Man in Africa & His Literature

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Migrations in historic and prehistoric times have taken people, along with their cultural creations, from one edge of Africa to another. Since ancient times traders have journeyed back and forth between inner Africa and the ocean shores. River highways and camel caravans have carried not only men and goods, but information, Tradition, tales and beliefs. Today a story told among the Ivory Coast Baoule also may be heard among the Amazulu far to the south. The trickster hare of Zaire performs the same clever mischief as the spider trickster in Ghana and Togo. Many of the musical instruments of West Africa are equally known in the east and south. And while the music of Central Africa may have local characteristics, it nevertheless belongs to a general musical system on which diverse peoples such as the Ashanti of Ghana, the Shangaan of South Africa and the Kamba of Kenya also draw for their music making. Even where Islamic or European influence has intruded and hybridized the sound, the overall African character can be readily recognized. So, too, with dancing, the arts of orating and storytelling, and games played by adults and children. There is no part of the continent that does not know some variant of the counting game played with beans or stones on carved playing boards, and known under the names wari, munkala, adi and many others.
Though religious systems vary, there is a general ized African view regarding the forces of nature. Throughout much of West, Central, East and Southern Africa there prevails (except where initiated by European influence) the concept of a total world made up of the seen and the unseen, of forces that for all their invisibility are none the less real and which must be coped with through rituals and magico-religious means.

The goodwill of the ancestors is vital to the well-being of the living, and the dead are therefore supplicated and placated by an unending series of individual acts and prescribed rituals. While contacts with Islam and Christianity have moderated such concepts, the African view of a partly seen, partly unseen universe remains strong. The invocation of a Christian saint is not regarded as greatly different from appeals to one''s ancestors; nor, to many is the Christian God, remote and invisible, incompatible with the supreme sky deities who live in the traditions of the Yoruba, the Ashanti, the Bantu cultures of Central Africa, and others. Intruding non-African religious systems have themselves vouched for the existence of a physical world surrounded by spiritual forces, reinforcing what earlier generations of Africans saw as the real nature of the universe. Thus the oral literature of Africa reflects ideas, themes, suppositions and truths that are widely shared, at the same time that it reveals creations unique to, and particularized by, a tribe, village or region. A tribe may be united with a mainstream of African traditions and yet have legends of its own heroes, kings and demigods, its own conflicts and migrations, and its unique ancient origins. A village may reshape, to its own liking, a widespread tale- A narrator may embellish, recast and refine stories known elsewhere and give them the mark of his own creative genius, or compose
Man in Africa & His Literature Originally published in Shvoong: http://www.shvoong.com/humanities/1677358-man-africa-literature/