ABSTRACT
This chapter explores what could be described as the new orality as well as how it affects content and form and is used as a technique to express not collective but individual themes in current creative works by Africans. It discusses composition and performance which have a symbiotic relationship, memory in the form of remembering and not memorizing, the variety of repetitions for musicality and emphasis, and the transformation of folklore to new legends, especially urban legends. The orality in modern African literature was for long seen as not only incorporating the spoken in indigenous African languages into the written medium of expression but also deriving from oral traditions or African oratures. The new development in orality in African literature seems to derive from a confluence of many language directions, especially street jargon, Pidgin English, new social media expressions, and impatience with correctness in grammatical expression.
