This chapter accounts for the recurring fixation in African literary discourse on the continuities between African orality and written African literatures. It highlights the astonishing range of the African oral heritage and underscores its deployment in modern African writing as literary nationalism and resistance to cultural imperialism or as facets of Indigenous formalist experimentations. The chapter pays particular attention to the debates that illuminate the implications of the transposition of orality to writing and sets in relief the scholars who have played pivotal roles in that discourse; it equally annotates several representative texts to underscore the quality of orality and the implications of its transposition into writing. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the current state of African orality and envisioning its future in written African literature.