African Folklore

African folklore is one of the most complex, most ancient, and most influential bodies of folk tradition on the face of the earth. From the trickster figures of the West African forest — Anansi the Spider, Zomo the hare, Leuk the hare, Kui the tortoise — to the desert djinn of North Africa and the mantis-trickster of the Kalahari, from the masked initiation societies of the forest to the great masked dancers of the Tsonga, from the Yoruba orisha of Nigeria to the sangoma diviner of the Zulu, from the griot of the Mande to the pharaonic inheritance of the Nile, African folklore is the work of more than a thousand distinct peoples, in more than two thousand distinct languages, over more than four thousand years of recorded history.

The African continent, in other words, has produced one of the great folkloric traditions of the human race, and it has been a major source of folkloric material for the entire modern world. The African-American trickster, the Caribbean Anancy, the Brazilian Iemanjá, the Haitian Loa, the New Orleans voodoo — all carry in their bones the inheritance of African folklore. The blues, jazz, soul, funk, hip-hop, Afrobeats, mbalax, soukous, highlife, and rumba all carry it too. The modern folkloric revival of the African continent — from Amos Tutuola and D. O. Fagunwa to Wole Soyinka, Zakes Mda, Ben Okri, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and the Afrofuturist movement — is one of the most important cultural events of the twenty-first century.

The Diversity of African Oral Literature

The first thing to understand about African folklore is its sheer diversity. The continent has more than three thousand distinct living languages, more than two thousand distinct cultures, and folk traditions that range from the rainforest of the Congo to the sand seas of the Sahara, from the Cape of Good Hope to the mountains of Ethiopia, from the savanna of the Sahel to the Swahili coast of East Africa. There is no “African folklore” in the singular. There are African folkloric traditions.

The common threads, however, are real. The most important of them are the centrality of the spoken word, the closeness of the community of the living to the community of the ancestors, the importance of the trickster as a moral voice, the centrality of the mask and the drum in the ritual life, the role of the diviner as the keeper of the moral and physical health of the community, and the dominance of the oral tradition — the poem, the story, the song, the riddle, the proverb — as the central medium of the tradition.

The West African folkloric complex — the Akan of Ghana, the Yoruba of Nigeria, the Fon of Benin, the Mande of Mali, the Wolof of Senegal, the Hausa of the Sahel, the Igbo of south-eastern Nigeria — is the largest in the continent, and the one best known in the wider world. The Southern African folkloric complex — the San, the Zulu, the Xhosa, the Sotho-Tswana, the Ndebele, the Shona, the Venda, the Tsonga, the Ovambo — is the second, and is the oldest continuous one on the continent. The North African complex — the Egyptian, the Berber, the Arab, the Coptic — is the third, and is the most deeply connected to the older Mediterranean and Middle Eastern folkloric tradition.

The Trickster Figures

The trickster is the most important single figure in the African folkloric imagination. From the Anansi of the Akan to the mantis-trickster of the San and the jackal of the Zulu, the tortoise-trickster of the Yoruba and the Fon, and the hare-trickster of the Kalahari, the trickster is the central comic voice of the African tradition.

The trickster has a recurring role. He is the bringer of stories, the maker of the world, the teacher of wisdom, the thief of the gods’ secrets, the violator of the taboo, the king of the carnival, the lord of the reversal. He is also, in his other aspect, the small, the weak, the ugly, the hungry, the lazy, the vain, the cowardly. He is the figure of the village’s worst self, played for laughs, and the laughs are the school of the community.

The Akan Anansi is the most popular of the African tricksters. He is the spider, the weaver of the web, the trickster who stole the stories of the sky god Nyame and brought them down to the people of the earth. The Anansi stories are a complete philosophy: they are a theory of knowledge (the spider is the keeper of the wisdom), a theory of social order (the spider is the small man’s victory over the great), and a theory of humour (the spider is the lord of the comic reversal). The Anansi stories have crossed the Atlantic, become the Brer Rabbit of the American South, the Anancy of the Caribbean, the Bru Anansi of the Suriname forests, and they are the central folkloric inheritance of the African diaspora.

The San mantis — //Kaggen in the /Xam belief, the Cagn of the Khoikhoi — is the oldest of the African tricksters, going back to the rock art of the Drakensberg and the Brandberg, painted by the San at least twenty-five thousand years ago. //Kaggen is the creator, the trickster, the teacher, the lord of the rain and the eland. The //Kaggen myths are the central folkloric inheritance of the southern San, and they are the foundation of the trance dance of the Kalahari.

The Zulu and Southern Bantu trickster cycle — the jackal, the hyena, the hare, and the bull-frog — is the largest in the African continent. The cycle runs from the Cape to the equator, and from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, in hundreds of distinct local forms. The Zulu trickster tales have been collected, transcribed, and translated by Henry Callaway (Nursery Tales, Traditions, and Histories of the Zulus, 1868), by the Swiss missionary Henri-Alexandre Junod (whose Folktales of the Tsonga is the standard text), and by the American folklorist Zakes Mda in the modern period.

The trickster cycle of the West African forest — the hare of the Fon and the Yoruba, the tortoise of the Akan, the spider of the Ashanti — is a parallel tradition, with its own cycle of stories, its own praise-songs, and its own proverbs. The Yoruba trickster, Ijàpá, the tortoise, is the lord of the world turned upside down: he loses his tail, he outwits the elephant, he marries the daughter of the sky, and he is undone by his own vanity.

The Griot Tradition

The griot — known as jali in Mande, gawlo in Wolof, arale in Hausa, bajan in Fulani, g’* in Songhai — is the most important professional figure of West African folk tradition. The griot is a historian, a praise-singer, a genealogist, a diplomat, a musician. In a region without written history for most of its long past, the griot is the archive. The griot is the one who knows the name of the king’s great-grandfather, the song of the great battle, the curse of the ungrateful son.

The griot’s art is the praise-name — the sila of the Mande, the tindi of the Wolof, the kirari of the Hausa. The praise-name is a long, elaborate verbal painting of a person, in which the griot names the ancestors, recounts the deeds, invokes the baraka (the blessed power), and so creates, in sound, the public figure of the patron. The praise-name is also a contract: in calling up the name, the griot is the one who keeps the line of the patron alive in the memory of the community.

The great families of the Mande griot tradition — the Diabaté, the Kouyaté, the Diallo — have been keeping the Sunjata Epic for at least seven centuries. The Kouyaté family of the Mande has produced a long line of great griots, among them the great singer Sory Kandia Kouyaté (1924–1977), who performed before kings and presidents from Guinea to Morocco, and the late-twentieth-century master Banzoumana Sissoko, one of the most respected voices of Bamako. The Senegalese griot Youssou N’Dour is the most famous modern griot in the world, and the griot tradition has now been carried into the studio and the pop concert.

The griot tradition is also a literary tradition. The Mande of Mali have been writing down the Sunjata Epic for at least a century, and the great modern Mande writers — Mamadou Diawara, Sibylle Finke, David Conrad — have been among the most important scholars of the griot tradition. The Malian writer Amadou Hampâté Bâ — himself descended from the Diabaté griot family — wrote The Fortunes of Wangrin (1973) and Kaïdara (1969), both central works of the modern griot tradition.

The Ancestor Cult and the Spirit World

The second great pillar of the African folkloric tradition is the centrality of the ancestor. The ancestors — the amadlozi of the Zulu, the eire of the Igbo, the midzimu of the Shona, the arw of the Akan — are the close, present, active dead. They are the parents, the grandparents, the great-grandparents, the great-chiefs, the heroes of the lineage. They are present in the daily life of the family, and they are honoured in the morning libation, the memulo (the first-fruits), the ukubuyisa (the bringing-back of the spirit of a dead chief), and the great mawlid of the village saint.

The ancestor is not a ghost. The ancestor is a member of the family who has crossed over, and who is honoured and consulted. The ancestor brings the rain, the harvest, the healthy child, the successful hunt. The ancestor punishes the broken taboo, the ungrateful son, the lie to the elder. The ancestor is the moral voice of the lineage, and the isangoma (the diviner) is the one who can speak to him.

The spirit world of the African folkloric tradition is populated not only by the ancestors but by a vast range of nature spirits, of which the most important are the water spirits, the forest spirits, the air spirits, and the spirits of the desert. The water spirits include the great Mami Wata of the West African coast, the Yemoja of the Yoruba, the mami of the Igbo, the Maman Dlo of the Haitian forests, and the Iemanjá of the Candomblé of Brazil. The forest spirits include the egungun of the Yoruba, the aziza of the West African coast, and the nkisi of the Kongo. The air spirits include the shayṭān and djinn of the Sahara and the wider Islamic tradition. The desert spirits include the ghoul of the Bedouin, the ifrit of the Thousand and One Nights, the marid of the high seas, and the jann of the household wall.

The Masked Initiation Societies

The third great pillar of the African folkloric tradition is the masked initiation society. The masked initiation society is the school in which the children of the village are made into the adults of the community. The most famous of these are the Poro and the Sande of the Mende of Sierra Leone, the Ekpo of the Igbo of south-eastern Nigeria, the Gelede and the Egungun of the Yoruba of south-western Nigeria, the Makishi of the Tsonga of Mozambique, the Vodu of the Fon of Benin, the N’domo of the Bambara of Mali, the Atinga of the Mossi of Burkina Faso.

The masked initiation is, in the first place, a school. The initiate learns the songs, the dances, the proverbs, the histories, the moral codes, the skills of the trade, the secrets of the medicine, the names of the ancestors. The initiate also learns, in many cases, a new language, a new set of names, and a new identity. The sowo of the Mende Sande, the Zulu of the Tsonga Makishi, the egungun of the Yoruba Egungun — these are the secret names and the secret identities of the initiated.

The masked initiation is also, in the second place, a theatre. The masked dancers are the great actors of the community. The Egungun masquerader of the Yoruba, in his long strips of brilliantly coloured cloth, is the ancestor himself, returning in whirlwind dances to bless the lineage. The Gelede masquerader of the Yoruba, in his elaborate wooden superstructure representing the figures of the community, is the mother-power itself, dancing the dance of the women of the community. The Makishi masquerader of the Tsonga, in his great wooden mask, is the bridegroom, the ancestor, the wild spirit of the bush, and his dance is the central ritual of the initiation.

The masked initiation is also, in the third place, a centre of political power. The Poro society of the Mende was, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a shadow government of the region. The Ekpo society of the Igbo was the keeper of the law. The Egungun society of the Yoruba was the chief, the priest, the babalawo of the community.

The Divination Systems

The fourth great pillar of the African folkloric tradition is the system of divination. The diviner is the one who speaks to the ancestors, who reads the bones, who throws the cowries, who interprets the Odu verses of Ifa. The diviner is the doctor, the priest, the judge, the seer.

The most important of the African divination systems are the Ifa of the Yoruba of Nigeria, the Fâ of the Fon of Benin and Togo, the Komo of the Bambara of Mali, the Sande of the Mende of Sierra Leone, the Akam of the Bamileke of Cameroon, the Candomblé of the Afro-Brazilian tradition, the Vodou of the Haitian tradition, the Santería of the Cuban tradition.

The Ifa system of the Yoruba is the largest in the world. The Odu Ifa — the verses of the 256 Odu — number in the thousands, and they form one of the most extensive bodies of oral literature in the world. The Ifa verses are chanted by the babalawo (the father of the secret) at the consultation, and they are used to diagnose the cause of the illness, the broken taboo, the lost husband, the ungrateful son, the curse of the witch. The Ifa system has been carried across the Atlantic by the slave trade to become the heart of the Santería of Cuba, the Candomblé of Brazil, and the Vodou of Haiti.

The Fâ system of the Fon of Benin is the second largest. It is closely related to the Ifa of the Yoruba, and it has been carried across the Atlantic to become the heart of the Vodu of the Caribbean, the Vodou of Haiti, and the Candomblé of Brazil.

The Yoruba Orisha

The Yoruba of south-western Nigeria have built one of the most sophisticated folkloric systems in Africa, and the heart of it is the pantheon of the orisha — the great gods, the children of Olodumare, the supreme deity. The most important of the orisha are:

Shango, the god of thunder and of the divine kingship of Old Oyo. Shango is the lord of the dundun drum, the lord of the Odu Ifa verse Ofun, the lord of the Oshe double-bell. Shango is the great god of Yoruba power.
Ogun, the god of iron, of the smith, of the road, and of the war. Ogun is the lord of the path, the lord of the tool, the lord of the journey. Ogun is the patron of the babalawo (the diviner), the adura (the prayer), and the Odu Ifa verse Ogbè.
Yemoja, the mother of the waters and of all the fish. Yemoja is the great mother, the goddess of the river, the goddess of the surf, the goddess of the seven seas.
Eshu-Elegba, the trickster-divinity of the crossroads, the messenger between the gods and the humans. Eshu is the great lord of the trickster cycle, the bringer of misfortune, the master of the joke.
Obatala, the father of the white cloth, the lord of creation, the god of peace, the patron of the lame, the friend of the cripple.
Oshun, the goddess of the river of Oshun, the goddess of love, the goddess of beauty, the goddess of the small, the goddess of the honeybee.

The orisha of the Yoruba have been carried across the Atlantic by the slave trade to become the saint of the Santería of Cuba, the orixá of the Candomblé of Brazil, the loa of the Vodou of Haiti, the vodun of the Vodu of the Caribbean, the shango of the Shango tradition of Trinidad. The survival of the orisha in the New World is one of the great folkloric stories of the modern world.

The Forest Spirits and the Water Spirits

The forest spirit of the African folkloric tradition is one of the great folkloric figures of the continent. The most important of the forest spirits are the egungun masqueraders of the Yoruba, the aziza faerie-forest beings of the West African coast, the jengu of the Sawa coast of Cameroon, and the nkisi powers of the Kongo. The forest spirit is the wild, the dangerous, the unknown. It is the lord of the bush, the lord of the night, the lord of the threshold between village and wilderness. The forest spirit is honoured with drumming, with dancing, with the offering of the goat, the chicken, the palm-wine.

The water spirit of the African folkloric tradition is the Mami Wata of the West African coast, the great mother of the waters. Mami Wata is half-woman, half-fish, with a long flowing hair, a comb, a mirror, and a snake-body. She rules the lagoon, the river, the sea. She is the goddess of the fisher, the trader, the traveller, the wife. She is honoured with the offering of the gin, the palm-oil, the perfume, the mirror. She is the central figure of the shrine of the West African coast.

The Desert Djinn and the Egyptian Inheritance

The desert djinn of the North African tradition is one of the great folkloric figures of the continent. The djinn of the desert is a creature of fire and air, made by God from the smoke of the samum (a wind without smoke). The djinn is present in the older religion of the desert, and the Quran accepted the djinn into Islam. The folkloric djinn of the desert — the ghoul of the Bedouin, the ifrit of the Thousand and One Nights, the marid of the high seas, the jann of the household wall — are the great figures of the North African folkloric imagination.

The Egyptian inheritance — the ancient Egyptian inheritance of the pharaohs, the Nile, the temple, the tomb, the papyrus, the hieroglyph, the Odu, the maat — is the deepest folkloric layer of the continent. The survival of the figures of Isis and Osiris in the modern folk memory of Upper Egypt, the survival of the pharaonic revival in the Egyptian popular culture, the survival of the Coptic calendar as the calendar of the country, the survival of the ancient Egyptian in the Coptic liturgy — all are part of the same story.

The African Folklorists

The African folklorists of the twentieth century are among the most important in the world. The Yoruba folklorist Amos Tutuola wrote The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954), two of the strangest and most influential novels of the twentieth century. The Yoruba folklorist D. O. Fagunwa wrote the first Yoruba novel, Ògbójú Ọdẹ́ nínú Igbó Irúnmọlẹ̀ (1938), a forest-adventure in which a hunter meets the spirits of the bush. The Southern African novelist and playwright Zakes Mda — whose Ways of Dying (1995), The Heart of Redness (2000) and The Madonna of Excelsior (2002) are explicitly grounded in Southern African folk tradition — is the most important modern reteller of the Xhosa, Sotho and San cycles. The Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who writes in Gĩkũyũ rather than English, has been the central figure of the East African folkloric revival, in works such as A Grain of Wheat and Wizard of the Crow. The Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe is the founding father of the modern African novel, and his Things Fall Apart (1958) is a major work of folklore. The Nigerian novelist and dramatist Wole Soyinka (Nobel Prize 1986) — whose Death and the King’s Horseman (1975) draws on the Yoruba Egungun tradition — is the major figure of the Yoruba folkloric revival in modern drama. The Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz (Nobel Prize 1988) wrote the Cairo Trilogy, the great folkloric novel of the modern Arab world.

The Modern Echoes in Music, Cinema, and Afrofuturism

The African folk tradition continues to be a living inheritance. In music, the older world of the drum and the praise-name is most clearly present in the Afrobeats, Fuji, Jùjú and Fela-era Afrobeat of Nigeria (Fela Kuti, King Sunny Ade, Burna Boy, Wizkid), the Mande praise-song of Salif Keita and Ali Farka Touré, the mbira tradition of Zimbabwe (Thomas Mapfumo, Stella Chiweshe), the mbalax of Youssou N’Dour, the isicathamiya of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and the South African jazz of Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela. Each of these is a working continuation of a regional folk root.

In cinema, the Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène is the founder of African cinema and made folklore the central subject of his films (Mandabi, Xala, Ceddo); the Burkinabè director Idrissa Ouédraogo (Tilai, Yaaba) and the Malian Souleymane Cissé (Yeelen) work in the same tradition; and the Tunisian-born, Algerian-trained Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina won the Palme d’Or in 1975 for Chronicle of the Years of Fire, the only Arab-African film ever to do so.

In the Afrofuturist movement, African folklore has become the central inheritance. The African-American writer Octavia Butler built the Parable and Lilith’s Brood sequences on African-diaspora spiritual frameworks. The Ghanaian-American writer Nnedi Okofor — Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Award winner for Who Fears Death and the Binti trilogy — is the most influential contemporary African-diasporic speculative voice. The Kenyan filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu (Pumzi, Rafiki) brings an Afrofuturist visual aesthetic to East African folk material. The Jamaican-Canadian writer Nalo Hopkinson (Brown Girl in the Ring, Midnight Robber) extends the older Caribbean folkloric substrate into speculative fiction. The Zimbabwean-Scottish writer T. L. Huchu (The Hairy Neil series) writes from the Shona and Ndebele tradition. The most striking of the recent Afrofuturist works is Ryan Coogler’s film Black Panther (2018, 2022), in which the folkloric inheritance of the African continent is the central source.

The Influence of Slavery and Diaspora on African-American Folklore

The slave trade, between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, carried the African folk tradition across the Atlantic to the Americas. The most concentrated point of the carrying was the Bight of Benin, the slave coast of West Africa, the coast of Ghana, Togo, Benin, and western Nigeria. The traditions of the Akan, the Yoruba, the Fon, the Mande, the Igbo, and the Hausa were carried in the holds of the slave ships across the Middle Passage to the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, the cotton fields of the American South, the gold-mines of Brazil, and the rice fields of the Carolinas.

The African-American folkloric inheritance is the great inheritance of the modern African-American culture. The Anansi of the Akan became the Anancy of Jamaica, the Brer Rabbit of the American South, the Bru Anansi of the Suriname forests. The Mami Wata of the Fon became the Maman Dlo of the Haitian forests, the Iemanjá of the Candomblé of Brazil, the Yemayá of the Cuban Santería. The orisha of the Yoruba became the saint of the Santería of Cuba, the loa of the Vodou of Haiti, the orixá of the Candomblé of Brazil. The egungun masqueraders of the Yoruba became the maskaron of the Caribbean carnival. The griot of the Mande became the griot of the New World — the jalis of Suriname, the jayu of Haiti, the cantadores of Brazil, the griots of the American South of the old slave plantations.

The African-American folkloric tradition is the foundation of the modern African-American culture. The slave narrative, the gospel song, the blues, the jazz, the soul, the funk, the hip-hop, the calypso, the soca, the reggae, the samba, the rumba, the marimba, the bamboula, the candombe — all carry in their bones the African folk tradition. The African-American literary tradition, from the slave-narrative writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through Frederick Douglass to the Harlem Renaissance (Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston), to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 70s (Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison), to the contemporary novel (Colson Whitehead, Ta-Nehisi Coates), is rooted in the same inheritance.