Arab and Berber oral traditions in North Africa

Abstract

Background and research trends North African oral traditions have left early and powerful traces despite their apparent ephemeral nature. The Golden Ass by the Roman writer Apuleius, born in Algeria in the middle of the first century of the Common Era drew, in text and texture, on the North African oral culture of his era. Apuleius, whose first language was probably Punic rather than Libyan (Berber), nonetheless claimed membership of two distinct Berber communities. To these African connections were attributed both his strengths (a facility for verbal artistry, a seeming naturalness and lack of artifice in his writing, an infusion of the techniques of African oral literature and magical and religious traditions in his work) and his weaknesses (the same). His work, like other literary works of the “African School,” enlivened Greek and Roman metropolitan literature – displaying vivid color, a fondness for allegory, and a grotesque realism harvested from, by that time in western North Africa, a rich blending of Phoenician and various Berber cultures and in eastern North Africa, ancient Egyptian culture. Until recently, the influences of the Berber or Egyptian languages and culture(s) on Punic, Latin, or Greek have remained mostly unconsidered (but see Scobie 1983 for a discussion of the influence of Berber nannies and their storytelling on the children of Phoenician or Latin-speaking households and Black Athena and the controversy surrounding it).