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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:The idea of democracy in African tales
Author:Dong'Aroga, JosephISNI
Year:1999
Periodical:Research in African Literatures
Volume:30
Issue:1
Pages:140-153
Language:English
Geographic term:West Africa
Subjects:democracy
folk tales
External link:http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/research_in_african_literatures/v030/30.1aroga.pdf
Abstract:At the origin of each work of oral literature is an individual author who does not create ex-nihilo. He is himself the result of an education, of a sum of experiences that are expressed through his work. Various social categories and structures are reflected by oral literature. This article examines how ideas of democracy are reflected by oral literature. It presents examples of a corpus of texts from West Africa that effectively come from the precolonial era. Although the storyteller reinvents folktales and expresses them in his own words, the structure and the ideological content nevertheless remain the same. The tales show that democracy, at the political and judicial levels, was a reality in the lives of the societies that produced these texts. Bibliogr.
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