Storytelling
African storytelling transmits myths through griot narratives, folk tales, and ritual speech—research on how oral tradition preserves and shapes cultural beliefs.
The Character Arc and Orisha: What Film Adaptation Changes
There is a question asked in every story meeting, every workshop, every notes call: what does she want, and who is she by the end? It sounds like common sense.
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.
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 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 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…