Narrative Aesthetics and the Digital Revolution in Indigenous Oral Traditions in the Anglophone and Francophone West Africa

Abstract

The paper will discuss how indigenous oral traditions in Anglophone and Francophone West Africa have been aesthetically reorganised in the contemporary digital spaces. Although mass media tend to describe digital mediation as the process of conservation or destruction, the current paper claims that the digital platforms completely reorganise, instead of destroying, the fundamental narrative aesthetics. Based on the performance theory, transmedial narratology, multimodal analysis, platform studies, and African digital humanities scholarship, the paper examines the work of rhythmic repetition, tonal modulation, invocation formula, genealogical anchoring, and linguistic hybridity in the technologically mediated storytelling. By presenting qualitative narrative analysis and digital ethnographic observation of online Nigerian digital folktale narration and Senegalese griot performance that circulated between 2018 and 2024, the paper shows how the indigenous epistemological structure is maintained in the conditions of algorithmic visibility and time compression. The digital infrastructures change the temporality, the involvement of the audience, the position of authority and the dynamics of translation; nevertheless, they do not override the aesthetic principles that used to guide oral traditions in West Africa in the past. They instead produce hybrid possibilities where the logics of indigenous narratives are reconfigured to occupy the networked publics. This work, by foregrounding narrative aesthetics as a mode of critical analysis, carries an input into African digital humanities, postcolonial media studies by discarding any technologically deterministic narratives of cultural change. It postulates that digital mediation is aesthetic reconfiguration in continuity, as opposed to tradition discontinuity.

Keywords: narrative aesthetics, digital orality, West Africa, griot performance, platformization, linguistic hybridity, African digital humanities.

DOI: 10.36349/alqajolls.2026.v01i02.017

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