ABSTRACT
Scholarly negotiations of African oral literature in the wake of the colonial and imperial encounter were championed by Western scholars who were mainly missionaries, administrators, anthropologists, ethnologists, linguists and other allied professionals. These Westerners with enormous epistemological capital lacked the requisite training to sufficiently appreciate the aesthetic distillates and literary sophistication of African oral forms. The yawning gap represented by this hegemonic Eurocentric discourse was only bridged with the emergence of indigenous scholar-critics who were steeped in the traditions and cultures of their societies. It is to this generation of scholars that Isidore Okpewho eminently belongs. This chapter appraises the contributions of Okpewho and this generation of scholars in their counter-hegemonic engagements with the condescending and paternalistic attitudes of metropolitan scholars whose misrepresentations and prejudices consigned African oral literature to the eaves of pre-history. I argue that the Okpewho generation was on a rescue mission and piously mobilised its creative and intellectual energies in the (re)mapping of the beleaguered terrain, staked and redefined it as a field of study in its own right as a veritable literary endeavour. The chapter concludes that the counter-hegemonic temperament of this generation constituted an alternative discourse and vision in the cultural decolonisation process and identified African oral expressive forms as veritable literature in consonance with Euro-American universal tastes and canonical standards.
