of the collaboration: who has the intellectual initiative and the intellectual property and, obviously, who can claim the property rights, particularly when products are on the market to be sold and bought. ”

“ The idea underlying the Verba Africana series is that textual content and visual performance are both essential for classification, description and interpretation of the oral genres and their narrative context. The performance of African oral genres, whether classic poems, songs and tales or innovative genres such as hip hop and AIDS theatre, is recorded and integrated to allow the interested public to approach oral literary productions as total events distributed in several layers: video fragments and summaries on the menu, with the possibility to view accompanying material on subpages. ”

“ The ethical and scientific knot is that we intend to publish a video interview that respects the original discourse of the interviewee but at the same time we do not want to be incorporated into his personal agenda by endorsing his complex narrative as scientific, nor do we intend to publicise his agenda or spread it as history among Ewe, Ghanaian and international students and among Ewe people. We wish to avoid falling into the same trap that missionary discourses, through their teaching and preaching, have generated among the Ewe. ”

“ Problematic positions of researchers The problems encounterd raise several issues for research, some of which go beyond the immediate concerns of authorship. One of the issues is that of “insider” and “outsider” researchers, but it transcends that. Merolla is evidently an outsider, but we are also confronted with different kinds of insiders. The interviewee is an insider who is now both a researcher and a researched, Dorvlo is an insider (as an Anlo) but a researcher, while Ameka is an Ewe insider but an Anlo outsider (as a researcher) . ”

“ The most frequently narrated story includes the migration from Notsie to Ghana during the reign of Agokoli I, a cruel king who asked the Ewes (then called Dogbos) to kill their elders, to build houses and the city wall with mud and pieces of glass, rock and thorns and to produce “a rope out of clay”. The Ewes were able to escape from Notsie thanks to a cunning trick: they left the town walking backwards so that nobody could guess from the direction of their footsteps that they were leaving. In such narratives, Notsie is presented as the Ewe ancestral home. ”

“ The “researchers as griots” thus select the video fragments to mediate (or protect) the communication between interviewee and audience, and only offer the whole text of the interview with explicative comments [34] .
When we re-read the interview and our selection in light of indigenous rights and new media collaborative authorship, we see that our case opens up an important point: indigenous rights are not individual rights so that no one individual is expected to be a self-appointed advocate for the group. ”

“ We asked the interviewee whether he knew what kind of Ewe migration stories were narrated orally and their role and meaning in the organisation and functioning of theHogebetsotso festival. He made it clear that he was the repository of a very special, secret knowledge that no other researcher could reveal and that he was worried about “people tapping and stealing” his knowledge. ”

“ Merolla is troubled by the clash between the interviewee’s attempt to legitimise his narrative (through etymological evidence, historical reconstruction, and the interview itself) and the researchers’ knowledge and standards required to distinguish academic discourse from such a hybrid mixing of creation myths, popularising narratives and scientific/historical knowledge. By selecting the video fragments according to our discourse, “are we simply positivist?” ”

“ A possible resolution may be to pay careful attention to interactions and negotiations and make explicit where the researcher’s voice and perspective is constructed and how, when, and where these take the upper hand in the documentation and in the interpretation. As we have seen, however, these indications still leave problems in the recording and video research and documentation.
On authorship Philosophical and literary studies declared the author “dead” as far back as the 1970s, [24] but questions of authorship and rights persist all the same. ”

“ The question of intellectual property and the rights of indigenous people developed from the experience of expropriation during and after European expansionism and colonialism, when not only lands and resources but also material and immaterial knowledge and arts were exploited to the advantage of museums, universities, international organisations and enterprises, individual scholars and businessmen. ”

“ The influence of schoolbooks is far reaching and goes beyond national boundaries and generation shift. For example, the reconstruction of human history in terms of Ewe worldwide migrations is shared by Togolese Ewes who produced a video summarising the creation and migration narrative of the Ewe, similar to the narrative offered in the interview presented here. ”

“ The departure from Notsie is enacted in the Hogebetsotso festival (“leaving Hogbe”, i.e. leaving the ancestral land) that takes place in several Anlo towns in Ghana. Merolla and Dorvlo’s project aimed to investigate what the festival contributes to the discourse of the migration tradition, whether there are other local versions recounted orally and what the present written/oral/new media interactions are [2] . The project also envisaged collecting video materials of the Ewe migration stories during the festival in the framework of the Verba Africana series [3] . ”

“ We also see the linking of ancestors to major civilisations as a brave attempt to find a role for local knowledge—but in a learned and esoteric elaboration—that cannot just be put “aside” because it risks becoming ineffective and futile when segregated in the realm of mythology or philosophy.
Questions and problems In making the Verba Africana volume on Ewe migration narratives it was decided to include only the less controversial parts of the interview, and present them as video fragments. Problematic parts of the interview are, however, presented in written form accompanying the video. ”

“ Our scientific problems Etymologies In the interview, etymologies are offered as evidence to sustain an elaborate narrative that mingles mythological creation stories, “scientific” evolutionism, popularising narratives and historical knowledge. The narrator claims that the word “amoeba” is the Ewe expression hamueba which the Mother Goddess uttered when she saw human beings emerge from water, and links this to the beginning of life. ”

“ The Hogbetsotso festival is usually held in the first week of November every year. Merolla and Dorvlo had hoped to be participant observers and documenters during the 2007 festival. However, in that year and ever since, the festival has not been held due to disputes surrounding the chieftaincy of the Anlo paramountcy [4] . In November 2007, given the volatile situation in Anloga, Merolla and Dorvlo were not able to visit the area, instead we interviewed Datey-Kumodzie [5] who had been recommended to us as being well informed about the Hogebetsotso festival and the migration stories. ”

“ New electronic media—in particular the Internet and World Wide Web—have opened up very animated discussions on authorship and intellectual property, and even fiercer debates as far as copyright and legal issues are concerned. ”

“ In the beginning Daniela Merolla and Kofi Dorvlo started a video documentation project in 2007 on Ewe migration stories and the festival in which these stories are re-enacted, Hogebetsotso. Oral sources and archaeological remains suggest that a series of migrations started in the eleventh century and that Ewes settled in Ghana in the early seventeenth century [1] . Oral narratives called xotutu recount a flow of people from the town called Notsie (in central Togo) to Ghana. ”

“ World Oral Literature Project 2010 Workshop, CRASSH, Cambridge, UK for the suggestions to use a new format including several video fragments in the same frame, so that different perspectives (also those of the researchers) can be heard. The need remains for the researchers to select and to mediate the communication between the “Principal” and the third party in the production of a video documentation freely accessible on the Internet as the Verba African series is. ”

“ A young foolish Agokoli seeks to rid himself of the confining advice of his elders by ordering all to be executed. His Ewe subjects, however, are successful in saving a few from death [...] And it is the elders who successfully lead them [the Ewe] out of Notsie when they make their escape. (Greene 2002a: 1035)
If the solution offered in the Notsie narrative re-states the authority of the elders, other stories offer a more ambiguous discourse on seniority. ”

“ But it is presented as real/scientific, as knowledge that has to be believed as being truthful and that contends with scientific knowledge for defining and understanding the field of reality. This is the reason why we need to present it in a cautious way when we produce a video documentation intended not only for scholars but also for students and a large public.
Ethical problems The ethical problem is directly linked to what has been discussed before. We intend to respect our interviewee’s discourse, but cannot propose his narrative as such. ”

“ It is evident that his narrative and style is his own. However, interviews conducted in November 2009 in Anloga, traditionally the ritual and political capital of the Anlo-Ewe in Ghana, with some educated Ewes (teachers and office workers) show that the idea that Ewes migrated from Ethiopia to Egypt before reaching West Africa is well-known and it is often presented as historical fact. ”

“ On giving voice Scholars know that the use of video cameras may affect the performance and the context in which they operate. Moreover, the apparent objectivity of video images risks obfuscating perspectives, aims, audiences, and selection processes conveyed by the images. ”

“ This means that we need to reflect on internal discordances and diversities and to make use of the criticism raised about collectivistic concepts such as tradition and heritage, and to encourage the “grand” institutions to become less populist in their approaches to collaborative work and indigenous rights. ”

“ Similarly, he claims that the term hogbe which the Ewes use to refer to Amedzɔƒe “the place where humans originated” is related to two present day geographical areas in Eweland: the Ho area and what he calls the Gbe area. The unfortunate thing is that the group which he refers to as the Gbe are actually called the Gbi and there is no linguistic reason that could explain the modification from “e” into “i”. Elsewhere he links the name Khartoum to an Ewe expression that seemingly sounds like it. ”

“ Image by Felix Ameka and Daniela Merolla, 2012. Although the aim of the Ewe creation and migration story aired on the Supreme Master Television is unclear, the video appears to assert the centrality of Ewe cosmology and religious/philosophical knowledge in human global history. As in a paper by the interviewee (Datey-Kumodzie 2006) , the Ewe/African local knowledge foundation is seen as being central to new technical and spiritual developments in Africa. One wonders whether they do not have the same agenda and whether Dr. ”

“ Woeli Publishing Services, 2005) , 1–13. —, ‘Agpkoli et la dispersion des Ewe de Notsé’, in Peuples du Golfe du Bénin, ed. by F. De Medeiros (Paris: Karthala et Centre de Recherches Africaines, 1984) , 21–34. —, ‘Le remodelage des traditions historiques: la légende d’Agokoli, roi de Notse’, in Source orales de l’histoire de l’Afrique, ed. by C.-H. Perrot, G. Gonnin, and F. Nahimana (Paris: CNRS, 1989) , 209–214. Gee, J. P. and E. R. Hayes, Language and Learning in the Digital Age (London: Routledge, 2011) . Geertz, C., The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic, 1973) . ”