Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958) relates the clash between African and European culture during colonial days, using a style very similar to that of the oral historian.

Camara Laye recounts another version of the Sundiata story in his The Guardian of the Word: Kouma Lafdld Kouma, translated from French into English in 1980.

The Children ofSegu, translated into English in 1989, is Maryse Conde's fictional account of the Bambara kingdom in Mali at the end of the late eighteenth century.

A collection titled West African Folktales (1993) by Jack Berry introduces the reader to the spoken art of West Africa in a series of short tales.