Oral Culture in the Written African Novel as an Excavation Site for Moral Redemption. The Case of Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and The White Man of God by Kenjo Jumbam

Many researchers have identified that African oral culture has
contributed enormously to the development of African literary discourse
in written European languages, but exploring how oral culture can be
exploited to review contemporary realities is still inadequate. This paper
demonstrates that oral culture in the contemporary African novel written
in the English language can be consulted as an excavation site for moral
redemption in the present global context that is visibly assaulted by high
technological advancement. Using Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
and The white man of God by Kenjo Jumbam, this work identifies and
explores aspects of African oral culture and illustrates how they can be
used as archaeological dig sites to review political, economic and sociocultural concerns in this modern era. Achebe in Things Fall Apart and
Jumbam in The white man of God use different aspects of African oral
culture as tools to emphasize commitment in their creative endeavours
to evaluate the contemporary experience and propose a way forward.
Using new historicism and the theory of negritude for the analysis of
these texts, the study revealed that African oral culture in the written text
is committed to the wellbeing of the African people. It assumes that the
written text in the English language taps from the African oral tradition
to evaluate African collective morality and carve a path for the future.
Through careful reading of how the two writers tactfully put the oral
forms into print, the study concluded that the two novelists share the
opinion that looking back into African oral communities and their
different cultural reservoirs sustained by their oral cultural forms is one
of the relevant ways forward into a wider global context. The findings
revealed that the boundaries between oral culture and the written text
are porous with respect to the African novel and that the authentic
destiny of the modern African is in tapping from the past that is sustained
by its oral culture. The conclusion here is that oral culture can be
revisited to excavate significant knowledge systems that can be used to
address contemporary social concerns and for this reason, the two novels
are read as excavation sites for moral redemption

Keywords: Oral culture, African novel, Excavation, Moral, Redemption