Nouvelles Figures de Sarraounia à l’école et Dans Les Médias: Notes sur les Usages de la Littérature Orale à l’ère de la Reproductibilité Numérique

Abstract

Sarraounia Mangou, who resisted the conquest of the Voulet-Chanoine army at the end of the nineteenth century, became a heroine of oral literature in Niger. Linked to the foundation stories of Lougou, Sarraounia became popular in textbooks and in contemporary media (radio, television, ballet). We will analyze the different types of reuses this oral intertextuality, from the texts of the Ministry of Education to the wider field of education involved in the media. Education in this sense thus affects a wide audience, from school pupils to popular reception or rumor, involving varied enunciators, from the Ministry of National Education to singers and producers of cultural events. Various purposes are thus inevitably assigned to education, from the child’s personal development to the dissemination of an official version of history, thus including competing visions of the social fact. The purpose of this article is to trace the institutionalization of literary fiction; textbooks have indeed authenticated the resistance of Sarraounia. The oral heritage has acquired a witness value, becoming an attested fact which, however, is based on a questionable assumption: the documentary value of literature.