MYTH AS MEMORY

In African storytelling, myth is not a relic of the past, it is memory in motion. Every tale of gods, tricksters and ancestors carries within it a collective remembering of who we were, how we lived and what we continue to dream about. In the context of African animation, these ancestral figures do more than populate the screen, they perform the psychological work of reconnecting fragmented identities across time. The Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Gyekye once noted that African cosmology “binds the living, the dead and the unborn in a moral continuum.” In animation, this continuum takes visual and emotional form. When Nigerian animator Ebele Okoye designed her short The Legacy of Rubies, she wasn’t just reviving folklore, she was staging an act of psychological reclamation. The trickster, the mother and the warrior archetypes that reappear in African stories serve as cognitive anchors for communal identity. They embody Jungian archetypes, yes, but they also express something uniquely African, a sense of belonging to a moral and spiritual lineage that survives colonization, urbanization and modern erasure.

Take the trickster; Anansi, Eshu or Legba, who dances between chaos and creation. Western readings often cast the trickster as mere comic relief or rebellion but in African cosmologies, he embodies adaptability and survival. Nigerian scholar Bolaji Idowu argued that Eshu represents “the power of communication and mediation,” a divine figure who ensures the world’s constant renewal through unpredictability. In animation, the trickster archetype becomes a metaphor for African creativity itself; playful, boundary-breaking and resistant to control. The mother archetype, equally, extends beyond nurture. In many African cultures, the maternal figure from the Yoruba Yemoja to the Akan Asase Yaa, embodies the psychological core of communal care and regeneration. Then there is the warrior, not simply a fighter but a custodian of moral order. Animated African warriors often stand at the intersection of justice and spirituality. They externalize the collective struggle for autonomy and dignity, a psychological reenactment of decolonization through visual myth.

Ancestral figures in African animation are not just narrative devices, they are containers of memory, acting as bridges between modernity and metaphysical history. As Kenyan filmmaker Ng’endo Mukii once said, “Animation gives us the power to touch the intangible, to visualize what we have always known but forgotten how to see.” The return of these archetypes to African screens signals more than nostalgia. It marks a reawakening. It is a way of healing cultural amnesia through story and motion, reuniting the African psyche with its mythic imagination and perhaps that’s what animation, in its essence, was always meant to do: to animate memory, to make the unseen breathe again.