In this paper, I engage the epistemic status of orality in culture. As part of the rationale for this engagement, I posit a close connection between technologies of communication and the epistemological and ontological status of cultural productions and subjects. The background to my argument is this: the historical reason for the European contempt for Africa and the denial of its civilization is the lack of writing and written records in most parts of the African continent at the time of the European incursion. The way in which anthropological, philosophical and historical discourses (of the Other) have shaped Western conception of African identity lends fillip to this claim. It is amply supported by a host of evidence from European and North American philosophers, historians and communication scholars, among the most recent of whom we may recall Walter Ong and Eric Havelock who indeed claimed famously that European civilization can be attributed to one principal cause, the discovery of (phonetic) writing.
