Orature, Literature and the Media

Abstract

Summary This paper argues that people yearn to return to an Africa, not as it actually was, but as it should have been. An Africa based on the written accounts of colonialists and travellers because the Africans themselves had been incapable of “writing” in the strictest sense of the word ‐ a contention negating, for example, the significance of drawings as a form of “writing”. The African anger at a loss of origin because the past is inaccessible, is understandable, for the past can neither be denied, but nor should it be regarded as having been akin to Paradise. The privilege of writing and possessing information was confined to the select few until the advent of oral and visual media catering for the illiterate masses. Whereas the original poet/narrator commanded respect and enjoyed a captive audience within his closed community which exacted the accurate retelling of an event, the media of today babble incessantly, also repetitively, but the signifier is of no consequence in the eternal quest for the original and the innovative. Recording traditional narration by the imbongi will be a travesty as it cannot bring back the oral poetry of Africa, per se, because it will merely become a media event, transgressing all boundaries, signifying nothing.