Orality and the Writing Lesson: The Work of Vernacular Intellectuals

Setting off from Eileen Julien’s work on orality and the African novel, this essay takes the question of the relation between writing and oral expressions a step further by exploring how, in the hands of “vernacular” intellectuals, the oral became inseparable from writing. Writing enabled orality to enter the colonial public sphere; conversely, writing needed orality to assert its Africanness.