oral literature tradition

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

the body of verbal artistic expression — including epic narratives, praise poetry, riddles, proverbs, folktales, and song — transmitted across generations through memorisation, performance, and apprenticeship rather than through writing; African oral traditions are among the most elaborate and formally complex in the world, with genres such as the Mande epic of Sundiata, the Yoruba oriki praise poetry, the Somali gabay verse form, and the Zulu izibongo achieving levels of compositional sophistication comparable to written literary canons; the study of oral literature, pioneered by scholars such as Ruth Finnegan and Isidore Okpewho, has challenged Eurocentric assumptions that equate literacy with intellectual advancement and has established oral performance as a domain of knowledge production and cultural authority in its own right