Before the letter: what the voice already knew
A voice telling in the middle of a courtyard. A voice that sings a genealogy. A voice that riddles children. A voice that recalls the achievements of an ancestor, comments on the living, warns the powerful, consoles the bereaved or makes an entire assembly laugh.
For a long time, we have too often confused literature and writing. As if a text only became serious once it was fixed on a page, printed, stored in a library. However, a large part of African literatures has been built differently: in speech, memory, performance, repetition and variation.
Before the book, there is therefore already literature. There are forms, rules, genres, artists, audiences, traditions and innovations. There are ways to compose the world through speech.
Orality is not the absence of writing
Talking about oral literature does not mean talking about “formless” or “memoryless” literature. This means recognizing that a work may exist other than in a printed object. She can live in a voice, in a rhythm, in a gesture, in a relationship with those who listen.
African oral traditions include many genres: tales, proverbs, riddles, lyric poetry, heroic poetry, songs, foundation stories and epics (Encyclopaedia Britannica). These forms do not all play the same role. Some entertain, some instruct, some transmit a family memory, some accompany rites, some comment on collective history.
A riddle can learn to look differently. A proverb can condense a worldview into a single formula. A tale can convey caution, cunning, or social criticism. An epic can bring together the history, myth, values and political imagination of a people.
Orality is therefore not a draft of written literature. It is a comprehensive way of creating, transmitting and transforming narratives.
A literature that is played in front of others
The essential difference between a printed text and an oral narrative often lies in the presence. In orality, literature is given in front of an audience. It assumes a voice, a body, listening, sometimes music, sometimes answers, laughter, silences or repetitions.
The oral narrative is not always repeated identically. It may vary depending on the location, the age of the audience, the circumstance or the intention of the storyteller. This variation does not make it any less literary. On the contrary, it shows that the work is alive.
In a print culture, we tend to value the stable version: the final edition, the fixed sentence, the page that everyone can read again. In a culture of orality, strength can be elsewhere: in the ability to reactivate a story at the right time, in front of the right people, with the right energy.
This performance dimension is essential to understanding African literatures. She reminds us that literature is not only what is written. It is also what happens between a word and a community.
Griots, storytellers, singers: guardians and creators
In West Africa, the griot figure occupies an important place in the imagination of transmission. The griot is often presented as a historian, a storyteller, a musician, a poet and a guardian of memory. Britannica defines him as a West African “troubadour-historian” whose traditional role is to preserve the genealogies, historical accounts and oral traditions of his people (Encyclopaedia Britannica).
This definition is useful, but it must be handled with nuance. Not all African spaces have the same social organization, the same names or the same functions. The word griot does not sum up all African orality. However, he points to a powerful figure to understand one thing: in some societies, memory is not only preserved by written archives. It is worn by people trained in speech, music, genealogy and storytelling.
The griot can recall where a family comes from. He can sing the feats of a lineage. He can accompany a ceremony. They can also advise, comment, praise or criticize. His word is not just decorative. It has a social function.
In this perspective, oral literature is not separate from collective life. It intervenes in moments when a community tells itself.
The epic: when history becomes living memory
Among the great forms of orality, the epic occupies a special place. It often tells of heroic figures, political foundations, conflicts, exiles, returns, alliances and transformations. She doesn’t just tell “what happened”. It gives an imaginary form to what a group wants to remember from its history.
The Soundjata epic, associated with Mandingo memory and the Mali Empire, is one of the best-known examples. It tells the story of Soundjata Keïta, a founding figure, through childhood, hardship, exile, conquest and the foundation of a political order. Depending on the version, the story changes, gets amplified, gets modulated. This variable character is not a defect. It is part of the life of the epic.
UNESCO gives another example with the Moorish epic T ‘heydinn, in Mauritania. This epic includes dozens of poems that celebrate the achievements of Moorish emirs and sultans, transmit ancestral values and constitute a literary and artistic manifestation of the Hasaniya language (UNESCO). UNESCO also specifies that this epic is interpreted by griots, accompanied by traditional instruments, and that it serves as a reservoir of cultural memory for Mauritanian society (UNESCO).
These examples show that the epic is not just an ancient narrative. It is a space where history, poetry, music and collective memory meet.
What Orality Passed on to Writing
One might think that the arrival of printed writing has replaced orality. The story is more complex. Oral traditions and written traditions have intersected, influenced and sometimes transformed each other. Britannica insists on this parallel development and on the lasting influence of orality in modern works (Encyclopaedia Britannica).
This influence is seen in narrative structures, sentence rhythms, the use of proverbs, mythical characters, embedded narratives, addresses to the reader or back and forth between real and fantastic. Many modern African novels do not leave orality: they move it into writing.
A writer can write a novel in French or English and make a storytelling memory, a proverbial logic, a cadence of speech or a mythical vision of the world be heard behind this language. The page then becomes a place of translation, but also of transformation.
Ruth Finnegan contributed to the recognition of the richness of these forms in Oral Literature in Africa, a major study first published in 1970 and devoted to narrative forms across the continent, with chapters on poetry, prose, “drummed language”, theatre and the social and linguistic contexts of orality (OAPEN Library).22 23
Why it matters today
Returning to orality is not idealizing the past. This is not to say that everything was better before print, nor to enclose African literatures in a traditional image. Rather, it is recognizing that African literary modernity was not built from scratch.
For contemporary authors, orality can be a formal resource. It allows us to think about voice, rhythm, polyphony, the collective story and the links between family memory and political history.
For publishers, it reminds us that a text cannot be reduced to its plot. A manuscript can carry a cadence, an address, a way to circulate the word. Editorial support can then seek to preserve this energy rather than smooth it out.
For readers, orality opens up another way of reading. To read an African novel, a tale, an epic or a poetry, is sometimes to listen to what passes under the sentence: a voice, a memory, an invisible assembly.
Three ideas to remember
Literature doesn’t always start with print: tales, songs, proverbs, riddles and epics are literary forms in their own right.
Orality is a living creation : it is based on memory, performance, audience and variation.
Modern African writing remains permeated by orality: many written works continue to dialogue with ancient forms of speech.
Mini library to continue
Ruth Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa: a landmark study to understand the diversity of African oral forms, from poetry to theatre to prose and social contexts of transmission (OAPEN Library).
Djibril Tamsir Niane, Soundjata ou l ‘épopée mandingue: an accessible gateway to one of the great West African epics.
Birago Diop, Les Contes d ‘Amadou Koumba: an important collection to enter into a literary writing nourished by the storytelling word.
