ABSTRACT
The Igbo people of southeastern Nigeria have one of the most thematically and stylistically varied traditions of storytelling in Africa. Little wonder that storytellers of Igbo origin dominate the modern African literary scene. Among these are such pioneering and world acclaimed novelists as Chinua Achebe, Cyprain Ekwensi, John Munonye, and Elechi Amadi. Igbo culture has also produced outstanding women writers, notably Flora Nwapa and Buchi Emecheta. In several interviews as well as in the many stories-within-the-story told in their works, these writers have again and again paid tribute to generations of little-known orators, historians, and raconteurs whose wish-fulfillment fantasies, gossips, dreams, visions, lies, projections, eyewitness accounts, memoirs, and recreations of historical reality have passed into common currency both as humor and as myths to live by.
