Research in African Literatures articles from June 1993

Research in African Literatures archives from June 1993

Ancestors from the east in Sahelo-Sudanese myth: Dinga Soninke, Zabarkane Zarma, and others. (Special Issue: Oral Literature)
June 22, 1993... "Dinga was born in India, Dinga grew up in Yemen" and "Zabarkane comes from Sinai." So it is said in "The Empire of Ghana: The Legend of Wagadu" (Silla) and in "The Exodus of the Zarmas" (Laya). Elsewhere, a Zarma informant says of his own...

'Sarraounia,' an epic? (Special Issue: Oral Literature)
June 22, 1993... Not until the appearance of D. T. Niane's Soundjata in 1960 did literary critics begin to pay the same attention to the African epic that had long been accorded to the great Medieval European chansons de geste, to Latin and Greek epics, and...

Narrative genres and intertextual phenomena in the Sahelian region (myths, epics, and novels). (Special Issue: Oral Literature)
June 22, 1993... Introduction The discussion of the intertextuality of oral and written works and the linking of this relation with fields of culture would, from the outset, proceed from a doubly articulated research procedure. On the one hand, it...

The narrative genre among the Bamana of Mali. (Special Issue: Oral Literature)
June 22, 1993... In her Chants et chansons en pays Akye, Agnes Aye Monnet makes what I consider to be a mistake in her distinction between the Bamana concepts "donkili" and "fasa." Actually the existence of competing criteria make it difficult to...

Fulani poetic genres. (Special Issue: Oral Literature)
June 22, 1993... As elsewhere in Africa, literature among the Fulani is essentially oral and musical. It is lyrical, and it is by its very nature literary, as is every word that transcends the merely denotative or communicative functions of language. Sung,...

The tebra' of Moorish women from Mauritania: the limits (or essence) of the poetic act. (Special Issue: Oral Literature)
June 22, 1993... One of the most appealing and creative aspects of Hassaniyya oral literature is its lyrical tradition (in the post-Romantic sense of the word). The highly codified poems that used to circulate in the nomad camps can be heard with increasing...

Woyi Ceet: traditional marriage songs of the Lebu. (Special Issue: Oral Literature)
June 22, 1993... The Lebu, who now inhabit the peninsula of Cap Vert, originally came from Tekrour in the Senegal Valley but left it for Kayor and finally settled on the coast and in the Jandeer. Until about 1900, they fiercely resisted Islamization, although...

Erotic poetry of the grasslands. (Special Issue: Oral Literature)
June 22, 1993... According to tradition, the Bamileke, known as the "people of the plain" (a term applied to them by the German colonialists who, coming from Bamenda, entered the Dschang region from the heights of Mbamboutos) or "the Grassfields" (the...

Poetic idiom among the Akye of Cote d'Ivoire: the agnanda-nou. (Special Issue: Oral Literature)
June 22, 1993... The notion of poetic language is a present and effective reality among the Akye in Cote d'Ivoire. As in the area of music, the Akye distinguish between a "full word" (i.e., a truly creative language) and an "empty word" in poetry. The "full...

Western Indian Ocean folklore. (Special Issue: Oral Literature)
June 22, 1993... For the first time in scholarly history, the Western Indian Ocean begins to be visible as a distinct zone of cultural and folklore research. Rather than separating the countries on its shores - Madagascar, the Comoros, the Seychelles,...

Ecrivains africains et identites culturelles: Entretiens. (Special Issue: Oral Literature)
June 22, 1993... This collection of fifteen interviews with Francophone African writers extends the field that includes, for example, Cosmo Pieterse and Dennis Duerden's African Writers Talking, Don and Mary-Lou Burness's Wansema: Conversations with African...

Perspectives on African Music. (Special Issue: Oral Literature)
June 22, 1993... The Bayreuth African Studies series is becoming invaluable to African musicology. Besides the seriousness of the scholarship and the attractive interests in such previously obscure areas as the early days of African popular music, the volumes...

Yoruba Drumming: The Dundun Tradition. (Special Issue: Oral Literature)
June 22, 1993... The Bayreuth African Studies series is becoming invaluable to African musicology. Besides the seriousness of the scholarship and the attractive interests in such previously obscure areas as the early days of African popular music, the volumes...

Essays on Music in Africa, vol. 2, Intercultural Perspectives. (Special Issue: Oral Literature)
June 22, 1993... The Bayreuth African Studies series is becoming invaluable to African musicology. Besides the seriousness of the scholarship and the attractive interests in such previously obscure areas as the early days of African popular music, the volumes...

Turkana-English Dictionary. (Special Issue: Oral Literature)
June 22, 1993... Two years after the appearance of his English-Turkana dictionary, A. Barrett has brought out a Turkana-English one. Although less extensive than its 225-page counterpart, it is a useful and reliable dictionary of this Nilotic language, such...

Critical Approaches to 'Anthills of the Savannah.' (Special Issue: Oral Literature)
June 22, 1993... The editor's introduction to Matatu no. 8 justifies the dedication of this special issue to Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah on the ground that it is "the most important novel to come out of Africa in the eighties." As if to prove the truth...

Die Kinder der Regenmacher: Eine Familiensaga von Aniceti Kitereza aus Tansania. (Special Issue: Oral Literature)
June 22, 1993... Amadou Hampate Ba's observation that "an old man who dies is a library that burns" was reconfirmed in the case of Aniceti Kitereza, who initially wrote his novel in Kikerewe in 1945. The Kerewe are a small ethnic group in central Tanzania,...

Emerging Literatures. (Special Issue: Oral Literature)
June 22, 1993... One of the (admittedly minor) tragedies that apartheid has inflicted on South African culture is the intellectual segregation that has affected literary studies: until recent years, each scholar used to remain confined within the narrow...

Journeys Through the French African Novel. (Special Issue: Oral Literature)
June 22, 1993... In its brief but fascinating existence, the French African novel has undergone transformations that mirror the flow of history and reflect a certain process of maturation and self-awareness. Prior to World War II, its literary output in this...

The Novel as Transformation Myth: A Study of the Novels of Mongo Beti and Ngugi wa Thiong'o. (Special Issue: Oral Literature)
June 22, 1993... The publications of Beti's Remember Ruben and Perpetua in 1974 and Ngugi's Petals of Blood in 1977 were viewed initially by most critics of African literatures as major literary events. After all, it had been fifteen years since Beti...

Bergers des mots: Poesie peule du Massina. (Special Issue: Oral Literature)
June 22, 1993... This twenty,third volume in the series "Collection Classiques Africaines" is a welcome addition to the published literature on oral literature, for with her usual competence and scholarly rigor, Christiane Seydou has gathered, transcribed,...

Chinua Achebe: A Celebration. (Special Issue: Oral Literature)
June 22, 1993... Celebrations are always a good idea, if the occasion to be celebrated is worthy, and unquestionably Chinua Achebe's sixtieth birthday is an occasion worth celebrating. Achebe is not only one of the two or three most important African writers...

Frankophones Theater im Senegal. (Special Issue: Oral Literature)
June 22, 1993... This book is a historical overview of the development of Senegalese theater in French, with emphasis on the thematic content, from its origins in colonial times to 1987. The body of the text is prefaced by a fifteen-page overview of the...

Repertoire du theatre burkinabe. (Special Issue: Oral Literature)
June 22, 1993... "The present Repertoire du theatre burkinabo lists all the plays by Burkinabe authors of whom I could find any trace: plays edited and published in reviews, newspapers, or publishing houses in Africa or in Europe; plays performed before an...

Whispers from the Caribbean. (Special Issue: Oral Literature)
June 22, 1993... Wilfred Cartey's last work of literary criticism, Whispers from the Caribbean, immediately brings to mind his well-known early work on negritude writing, Whispers from a Continent (1968). The author himself draws attention to the earlier...

Verbal Arts in Madagascar. (Special Issue: Oral Literature)
June 22, 1993... Lee Haring is the preeminent American scholar of Malagasy verbal art. His 1982 Malagasy Tale Index (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia), by far the finest of its genre, cleared new ground for the intertextual study of oral narrative....

Women's Voices on Africa: A Century of Travel Writings. (Special Issue: Oral Literature)
June 22, 1993... Travel writing is one of the principal means by which Europeans have constructed the rest of the world and themselves in relation to it. Although European women have written about African travel from early in the nineteenth century onward,...

Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. (Special Issue: Oral Literature)
June 22, 1993... Mary Louise Pratt characterizes this study of European travel writing about Africa and South America from 1750 to the present as "both a study in genre and a critique of ideology" (4). In both modes, and especially in their interconnection,...

Introduction to African Oral Literature. (Special Issue: Oral Literature)
June 22, 1993... The authors of this book hope to redress the virtual neglect of traditional literature in the Nigerian school system. The book is meant for students in the primary secondary, and tertiary institutions. The first in a projected series, it...

A Dictionary of Oral Literature. (Special Issue: Oral Literature)
June 22, 1993... In addition to a brief preface and an introduction, this book presents definitions of a selection of terms used in discussions of oral literature. Many of the definitions are followed by texts - tales, songs, proverbs, and other forms - which...

Binding Cultures: Black Women Writers in Africa and the Diaspora. (Special Issue: Oral Literature)
June 22, 1993... In Binding Cultures Gay Wilentz explores the literary and cultural connections between African and African-American women as illustrated in the work of six contemporary writers from Africa and the United States. She coins the term...

Voices from the North African Immigrant Community in France: Immigration and Identity in Beur Fiction. (Special Issue: Oral Literature)
June 22, 1993... The word Beur was created in the 1970s by young North African immigrants (mostly of Algerian origin) living in the poorer suburbs of Paris. This disenfranchised youth practices a form of slang called Verlan "which functions by inverting the...

African Studies Thesaurus: Subject Headings for Library Users. (Special Issue: Oral Literature)
June 22, 1993... This thesaurus is a compilation of some 4,000 Library of Congress subject headings for Sub-Saharan Africa. It does not include "all" Library of Congress subject headings that relate specifically to Sub-Saharan Africa, as the author states on...