African Folklore in Contemporary Storytelling: Who Narrates

Late in Atlantics, a line of young women leave their beds in a Dakar suburb and walk to the house of the developer who never paid their boyfriends. Their eyes have gone white. They speak with the voices of men who drowned in the Atlantic trying to reach Spain, and they ask for the wages. Nobody explains them. No elder is wheeled in to gloss the scene, no character says the word djinn, and the film keeps moving.

That refusal to explain is the most interesting thing happening in African folklore in contemporary storytelling, and it turns up in three works released within two years of one another: Akwaeke Emezi's novel Freshwater (2018), Chigozie Obioma's novel An Orchestra of Minorities (2019), and Mati Diop's film Atlantics, which premiered at Cannes in 2019 and took the Grand Prix. Two novels and a film. Two works drawing on Igbo thought from southeastern Nigeria, one rooted on the Senegalese coast. Three artists with different passports and different reasons for writing.

What connects them is not a shared belief. It is a shared structural decision: each hands the act of narration to a spirit, and then declines to translate.

From retelling to architecture

An earlier generation put the folklore on the surface, where a reader could see it working. Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) moves with the rhythm and logic of Yoruba oral narrative — episodic, unhurried about plausibility, willing to spend a chapter on a creature met at a crossroads. Ben Okri's The Famished Road (1991) gave its narration to Azaro, an àbíkú (ah-BEE-koo), which in Yoruba tradition names a child born to die and return again to the same mother. Souleymane Cissé's Yeelen (1987) staged a Bamana story from Mali as a contest between a father and a son inside an initiatory order, and asked the audience to accept its powers as powers, not as tricks of the light.

Those works were already sophisticated. But the folklore in them mostly sat where a reader expects content to sit: in the events, the creatures, the quest. You could summarise the myth and the summary would be about the plot.

The three works in question do something else. The tradition is not in the plot. It is in the apparatus — the point of view, the tense, the person the story is addressed to, the question of who is entitled to know things. An Orchestra of Minorities is a novel about a poultry farmer and a bad decision, and its Igbo cosmology lives almost entirely in the fact that a guardian spirit is telling you about it. Strip the spirit out and you have a different book, not a plainer one. That is a much harder thing to pull off than a monster, and it is the reason these three reward being read against each other.

Side by side

Five criteria make the comparison useful: the people and the place each work is anchored in, who is permitted to narrate, whether the spirit is literal inside the story's world, the contemporary pressure the folklore is carrying, and how much the work is willing to explain to an outsider.

The people and the place

Specificity is doing real work in all three. Freshwater is Igbo, and its opening turns on Ala, the earth deity in Igbo religious thought, and on the royal python, an animal held sacred in a number of Igbo communities. The book then moves to a small American college town, and the cosmology travels with it rather than staying behind in Nigeria as local colour. An Orchestra of Minorities is also Igbo, set largely around Umuahia, and its supernatural vocabulary comes from Odinani, the Igbo religious system — chi, Chukwu, the ancestors it calls the old fathers. Atlantics is Senegalese and coastal, set among the sort of Dakar neighbourhood where the Lébou (LAY-boo), the fishing people of the peninsula, have long been at home, and where belief in djinn is unremarkable rather than exotic.

None of the three says "Africa." That is not squeamishness. It is precision, and it is why the works can be compared at all — you cannot compare two things that have been sanded down to the same generic surface.

Who is allowed to narrate

This is the sharpest line between them. Freshwater is narrated mostly by a first-person plural: the ogbanje (oh-GBAN-jay) who inhabit a young woman named Ada. They call her the body. Over the course of the book, individuals emerge from the collective and take names — Asụghara, who arrives after an assault at college and is furious and protective and cruel; Saint Vincent, quieter and male. Ada gets chapters of her own, but she is not the primary voice, and the reader spends most of the novel listening to the beings who share her.

Obioma's chi (chee) is a different kind of narrator: an advocate. In Igbo thought, a chi is the personal spirit attached to an individual, a companion and portion of destiny. Obioma's chi is standing before Chukwu, the supreme being, whom it addresses again and again as Egbunu, arguing the case of its host, Chinonso, and pleading for a merciful reading of what he did. The book is a legal brief delivered in an incantatory register, and it keeps interrupting its own plot to explain the customs of the old fathers — because that is what an intercessor arguing before a deity would do.

Diop gives narration to nobody. There is no voice from beyond, no explanatory subtitle. Possession is shown, and the camera holds on faces. The drowned men speak only by borrowing throats. It is the most restrictive choice of the three and, on screen, the most effective.

Whether the spirit is literal

All three decline the exit that magical realism is often assumed to offer — the shrug that lets a reader file the supernatural under metaphor and move on.

Freshwater is the most explicit. The ogbanje are not a figure for something else in the novel's world; they are what is true. Emezi has written publicly about understanding themselves as ogbanje, and about treating that as an Igbo reality rather than a symbol borrowed to describe something a clinician would name differently. The novel does not argue against diagnosis so much as decline to let it have the last word.

Obioma's chi is likewise not a device the narrative winks at. The cosmology is the frame around everything, including the reader; the book never steps outside it to reassure you.

Atlantics is the ambiguous one, and its ambiguity is deliberate rather than evasive. A young detective, Issa, burns with fever and finds himself somewhere he did not walk to. A wedding bed catches fire. The film offers no rival explanation, and it never turns to a rationalist character for a second opinion. It simply proceeds as if the returned dead are among the facts of the case.

The modern pressure underneath

The folklore in each is carrying a load, and the loads are contemporary.

In Freshwater, it is the pressure on a body that does not fit the categories offered to it, and the question of whose account of that body counts. In An Orchestra of Minorities, it is money: Chinonso, a poultry farmer, sells nearly everything he owns to study abroad and become worthy of Ndali, whose family have written him off as beneath them — and is defrauded by a man from home. The migration is not an adventure; it is a class calculation that fails. In Atlantics, it is unpaid labour. The young men build a tower they will never enter, go months without wages, and take a pirogue toward Spain because the arithmetic at home does not work. The supernatural in Diop's film is not decoration on a social problem. The dead come back specifically to collect.

How much the work explains

Here the three sit at very different points on a scale. Obioma explains constantly, because his narrator's entire posture is explanatory — but it explains inward, to a deity who already knows, which is a very different thing from explaining outward to a foreign reader. Emezi explains a good deal too, and asks you to accept the explanation as literal. Diop explains nothing.

Two books, one cosmology, opposite verdicts on fate

Put Freshwater and An Orchestra of Minorities directly against each other and something more interesting appears than a shared heritage. Two novelists reach into the same body of Igbo thought and come out with opposite answers about how much a person controls.

Emezi's ogbanje are, in the tradition, spirits that come and go on their own schedule. A mother bears a child, the child dies young, the same spirit returns through her again. The belief is bound up with grief, with infant mortality, and with the marks and rites some families used in an attempt to end the cycle — the site describes what people hold, not how any of it is done. Transposed into a novel about a life, that logic produces a narrator who arrives without permission and stays without asking. Ada does not choose her passengers. Much of the book's tension is the tension of a house that has other residents.

Obioma's chi points the other way. The most-quoted Igbo proverb on the subject is the one Chinua Achebe renders in English as "when a man says yes his chi says yes also" — a saying he also examined at length in his essay "Chi in Igbo Cosmology." Assent runs from the person outward. The chi is not a puppeteer; it is a companion bound to what you affirm. That is a cosmology with a great deal of room for agency in it, which is why Obioma's chi spends the novel in something like anguish: it can see what Chinonso is walking into, and it cannot stop him.

So the comparison yields a small, specific finding. Two works, one tradition, two very different theses on freedom. Anyone who wants to talk about "Igbo cosmology in the novel" as a single thing has to reckon with the fact that the tradition itself supports both readings — and that this is normal for a body of thought developed across many communities over a long time, not a contradiction to be resolved.

What the camera can do that a sentence can't

Atlantics is the odd one out, and comparing across media clarifies rather than muddies. A novel can put you inside a spirit. Film mostly cannot, and Diop does not try. What she has instead is duration and image: long shots of the ocean at different hours, a tower lit like a monument to nothing, faces held past the point of comfort.

Diop came to the story through documentary. Her short film Atlantiques (2009) sat with a young man in Dakar who had made the crossing. The feature keeps that grain. And she works in a lineage — her uncle Djibril Diop Mambéty made Touki Bouki (1973), which also ends at the water, with two young people and a ship to France and only one of them boarding.

What the film borrows from the coast is a grammar rather than a rite. Among the Lébou there is the ndëpp (n-DEP), a healing ceremony addressed to spirits understood to inhabit a person, presided over largely by women. Atlantics is not a depiction of ndëpp, and it would be wrong to describe it as one. But it shares an assumption: that a spirit occupying a body is something a community meets and negotiates with, in a room, together, rather than something an individual suffers alone. When the possessed women arrange themselves in the developer's house, the scene is not a horror set-piece. It is a hearing.

Names and terms

• Ogbanje — in Igbo belief, a spirit that is born as a child, dies young, and returns through the same mother.
• Àbíkú — the Yoruba counterpart, the name meaning, roughly, born to die. The two are commonly discussed together; they are neighbouring ideas, not one idea with two spellings.
• Chi — in Igbo thought, the personal spirit attached to an individual, tied to that person's portion of destiny.
• Chukwu — the supreme being in Igbo religion. Obioma's chi addresses Chukwu throughout by praise-names, including Egbunu.
• Odinani — the Igbo religious system, still practised today alongside Christianity in much of southeastern Nigeria.
• Ala — the Igbo earth deity, associated with fertility, morality, and the dead.
• Djinn — spirits of Islamic cosmology, long woven into everyday life across Senegal and much of the Sahel.
• Ndëpp — a healing ceremony held among the Lébou of Senegal's Cap-Vert peninsula, addressed to spirits inhabiting a person and led largely by women.

Where the connection ends

The temptation with a piece like this is to let the three works dissolve into one another. They should not.

Igbo is not Lébou, and neither is "African." Odinani and the spirit world of coastal Senegal are separate systems with separate histories, separate languages, and separate relationships to Christianity and Islam. A chi and a djinn are not versions of the same being. The drowned men in Atlantics are the returning dead of a specific coast, not ogbanje.

The three artists are not one cohort. Emezi is Nigerian, born in Umuahia, writing largely from the United States. Obioma is Nigerian and teaches in Nebraska. Diop is French and Senegalese, working in French cinema and in Dakar. There is no manifesto, no shared circle, no evidence they were answering each other. The overlap is real and it is a matter of a moment, not a movement — which is the more interesting claim anyway, because it suggests several people arrived independently at the same solution to the same problem.

Readers disagree, seriously, about Freshwater. Emezi has framed being ogbanje as an Igbo reality that also names something about gender and embodiment — a refusal to let Western psychiatric or Western gender categories be the only available description. Many readers, including Igbo readers, have found that a genuine act of return: the tradition allowed to describe a life on its own terms. Others, also including Igbo readers and scholars of Igbo religion, have argued that ogbanje is a specific belief about repeated infant death and a mother's grief, and that extending it to a template for identity stretches it past what the tradition holds. Both positions are argued in good faith, and this is not the place to settle them. It is worth saying that Emezi has generally presented the claim as their own, about their own life, rather than as a rule for anyone else.

Diaspora work is not a diluted version of home. Two of these three were written from outside Nigeria. That is a fact about biography, not about authenticity, and the older habit of grading works by proximity to a village is not a useful instrument here.

What the comparison settles

Read together, the three make a case that folklore in contemporary African fiction and film is at its strongest when it stops being subject matter.

The weakest use of a tradition is as inventory: a deity name-checked, a mask on a wall, a proverb dropped in for texture. The middle use is as plot — the curse, the prophecy, the creature. The use these three share is structural. The tradition supplies the point of view. It decides who may speak, what counts as evidence, and who the story is being told to. In An Orchestra of Minorities, the addressee is a deity, and that single choice governs the diction of every page. In Freshwater, the pronoun is plural, and the whole account of a life reorganises around it. In Atlantics, the community's assumptions about the returning dead determine what the camera treats as needing explanation, which is nothing.

And the second half of the finding: none of them translates. There is no glossary character, no scene where somebody patiently tells an outsider what is happening. This is a bet on the reader, and it is the same bet novelists working in any well-established tradition have always been allowed to make. A reader who does not know what a chi is will work it out, the way readers work out purgatory or a shiva or a whale hunt. Explaining less turns out to be the most respectful available option, because it treats the cosmology as load-bearing rather than as something to be apologised for.

So: three works, inside two years, all handing the telling to a spirit. It reads at first like one method appearing three times. It is not. It is three separate systems of thought — Igbo, twice and to opposite ends; Lébou and Senegalese Muslim, once — each of which already contained a fully worked-out theory of who is entitled to speak about a person's life, and three artists who noticed that the theory was there and used it. The folklore did not need modernising. It needed to be taken at its word. As the Igbo have long said, in the rendering Achebe gave it: when a man says yes, his chi says yes also.