A Conceptual Model for Digitalising Bette-Bendi Oral Traditions

In the wake of colonisation, Africans generally replaced uncritically and almost wholesale their own pre-colonial indigenous values and cultures with those of their western colonial masters. As a result, there has been progressive deracination which has resulted in the creation of the modern African youth who is detached quite disdainfully from the enviable values that nurtured and nourished a morally healthy pre-colonial African world. Blessedly, these social values and mores were transmitted from generation to generation largely through the agency of the people’s oral heritage, remnants of which can still be recovered from elders and other knowledgeable persons in African communities. This Chapter, hence, re-echoes the urgent mission for documenting aspects of our oral heritage and transmitting same through modern tools and techniques, for wide consumption by our African youths. A conceptual model is proposed to encourage community-government/industry-and-university partnership, and domesticate the curation of community collections; transforming them through technology into enhanced digital collections for efficient learning and dissemination of oral traditions. The choice of digitalisation can be best understood in the context of the statement in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, where nneke the bird is said to have reasoned that since hunters have learnt to shoot without missing, he too has learnt to fly without perching. In our situation, since the African youth of today largely yoked to all manner of social media, it is only strategic to encapsulate such value-loaded aspects of oral heritage in the form of avatars (cartoons, animations) and other categories of social media for the wide consumption of our youth. This is one way the present western content of these media can be supplanted by the typical African ones.