ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to summarize theoretical concepts which have been used to approach African literature to make meaning of the people and their literary experience. It begins with the inter-related aspects of form and content in traditional African literature – the oral form and the Ubuntu philosophy of humanity espoused by Africans that affects the characters, themes, and visions of African oratures and folklore. Modern African literature, from its inception in the mid-twentieth century to this second decade of the twenty-first century, has undergone critical scrutiny through different indigenous and foreign theoretical concepts. African communality affirms the people's humanity in the extended families and network of communal activities towards the survival of all. The virtues or lack of them inform oral traditions and modern African literature. Literary scholars attempted to find out what use African writers have made of the oral traditions of their respective ethnic groups.
