IN
PRAISE OF THE WORD:
Traditional African Oral Arts
SHORT CUTS on this webpage: In Praise of the
Word | Orality and Literacy: Different Ways of
Knowing
| A
Twi Proverb |
Ikemefuna's Song | Fulani Poetic
Genres | African Music and Culture
African Tribal Dances & Music . . . (CD)
See also African
Storytelling
URL:
http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/hum211/afrstory.htm
IN
PRAISE OF THE WORD
In many of traditional African
cultures, oral arts are professionalized: the most accomplished storytellers
and praise singers are initiates (griots
or bards), who have mastered
many complex verbal, musical, and memory skills after years of specialized
training. This training often
includes a strong spiritual and ethical dimension required to control the
special forces believed to be released by the spoken/sung word in oral
performances. These occult powers
and primal energies of creation and destruction are called nyama
by Mande peoples of Western Africa, for example, and their jeli,
or griots, are a subgroup of the artisan professions that the Mande designate nyamakalaw,
or “nyama-handlers.” Following
a traditional griot performance of a spiritually-charged oral epic like Sundjiata,
a Malian audience might ritualistically chant, “!Ka nyama bo!”-- which could be translated
something like, “May the powers of nyama safely disperse!”
This power of the spoken word is expressed in the following praise poem of the
West African Bamara (AKA: Bambara) peoples:
Praise
of the Word
The
word is total:
it
cuts, excoriates
forms,
modulates
perturbs,
maddens
cures
or directly kills
amplifies
or reduces
According
to intention
It
excites or calms souls.
--Praise
song of a bard of the Bamara Komo society
(qtd. in Louis-Vincent Thomas and Rene Luneau,
Les
Religions d’Afrique noire, textes et traditions sacres,
Gleason xxxvii)
Learn
more about the Bamana:
http://www.uiowa.edu/~africart/toc/people/Bamana.html
and Mali: http://www.uiowa.edu/~africart/toc/countries/Mali.html
Courtesy
of Art and Life in Africa Project, Univ. of Iowa, rev. 1999
However,
this sense of the spoken word’s awesome power has largely been lost in
literate-based societies of the West.
Orality and Literacy: Different Ways of
Knowing
Human culture encompasses all that is learned, and language is a
primary means for learning and transmitting one’s culture, as many Western
anthropologists would maintain. Furthermore,
linguistic theorists like Walter Ong maintain that a culture’s dominant
means of communication shape its people’s consciousness and ways of knowing
the world. Ong ascribes
fundamental differences among cultures—and the arts and technologies they
create and value—to whether those cultures are oral or literate
(writing-based).
Consider the following characteristics generalized for
traditional oral cultures:
·
Knowledge is sacred, magical power, immanent in the spoken word
(God’s/gods’ word initiating creation and destruction)
·
Time is cyclical, non-linear: you live in the “always” of
inseparably intertwined past, present, and future (the community = all past,
present, and to-be-born members)
·
Knowledge must be re-called, re-created, re-interpreted
constantly, or you lose it; orature “lives” only insofar as it is
repeated, performed by the community
·
You are (know) what you can remember, so you must strive to
remember, think and orally perform memorable thoughts.
Sophisticated oral memory systems requiring years of “saturated
listening” and oral performance training are developed so that people can
remember and thereby ensure the culture’s vitality and survival
·
Elders and spoken word specialists who have mastered these
memory systems and the community’s repositories of collective wisdom are
revered; they are like “human libraries” or walking sacred texts, capable
of astonishing feats of remembering for the benefit and survival of the people
and their culture.
·
Oral narratives (stories, proverbs, etc.) are practical,
flexible, spiritual; these living “texts” have no single definitive
version. They vary, adapt, and
change with performer, audience, time, place, situation, and need; and if they
lose their relevance and power, their “memory” is discarded.
“…Oral cultures produce powerful and beautiful verbal performances
of high artistic and human worth which are impossible
once writing has taken possession of the psyche.” –Walter
Ong
Compare the above to these characteristics
generalized for literate (writing) based cultures:
·
Knowledge—both sacred and
secular--largely resides in books and writing-based repositories of a
culture’s information, which many can freely access (e.g. in a democracy)
·
Time is conceived as linear;
history is written down with clear demarcations separating past, present, and
future events and communities
·
Knowledge is preserved by
writing it down, collecting it (e.g. in libraries, archives), organizing and
cataloging it so that it can be retrieved by readers and researchers.
·
Memory is devalued, as are
skills of hearing, listening, speaking; instead, people rely on ‘literacy”
skills of reading, writing, and conducting research to become educated and
knowledgeable—i.e. we need not “remember” everything: we can “look it
up” (e.g. in dictionaries, encyclopedias), read about it, write it down
·
The magical, spiritual
powers of the spoken word, and its skillful verbal performance, are devalued.
(And the elderly are more likely to be confined to “rest homes,” than
consulted for their life wisdom)
·
Written texts are published
in “definitive” versions, become static--frozen in print and in time.
The written word may be powerful—if it is still read and studied.
Author and readers do not interact directly; their relationship is
distanced and individualistic.
Ancient
writing traditions do exist on the African continent, but most Africans today,
as in the past, are primarily oral peoples, and their art forms are oral
rather than literary. In
contrast to written “literature,” “orature”
(a phrase favored by Kenyan novelist and critic Ngugi wa Thiong’o) is
orally composed and transmitted, and African oral arts are created to be
verbally and communally performed as an integral part of dance and music. The Oral Arts of Africa are rich and varied, developing with
the beginnings of African cultures, and they remain living traditions that
continue to evolve and flourish today.
One important oral art form of African cultures is the
proverb. Study of African proverbs (which Achebe uses frequently in Things
Fall Apart) can give us important clues to rich wisdom traditions and
cultural values. In a Twi language, mmebuo is
proverb-making (proverb is called ebe in the singular, and mme
in the plural form.) Here is a Twi proverb, given and translated
by Kwame Anthony Appiah:
Asem a ehia Akanfoo no na
Ntafoo de goro brekete
A matter which troubles the Akan
people,
the people of Gonja take to play the brekete drum.
Appiah, a multi-linguist and philosopher now teaching
in the U.S., grew up in Kumasi, Ghana, where one dialect of the Twi language,
often called "Akan" is the major language spoken. (Akan
refers to a cluster of Twi languages spoken by peoples of southern Ghana
and adjacent Côte d'Ivoire.) He selected this proverb from
"the 7000-odd proverbs that my mother has collected over roughly the
period of my lifetime, and she and some friends have been trying to understand
them for the last decade or so; latterly I have joined them in setting out to
prepare a manuscript that (as we say) reduces many of these sayings for the
first time to writing, that glosses them in English, and that offers also, in
each case, what I have offered you: what we call a literal
translation." "A translation aims to produce a new text
that matters to one community the way another text matters to another,"
states Appiah, but literal translation cannot begin to give us a full sense
the proverb's "rich cultural and linguistic context."
Appiah explains that "Brekete is the (Akan) name of one of
the main Dagomba drums, which
accompanies dancing"
(n. 1). A "typical
use" of this proverb might arise in a situation like this: "I
might utter it in the midst of an argument with
my father about whether it matters that I do not want to go to church
with him one
Sunday; our contrasting attitudes, he will infer, are being likened to
the contrasting
attitudes of Dagomba ["people of Gonja"] and Akan
peoples--for the brekete drum is one they play for
entertainment at dances, and represents fun." Given only a
literal translation in English, we would also miss the interplay of
sound-rhythm-meaning
[try saying the Twi proverb aloud], for a
"whole class of proverbs...depend on playing with similar-sounding names
of dissimilar objects" (Appiah, n. 2).
Akan:
http://www.uiowa.edu/~africart/toc/people/Akan.html
Ghana: http://www.uiowa.edu/~africart/toc/countries/Ghana.html
Courtesy
of Art and Life in Africa Project, Univ. of Iowa, rev. 1999
Work Cited
Appiah,
Kwame Anthony. "Thick Translation." Callaloo 16.4
(Fall 1993): 808 (12 pp). Rpt. Infotrac 2000
Expanded Academic ASAP Article A14865099.
African
writers like Chinua Achebe often introduce into literature, stories from their
culture’s oral traditions—e.g., narrative proverbs, song-tales, myths,
folktales, fairy tales, animal fables, anecdotes, ballads. One
example is this proverb-song given in untranslated Igbo in Achebe's Things
Fall Apart, Ch. 7, p. 42:
Eze elina,
elina!
Sala
Eze ilikwa ya
lkwaba akwa
oligholi
Ebe Danda nechi eze
Ebe Uzuzu nete egwu
Sala”
Call and Response: Call-and-response
forms, found everywhere in Africa, entail a caller
or soloist who “raises the song”--as the Kpelle say--and the community
chorus who respond, or “agree underneath the song.”
In the case of the Igbo stories, the storyteller “calls” out
the story in lines; the audience “responds” at regular intervals with a “sala” (Igbo for the chorus’ response). One common Igbo “sala”
is “amanye,” roughly equivalent
to American English expressions of agreement like “amen,” “indeed,”
“it is true,” or “right on!” Traditional
African storytelling is a communal participatory experience.
Everyone in most traditional African societies participate in formal
and informal storytelling as interactive oral performance—such participation
is an essential part of traditional African social life.
Below is a literal translation into English of
Ikemefuna's song, offered by Igbo scholar Emmanuel Obiechina. But even
with the English translation--which Achebe does not give in Things Fall
Apart--it is difficult for U.S. readers to make sense of this
song-proverb without learning more about the cultural context of Igbo beliefs
and the folktale on which Ikemefuna’s song is based.
[Singer’s
call:]
King, do not eat [it], do not eat!
Sala [Chorus
response]
King, if you
eat it
You will weep for the abomination
Where
Danda [White Ant] installs king
Where Uzuzu [Dust] dances to the drums
Sala [Chorus
response]
·
This Igbo proverb-story sung
by the character Ikemefuna is based on an Igbo wisdom story of a perverse,
headstrong king who breaks a sacred taboo by eating roast yam, from the first
fruits of the harvest, which is reserved for and offered in sacrifice to the
gods.
·
The song speaks in the
communal voice of the elders’ collective wisdom and carries serious social
and ethical weight. It
warns the king not to break taboo that would compromise himself, his high
office, and the continued prosperity of his people.
·
A dishonorable death without
proper burial rites is predicted by the last two lines: only white ants and
dust will claim this headstrong king after his human death.
Thus, he will be denied reunion with ancestors and clan and be forever
alienated from his community, believed to encompass the dead, the living, and
the yet-to-be-born.
·
Breaking this sacred taboo
could seriously unbalance of the Igbo world--the kind of “abomination” for
which the Igbo gods could deny future good harvests and bring devastation to
Igboland.
In the context of Ch. 7 of Things Fall Apart,
Ikemefuna's song offers a weighty parallel warning to the protagonist Okonkwo.
Like the headstrong king, Okonkwo is on the verge of committing a serious
"abomination"--the "kind of action for which the goddess [Ani]
wipes out whole families," as his friend Obierika points out (Ch. 8, p.
46).
Learn more about the Igbo:
http://www.uiowa.edu/~africart/toc/people/Igbo.html
and where they live:
Nigeria: http://www.uiowa.edu/~africart/toc/countries/Nigeria.html
Courtesy
of Art and Life in Africa Project, Univ. of Iowa, rev. 1999.
Works Cited
Achebe,
Chinua. Things Fall Apart. Expanded edition with notes. London:
Heinemann, 1996.
Obiechina, Emmanuel. "Narrative
Proverbs in the African Novel. (Special Issue in Memory of Josaphat Bekunuru
Kubayanda) Research in African Literatures 24.4(Winter
1993):123 (18 pp). Rpt. Infotrac 2000 Expanded Academic ASAP Article
A14706083.
Sow,
Abdoul Aziz. “Fulani
Poetic Genres.”
(Special
Issue: Oral Literature) Research in
African Literatures 24.2 (Summer 1993): 61(17pp).
Rpt. Infotrac 2000 Expanded Academic ASAP: Article
A13891469.
Abstract: The Fulani people of the northern
Senegal River have songs which fit poetic genres. There are different songs
for fishermen, weavers, warriors, hunters, cattle drivers, women griots,
merchants, nomad entertainment, shepherds, lullabies, eulogies, rejoicing,
mockery and special occasions.
"As elsewhere in Africa, literature among the
Fulani is essentially oral and musical. It is lyrical, and it is by its very
nature literary, as is every word that transcends the merely denotative or
communicative functions of language. Sung, chanted, declaimed, recited, set to
rhythm, or supported by gestural or musical accompaniment, it is magnified to
the status of art - "a verbal art so pure and so complete that writing,
far from assuring its diffusion, merely impoverishes and weakens it by
restricting its range of expression" (Seydou 178)" [qtd. by
Sow].
"The most striking aspect of Fulani oral poetry
is its rhythm. Indeed, rhythm is the most important defining
characteristic of African poetry: It is its very essence. The skillful use of
numerous linguistic resources in this poetry is obscured in English, which is
insufficiently flexible to convey many of the verbal and aesthetic nuances of
the Fulani originals. In any case, the poet is as indispensable to Fulani
society as any other individual. Steward
and artisan of the word, crystallizer of the people's collective memory,
eulogist of the ancestors' noble deeds and exploits, he remains the genuine
promoter of cultural and social values."
Work Cited
Sow, Abdoul
Aziz. "Fulani Poetic Genres." Research in
African Literatures 24.2 (Summer 1993): 61 (17 pp).
Rpt. Infotrac 2000 Expanded Academic ASAP: Article
A13891469.
Learn more
about the Fulani:
http://www.uiowa.edu/~africart/toc/people/Fulani.html
and where they live:
Guinea-Conakry: http://www.uiowa.edu/~africart/toc/countries/Guinea-Conakry.html
Burkina Faso: http://www.uiowa.edu/~africart/toc/countries/Burkina_Faso.html
Mali: http://www.uiowa.edu/~africart/toc/countries/Mali.html
Nigeria: http://www.uiowa.edu/~africart/toc/countries/Nigeria.html
Niger: http://www.uiowa.edu/~africart/toc/countries/Niger.html
Cameroon: http://www.uiowa.edu/~africart/toc/countries/Cameroon.html
Chad: http://www.uiowa.edu/~africart/toc/countries/Chad.html
Courtesy
of Art and Life in Africa Project, Univ. of Iowa, rev. 1999
AFRICAN MUSIC
AND CULTURE
Some
generalizations about African musical cultures can be hazarded even amid the
continent’s rich and dizzying diversity, according to scholars J. H. Kwabena
Nketia and Ruth M. Stone.
African
music is woven into the fabric of daily life, performed often inseparably with
games, words, drama, ceremony, visual art, and dance in both special and
everyday activity. A.M. Ipoku,
director of the Ghana Dance Ensemble, tries to achieve the performance ideal
of dance and music so interlocked that one “can see the music and hear the
dance.” The Western idea of music as a thing of beauty to be admired in
isolation is a foreign concept to many Africans.
Music promotes group participation, strengthens social cohesion, and
infuses collective activity--spiritual rite, prayer, ceremony, festival; the
work of building new hourses or putting out fires, the games and entertainment
of leisure and recreational hours. Individuals
sing songs of praise and criticism, well-wishing and war, cradle rocking and
food preparation, grinding and pounding tasks.
Call-and-response forms, found everywhere in Africa, entail a caller
or soloist who “raises the song,” as the Kpelle say, and the community
chorus who respond, or “agree underneath the song.”
Many African oral traditions include accounts of how music originated.
For example, the Kpelle people of Liberia maintain that, in the distant
past, a hunter got the idea to make a goblet drum from a chimpanzee beating
his chest, and the chimpanzees then showed the hunter how to hollow out a log
for the body of the first drum. To
be a fully adult person in many traditional African societies means learning
to perform music, song, and dance proficiently: to be a social person is to be
a musical person. In much
of Africa, musical notation is heard--conveyed and learned in mnemonic phrases
and vocalizations--rather than written. Akan
master drummers may teach children the talking drum by tapping the rhythms
into the children’s shoulder blades and having them chant sentences of
nonsense syllables in the same rhythm. Acquiring
music, like acquiring a first language rises from early and regular exposure
and participation in musical situations; further training may come through
apprenticeship systems for the young, individual tutelage for the especially
talented, and/or special spiritual training in music for initiates into secret
societies and caste professions.
Many
Africans are more sensitive to timber and pitch than most Westerners, and
African instruments are characterized as human “voices,” not just sounds
or rhythms. The Shona of
Zimbabwe call the lower register of the instrument mbira (a hand piano)
“old men’s voices,” the middle register “young men’s voices,” and
the highest register “women’s voices”; and keys are given names like
“mad person,” “swaying of a person going into a trance,” and “to
stir up” to show how the key works in the music.
The Yoruba speak a tone language (the pitch of a spoken syllable
determines its meaning, a change in pitch can drastically change its meaning),
and they have reproduced speech in their “talking drums,” the
special example of musical signaling that has long fascinated Westerners.
Africa’s rich variety of drums, as well as many other types of
instruments less familiar to non-Africans, are understood to sound as
“voices” of interpenetrating tone colors and pitches--not simply as
rhythms. Musical sounds are
typically organized against each other in conflicting and sophisticated ways,
interlocked and balanced in a kind of interactive tug of war binding
performers to each other and their instruments, creating togetherness out of
the segmentation and fragmentation of musical elements.
Sound
is everywhere noticed, admired, and shaped--e.g., postal workers in Ghana
cancel stamps in deliberate rhythm. Everything
is subject to portrayal in sound, and African music may imitate many things,
including nature, bird, and spirit sounds. Music may be symbolic and
representational: the Akan etivie specialize in imitating the snarl of
the lion. Even if very different,
African musical performance demands and aesthetic criteria are no less
exacting than those of Western musical cultures.
Performance criteria for a Dagomba hour-glass drummer of Ghana include
knowledge of innumerable chants and traditional history--especially chronicles
of chiefs and their praise names--demands on the oral memory unfathomable to
Westerns shaped by literate-based cultures.
So too must the Dagomba performer have a sweet voice and the supple
wrist needed to perform the tones and dynamics of the hourglass drum
skillfully. Members of nindo
vocal groups of the Gogo people (Tanzania) must be skilled at
“interlining” (feeding singers the first few words of stanzas). Lead singers and master drummers of the Akan (Ghana) must
have a formidable command of language and memory, in addition to fine strong
voices and the kind of “good ear” that will not be distracted from their
specific musical roles by other performing parts of the chorus--called gofomma
(or “the children”).
Performers--singers,
dancers, storytellers, actors, instrumentalists--are vital to ceremony,
individual and communal life.
Their participatory audience may also count ancestors and spirits among
these exacting judges of performance -- dangerously so, for example, if a
virtuoso musician’s tutelary spirit ultimately requires the performer’s
life in exchange for the spirit’s aid in achieving especially fine playing.
The player may offer sacrifices to his instrument to please and bond
with instruments considered part-human, part-spirit nature.
The kora (harp-lute) is considered a personal extension of the
Western African griot--itinerant praise singer, historian, and social
commentators of Mali, Senegal, and Mande-speaking traditions stretching back
at least to the time of Sundjata (1230-1255 A.D.), the first emperor of Mali.
(We’ll be studying this topic
in connection with the film Keita: Heritage of the Griot.)
Contemporary Africans’ search for identity and awareness of past
cultural achievements has given new urgency to promoting, preserving, and
re-creating African musical traditions.
Music
is expressed in a dazzling variety of instruments, creative forms, and
performance styles in Africa today, as in the past.
And the forms of African music continue to evolve and multiply as
cross-cultural influences within and outside Africa meet and combine.
For example, modern mergers of indigenous and Western musical forms
have produced such uniquely African styles as East African beni and
West African “highlife” drawing on brass band music; soukous, which
echoes soul and disco music, of Zaire; the early forms of Nigerian juju
and fuji which incorporated electric guitar and banjo; and South
African makwaya which fuses Xhosa rhythms, European vocal
harmonies, and ragtime. Growing
international audiences count themselves enthusiastic admirers of the
“African World Beat.” The
township jive chorals of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the juju beat of King
Sunny Ade, the Afro-funk of Angelique Kidjo of Benin, the Algerian rai
syle of Chaba Fadela, the soukous of Tabu Ley Rochereau (Zaire), the
Caribbean-Parisian zouk band Kassav, and the South African anthology
Indestructible Beat of Soweto are only a few tributaries feeding
the vital new river of musical inspiration and influence flowing out of the
rich talent and diverse cultures of Africa.
Adapted from (1) The Music of Africa
by J. H. Kwabena Nketia (NY: Norton, 1974), and (2) “African Music
Performed” by Ruth M. Stone (in Africa, 3rd ed., ed. by Phyllis M.
Martin and Patrick O’Meara [Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1995],
257-272).
African
Tribal Music and Dances
Featuring Music of the Malinke, Baoule and Others
(1993; CD: Laserlight-Delta
Music, Santa Monica, CA; licensed from Tradition Records)
This CD includes
traditional music of the Mande or Malinke (Senegal and Guinea, West Africa);
the Baoule (Cote d’Ivoire/Ivory Coast, West Africa); and “Sonar Senghor
and His Rhythms,” including sicco dance rhythms of Guinea; music
styles originating in Cameroon; Senegalese sicco; Walof (or Wolof)
songs and rhythms of Senegal; and cross-cultural songs and rhythms combining sou
sou dialect of Guinea, “goombay” dialect of Gambia, and Walof rhythms
of Senegal. Sicco,
originating in French Guinea, is the name of a very practical, simple dance,
accompanied by a distinctive rhythm created with rectangular and square drums,
maracas, cowbells, a bottle struck with an iron pestle, and/or a ridged gourd
rubbed by a wooden stick. Content
and occasions for some of the songs:
(1) a joyous song of a people returning to rebuild their village ruined
by fire: “we have come back to rebuild our village and plant new crops, and
resume once again the happy life we knew here”; (2)
a sentimental song “we are going back,” of a young man whose people
have been feted by another far-away people for two days, but now must leave a
pretty young woman; (3) a happy song of a young girl who has convinced her
mother to let her go out and play and have fun, rather than do her
chores—such songs are often accompanied by whistling, an expression of
freedom and happiness; (4) a love song of a young man wooing a beautiful
Gambian maiden.
Works Cited
Achebe,
Chinua. Things Fall Apart. Expanded edition with notes. London:
Heinemann, 1996. [Edition used in Hum 211].
Achebe,
Chinua. Things Fall Apart. Expanded edition with notes. London:
Heinemann, 1996. [Edition used in Hum 211].
African Tribal Music and Dances
Featuring Music of the Malinke, Baoule and Others
(1993; CD: Laserlight-Delta
Music, Santa Monica, CA; licensed from Tradition Records)
Agatucci, Cora, ed.
Summary of The Music of Africa
by J. H. Kwabena Nketia (NY: Norton, 1974), and “African Music
Performed” by Ruth M. Stone (in Africa, 3rd ed., ed. by Phyllis M.
Martin and Patrick O’Meara [Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1995],
257-272).
In Praise of the Word: Traditional African Oral Arts.
Humanities 211: African Cultures & Literatures, Central Oregon Community
College, Bend, OR; Winter 2003. 2003.
http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/hum211/coursepack/oralarts.htm
Appiah,
Kwame Anthony. "Thick Translation." Callaloo 16.4
(Fall 1993): 808 (12 pp). Rpt. Infotrac 2000
Expanded Academic ASAP Article A14865099.
Obiechina, Emmanuel. "Narrative
Proverbs in the African Novel. (Special Issue in Memory of Josaphat Bekunuru
Kubayanda.) Research in African Literatures 24.4 (Winter
1993):123 (18 pp). Rpt. Infotrac 2000 Expanded Academic ASAP Article
A14706083.
Abstract: "'Things Fall
Apart' by Chinua Achebe exemplifies the use of narrative proverbs in the
African novel, reflecting the synthesis of oral and written traditions.
Narrative proverbs are stories or other forms derived from the oral tradition
which are embedded within the novels and perform the function of proverbs.
Achebe's novel incorporates nine embedded narratives, seven of which are
folktales or myths. Narratives discussed in relation to the novel include the
quarrel between Earth and Sky, the locust myth, Ikemefuna's song, the mosquito
myth, the tale of the tortoise and the birds, the Abame story and the kite
myth."
Sow, Abdoul Aziz.
"Fulani Poetic Genres."
Research in
African Literatures 24.2 (Summer 1993): 61 (17 pp).
Rpt. Infotrac 2000 Expanded Academic ASAP:
Article
A13891469.
Go to:
African
Praise Songs
http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/hum211/coursepack/praisesongs.htm
HUM 211
Home
Page Syllabus
Course Plan
Assignments
Course
Pack
African
Storytelling
Chinua
Achebe, Things
Fall Apart Tsitsi
Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions
African Links
African
Timelines: History, Orature, Literature, & Film
African
"Literary"
Map African Films
African Contexts: Film
Afrique, Je Te Plumerai
You are
here: In
Praise of the Word (Hum 211 Online Course
Pack)
URL of this page:
http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/hum211/coursepack/oralarts.htm
Last Updated: 31 March 2005
This webpage is maintained by Cora
Agatucci, Professor of English,
Humanities Department, Central
Oregon Community College
I welcome comments: cagatucci@cocc.edu
© Cora Agatucci, 1997-2002
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