Quel rôle peut jouer le conte traditionnel dans l’éducation moderne? Une réflexion à partir de la situation des Gbaya d’Afrique centrale

Traditional education in sub-Saharan Africa almost never presents a didactic character. I investigate the specific case of an oral culture, the Gbaya of Central Africa. A child acquires knowledge without the help of methodical explanation. Often there is no teacher / pupil relationship. I will present (i) the terms relating to the field of knowledge and learning, and (ii) the methods of observation, listening and repeating that underpin how a child learns to know all kind of information. A second part is devoted to the folktale, a genre that in many oral societies of Africa is not performed by a specialist. I will present it as part of the Gbaya culture where it is still alive, and then I show that folktales give expression to cultural imagination and reality. Finally, I will deal with the requirements to use the folktales to transmit cultural memory in a modern didactic teaching. In fact the meaning of the tale is specific to each culture. If we reduce the tale to a list of “universal” moral statements we miss the specific cultural identity that modernity tends to make disappear.