African Oral Story-telling Tradition and the Zimbabwean Novel in English

The Memory and African Cultural Productions series aims to establish a new intellectual discourse that will move beyond the limits of historical representations of Africans in dominant narratives. It will reflect on the dynamic nature of African memory in both written and unwritten cultural production and revise the notion of a single knowledge economy based on the written word. It hopes to show that there are no authentic, autonomous memories that lie outside cultural power and domination.

This study presents a break with previous literary criticism that has vilified orality, in an effort to understand the interface between orality and the black Zimbabwean novel. It traces the ways in which the African oral story-telling tradition has survived within the black Zimbabwean novel in English. The author critically analyses the works of eight leading Zimbabwean creative writers, revealing how they have used oral story-telling traditions in their literature. He argues that throughout the colonisation, liberation and post- independence periods, African orature was and remains a mode of expressing resistance to authoritarian ideas and cultural dominance, and a social vision.