SOURCE: Okpewho, Isidore. “The African Heroic Epic: Internal Balance.” Africa 36, no. 2 (June 1981): 209-25.

In the following essay, Okpewho describes how a balance is achieved between the various elements of the Sunjata narrative.

Introduction

The tradition of epic or heroic narrative in African societies has become a subject of growing interest. But of all the question which scholars of this branch of oral literature ponder, perhaps none has received quite as little attention as that of the sheer implications of scope. Some of the more notable scholarship on this genre has, with varying degrees of sensitivity, recognized prosody as a determining factor in the classification¹; and though there seems to be a certain concession to the fact that for a tale to be classified as epic there must be some element of largeness or scope to it², the question has seldom been raised what this scope consists in or...