Challenges of Ethnopoetic Research in African Oral Literature in the 21st Century

Abstract

The point of departure for this paper is a view that the significance of effective human communication to sustainability of development is in no doubt and that this effectiveness has been enhanced by creativity of expression (literature) throughout generations. In the last few decades African literatures have constituted the new literatures of the world and African oral tradition, in which oral poetry is integral, forms critical roots that nourish form and content pervading these literatures in complete disapproval of the unfortunate notion that African oral literatures are the old and the obsolete art forms. The correct view of scholars is that African oral literature is a dynamic literary continuum informed by and impacting people's everyday experience as they navigate into their future. As the family of scholarship continues to employ multi-disciplinary approaches seeking to facilitate an understanding of our worlds, that effort will be significantly limited if it excludes studies on our rich repertoire of literary cultures. This paper observes that critical literary study, no doubt, needs to be anchored on appropriate theoretical ground and the Ethnopoetics theory has been successfully applied to such effort. The paper sets out to demonstrate that in the process of applying tenets of Ethnopoetics to the study of African literatures in the 21^st century, there are precedents of different types of unique challenges which ethnographers need to understand and address. The paper samples some of them, explores their possible implications to research, and recommends proactive and reactive strategies of addressing them in order to realise valid findings and credible conclusions. Empirical data for this study is drawn from an ethnopoetic research conducted between 2014 and 2017 on the cultural aesthetics of the oral poetry of Makindi ritual of the Mbeere community of Kenya. The research in reference and the discourse of this paper are anchored on theoretical tenets drawn from the strands of Ethnopoetics by Dennis Tedlock and Dell Hymes. The paper argues that sustainable development of a community is significantly predicated upon the validity of findings and conclusions from studies about such people because it is through results of such research that social and economic policies are designed and their implementation is significant to sustainable development.