Lone Voices, Shared Stories: Reimagining Singlehood through African Oral Literature and Folklore

Abstract

Scholarship on singlehood has largely been shaped by Eurocentric paradigms that foreground urban modernities, nuclear family structures, and Western cultural expectations. Such perspectives have marginalized indigenous African understandings of singleness, which are often embedded in oral traditions and communal storytelling. This paper draws on African oral literature and folklore—including proverbs, praise poetry, myths, and storytelling traditions—to explore how African communities historically conceptualize singlehood as a dynamic and socially meaningful category, rather than merely a deviant or liminal status. Using examples from Xhosa, Shona, and Cameroonian oral traditions, the paper demonstrates how tales of unmarried women and men are often deployed to reinforce communal values, articulate gendered expectations, and negotiate moral agency. At the same time, these narratives also offer spaces of resistance, where single characters embody independence, spiritual authority, or social critique. Through a decolonial methodological lens, this paper interrogates how these oral forms can help us rethink global singles studies by diversifying epistemologies and moving beyond the Global North’s cultural geographies of singlehood. Ultimately, the paper argues that African oral narratives offer alternative conceptual vocabularies and relational models for understanding singlehood, not as isolation but as interconnectedness through narrative and memory. This intervention contributes to the pluriversal vision of singles studies by centering African epistemologies and lived cultural forms in contemporary theoretical debates.