Folklore
African folklore comprises oral narratives, myths, and spiritual traditions explored for cultural significance, origins, and connections to lived practice.
African Folklore in Contemporary Storytelling: Nigerian Novels and Film
Ben Okri opens The Famished Road with a river that becomes a road, and a road that stays hungry because it was once a river.
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.
Black Folklore: Why the Teller Keeps Stepping Out of the Story
Before the tale begins, the teller says a strange thing. We do not really mean, we do not really mean, that what we are about to say is true.
Black Folklore: How West African Stories Traveled and Survived
In one Akan telling recorded in the 1930s, the storyteller opens by taking it all back: We do not really mean, we do not really mean, that what we are about to say is true.
African Mythology and Oral Tradition: Reading the Form
There is a question that comes near the end of almost every reading. A hand goes up somewhere in the middle rows, and someone asks the novelist where the magic came from — as though African mythology…
African Folklore in Contemporary Storytelling: Àbíkú to Mami Wata
Folklore is the newest thing on the page. That reads backwards, so let me state it plainly and then spend the rest of this piece earning it.