ABSTRACT
Secrecy is a powerful esthetic strategy underlying many forms of African orature. A dialectic of concealment and revelation is implicit to narratives, legends, proverbs, riddles, puzzles, songs, and praise poems-and to the visual arts related to these oral media. Exploration of the uses of secrecy in African orature lends insight into the ways secrecy embodies, protects, and selectively transmits knowledge in diverse contexts, including initiations and gender dramas, royal rites and performances, processes of divination and healing, and encounters with foreigners. By activating the tension between clarity and obscurity implicit to knowledge itself, secrecy can structure experience so that it mirrors and invokes the partiality of human understanding.
