Do you remember the stories your parents told you when you were a child? I remember the times in Cameroon when the lights went out and we had to entertain ourselves. Sometimes we told African folk tales. I’m sad that I can’t remember the details of many of them, they are vague memories.

African storytelling is something cultural that was passed on from generation to generation. You had a leader or in West Africa, a griot, who will use stories to entertain the people while passing down life lessons and cultural values. Storytelling in this manner was common in other cultures as can be seen throughout the Bible. 

In most places today, we have a different means through which stories are told, by television. We get to watch it. While this is entertaining and easy to just press play. There seems to be something that is lost, using your imagination. When stories are told, you come up with the pictures in your mind, you get to play around with your own creativity. That imagination is what leads to innovation and “aha” moments when you get to explore what you can fabricate in your mind. Reading a good book has a similar effect on us. But reading a book by yourself is a different experience from telling a story in a community. That’s what made story telling in African communities so essential. It brought people together to sit still and listen. Each person walked away with different ideas sparked inside of them. Some may have been so angered by one of the characters in the story. Some may have thought about something they wanted to create. Some may have envisioned wanting to be a storyteller themselves because they enjoyed the griot’s story-telling abilities. Others might have even thought about something they needed to change in their character. And some may have looked forward to the next day for another story.