Orality and Literacy
Orality tradition in African cultures and European criticism For centuries, generations after generations, orality has been the vehicle driving the history of the old continent. ... Despite the high cultural value of orality, and it’s ‘reliability’ by Africans, many European intellectuals criticize orality for its lack of consistency and factual knowledge. ... For many reasons, it seems that the western culture critics against orality in Africa tend to only deprive Africans from their historical heritage. In today’s world, literacy and orality are viewed as important index differentiating what historians refer to as “The Dark Ages”, and the modern literate, high-tech world. ... In reality, African literature originated as a political counter-offensive strategy against the uprising European cultural colonization through literacy, and language. ... " --Chinua Achebe, “Anthills of the Savannah (1987) Indeed, it’s really difficult to learn about the structure of African societies, and African cultures without understanding the concept of orality, and the importance of this concept to the global African continent. ... Most critics about African traditional orality come from the fact that the Europeans tend to judge our culture based on their own sets of standard, which, obviously does not apply to our cultural realities. ... As it was stated previously, a marriage between oral tradition and literacy will only help historians, and writers (Africans and non-Africans) to effectively put into writings forgone values, unbounded mysteries of the “Dark Age”, and courage lessons yet to be learned from the ancestors. ... It was how our cultures survived…Growth of orality displays that the human thread of communication keeps us together.