Oral Tradition Volume 9, Number 1March 1994
About the Authors
Rüediger Schott
Rüdiger Schott has recently retired as professor of ethnology in the University of Münster/Westphalia, Germany. Between 1966 and 1989 he conducted ethnographic fieldwork among the Bulsa of Ghana. He continues to publish his results in European journals; a major collection of Bulsa tales is in press.
Zainab Mohamed Jama
Zainab Mohamed Jama trained at the School of Oriental and African Studies before returning to her native Somalia to work for the United Nations Development Program and the World Food Program. In 1983-92 she was a producer for the BBC World Service. Currently she is writing a book on Somali women.
Lee Haring
Lee Haring is Professor Emeritus of English at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. His research in island folklore of the Indian Ocean has appeared in Verbal Arts in Madagascar: Performance in Historical Perspective (1992), numerous journal articles, and a collection of translations entitled Indian Ocean Folktales (2002).
Veronika Görög-Karady
Veronika Görög-Karady is a member of the French CNRS research team “Language and Culture in West Africa.” She has two fields of study, West Africa and her native Hungary. She has published a study of the image of blacks and whites in African oral literature, the definitive French-language bibliography of African oral literature, and numerous collections of African and Hungarian materials including Contes d’un tzigane hongrois (Budapest, 1991). She serves on the editorial board of Cahiers de Littérature Orale.
Graham Furniss
Graham Furniss teaches in the Department of African Languages and Literatures of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
Sa’idu Babur Ahmed
Sa’idu Babura Ahmad teaches in the English Department at Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria.
Rachel I. Fretz
Rachel I. Fretz, an instructor in the Writing Program at the University of California at Los Angeles, conducted research on storytelling among the Chokwe of Zaïre in 1976, 1977, 1982, 1983, and 1989 for a doctoral dissertation and subsequent writing. In 1992-93, as the recipient of a Fulbright award, she continued her Chokwe research, this time in Zambia.
Sory Camara
Sori Saba Jaaje Camara is Professor of Social Anthropology and Ethnology at the University of Bordeaux II in France. His studies of oral tradition, the nature of utterance, and the “Masters of Speech” include Gens de la parole (1975, reprinted 1993) and Paroles trés anciennes (1982). His current research builds on ten years of interviews in eastern Senegal on incantations, legends, and myths, to discern Mandinka conceptions of the nature, function, and status of speech.
Chukwuma Azuonye
Chukwuma Azuonye was formerly a lecturer in oral literature at the Departments of Linguistics and African Languages in the Universities of Ibadan and Nsukka, where he served as acting head from 1986 to 1988. Since 1992 he has headed the Department of Black Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. His scholarly writings, poetry, and short stories have been published in journals and books in Africa, Europe, and the Americas.
Daniel K. Avorgbedor
Daniel Avorgbedor, formerly a lecturer in music at the University of Ghana, studied at Indiana University and currently is editor of Abstracts, the international reference publication on music, based at the City University of New York. He also teaches at City College. His present research focuses on urban Ewe music, the Anlo-Ewe haló tradition, and contemporary Christian music in Ghana.
K.E. Agovi
K. E. Agovi is Associate Professor, Deputy Director, and Head of the Languages and Literature Section of the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana. A poet and fiction writer, he is the author of Novels of Social Change and Wind from the North and Other Stories. He has researched and published extensively in African literature, drama, oral traditions, and performance. In 1992-93 he held a Japan Foundation Professional Fellowship in Tokyo.
