Oral Tradition and Written Literature: Comparing Storytelling in D.O. Fagunwa and Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The incorporation of oral storytelling conventions into written prose fiction is a characteristic feature of both Latin American magical realism and Yoruba literary tradition, and a comparison of D.O. Fagunwa's Ogboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irunmale (Forest of a Thousand Daemons) and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude illuminates the shared literary strategies by which oral cosmologies are translated into the modern novel. This study examined how both writers construct narrative worlds in which the supernatural is presented without ontological apology, integrated into everyday reality through a narrative voice that assumes the authority of the communal storyteller. A comparative oral-literary critical methodology drawing on Walter Ong's orality theory and Latin American magical realism criticism was applied. The analysis focused on narrative address, temporal structure, supernatural causality, and the social function of storytelling in both texts. Both Fagunwa and Garcia Marquez construct narrator figures who occupy the position of the village elder or community griot, mediating between the ancestral past and the contemporary reader. Results showed that while Fagunwa's prose is more explicitly didactic and morally structured according to Yoruba cosmology, Garcia Marquez's narrative employs more overtly ironic distance between the narrator and the magical events described. The study concludes that these texts, read together, demonstrate that magical realism as a global literary mode has parallel roots in West African as well as Latin American oral and spiritual traditions. The pairing is recommended for literature courses at universities in the South West geopolitical zone.