Communication in Africa and its Influence

Looking at the span of human history in its entirety, orality clearly antedates literacy, so deciphering the origins and development of oral and textual forms of communication in Africa, and their relationships, is not an easy task. Many Africanists used to claim that Africa, by which they often meant "sub-Saharan Africa," was defined by oral modes of expression and communication before the intrusion of European influences from the fifteenth century and especially following colonization in the nineteenth. The contention that Africa was ontologically oral and Europe literary had both positive and negative implications. On the positive side, it led to the valorization of oral sources in reconstructions of African history and of oral narratives—what came to be known as oral literature, or orature—in African literature. On the negative side, it oversimplified both African histories and narrative traditions and reinforced the age-old analytical dichotomies in the conceptualization of African and European phenomena.

Undoubtedly, oral communication and traditions have been important modes of social dialogue and transmitting history in African societies for a long time. Oral traditions include oral narratives (epics, legends, and explanatory tales), poetry (praise poetry, chants, and songs), and epigrams (proverbs, riddles, puns, and tongue twisters). Combined, they served to link the past and the present, construct collective worldviews and identity, educate the youth, express political views, and provide entertainment and aesthetic pleasure. The production of oral traditions often involved performance based on a participatory ethic. In many societies, there were highly trained and esteemed custodians of oral tradition. Among the Mande of West Africa, for example, they were known as griots, a word that acquired popularity in the United States following the 1977 airing of the acclaimed television miniseries Roots, based on the 1976 book in which Haley reputedly traced his African ancestry to a village in the Gambia with the help of a griot.

From Thomas Hale's fascinating history, it is clear that griots had many other functions besides being genealogists. They were historians, advisers to rulers, patrons, and other members of society, spokespersons, diplomats, mediators, interpreters and translators, musicians, composers, teachers, exhorters, warriors, witnesses, praise-singers, and ceremony participants during namings, initiations, courtship, marriages, installations, and funerals. Griots first emerged at least a thousand years ago; since then their role has changed, and so have interpretations of their history in the oral accounts themselves and in written accounts by locals and outsiders. In more recent times, the griots have taken advantage of twentieth-century technologies including radio, television, audiocassettes, and CDs to spread their knowledge to new audiences locally and globally. Also, many griot epics, such as the renowned Epic of Sundiata, about the legendary king of the Mali Empire, have been committed to print. While the literature has mostly discussed male griots, recent scholarship has demonstrated that there were female griots, or griottes, as Hale refers to them.

The case of the griots demonstrates the intricate connections between orality and performance. As a medium for the construction, dissemination, and consumption of ideas, performance in the forms of drama and music and dance were particularly important in African societies. According to Modupe Olaogun, African drama dates back to ancient times and includes pantomimes, dance-drama, mask, shadow, and court theaters, heroic recitations, praise-poetry, and market comedy by itinerant troupes, which use, in various combinations and with different degrees of sophistication, role-playing, dialogue, mime, movement, dance, song, puppetry, costume, and scenic spectacle. In the late eighteenth century, African theater entered a new era as contacts with Europe increased and European theater motifs and practices were introduced, elements of which were creatively appropriated and used to further diversify African theatrical expression. Most important was the incorporation of scripted text and reorganization of theatrical space to separate performers and spectators. In Egypt, Ya'qub Sannu (1839–1912) founded modern Egyptian theater with distinct European influences.

Syncretized performances emerged. For example, the black township music theater of South Africa combined the indigenous dramatic modes of storytelling (the isiZulu's ingoma or the isiXhosa's ntsomi) with Western choral and vaudeville forms to create a popular theater, which from the 1930s became a powerful vehicle for antiapartheid resistance. In West Africa, where European settler influence was negligible, new theatrical practices were largely developed through educational institutions. In the 1920s, there emerged in countries such as Ghana and Nigeria itinerant indigenous language theater. By the mid-twentieth century, European influences had waned and Africa's vibrant theater could be divided into distinct forms: literary, popular, and theater for development, each with its own styles, aesthetics, themes, messages, languages, and audiences.

Similarly, music as a mode of cultural production and communication underwent significant changes over the centuries. As with theater, different musical forms developed across the continent, depending on the performance contexts of location and audience, the nature of the performers (spontaneous groups, popular musicians, or specialized musicians), the instruments used (ranging from idiophones to membranophones including drums, aerophones, and chordophones), and their functions (whether entertainment, political, religious, and educational, work-related, or mnemonically to recall past events). According to Turino (2003), despite their obvious differences, music in African societies tended to share a participatory ethic rather than a presentational one (except for music specialists at royal courts), and music and dance were conceptualized as part of the same art form and as social processes rather than as set items or products.

Dance not only included music, but was a complex interactive affair involving movement, theater, sculpture, and religion, whose styles and organization served as social metaphors that communicated aesthetic preferences, issues of kinship, gender, status, and age. Different African societies influenced each other, and from the nineteenth century they began to feel European influences, not least missionary attacks against African dance as "lewd" or "lascivious." In the course of the twentieth century, numerous old dances were reconfigured and recontextualized and new ones emerged. In the 1950s and 1960s, formal dance companies and national dance ensembles practicing traditional dance were created in many countries. In the meantime, new dances such as highlife and rhumba had emerged in Africa's rapidly expanding cities. All this demonstrates, argues Oforiwaa, the continent's remarkable cultural flexibility, capability, and creativity.

Many of the new music and dance styles were adapted from the African diaspora in the Americas. Rhumba, for example, was an Afro-Cuban dance genre created by slaves after emancipation in the 1880s. While African music was exported to the Americas during the era of the Atlantic slave trade, where it was further developed and transformed, as cultural contacts between Africa and the African diaspora grew from the late nineteenth-century diasporan music—from jazz, rhumba, and reggae to pop music and hip hop—it was re-exported back to Africa, where it was reappropriated and converted. In the twentieth century, African music and dance became a powerful medium to express Pan-African, cosmopolitan, and nationalist consciousness, in addition to performing gender, class, and religious ideas and identities.