Myth as an Oral Tradition and Technique; Re-inventing Oral Tradition in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the elements of myths as an Oral tradition and the techniques Ben Okri uses in his novels for the reinventing of it in The Famished Road. Oral tradition refers to the cultural processes and products that though handed overtime are not written, it is a combination of two words-oral and tradition. The term “oral” implies unwritten and verbal, something expressed in words. The term tradition can mean variously culture as a whole; all the inherited elements in a society; conventionally recognized customs whether or not of any antiquity; the process of handing down practices, ideas or values, particularly intergenerationally and the products as handed down.  Jan Vansina, oral traditions are verbal messages which are reported statements from the past beyond the present generation. David Henige adds that oral tradition should be commonly or universally known in a given culture for J C Miller, an oral tradition is a narrative describing or purporting to describe eras before the time of the person who relates it .Ben Okri uses Nigerian oral traditions in his works due to a myriad of reasons. His oral tradition offers a distant personal statement in artistic terms upon the issues of human life. He also uses riddles, proverbs, myths, and legends to present Nigerian history, present issues and to proffer solutions to the countries countless problems and the authors experiment with narrative techniques. Much can be learned of the past from those oral traditions of Nigeria that are concerned with the past hence testify despite themselves.

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