When the story becomes a question

Before stories were printed in books or appeared on screens, they lived in the space between the storyteller’s voice and the listener’s ear, by firelight or beneath the shade of trees, carried through sound, rhythm, gesture, and memory. In the Horn of Africa, as across the continent, storytelling was not mere entertIt is a form of entertainment or a primitive form of communication, but a complete system for seeing and understanding the world: it taught children and young people how to live and think, how to distinguish right from wrong, and how to interpret fear, organize values, and situate the self within the collective.

When we listen to the folktales of this region, we notice that they do not recount events as they are, but as they are meant to be understood. The talking animal is not a mere beast but a condensed image of the human being, in both cunning and frailty, and the journey is not merely geographical movement but a moral trial. In this sense, the tale was as much an instrument of collective thought as it was a means of entertainment. The child who listened did not receive a story alone, but an entire conception of good and evil, of survival, and of belonging.

Oral poetry occupies a central place in the Horn of Africa, especially in Somalia and Ethiopia, where it has not been viewed as an elite art, but as a shared language of the community. The poet was never detached from daily life, but part of its dynamism, commenting on conflicts, recording events, and expressing political and social positions. Rhythm here is not ornamental; it is a technique of memory that preserves experience and allows it to pass from one generation to the next.

It is within this deeply oral world that the modern novel began to emerge in the continent. It did not arise in a cultural vacuum, and the shift from spoken word to written text was not a rupture, but a translation. The novel did not merely borrow its themes from oral tradition; it internalized its narrative logic: repetition, the centrality of the moral event, the presence of an omniscient narrator, and an address directed to the community rather than the isolated individual.

This influence is especially visible in early works from the Horn of Africa, where the narrative retains the tone of the oral storyteller even in written form. One example is Araya, by the Ethiopian writer Girmachew Tekle Hawaryat, written in the late 1940s and considered among the first modern novels in Ethiopia. It tells the story of a young man who travels to Europe in search of education, then returns to confront his traditional world. The tension between modernity and tradition is not presented as a fixed opposition, but through a narrative grounded in popular wisdom and an ethical vision still shaped by the spirit of orality.

Here, oral tradition is not material for nostalgia, but for thought. The novel does not reproduce the old tale; it enters into dialogue with it. The voice that once told people how to live begins, in the modern text, to ask them why they live in this way.

In the Somali context, Nuruddin Farah stands out as one of the most important contemporary novelists of the region. In his well-known work From a Crooked Rib (1970), Farah reworks the structure of the oral tale to address questions of gender, power, and individual choice. The novel draws on oral tradition in its construction of characters as moral models, but charges these models with new questions shaped by the modern state and social transformation. Here, oral tradition is not material for nostalgia, but for thought. The novel does not reproduce the old tale; it enters into dialogue with it. The voice that once told people how to live begins, in the modern text, to ask them why they live in this way.

The movement of oral tradition across forms becomes even clearer when we look beyond the novel. One of the most striking examples, which finishes the cycle of this transformation from orality, through text and then the screen, is the epic of Sundiata Keita, founder of the Mali Empire, one of the most widely known oral epics in West Africa. It was transmitted orally for centuries by griots before being written down in Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali by the Guinean scholar Djibril Tamsir Niane in 1960. The written text preserves the core elements of the epic: the weak hero destined for greatness, the long journey, and victory as the restoration of moral order. Yet the act of writing transforms the story from a performance tied to the moment into a fixed text addressed to a modern reader living in a world of states rather than tribes.

Three decades later, the Burkinabè filmmaker Dani Kouyaté adapted the same epic in his film Keïta ! L'Héritage du griot (1995). The film does not simply recount the story of Sundiata; it places it within a contemporary frame, where an old storyteller travels to the city to narrate the tale to his grandson, who is being educated in a modern school. In this way, the tale itself becomes the subject of reflection. Here the struggle is no longer only that of the legendary hero, but of memory and forgetting, and of orality and the modern educational system.

In the novel, Sundiata stands at the center of the narrative world, while in the film, the contemporary child becomes part of the story. The question that emerges is whether the tale can remain alive in an age shaped by curricula and screens, and whether oral tradition can still find a place in a world that no longer listens as it once did.

The African novel, especially in the Horn of Africa, can be understood as the rebellious daughter of oral storytelling; it carries its mother’s features without inheriting her certainties. It borrows her voice, but fills it with doubt.

This shift in mediums points to a deeper transformation in the function of storytelling itself. The difference between the folktale and the modern novel is not merely formal, but conceptual. The tale once organized the world and gave it stable meaning, while the novel places that meaning under question. In contemporary literature, oral tradition no longer appears as a complete truth, but as material for interpretation and critique. Even language carries traces of its oral origin: deliberate repetition, the internal rhythm of the sentence, and the direct address to the reader. It is as though the writer, while writing, still hears the storyteller’s echo and tries to satisfy the eye without betraying the ear.

Yet this way of invoking orality within modern storytelling is not without tension or even contradictions. At times, heritage becomes a folkloric mask used to lend local color to texts aimed at the global market, losing its critical function and becoming mere ornament. Its value, therefore, lies not in the number of proverbs or myths invoked, but in how it is woven into a contemporary structure of thought.

Thus, the African novel, especially in the Horn of Africa, can be understood as the rebellious daughter of oral storytelling. It carries its mother’s features without inheriting her certainties. It borrows her voice, but fills it with doubt. The shift from folktale to the modern novel is not a movement from simplicity to complexity, but from fixing meaning to questioning it.

What follows from this is that oral tradition is no longer simply a beautiful past or a reservoir of nostalgia, but a living resource that continues to produce meaning in the present. Stories once helped organize collective life and clarify good and evil, belonging and survival. Today, they reopen these questions and test them against contemporary challenges. As the tale moves from voice to novel and then to screen, it shifts from a discourse that affirms values to one that interrogates them, from a means of imparting meaning to a space for critical inquiry.