Beyond the Text: An Akan Perspective on Oral Literature and Literature as a Human Phenomenon

In many Western traditions, literature is equated with writing, a view that has marginalised the oral verbal arts of African societies. Among the Akan of Ghana, proverbs, folktales, dirges, songs and riddles remain living institutions through which identity, memory and morality are sustained. This study examines the Akan perspective on oral literature and argues that literature, oral or written, is fundamentally a human phenomenon: an activity whose meaning is produced by people in performance and context, rather than a body of fixed texts.
A qualitative, interpretive design was used. The study defines its three central concepts (oral literature, the Akan perspective and literature as a human phenomenon) and builds a conceptual framework that links performance theory, functionalism and reception theory to Akan concepts of performance, audience, memory, occasion and ownership. Data comprised 15 purposively selected scholarly sources on African and Akan oral literature and a corpus of 14 illustrative Akan oral texts and conventions, selected against explicit criteria. Each text was documented in Akan with a gloss and interpreted through a four-level contextual-functional reading (text, performance setting, cultural meaning and social function), and the material as a whole was examined through reflexive thematic analysis.
Six themes emerged: performance as the locus of meaning; the audience as co-creator and custodian; fluidity anchored in memorisation; context-bound appropriateness; communal ownership and ancestral authority; and genres as instruments of human life. Worked examples showed that proverbs such as Tikoro nkɔ agyina guide deliberation and arbitration, the tale of Ananse and the pot of wisdom forms moral character, dirges channel grief and preserve genealogy, songs accompany every life stage, and riddles sharpen reasoning.
From the Akan perspective, the meaning of literature resides in people, performance and community, not in the text alone. Oral and written literature differ in medium but share their grounding in human experience, cultural knowledge and interpretation.
Literature curricula in Ghana should integrate performance-based study of Akan oral genres, and documentation efforts, including digital archiving, should record performance context alongside verbal content.

Akan; oral literature; performance; verbal art; literature as a human phenomenon

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