The folktale and its extensions

Abstract

The folktale is the most important strand within the prose narrative complex in Africa. It is also the most widely studied. The distinctiveness of the folktale as a genre, however, is questionable due to its close textual affinities with other expressive genres such as myth, epic, dilemma tale, legend and proverb. Even though local terminology often provides the best basis for resolving ambiguities in genre taxonomies (see Herskovits and Herskovits 1958), the folktale has sometimes posed a problem in Africa. In certain cultures, such as the Limba of Sierra Leone, the folktale and proverb do not have separate labels (Finnegan 1967: 28). Besides this, whenever the folktale has been cited in ongoing discourse for the purposes of persuasion, it has attracted the label “proverb” in certain cultures (see Yankah 1995: 88–93). The overlap between the proverb and tale should not be surprising, since they both convey moral lessons, and are mutually interactive in performance situations. Tales based on proverbs abound in Africa, and so do proverbs based on folktales. No doubt scholars who have compiled proverbs in Africa have often shown interest in the folktale (see Rattray 1916 and 1930; Dugaste 1975). © Cambridge University Press 2004 and Cambridge University Press, 2008.