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African Folklore: A Catalyst in Contemporary African Fictions

Abstract

African folklore which are said to be active traditions have had immense influence on the growth and development of African literature. This claim is aptly demonstrated in the works of successful early African writers as in the case of Amos Tutuola and Daniel O. Fagunwa of Nigeria, Violet Dube in Zulu, S.E.K. Mghayi in Xhosa and a host of them. These literary artists draw their inspiration from the oral tradition by translating their structures and images to literary mode. It is on this platform that the article seeks to examine this claim in the light of the state of African literature today. This paper adopts Cyprian Ekwensi's African Night's Entertainment as a case study to demonstrate how present African writers build on that trend to success. Ekwensi is considered one of the pioneers of African literature and writing fiction in English in West Africa. Ekwensi's works observed oral conventions in terms of themes, style and other motifs; but literary in its form. The book adopts tales from African cultural background. This article establishes that contemporary African writers owe much to African oral tradition in their various domains of literary inspirations.

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AFRICAN)FOLKLORE:)A)CATALYST)IN)

CONTEMPORARY)AFRICAN)FICTIONS)

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Marius!CROUS2!

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ABSTRACT!

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ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.

• Ruth Finnegan

"Besides being a goldmine for scholars, [Oral Literature in Africa] is a delight for the general reader…The people and animals and spirits of Africa live, laugh, weep and quarrel between the covers of this book." — Journal of African and Asian Studies.First published in 1970 by Oxford University Press, this classic study has been hailed as "the single most authoritative work on oral literature". It traces the history of story-telling in Africa, and brings to life the diverse forms of creativity across the African continent. Author Ruth Finnegan is thought to have "almost single-handedly created the field of ethnography of language" with this book, and it continues to be a go-to text for anyone studying African culture.However, despite its enormous scope and popularity, Finnegan's book is now out of print. It is particularly hard to find in Africa, where its original retail price was beyond the budget of most university libraries. The non-profit organization Open Book Publishers is endeavoring to make this definitive book freely available to African students and scholars — and indeed to any interested readers around the world. The Unglued Ebook will be particularly friendly to people in places with slow Internet connections: once a copy is downloaded, the book can be read offline.This edition, developed in conjunction with Cambridge University's World Oral Literature Project, will include a new introduction and extra digital material. When Finnegan's book was first published forty years ago, the technology did not exist to include audio clips. Part of this Unglue campaign will involve the creation of a free online repository of Finnegan's audio recordings of African story-telling, carefully collected during her fieldwork in the late 1960s. A sample from this collection can be found here. It demonstrates the richness of the audio material that will be made available for the first time as part of this campaign. These clips, together with original photographs taken during her research, will be an invaluable resource to scholars of African literature and culture.After decades of outstanding research, for which she was awarded an Order of the British Empire, Oral Literature in Africa remains the book closest to Finnegan's heart. "It was so frustrating to me that my book has been largely unavailable to readers in Africa," she says. "It is wonderful to think that it will now be freely read in the very continent it discusses."

• Edward Sackey

In the growth and development of modern African literature, African traditional oral poetics is playing a very significant role. This is seen in modern African poetry, modern African drama, and the modern African novel. Indeed, it is at the center of the on-going experiments and innovations in modern African literature. The African writer has found in the sources of the African oral heritage a new enrichment, a new revitalization of contemporary African writing. Now African oral literature invites communal participation so that I do not see anything intriguing about its incorporation into African drama and African poetry. This is because their consumption is also communal. Like African oral literature, modern African drama and modern African poetry can be socialized, democratized. This is not meant for a particular class of people. The same cannot be said of the African novel because its consumption and creation are basically individualistic. Thus, the incorporation of African oral poetics into the novel forms a basically written and individualistic form and seems to be rather intriguing plumbing. This paper, therefore, seeks to plumb the significance of African traditional oral poetics in the African novel. Many African novelists now expect that the riches of the African oral tradition will nourish the novel form, but I do not think all of these authors make creative use of the African oral tradition in the sense of making something new out of it or showing innovation. One must therefore go beyond mere exploration of the African oral tradition. The level of a novelist's success may be determined by the degree of his or her innovation because a mere celebration of the romantic aspect of the African oral tradition is not enough. The concerns of this study are the structural and thematic significances of African oral poetics for the growth of the modern African novel. Ayi Kwei Armah, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Ama Ata Aidoo, and probably Kofi Awoonor draw on the narrative of African oral tradition for structure, theme, and style. They show that this tradition is also extremely flexible and highly inventive by boldly breaking away from the conventional structure of the novel form so that the novelists represent a sophisticated continuation of African storytelling and other oral traditions in dialectic tension within the novel form. Also, by incorporating the oral literacy structures into the novel form, these innovative writers of the novel are gradually working toward the Africanization of the novel form and evolving a poetics of the African novel. They depend on the oral tradition of Africa to deform the received Western novelistic pattern in order to challenge our received notions while our African identity is also affirmed, thereby freeing Africans from the negative image in which others have created us. Indeed, Armah, Ngũgĩ, and Aidoo have boldly willed themselves to break the rules of the conventional Western novel form and to show that African literature is reactive. It is a literature that is defensive of the African heritage. Chinua Achebe was the vanguard in this literary movement that seeks to defend the African heritage, but the achievement of Achebe seems to end at the level of the word. I admit that the attempts being made to relate the English language to the rhythms of African speech are important given the language crisis in African literature, but it seems that a novelist must go beyond that to include other elements of the novel such as structure and perspective. Achebe is undoubtedly sensitive to the African oral tradition, but he appears to be less innovative when it comes to the deployment of oral literary structures. One is therefore not surprised that all Achebe's novels—from Things Fall Apart through Anthills of the Savannah—are structurally in the mode of the great Western tradition. It is useful for one, in attempting to explore influences of the African oral tradition on the novel form, to be clear as to what is typically African and what is exclusively African or what is borrowed to nourish the African tradition. This is because the oral literary tradition—the folktale, the proverbs, and the riddles among others—is not ethnocentric in favor of African culture alone. In fact, it...

• N. Frank Ukadike

African cinemas are moving in new directions and demonstrating the need for a broader spectrum of analyses of the changes and shifts in the cultural, economic and historical sectors, as well as in audience expectation. The new phenomenon of video-films, as they are popularly known, constitutes unique cultural art while remaining true to its objective - commercial viability. The explosion of video production and its popular appeal in the anglophone countries of West Africa attests to the manifestation of what might be called a real 'first' cinema. Video's triumph does not necessarily imply the displacement of the celluloid film medium, but rather the transcendence of the limitations imposed by the conventions of celluloid film making. For example, this new boom has created thriving local industries and market-oriented economies within the media sectors and has rapidly expanded the parameters for defining national film and video cultures and audience tastes.

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Source: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332016526_African_Folklore_A_Catalyst_in_Contemporary_African_Fictions

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