Search

Various writers have demonstrated that the core of the black African cultural practice of initiation defies state, ethnic, tribal, chieftaincy, and kingdom boundaries. However, circumcision practices of the Northern Ndebele and other South African tribes have so far been studied without adequate nuance. This is partly why writers such as Krige and Krige (The Realm of a Rain-Queen: A Study of the Patterns of Lovedu Society. Oxford University Press, London, etc., 1943, p. 115) fail to make sense of the songs among BaLobedu initiates, to the extent of misconstruing their content as “nonsensical” and as disconnected from other social practices of the people. In this chapter, I explore evidence of sense in the orature of circumcision schools through a case study of one Ndebele initiation center, among many like it continuing the institution of male circumcision among the Northern Ndebele people of the Mokopane Kekana (Ghegana) tribe in the Limpopo Province of South Africa. Cultural lore indexed in initiation teachings of the Ndebele is a mere variable of a constant of circumcision oral lessons practiced similarly yet not identically among other African cultural groups on the continent. I assert that the addition of this other tribe among those whose initiation practices have been studied clarifies the nature of this cross-tribal practice in ways that enrich knowledge about this aspect of African cultures. This is in keeping with the premise of my study asserting that similarity of content and modes of teaching among performances of initiation across geographical and ethnic identity points to an identifiable common core worthy of characterization. In addition to fieldwork using oral history methods, I analyzed texts on the subject qualitatively in order to frame my findings within a germane theoretical and conceptual context.

Oral literatures, via the creativity and intellectual flexibility of the artists themselves, have the ability to reconfigure themselves toward a variety of contemporary contexts. In Angola, non-Portuguese-based orality present in poetry written within the borders of, essentially, a Portuguese-speaking Angolan “nation” has become a staple of the literary landscape of the past several decades. Mozambican pre-independence writing similarly took as its basis the kind of hybridized identities with Angolan writers of the same period saw; later postcolonial identities forced a reworking of this socio-philosophical framework. In comparative terms, so-called Anglophone and Francophone African countries have seen a similar restaging of the oral into the written, more easily transmissible forms in recent decades, albeit by way of techniques which differ substantially from those in Lusophone Africa. Senegal has seen the incorporation of notions of fluidity even at the most local levels of high and low cultural practice, with differing language politics and corresponding realities from those of the Lusophone African countries. Namibia has seen transnational identity shifts in even the academic cultural venue. Finally, Tanzanian poets have taken on oral tradition as part of a combined strategy of local transculturalism concomitant to an evident nation-oriented governmental policy. No matter which process we observe the passage from establishing a constructed, monolithic national culture toward a more fluid concept of postcoloniality, the ideals of hybridization give way to those of what we may refer to as a “transnational” identity, one porous with regard to the “national” and well as “local” and “international” lens.

South Africans experiences a confrontation values of people from other cultures. Multiculturalism is the phenomenon of multiple groups of cultures existing within one society such as South Africans. This society is called “Rainbow Nation”, which was made up of different languages and cultures after post-apartheid. The rainbow nation comprised many groups with different languages, religions, race, customs, and tradition as illustrated by South African History Online (2015). This chapter addresses three core questions: To what extend can orality and folklore enhance our understanding of cultural difference in multicultural society such as South Africa? What are exactly the relation between culture and social reality in multiculturalism society? In which way can sharing of folklore stories help in creating multicultural awareness in diverse society? Multiculturalism, orality, and folklore can play an important and effective role in guiding South African society for better social adjustment environment.

My imaginary ethnography begins with a discussion of musicologist Gary Tomlinson’s investigation of the impact of Indigenous vocality on the experience of European explorers engaged in the “discovery” of what they considered to be the “New World.” I then place historical accounts, namely testimonies by European colonizers about their perception of Indigenous voices, in dialogue with theoretical texts by European philosophers whose work has significantly informed Western ways of thinking about language, speech, song, and music. Investigating past vocality hence provides an opportunity to radically reimagine ethnography and fieldwork beyond their discursive and spatio-temporal boundaries, which can be traced to the colonial legacy of anthropology.

African proverbs have always been a source of fascination in the exploration and attempt to understand African oral literature. Scholarly collections and bibliographical publications pertaining to African proverbs abound. However, it has taken a while for scholars as well as practitioners in various fields to appreciate the value of African proverbs as they intersect with their fields. A notable example in this regard is the work of Christian missionaries in Africa that ignored, actually, dismissed African proverbs for long time only to relatively recent realizing that it was an unproductive way of preaching the gospel. In the wake of globalizing businesses, commercial advertisers also seem to grab the opportunity of understanding and they are no longer ignoring African proverbs in promoting their products or services. Nevertheless, exploration pertaining to the relationship between oral literature and the discourse of advertising in African context has not been given a significant scholarly attention. This article attempts to exactly do that but in a very modest way—it examines the intersection between African proverbs and commercial ads related to mobile phone services in the Swahili-speaking Tanzania. Thus, the focus is on the Swahili proverbs—the observed but also backed up by the Haya proverbs—the imagined. First, an overview of African proverbs is presented, followed by a brief discussion on the richness of Swahili and Haya proverbs. Then, a short account pertaining to the discourse of advertisement is provided with special reference to the advent of mobile phone services in Tanzania—which eventually leads to the author’s personal story that constitutes the data to be analyzed and discussed.

The shift in the media of storytelling tradition from primary orality to literacy and to other media of transmitting stories has transformed the content and aesthetics of stories. This paper employs the narratological method to argue that as the media of propagating a story shift from primary orality to the movie media, the content and aesthetics of the story will undergo changes. The dramatization of themes; the use of simulative techniques of cinematography and the vocalization of songs; the detailing of the death of distance and that of narrator; and the privatization and the commercialization of stories point to the cinema as a media that combine primary and secondary orailty with technology to transform the storytelling experience in Africa for the better.

It is first argued that dialectic was a form of regimented debate, which grew out of public debates in Ancient Greece. A set of rules for dialectical bouts is then given and their meaning explained. The transition from oral to written arguments is briefly examined, leading to the formulation of a delimitation problem in Plato’s dialogues, as he inserted dialectical arguments within ordinary dialogue contexts, turning them into discussions where one of the participants reasons hypothetically to make the other realize that they are not entitled to their view. Doing so, Plato adjusted dialectic to a variety of dialogue purposes and in order to explore this variety, a study of the early tradition of classifying Plato’s dialogues in terms of their ‘character’ is suggested, the results of which are then compared with types of dialogues in contemporary Argumentation Theory.

Oral traditions in preliterate Africa served not only as sociological tools for enculturation but also as a people’s artistic expressions and memoirs. Folktales, from experiences and fused with creative energies, were a people’s record of the collective ideology, while riddles, proverbs, and other short forms reflected both linguistic and cultural aesthetics. The oral rendition of folklore was not simply the only choice in preliterate Africa, but was a powerful community building tool in the traditional setup. Further, performances highlighted performance aspects which resulted in “new” texts with each performance that would reflect growth or variation in thought, changes in social structures and other emergent realities. Today, orality is increasingly mediated by secondary media in the transmission of traditional forms of oral art which carry cultural communication. Apart from orthography, audio and audiovisual platforms have become spaces for transmission of oral performances which try to maintain “authentic” forms of these on the screen. This chapter examines the performativity of African oral folklore within the strictures of television. Emerging oral performance theories, mainly Technauriture, will be employed to interrogate the influences of film as a static space and one that is removed from its immediate audience, on the performance of oral folklore as well as the interplay between demands of oral performance and film performance. Interest will be on the narrative, production, and archival aspects of film on a dynamic oral art and the resultant mutations of traditional African folklore on the screen.

Despite the various perceived advantages of writing over speech, speech still retains the pride of place as the preferred mode of human communication. With recent developments in multimedia and speech technologies, some of the perceived advantages of literature now also accrue to orature, yet modern ICT which makes these advantages of literature available to orature still manifests essentially as a tool of literacy. This calls for an examination of the possible effects of orality on the development of ICT and the possible effect of ICT on primary oral cultures and cultures with high oral residue. Furthermore, the needless levels of the influence of the culture of writing on the trajectory of the development of ICT are yet to take the attention of scholars. Hence, this chapter reflects on the interfacing of orature and ICT in an effort to direct attention to the need to give adequate consideration to primary oral cultures and cultures with a high oral residue in the future development of ICT so that it can also grow as a tool of orature.

A part of understanding how a people speak and perform is to appreciate their culture and outlook to life in general. This understanding should not be limited to face-to-face interactions alone. The asynchronous nature of virtual communication, especially how viewers receive/decode creative content, makes for interesting study and an alternative to an appreciation of a people not in geographical proximity. Creative performances have been studied in tandem with the nature of the language and its diversified possibilities of meaning; what has been left out (and should not be ignored) is an understanding of how the medium through these creative expressions shapes performances, reception, and interpretation. This third leg of this particular academic enterprise is within the purview of media studies. It is in this field that the tripartite of content, form, and its reception intersect seamlessly. To the knowledge of this researcher, how virtual audiences receive folktales has not yet been given its due intellectual/critical attention. Using empirical data, this paper follows randomly selected number of social media platforms to uncover how viewers relate to the video clips of African folktales and performances. The findings show that electronic footprints stand in place of instant feedbacks performers feed off during face-to-face performances.

Traditionally in Africa, songs are to be performed orally in the presence of an audience at various social activities. However, with time, some of these traditional songs have been transformed and transmitted differently through technological devices such as on radio, television, Internet and in CDs and DVDs. This chapter examines the effects of technology on the traditional songs and the advantages and/or disadvantages of using these technological devices on the songs. It argues that transforming traditional songs using technological devices preserves and expands their accessibility. The chapter concludes that technological devices have greatly influenced the way in which orality functions in contemporary Africa; therefore, there is a need to accommodate and embrace these changes to fulfill the ever-changing societal needs of the continent.

The ascendancy of literacy in the education of, and the general interactions between adults is also reflected in early childhood education. The objective of this chapter is to refocus attention on the traditional role of orature in early childhood education and thereby use carefully selected illustrations to argue for sustenance of the value of orature in early childhood education, more so in these days of the Information Technology age.

We are storytelling creatures and going deeper into the tales we tell and how we tell them makes us fuller people. Storytelling clubs are a growing phenomena at present and there is some useful work being done. Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy is referred to here. Myth and folklore come together in a discussion of Diana and Actaeon. Connections are made to ballad forms with an exploration and text of ‘The Earl of Mar’s Daughter’ (Chapter 6). Linking with Chapter 7 on locality, the use of folkloric and mythic material can awaken deep resources with landscape, self and history. The author’s two previous books on writing concerning myth and magic and the idea of owning your own myths and legends focus on a commonality between the local universal; both traditional ways of thinking.

The first and easiest way to be traditional is via exploring family and heredity: discussion includes Thomas Hardy’s ‘Heredity’, Dolly Parton, and Alan Watts The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. Language is learnt in the family, so traditions of words and orality (linked to storytelling in Chapter 3) are explored. ‘Occasional’ writing, Saints’ days and seasonal turning can be gathered. Plus the process of leaving and returning, which tradition addresses. The theme of home connects to the next chapter. The text of traditional song ‘Spenser the Rover’ provides an example of breakage and return, which is a return to the self.

Claude Levi-Strauss debunked the traditional claim that the advent of writing is the sine qua none sign of high civilization that dooms orality as an activity of the primitive. However, African literary critics convincingly argued for the complementary entanglement of orality and graphism as elements of the same narrative pulse. Written or oral renditions of narratives are mere forms of expression. The core of narration as a human activity lies not in the forms of the performance (credit to Propp and Jakobson), but in the conjugation of various communicative components. This is the inevitability of narrative as an endowment inscribed in the use of language as a representational instrument of human cultural heritage. The chapter deals with the way this inevitability of the narration by way of its fundamental channels, orality and writing, has fostered works that stand not in an antithetical relationship as it was earlier inferred, but rather in a complementary and sometimes conflictual way. The chapter aims at examining the narrative modalities adopted by three African writers who seamlessly incorporated orality in their fictional written works, namely Paul Lomami Tchibamba (Ngando), Ngandu Nkashama (Le Pacte de sang), and Alain Mabanckou (Verre Cassse and Lumieres de Pointe-Noire).

This opening chapter serves several overlapping tasks: to expose and query the colonial and missionary contexts of Pasifika theologies; to affirm the situatedness of Pasifika theologies in moana and vanua; to locate Pasifika theologies in the currents of talanoa—story, telling, conversation—at the intersection of orality and oratory cultures; to locate this project in the trends of Pasifika theologies; and to locate the essays in this collection in “all of the above.” The chapter presents Pasifika theologies both as current (in terms of timing) and currents (read: waves, energies) that can move conversations on several concerns and topics around the roots, reads, and routes of theology.

Cicero’s alleged denunciation of divination as superstitio led to divergent reactions from scholars and, most importantly, informed the need to provide justification for the possibility of divination. Although it is often said that Cicero’s de Divinatione has suffered different interpretations since his time to date, the suspicion still remains that, perhaps, the text itself assumes that science—and, by extension, the imposition of certain cognitive modes on others—is the hēgēmon in matters concerning the state and human existence; the oracular cannot disclose the true nature of the universe. Cicero’s position is no doubt a compelling reflection of the sharp differentiation between European and African thought that has endured as an issue that is mostly discussed in African philosophy and cultural studies. For the African, the issue of debate on the possibility of divination does not arise: as a matter of fact, divination, for him, serves as a veritable means through which he can understand the configurations of the entire universe and his place in it. Thus, this chapter invariably attempts a deconstruction of the myth of writing that is mostly associated with the constitution of science and/or philosophy and shows that African divinatory systems and their related mythical or religious conceptions represent a legitimization of the body of wisdom found in orality.

The story of the making of a Nordic legal culture and court culture appears, at first glance, to be a story of what should not have been. Culture is about commonalities arising from common experiences. However, the similarities between the Nordic countries’ political history are limited, with no common institutions before the late nineteenth century, large language similarities but no common legal language, and—most importantly—no common legal procedure. Still, the natural conditions in the very north of Europe came to shape the political and legal systems in similar ways, stimulating the desire to create a Nordic legal culture in the second half of the nineteenth century, with the Nordic Meeting for Lawyers playing a crucial role. Hence, law in the Nordic countries shares several characteristics today: a strong legislative tradition and strong courts with lay participation, accessible legal language in legislation and court decisions and orality in legal procedure, a small number of legal professionals and a small and pragmatic legal science. These characteristics can be viewed as building blocks in an overarching characteristic of Nordic legal culture and court culture: dialogue.

In this chapter, we introduce and explore the texts and performances of Christopher Monyoncho in the context of his audience and social circumstances. We examine the “cultural truths and aspirations cherished by the community” and through them show how the worldview, cultural values, and elements of material culture that bind together the Gusii people are reflected in his orature. Following the tradition of the griots, Monyoncho throughout his life-works never ceased to amuse, amaze, educate, and uphold the Gusii ways of life. Through Monyoncho’s orature, we also explore the creative dynamism of culture as a discursive, non-static response to existential issues. Ultimately, we introduce Monyoncho, the historical background and orientation that informed the content of his orality in order to interpret the cultural identity that are projected in his works and performances. In so doing, we illustrate the social, cultural, and political importance of oral literature in a group’s identity formation, retention, and furtherance.

The creation of the comics Cupim Conta Contos by the research group Cupim: Graphic Narratives and Visual Arts of the School of Fine Arts - UFBA is based on the diffusion of the Brazilian Law no 11.645, on the teaching of Afro-Brazilian and indigenous culture in schools, in view of the scarcity of playful content observed and the need to portray the stories of the peoples that are of great importance for the Brazilian identity. The methodology used is based on Design Thinking, whose process line is Inspiration, Ideation and Prototyping. At Inspiration, we sought to study authors who research comics, short stories and recreational activities with the target audience; Ideation sought a specific methodology for Comics, analyzing references and similars; and in Prototyping, mockups and the final version of the magazine were made. The magazine has 8 Afro-Brazilian and indigenous tales in the Comics format. In this way, the result demonstrates how this language has a strong influence among young people and is a way friendly and playful to disseminate relevant content to society, as well as the oral histories of people who collaborated in the construction of Brazilian identity.

Bradley explores the tensions that exist in regards to his long-term collaborations with Indigenous Australians; the expectations of the Yanyuwa community in regards to what he has come to know and how this knowledge translates into academic life. He reflects on the tensions inherent in such an epistemic project, problematizing the flattening tendencies of western education and addressing the challenges that come with contest between various understandings and logics. Writing through his relationships with Yanyuwa he reflects on translatability, working from a culture that values orality as an important way of knowing. Throughout this chapter he asks, what happens when oral traditions are written down? What is lost? What is sustained? And who is the audience for the texts we create?

This chapter deals with Arabic and ʿAjamī manuscripts in sub-Saharan Africa, which emerged due to the expansion of Islam from the eighth century onward through trade and Qurʾānic schools. They have proven to be abundant despite the misguided but persisting idea about supposed “illiteracy” and “orality” of the continent. While literacy in Arabic language was confined to specialized religious, political, and trading elites, ʿAjamī literacy has been a more democratic and widespread phenomenon. European missionaries and colonial officials laid the ground for the manuscript collections in various libraries and archives. After the independence of the continent, the localization and identification of the manuscripts intensified which led to the development of innovative and vibrant scholarship, reflecting the agency, creativity, and intellectual traditions of Africa.

This chapter explores tucker green’s unique dramatic idiom through her distinctive play ‘text’ which produces opportunities for audiences and readers to relish the ways in which language can be sounded – as it is seen, heard and uttered. Framed by Charles Bernstein’s distinctions between orality and aurality, the chapter examines tucker green’s technique for making the mind physically (en)actable through her non-naturalistic methods for staging a character’s thoughts. dirty butterfly (2003), stoning mary (2005) and nut (2013) exemplify a noteworthy aesthetic for ‘performing the mind’ — be it as a borderless aesthesia, a sensory space shared by multiple characters’ perceptions (dirty butterfly) or as an individually, physically embodied, character in mimetic stage space (stoning mary, nut). The chapter proposes that three socio-cultural acknowledgements are requisite for examining tucker green’s creative impact. These emphasize the considerable influences of post-war Caribbean poetic heritage, the ongoing after-shock of colonization as being crucial to conceptions of contemporary British culture, and the ‘right to opacity’ (Edouard Glissant 1997) as a counter-stance to the hegemonic critical and aesthetic frameworks that are habitually applied to (and even ‘post-colonize’) black British writers and their writing.

An experience of intervention in literacy classes in Early Childhood and Primary Education is presented in this chapter from a perspective that conceives language as a process of co-construction of meanings and associates orality, reading and writing in that process. This perspective discusses the implicit definitions of the most widespread teaching proposals and argues that there is a conceptualization of written language as an object of learning in the initial period. This conceptualization is evident in the activities and interactions entailed by that process, as well as a description of the learner at the starting point.

This chapter makes an argument for bridging the gap between Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and Literacy Studies from the perspective of so-called transmodalities, i.e. ways of using language that merge and blur the modalities of writing, speaking, listening, and reading. This argument is based on data from a qualitative case study that describes the transmodal practices of two trilingual high school students in a German classroom in the Midwestern US. More precisely, the study investigated how the high school students Jana and Karina (both pseudonyms), users of English, Latvian, and German, engaged in activities that mixed and blurred oral and literacy modalities in their German classroom. In addition, their multiple investments as language learners were examined. Findings showed that it was common for the two students to transgress and blur the boundaries of modalities, especially between writing and oral modes (“writing-speaking”). This helped them enact and display their investment in swift and accurate task completion as part of their good student identities, but could at times also threaten these investments. Transmodalities further played an important role in students’ navigating of their investments in their social standing and peer relationships.

Technological advances have made it possible for areas such as Corpus Linguistics and Computational Linguistics to advance exponentially. However, the basic evolution followed by corpora, as an essential tool in these areas, has been fundamentally in size. Proof of this is the Google nGram project, which has digitized a vast number of books from 1505 to the present day, allowing studies to be carried out on corpora. However, and as a result of the continuous evolution of new communication media and social networks, we have witnessed the birth of a new genre, called cyber-language, situated between orality and textuality, of which there are no specialized corpora. Our proposal is to design a tool to create a large multidimensional corpus based on the social network Twitter and a set of specific tools to generate subcorpora, conduct quantitative studies and visualize the stored information, from the perspective of bigdata manipulation.

This paper deals with the question of musical essences in the context of orally transmitted musical traditions. This question takes a very different color when we are dealing with musical traditions of this type. I concentrate on the related subject of heterophony and present my analysis of the phenomenon, an analysis that takes into account the orality factor. I propose the idea that in these forms of practices the essence of a musical composition is not a given but a collective quest, a forum open to negotiations. Of course, for this forum to take place, an ideal situation is necessary. I finally present some factors that often prevent this ideal situation to take place.

StudioLab’s first mission is to democratize digitality. The call to adventure involves a different image of knowledge, a transmedia knowledge composed of thought-action figures that mix ideas and images, logic and stories, episteme and doxa. At a deeper level, transmedia knowledge incarnates digitality, an emerging onto-historical apparatus whose modes of subject formation, social organization, and technical infrastructure mix the apparatuses of Platonic literacy and Homeric orality. StudioLab seeks to democratize digitality just as nineteenth-century educators sought to democratize literacy. The call to action here: become maker of transmedia knowledge, use the CAT frame to explore the conceptual, aesthetic, and technical dimensions of thought-action figures by combining learning activities found in seminar, studio, and lab spaces.

Hountondji’s contemporaries reacted to his critique of ethnophilosophy and his vision of how African philosophy should be properly done and fostered a vibrant discussion on the methods, scope, and standing of philosophy in the African context. The chapter resumes the main elements of this debate, including the topic of who philosophises (the individual or a collective), of the question of orality versus textuality of philosophical praxis, the nature of science, and the role of popular knowledge in academia. The chapter concludes by considering the ambivalent character of ethnophilosophy in the time of its emergence and in contemporary scholarship.