Analyse thematique de quelques contes Nkundo-Mongo

Master Thesis

2008

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University of Cape Town

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This thesis examines themes, characters in the oral tales one of the tribes of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the NKUNDO-MONGO tribe. Catholic priests have collected these tales during and after the colonization period. We have used the transcription of the Reverend Hulstaert. In this society, folktales have a major impact as they express some important rules of the tribe and help to convey their meaning. Also, they can transmit knowledge from one generation to another. The first chapter deals with the ethnology of the NKUNDO-MONGO people, to contextualize the tales. We shall try to give a partial analysis of their crisis of cultural identity. The second chapter compares folktales to other oral genres, such as proverbs, poems, ect., witch they often contain. The third chapter analyses essentially the folktales of the NKUNDO-MONGO tribe. In the first section, we analyses folktales that are linked to NKUNDO's family relationships: relationship between a man and his wife (wives), between a man and his children, and between a man and his brother (s) or sister (s) ... The second section analyses different themes within the tales, among which we find cosmogony, magic, customs, initiation, rituals, conflicts between generations, conflict resolution, ect. The fourth chapter deals with the structure of the NKUNDO-MONGO tales. The work by Denise Paulme on the morphology of African tales was our principal source of inspiration in this matter. The fifth, and the last chapter, describes the impact of modernization on the NKUNDOMONGO folktales. In conclusion, we evaluate the importance of these little know folktales of the NKUNDOMONGO tribe in the understanding and preservation of tribal rules.
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Includes bibliographical references (leaves 151-154).

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