The Artistic Traditions of Non-European Cultures, vol. 6: The art, the oral and the written intertwined in African Cultures

The current issue of “The Artistic Traditions of Non-Europeans Countries” is devoted to African cultures and it addresses matters which go beyond issues related to visual arts. In this volume the authors rather search for relations between arts and communication in different African settings.

Over millennia people have applied different ideas with the view to make ephemeral oral communication, or at least the ideas carried by spoken words, last longer. The tools applied to different thoughts have changed and developed, but the main aims remained the same since the most ancient times. They are: to be able to remember what was once said, to “freeze” and save what was once said or thought for future generations and also to use simple signs to make references, so that the others think about exactly the same ideas in the same context as expected.

This volume offers a glimpse into different aspects of how people communicated in the past and how they communicate today in Africa with the use of a wide spectrum of different tools and methods using art, orality and writing. In the centre of interest of the authors remains the area which is common to all these manners of passing on information and conveying messages, the area which reflects how orality and visuality influence each other.