"The situation in modern Africa amply illustrates the point about the merging of the worlds of orality and literacy. The superimposition of alphabetic writing upon the oral cultures of Africa in the nineteenth century did not extinguish the oral traditions upon which African cultures and literatures had long been established. The immediate result was that African indigenous languages were written down and brought into the mainstream of the world repertoire of literate languages, and, additionally, a substantial body of Africa's oral literatures--from epics and extended forms to unicellular tales and verbal art--was written down, recorded, and archived."--Page 198.