History is not behind us. History runs through us. Across centuries and continents, an unBROKEN Thread —a line that connects the creativity of Africa’s past with the imagination of our present and the innovations of our future.

This continuous narrative of human ingenuity spans from ivory carved with impossible delicacy to glass and aluminium milled by machines, and links the bronze caster in Benin to a blockchain engineer.

Form is the language through which cultures encode meaning; it is never neutral. Every object is a decision—a belief system cast, carved, woven, or smelted into shape.

• Morphology examines structure—how something is made.
• Form reveals meaning—why it was made.

The unBROKEN Thread is orature.Africa’s flagship essay series. It places African art, heritage, and thought in dialogue with the technologies, designs, and ideas shaping today’s world. It confirms that Africa has always been part of the global story of innovation, not as a footnote, but as a source.

An Invitation to Weave

Click to submit an essay

This story is too vast, too layered, and too alive to belong to one perspective. That is why the unBROKEN Thread is also an invitation.

We invite:

• Historians to respond.
• Artists to imagine.
• Curators and thinkers to add their own strands.

Each rejoinder strengthens the weave, reminding us that knowledge itself is a tapestry—richer when many hands contribute. Each essay is an act of reclamation and re-imagination—reclaiming the truths of the past, re-imagining their place in the present, and weaving both into a vision for the future.

The Enduring Continuity

When we follow the unseen thread, we discover that history does not fade; it makes us. It binds:

• Queen Idia (mother of Oba Esigie, 1504-1550) to the designer of a smartphone.
• The astronomers of Timbuktu mapping stars in manuscripts, to the astrophysicists decoding black holes with supercomputers.
• The pyramid builders of Egypt and Nubia, to the engineers of skyscrapers piercing modern skylines.
• Griots who preserved memory through orature, to today’s spoken-word poets on digital stages.

It is one story, woven across centuries, of Africa’s enduring creativity, ingenuity, and imagination. The unBROKEN Thread is identity, continuity, and possibility—proof that Africa’s legacy is not lost, but alive, waiting to be seen, shared, and re-woven together.

Orature is the living memory of a people. Coined in the 1960s by Ugandan scholar Pio Zirimu, it is the artistry of the spoken word—a dynamic tapestry of myths, epics, proverbs, and songs. In orature, history is a performance, not a document. It is the unBROKEN Thread that connects us to our ancestors and ensures no story is ever lost.

This is not a romantic idea, but a validated truth. The discipline of treating oral tradition as a legitimate historical source was pioneered by the renowned Belgian historian Jan Vansina (1929–2017), who established the rigorous academic framework for using the spoken word to reconstruct the past.

The Intellectual Crusade

The academic validation of this Thread was championed by a visionary group of Nigerian historians who, with courage and conviction, broke with Eurocentric scholarship that saw “no history where there were no written archives”. This intellectual crusade to establish the validity of orature was led by:

• Professor Kenneth Onwuka Dike (1917–1983): The Pioneer. The father of modern African historiography. He showed that a rigorous African history could be written using a multidisciplinary approach (combining written records, oral traditions, archaeology, and anthropology).
• Professor Jacob Festus Ade Ajayi (1929–2014): The Architect. He perfected the art of using oral sources to counterbalance and challenge colonial narratives. He demonstrated that colonialism was merely an episode, not the beginning of African history.
• Professor Obaro Ikime (1936–2023): The Custodian. A meticulous historian, he proved that the stories told in small communities were just as vital to the historical record as any official document.

Together with others, these intellectual giants transformed orature from a folkloric curiosity into an indispensable tool for scholarship.

History Made Present

At orature.africa, we honour this legacy. We believe the stories of our past are not relics—they are the living, breathing essence of who we are.

Orature.africa takes this validated history—the unBROKEN Thread—and actively weaves it into the present and future, connecting ancient African creators (like the bronze caster or Queen Idia) and cultural processes directly to modern life and technology.