Towards an Africa-centered and pan-African theory of communication: Ubuntu and the oral-aesthetic perspective

Abstract

This article supports scholarly findings that Bantu traditions are among the strongest civilising forces in the United States. Positing pop music as a paradigm of proof, the author argues for a cultural decolonisation and corrective understanding of this expression as a manifestation of Africa's oral traditions and the global agency of the continent's cultural custodians. The Euro-patriarchal episteme that has formalised the language of music appreciation has, through its inherent incapacity or lack of political will to grant proper academic status to these mature modes of human discourse, promoted a diminished regard of oral tradition and its pop music formats as low-brow fodder for entertainment industry exploitation. Recognising that such north–south circumscriptions have served to disenfranchise humanity as a whole, the author reasons that ubuntu has nonetheless extended its humanising reach into the pan-African and global village by captivating and cultivating the popular imagination through effective, Africa-centered modes of oral communication. A culturally congruent theoretical framework is advanced to illuminate the transformational art-for-life's-sake mission of an epic African odyssey.

Keywords:

• African communication theory
• black popular music
• ethnomusicology
• nommo
• oral aesthetics
• oral tradition
• pop music history
• sankofa
• ubuntu