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Dagara Verbal Art examines verbal art among the Dagara people of West Africa. It provides invaluable primary material for research, and does a close analysis of folktale narration, proverb usage, riddling, chanting of dirges and popular songs by male and female praise singers, and xylophone music performance as forms of verbal art. Folktales are characterized by wit, humor, and satire, and songs within tales are a mise-en-abyme, a story within a story that entertains but also enhances the narration through the participation of the audience in the performance. Moreover, Dagara tales are didactic and moralizing as a way of controlling the behavior of individuals in society. Riddling entertains...
This book argues that Gabonese writer Sylvie Ntsame utilizes her novels to question certain patriarchal traditions and practices in African society (such as polygyny) that, in certain contexts, tend to silence the voice of the female. Through engaging with feminist theories, among other theoretical frameworks, the author demonstrates how, in some of Ntsame’s novels, the black female body is an object of voyeurism that reduces the women to eroticized, exoticized Others. The author further argues that Ntsame counters the dystopia of racism with a depiction of idealized love through an interracial relationship, presented against the backdrop of stereotypes and myths that stifle such relationships. Ntsame does this by going back to her cultural roots, and calling for understanding between peoples of diverse ethnicities and cultures. The book makes valuable contributions to the study of Gabonese women’s writing in particular, and African women’s writing in general.