Much of Nigerian oral poetry, especially the musical genre, has been increasingly reduced to digital formats through the instrumentality of new media technologies. This transformation has, however, not been sufficiently acknowledged in oral literary researches and discourses. This alternative existence acquired by the oral forms manifests itself in digital technological modes like CDs, VCDs, DVDs, digital radio and television and the internet which assure them of longevity. This paper, therefore, engages Nigerian oral poetry and its inscription in digital processes using new media technologies. In particular, it negotiates the trajectory of transforming primary orality to secondary and tertiary orality through which oral performances like songs have acquired new modes of existence and meanings by way of recordings and digitalization using the new media. Many of these poetic forms have travelled through historical time to the postmodern moment as migrant metaphors and have become stored in digital forms thus making them new wine though preserved in the old wineskins of the poets and new media processes. Using an emergent generation of Nigerian popular poets and musical artistes, the paper problematizes the episteme of authorship. It interrogates the very idea of authorship in the contested and interstitial space of communal and individual authorship in the digital age where the term has undergone radical destabilisation. Who owns the oral forms, for instance? Is it the so-called anonymous composer in traditional society, the collector or recorder who mediates the creative process and becomes a surrogate agent, or the contemporary artist who is heir to this timeless tradition of oral intellection through performances that are digitalized and stored in retrieval systems, or is it a virtual community of authors, or a hybrid of all of these? The paper concludes that digital technologies are a means of preserving these oral forms and endowing them with vitality and enduring relevance to meet the immediacy and urgency of postmodern societal needs in Nigeria.
This article pays tribute to Akiga Sai (1898–1959) and his iconic status as the first great Tiv writer who recorded Tiv history, customs, beliefs and experiences during the turbulence unleashed by colonization and missionary intervention in the early twentieth century. It offers an appreciation of Akiga's vivid writing style and his achievements as both a historian and a recorder of his people's way of life, which was fast changing. The article presents the perspective of a younger Tiv generation who encountered Akiga Sai's work in the course of their education. Akiga, from this viewpoint, is not only an individual pioneer and creative genius, but also the representative of a better era, after which moral decay and a decline in communal health and well-being set in.
In the Senegambia region of West Africa exists the Sundiata Epic, perhaps the most famous, significant, and valued piece of folklore. The epic narrativizes the illustrious life and legendary career/achievements of Sundiata, the founder/emperor of the old Mali Empire. There are as many versions as there are raconteurs of the epic. Despite the differences, the common thematic center is that Sundiata established a vast empire from the ruins of Ghana Empire in the thirteenth century that stretched from the west of the Niger River to the Atlantic Coast. The epic signals the organic link between history and literature, tradition and continuity as it anticipates the emergence of a new world order with the advent of an inchoate Arabic culture. The literary assumptions of the epic are obvious from the creativity and ingenuity of the griots who have kept it alive as a unique contribution to world literature through their telling and re‐telling rites.
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