The Role of Orature in Literature

Orature is an African term that refers to a culture's oral tradition

and storytelling. The unwritten literature has been passed in
society through performances and art forms. Orature has played
a significant role in African literature, both historically and
contemporary.

The epics like Homer’s “Iliad” or the Germanic “Beowulf” were

sung before they were written down. When we consider a
multilingual country like India, we have many languages that are
enshrined in written forms. However, a large number of the are
preserved and sustained in oral forms. If we review, African
literature, we realize that most of the taboos were taught through
songs and myths to instill cultural values.

In contemporary literature, orature continues to be an important

source of inspiration for many African authors. Many writers
have drawn on the oral tradition to create works that reflect the
culture and experiences of their communities. This is
particularly true of writers from the African diaspora, who have
used orature to connect with their cultural roots and explore the
complexities of the African experience in the diaspora.

There was a clear interaction between the deeply rooted oral

tradition and the developing literary traditions of the 20th
century. That interaction is revealed in the placing of literary
works into the forms of the oral tradition. The impact of the epic
on the novel, for instance, continues to influence the writers
today. The oral tradition in the work of some of the early writers
of the 20th century- Amos Tutuola of Nigeria, D.O. Fagunwa in
Yoruba, Violet Dube in Zulu, S.E.K. Mqhayi in Xhosa, and
mario Antonio in Portuguese- is readily evident.

Some of these writings were merely imitations of the oral

traditions and were therefore not influential . Such antiquarians
did little more than retell, recast, or transcribe materials from the
oral tradition. But the work of writers such as Tutuola had a
dynamic effect on the developing literary tradition; such works
went beyond mere imitation.

The most successful of the early African writers knew what

could be done with the oral tradition; they understood how its
structures and images could be transposed to a literary mode,
and they were able to distinguish mimicry from organic growth.
Guybon Sinox explored the relationship between oral tradition
and writing, in his popular Xhosa novels.

A.C.Jordan, O.K.Matsepe (in Sotho), and R.R.R.Dhlomo (in

Zulu) built on that kind of writing, establishing new
relationships noy only between oral and written materials but
between the written and the written- that is between the writers
of popular fiction and those writers who wished to create a
more serious form of literature.
The threads that connect these three categories of artistic activity
are many, in reciprocal, and they are essentially African, though
there is no doubt that there was also interaction with European
traditions. Writers in Africa today owe much to the African oral
traditions and to those authors who have occupied the space
between the two traditions in an area of creative interaction.