African Oral Tradition: Forms and Relevances to Modern African Fiction

INTRODUCTION Critics and literary artists have argued that writing is not a presumptuousness in advance 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 raft like Amos Tutuola began to write. Oral tradition is as old as man himself. DEFINITION OF AFRICAN oral examination NARRATIVES/ ORAL TRADITION The translation of African oral literature is twain paradoxically complex and simple. The definition seems to depend on unmatchable 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 dependable African scholar will feel free to go under the discomfit with the consciousness of the fact that his culture has been misconceptualized and thus, erroneously malformed by the use of a pejorative concepts. ISidore Okpewho, for example, sets out to circumscribe African oral literature by pointing out that the subject of our study is identified by various scholars In a literature of bulk, 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 ring African sensibilities like Achebes or Ngugis works. It is only impossible for one to understand the literature of a people without understanding the sociology and psychology of such people. To buttress this is Finnegans forbearance that: The concept of an oral literature is one to most people brought up in a cultures which, like those of contemporary Europe, wide stress on the idea of literacy and written tradition. In the commonplace 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, uncomplete of these assumptions... If you want to get a full essay, order it on our website: Orderessay

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