The Unwritten Literature of the Igbo-Speaking People of South-Eastern Nigeria

Extract

Our attention has been drawn by Mrs. Chadwick1 to the need for systematic work on the collection and study of the unwritten literature—the thought of men in artistic form, to use her own phrase—of the peoples of Africa. This article raises very briefly certain points in connection with this study and attempts to illustrate them from Igbo unwritten literature. The causes for the comparative neglect of any thorough research work on African unwritten literature cannot be discussed here. But in passing one may note the tendency to rely predominantly on visual observation which has spread from the natural sciences to other fields and among them to that of social anthropology. It can, however, hardly be doubted that a systematic collection and study of this literature is desirable from the linguistic, the sociological, and the literary point of view.