Overview

Welcome to this 2025 Third Edition of the songs and stories of Africa - some of them, that is, for their voices are legion and they are still singing. Ruth Finnegan's Oral Literature in Africa was first published in 1970, and since then has been widely praised as one of the most important books in its field. Based on years of fieldwork, the study traces the history of storytelling across the continent of Africa. This edition makes Finnegan's ground-breaking research available to the next generation of scholars. It includes an introduction as well as its original chapters on poetry, prose, ""drum language"" and drama, and an overview of the social, linguistic and historical background of oral literature in Africa. Ruth thanks Callender Press and especially John Hunt (layout artist and cartographer) for sending forth this new edition of the now old but, I see, still green Oral literature in Africa. But I wonder whether perhaps it is no longer needed, not, that is, in the same way. For as the wheels of the great world turn and the words will dwell for ever they do not by now have to be heard under an ""Africa"" title. For Africa is no longer a marginal or extreme or ""exotic"", othered, section of the globe, but an accepted and loved part of our many-peopled, sounding, scintillating world a dear part of us all. The voices may sometimes be partly veiled and unrecognised, but they are always there. They are shared and sharing with us all, no longer separate. Long may you live, great songs and stories and sayings of Africa, no longer shining under a foreign, far, colonial sun but now here, a full, accepted, part of the great, everlasting, heritage of all nations. Additional ResourcesThis volume is complemented by original recordings of stories and songs from the Limba country (Sierra Leone), collected by Finnegan during her fieldwork in the late 1960s.

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9781919260303

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Ruth Finnegan FBA OBE was born in 1933 in the beautiful fraught once-island city of Derry, Northern Ireland, and brought up there, together with several magical years during the war in Donegal. She had her education at the little Ballymore First School in County Donegal, Londonderry High School, Mount (Quaker) School York, then first class honours in Classics (Literae humaniores) and a doctorate in Anthropology at Oxford. This was followed by fieldwork and university teaching in Africa, principally Sierra Leone and Nigeria. She then joined the pioneering Open University as a founding member of the academic staff, where she spent the rest of her career apart from three years - and more fieldwork - at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji, and is now, proudly, an Open University Emeritus Professor. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1996, and is also an Honorary Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford.

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