Oral Tradition Narratives of the Emai People

This collection of seventy prose of narrative samples represents the only published record of the oral tradition of the Emai people of southern Nigeria. The narratives are presented in both Emai orthography and English translation. They tend to portray everyday cultural practices of the Emai with human characters or their animal personification. As such, they provide an initial glimpse of Emai cosmology, cultural values and social norms as well as a firm impression of how Emai grammatical resources function in spontaneous narrative discourse.

Ronald P. Schaefer is Professor at the College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English Language and Literature, at the Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville.

Francis O. Egbokhare teaches at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria.