Search

This article deals with the interaction of Oromo's oral literature with written poetry. The main objective is to indicate the way different types of oral literature elements are adapted to written poetry. Data were collected through qualitative methods such as document analysis, interviews, and group discussions and were analyzed qualitatively. Types of Oromo oral literature like a proverb, oral narrative, oral poetry, and riddles are adapted into written poetry by different authors. The interaction forms a bridge between the oral literary culture and written literature enabling both to complimentarily develop Oromo literature. As Richard M. Dorson states, "Oral literature can and frequently does enter into written literature. A new generation of African novelists... strews the proverbs of their native languages throughout their fiction" (2). The intermixing of African orality and written literary works makes literature closer to culture and societal life. These connections sustain the life of oral literature in written literature, on the one hand, and enable written literature to aesthetically communicate the culture, history, norms, and beliefs of a group of people who share it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Kitula Kinge'i's reworking of a controversial nineteenth-century Swahili classic, Utendi wa Mwana Kupona by Mwana Kupona, into "biographical" children's books. It revisits some of the critical controversies surrounding her poem in order to underscore how King'ei's adaptations participate directly in the debates about the status and importance of Mwana Kupona's text within Swahili popular culture and imagination. The paper also highlights the ways in which, at the formal level, King'ei radically transforms Mwana Kupona's text, as well as the effects such transformations have on the way she is read in a new, global context. Ultimately, I demonstrate that although King'ei's transcreative adaptations of the formal elements of the poem are so extensive as to result in new texts, he is unable to decisively untether himself from its conservative, feudal class values. What would have been a radical project is, in the end, hampered by its didactic impulses and its ideological affinities to Mwana Kupona's poem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay discusses the contextual and formal qualities of Jesus of the Deep Forest , a long Ghanaian praise poem, situating this discussion in light of the difficulties Western readers often experience in encountering African oral literature. An analysis of the poem's artistic design begins with the conventions of its genre as an apae , a highly respected verbal artistic expression in Ghana. Without a narrative structure, the apae relies on a complex system of parallelism and repetition, along with three types of praise names. Close analysis of several representative passages demonstrates how repetition works. The poem's metaphors, shifts in voice and address, and use of allusion provide further access for aesthetic investigation. Such analysis demonstrates the creative evolution of an ancient literary form to address fresh contemporary realities. The elaborate artistry and the cultural significance of the poem point to the enduring importance of oral and religious genres for Africa today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literary field in Africa came into emergence as a result of a collective yearning for lesser dependency on the symbolic constraints the Western center is forcing on its margins. Granted that a work sets itself up by setting up its own context, and that the African context stands out as one where oral literature is still alive in society, the manifestation of expressive forms associated with traditional literature in a novel must carry heavy weight in an interpretation of African works. For that reason, this essay will argue that, through her “smuggling” of narrative forms drawn from oral literature, Aminata Sow Fall’s fiction testifies to an oral discursivity at work in the novel. The archi-textual approach focuses on various strategies the Senegalese woman writer resorts to in order to inscribe, deep within her creative work in French, a traditional universe hitherto conveyed through oral forms of expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Storytelling is essentially a communal practice transferring, across generations, cultural notions, norms, and values. However, in the study of storytelling practices in African societies, the empirical focus and analytical emphasis have been on adults and elders, in particular men, neglecting the roles of women and children. Adults and elders have been seen as producers and transmitters of cultural knowledge, whereas children have been seen chiefly as knowledge receivers. Based on ethnographic field research, this article analyzes the roles of children in storytelling events among the Oromo-speaking Guji people of Southern Ethiopia. Far from being passive knowledge receivers, the Guji children are attentive listeners and engaged narrators. They express their sentiments and opinions in gestures and words, pose questions to clarify points, make meta-communicative comments on the proper ways of narrating stories, and pass judgments on the moral messages. This article argues for a more child-centered perspective in the study of oral traditions in African societies, which recognizes their agency in the intergenerational transfer and change of storytelling traditions as well as of the cultural notions, values, and norms transpiring through them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the area of African oral literature, the voices of women continue to be muted. The image of the oral artist is often masculinized, and in the Sahel region especially, female verbal artists continue to be undermined. This essay intends to centralize the feminine voice in oral performance by exploring texts composed and performed by women for women. Its aim is to look at marriage songs in Senegal as literary sites that allow Wolof women to negotiate voice and power. Within that framework, women, such as griottes who are considered illiterate, can be seen as having theorized about gender for a long time. Yet their voices have been arbitrarily subsumed by the so-called intellectuals whose discourses are privileged because they are written. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Opacity is an intrinsic characteristic of Otjiherero praise poetry: it simultaneously enables and complicates reception. This essay analyzes a piece of Herereo praise poetry (omutandu) that was created for the burial of the victims of the so-called "Windhoek Shooting" in 1959 and preserved until today by means of oral transmission. It explores the poetic response of the Herero community to the forced removal of Africans from the vicinity of Windhoek, their articulation of resistance against the aims of apartheid, and the expression of grief and dismay about the killing of several people at the escalation of violence in 1959. At that time, the performers expressed, in coded diction, their collective will not to move to the newly built township, Katutura. Today the poem projects a version of history that contradicts the reading of colonial history contained in the archival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first possible variant of the urban legend The Vanishing Hitchhiker occurs in Acts 8: 26-40 with the conversion of an "Ethiopian" by the hitchhiking apostle Philip. More recent variants in the Gambia and Somalia exhibit a different plot, but retain the vanishing hitchhiker motif. A female hitchhiker spends time with a man, who is later unable to locate her, but who finds his coat on her grave. The found-coat variant is part of a widespread cycle of vanishing hitchhiker legends. Could the story have originated in Africa? This article deals with this issue and with widespread occurrences of this legend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The postmodern sensibility encourages doing away with particularizing traits and practices that impede the final emergence of a global community and culture. This reality and its imperatives inevitably come to mind when one works on traditional texts like Yoruba proverbs. The mechanical means at our disposal for recording and preserving such texts effectively release them from their traditional ties to specific cultural, social, and geographical contexts, so the texts lose the properties that scholars have traditionally relied upon to determine provenance, targeted audiences, routes of diffusion, and the like. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Publishing can help us to preserve the results of an oral performance; but in the end the reader is limited to the same linear arrangement of the information that we get from the oral performance. Computer technology can do better than that, because it can help us create a set-up which helps us not only to read the text of a narrative performance but, with the aid of a web of related ideas that define the world behind the tale, enable us to rearrange the sequence of the tale in a way preferable to us. That set-up is the hypertext or the hypermedia. Through it, we enter into a dialogue with the tale in an even more direct way than the live audience of its performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

African nations are undergoing change at a tremendous pace. Not only are their citizens losing a grip on their traditions, but the governments themselves find their political will severely tested by the challenges of change in which they are embroiled. The aim of this paper is to propose steps that would help researchers in Africa preserve one of their most cherished treasures--the oral literature--with modern technological tools that would not only protect the orality of the tradition but also ensure that it reaches as wide an audience as possible both inside and outside their countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Private radio stations have multiplied in Mali during recent years. Radio Parana is a rural station that broadcasts in a minority language spoken in the areas of San and Tominian, in the southeast of the country. In their desire to validate the cultural patrimony of this region, the station owners have from the very beginning included in their line-up a program on stories. That broadcast is undeniably successful among its listeners, as are the cassettes (31 as of now) that they have produced. This article focuses on the impact of a media practice such as this upon oral literature and also upon the storytellers who have been invited by the radio [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the significance of the autobiographical element in hunters' chants among the yoruba. Since hunters primarily occupy the subject position in these chants, they use them to construct and praise themselves and their communities and to contest their representation by others as well as to teach communal history. The paper examines the art of composition and recitation in the chants, showing how subjects are formed, developed, and contested to promote heteroglossia as different discourses and counterdiscourses are developed. Finally, the paper argues that the chants are crucial in reconstructing historical and literary aspects of precolonial Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the creative ability of an African writer to preserve different forms of oral literature in his video films. The paper argues that on several occasions, these folkloric materials also become instruments for raising social consciousness in the artist's audience. The films discussed are part of a growing body of African popular culture whose purpose is the discovery and pursuit of a new direction in the economy, politics, culture, and social life of contemporary Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines Maryse Condé's novel The Last of the African Kings in relation to the African griot tradition. The essay approaches the novel from an oral-arts aesthetic perspective, examining the ways Condé deploys the voice of the African griot, a traditional raconteur and chronicler of history, in the exploration of African diaspora sensibility. Although the narrative scheme of the novel seems to convey the author's keen familiarity with the sense of authority and significance with which the oral artist performs epic or other narratives, the essay argues that in the "brave New World" of African diasporic narration, a postmodernist, decentered narration replaces the unified and conservative voice of the traditional griot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using two books from the 1960s as a point of reference, this paper addresses the literary quality of African oral literature. Both books surprisingly underscore orature's objectives such as propriety as well as quotability, which are discussed together with orature's quality of finalization. The paper finally answers the question in its title, and points to a possible resolution of the comparative dilemma entailed in the varying notions of literature embraced by different cultures and eras. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main issue in this paper concerns the transition from oral to written. It illustrates with two Senegalese epics where the author was involved in the collection phase and in the production of written English and French versions. The first epic is ‘The Epic of Ndiadiane Ndiaye’ performed by the griot Cheikh Niang. The second is ‘The Epic of El Hadj Umar Taal of Fuuta’ whose author is a smith named birahim Thiam. Both epics are replete with historical, religious, linguistic, and cultural references, in addition to constituting important identity markers and memory preservation items for the constituencies and audience of the two performers. Three languages are involved in the production of the epics, each playing a specific role: Wolof, Arabic, and French. The first is the language of performance and is the culture carrier; Arabic is the language of the Islamic faith; and French is the medium of modernity. The paper discusses the translation process from word to print that poses a number of challenges, and the editing process, which is also an important step toward the production of the final text. The transmission process of the two epics stretches from earlier griots through the two performers discussed in this article to the English and French texts that the author has been involved in producing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For over a decade, Julius Chongo's weekly Nyanja radio drama Poceza m'Madzulo (‘Evening Story time’) was the most popular program ever aired on the Zambia National Broadcasting Services. How did this masterful author-performer utilize his dynamic vocal technique to give ‘eyes’ to an invisible and sightless audience—one very different from that of a typical vernacular oral performance setting? My study investigates eight important narrative techniques that Chongo uses to spark the imagination of his distant, disparate, and dispersed listening audience, thus enabling them to both envisage and experience his lively radio dramas. These features are illustrated with reference to a humorous tale that was broadcast some thirty years ago, entitled ‘What You Cry For.’ My study reveals that despite certain severe limitations, the faceless radio medium—when creatively manipulated by a skillful wordsmith—has great potential to entertain, educate, influence, and inspire a vast listening audience, enabling them to see in their mind's eye just about anything that words have the power to evoke. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women characters play various roles in African epics, including heroic roles, but audiences and scholars generally fail to note and appreciate the full extent of these roles, focusing, instead, on male characters and their actions. The experiences and actions of men get more attention than those of women. Notions such as heroism are seen and understood from a male perspective. These biases are built into research tools such as the motif indexes and the hero pattern. This paper outlines these problems, offering a critique of how we hear or read stories, and advocating a new approach, founded on new critical and conceptual premises, such as the idea of female heroism. Though focusing on epics, this paper incorporates comments on women in folktales, based on the premise that folktales are a key part of the groundwork on which epics are based, in terms of both structural elements and the representation of female characters and roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mukàndà/leetrè, a form of heroic Luba-Kasayi poetry that is of relatively recent origin, testifies to the vitality, dynamism, and the adaptive capability of oral literature. Contrary to indications in its name and the name given its producer—leetrè/mukàndà (letter), mubadi/mwedi wa mukàndà (reader, promoter of mukàndà)—this literary form is declaimed rather than read, before a participating public, by a male performer, at events that have their origin in r the contact of the Luba/Kasayi with the West, especially First Communion, Ordination, graduation, and Holy Matrimony. During the performance, the poet holds a blank sheet of paper which he occasionally looks at in order to simulate a reading. Beyond the function of praise, the mukànda entertains and instructs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the Nigerian folk epic 'The Ozidi Saga,' by John Pepper Clark. Artistic achievement; Projection of artistic integrity; Ideophone.

Characterizes African folktales in the Indian Ocean Islands. Skills manifested in folktales as told by verbal artists in the region; Famous folktales in the area.

Features the Nigerian literature. Formal and thematic differences between Soyinka poem and oral literature; Hegemony in Yoruba cultural discourse; Implication on the distribution of wealth and power.

Comments on the Sunjata epic, a masterpiece of African oral literature. Origin of the epic; Recognition as the sole epic entirely transmitted through oral communication; Details on the epic; Versions.

Examines Chinua Achebe's novel `Things Fall Apart,' based on Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of `heteroglossia' and diagolism. Achebe's novelistic agenda in drawing upon the Igbo oral traditions; Reasons for the appropriation by Achebe of ethnographic modes of representation; Demonstration of the feasibility of a selective appeal to `tradition' within the Igbo worldview.

Investigates instances of playful blasphemic references in the oral postproverbials in the Yoruba language of Western Africa. Context of the relationship between the traditional proverb and postproverbials; Analysis of the linguistic structure of the proverbs; Inherence of philosophical, didactic and ingenious descriptions of Yoruba proverbials.

Explores J.J. Moiloa's `Thesele, Ngwana Mmamokgatjhane,' a Southern Sotho oral epic. Contribution to the literary scene of South Africa and to the debate on the epic in Africa; Critiques from Isidore Okpewho, Heda Jason and Lauri Honko; Epics and heroic tales; Hero's image and relevance; Motifs in the text; Contextual circumstances under which performance takes place.

Profiles Habibu Selemani, a Tanzanian bard and a master of `enanga' epic performance. Personal and academic background; Career highlights; Poetic depth and excellence; Stature as a musician; Musical aspect of Selemani's performance; `Enanga' music and performance; Audience's involvement in the performance; Categories of `enanga' poems.

Explores African writer Ngugi wa Thiongo's works on the oral-aural lifeworld and community values of precolonial African culture. Ngugi's longing for the lost community setting of his childhood in a Gikuyu village; Contradictions of Ngugi's theoretical position about the oral-aural African novel; Lamentation for the loss of immediacy.

Examines how Rwandan writer Alexis Kagame sought to perpetuate the literature of oral tradition through his works. Creation of other modalities of language, forms and aesthetics; Contribution to the opening up of Rwandan symbolic territory; Kagame's translation of some of his works into the French language; Categories defined by Kagame as Rwandan oral traditions.

Examines African works of fiction or oral literature dealing with different aspects of the legal process. Method used for cases of theft, witchcraft, and criminal cases dealing with life and death; Interpretation and legal implications; Legal system.

Presents a systematic analysis of the three main levels or facets of Yoruba's indigenous performance criticisms. Includes pre-performance critical facet; Interperformers' criticism on stage; Pre-performance critical facet.