In oral literature the realization of a piece depends on performance: the words, the occasion, the audience, and the performer's delivery together constitute the work, so no fixed text exists apart from its enactment. The same narrative or poem varies with each telling because it is composed, selected, or elaborated in the act of performing.
Many oral forms are not memorized word-for-word but recomposed at each delivery from stock phrases, themes, and structural patterns the performer commands. This means variability between versions is a normal feature of transmission rather than corruption of an original.
African oral forms are typically tied to specific social occasions and purposes: praise poetry attached to political authority, dirges to funerals, work songs to labor, so the genre's shape and content are shaped by its social context. The literature cannot be fully understood when detached from the situations in which it is produced and used.
A proverb's meaning is not fixed in its words but realized in its deployment: the same saying can advise, rebuke, justify, or soften depending on who cites it to whom and when. Studying proverbs therefore requires attending to their use in actual speech situations, not just cataloguing their texts.
The categories of oral and written literature overlap rather than oppose: written texts can circulate orally, oral forms can be recorded, and literate and non-literate modes coexist and influence each other within the same society. Treating orality as a single primitive stage preceding writing misrepresents how the two interact.
Judged by the specific combined criteria of plot, enacted representation of character, costume, and a distinct audience, fully developed drama in the Western sense was relatively rare in traditional Africa, though many performances contained dramatic and mimetic elements. The scarcity reflects the particular definition applied, not an absence of theatrical expression.