Literature
African literature encompasses oral storytelling traditions, written works, and griot narratives that preserve belief systems and ancestral knowledge.
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.
African Mythology in Fiction: How the Story Reaches the Page
In a Yoruba household, a story does not start on its own. The teller calls out "Àlọ́ o" — roughly, a tale — and the room has to answer "Àlọ́" before anything happens.
African Folklore in Contemporary Storytelling: Àbíkú and Ọgbanje
Two hundred and fifty-six. That is the entire sign system of Ifá, the divination tradition of the Yoruba people of southwestern Nigeria, Benin and Togo — and one of the deepest reservoirs that African…
African Mythology in Fiction: Why the New Wave Isn't New
In 1938, a schoolteacher in western Nigeria published a novel in Yoruba about a hunter who walks into a forest thick with spirits and does not come home the same man.
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.