Abstract

African traditional societies are oral societies. Orality, in these societies, is the effect as much as the cause of the particular mode of social being of the African man. An African man is socially configured by orality. It is therefore a cultural formatting whose main issue is preservation and transmission, from age to age, of traditions, social norms and practices that determine the relationship of man of orality with the world. Moreover, according to Diagne, the process by which this cultural formatting, specific to traditional African societies is carried out, is the “dramatization”. Dramatization is the ruse of oral reason. The aim of this paper is to grasp, through the process of dramatization, cultural particularities of argumentation in traditional African societies. In order to do so, the analysis focuses on the discursive practices through which dramatization is revealed. More precisely, the study of proverbs in eʋe society allows pointing out the specificities of dramatized argumentation in an oral society. The epistemological issue animating this paper is to present a different way of grasping argumentative functions of image and metaphor.