African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

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as part of the Oxford Library of African Literature series. Of late, Isidore Okpewho’s
African Oral Literature has made a major mark in the study of the subject.
In the United States, African students at such institutions as Indiana University, the
University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of
California at Berkeley have contributed to the corpus of doctoral dissertations on African
folklore. At Indiana University, Kwesi Yankah’s 1985 dissertation (The Proverb in the
Context of Akan Rhetoric) won the Esther Kingsley Award for outstanding doctoral
dissertation, the first folklore dissertation to win the prestigious award.
On the African continent itself, a sustained study of African folklore (oral literature in
particular) began in the 1960s under the patronage of institutes of African studies, and
later in autonomous departments of Linguistics, African Languages and Literature, and
English. In Sudan, there is now a Department of Folklore at the University of Khartoum.
In most of these departments, trained folklorists who are Africans teach courses in oral
literature or folklore.
Established in 1972, the Department of Folklore at the University of Khartoum, Sudan
collects and documents traditional genres and artifacts from different parts of Sudan, and
trains graduate students in Sudanese, African, and Middle Eastern folklore. It offers
graduate diplomas, and masters and doctoral degrees in folklore. Courses offered cover
topics including folklore theory, fieldwork methodology, applied folklore, introduction to
African and Middle Eastern folklore, and the structural analysis of myth. The faculty
includes Sayyid Hammid Hurreiz and Sharafeldin Abdel-salam, both of whom obtained
their doctoral degrees at Indiana University. Ahmed Abdal Rahim Nasr, a third faculty
member, obtained his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Besides the Department of Folklore, other institutions in Sudan that collect and
analyze folklore materials include the College of Fine and Applied Arts and the Center
for Folklore Studies, which is a wing of the Ministry of Culture.
Sudan has hosted international conferences on folklore, the first of which was in 1968,
and the second in 1970. Proceedings of the first conference have been published as Sudan
in Africa, edited by Yusuf Fadl. The second proceedings were published under the title
Directions in Sudanese Folklore and Linguistics. In 1981, Khartoum again hosted a
conference on Folklore and National Development. Folklore monographs and journals in
Sudan include Sudanese Heritage Series, Sudan Notes and Records, Journal of Sudanese
Studies, Journal of Culture, and Al-Waza. There is also an archive in the Folklore
department, which currently holds over three thousand tapes.
In Nigeria, the academic study of African folklore was initiated in the latter part of the
1960s, when oral literature courses were taught at the University of Ibadan, the
University of Lagos, and the University of Nigeria. These universities offered a B.A. in
Yoruba within the institutes of African Studies. From 1970 onwards the study of oral
literature in Nigeria shifted from African Studies institutes to departments of Linguistics
and Nigerian Languages or African Languages and Literatures, in Lagos, Ife, Ibadan and
Illorin universities. Degrees offered in oral literature have been upgraded from bachelors
through masters in the mid-seventies, to Ph.Ds in the 1980s. Other institutions offering
oral literature courses in Nigeria include Bayero University’s Center for the Study of
Nigerian Languages and Oral Documentation, the University of Calabar, the University
of Jos, Ahmadu Bello University, and the University of Port Harcourt.