African Oral Tradition: Forms and Relevances to Modern African Fiction Essay Example
INTRODUCTION Critics and literary artists have argued that writing is not a precondition before having an interesting oral narrative. There were oral narratives before writing came to Africa. Chinweizu & co. insist that we have oral narrative in Africa before people like Amos Tutuola began to write. Oral tradition is as old as man himself.
DEFINITION OF AFRICAN ORAL NARRATIVES/ ORAL TRADITION The definition of African oral literature is both paradoxically complex and simple. The definition seems to depend on one who is doing the defining. A Eurocentric scholar would come up with the definition that take care of his own bias and prejudices while an authentic African scholar will feel free to define the subject with the consciousness of the fact that his culture has been misconceptualized and thus, erroneously misrepresented by the use of a pejorative concepts. ISidore Okpewho, for example, sets out to define African oral literature by pointing out that ‘the subject of our study is identified by various scholars’ In a literature of people, the audience must come from the social milieu of the writer .i.e. Africans must essentially be the audience for the African literature and that a writer must be a sharer of the experiences of his works. Omoyajowo (2004) there is no way an American or British can write an Africa novel that can reflect African sensibilities like Achebe’s or Ngugi’s works. It is totally impossible for one to understand the literature of a people without understanding the sociology and psychology of such people. To buttress this is Finnegan’s submission that:
‘The concept of an oral literature is one to most people brought up in a cultures which, like those of contemporary Europe, long stress on the idea of literacy and written tradition. In the popular view it seems to convey on the one hand, the idea of mystery, on the other that of crude and artistically undeveloped formulations. In fact, neither of these assumptions
DEFINITION OF AFRICAN ORAL NARRATIVES/ ORAL TRADITION The definition of African oral literature is both paradoxically complex and simple. The definition seems to depend on one who is doing the defining. A Eurocentric scholar would come up with the definition that take care of his own bias and prejudices while an authentic African scholar will feel free to define the subject with the consciousness of the fact that his culture has been misconceptualized and thus, erroneously misrepresented by the use of a pejorative concepts. ISidore Okpewho, for example, sets out to define African oral literature by pointing out that ‘the subject of our study is identified by various scholars’ In a literature of people, the audience must come from the social milieu of the writer .i.e. Africans must essentially be the audience for the African literature and that a writer must be a sharer of the experiences of his works. Omoyajowo (2004) there is no way an American or British can write an Africa novel that can reflect African sensibilities like Achebe’s or Ngugi’s works. It is totally impossible for one to understand the literature of a people without understanding the sociology and psychology of such people. To buttress this is Finnegan’s submission that:
‘The concept of an oral literature is one to most people brought up in a cultures which, like those of contemporary Europe, long stress on the idea of literacy and written tradition. In the popular view it seems to convey on the one hand, the idea of mystery, on the other that of crude and artistically undeveloped formulations. In fact, neither of these assumptions