(Reading habits and traditional learning in sub-Saharan Africa. An analytical bibliography.)

Juxtaposed against the oral tradition, books were long perceived as foreign media with inadequate cultural content. What are the patterns of reading habits in Africa today? This document, divided in three parts, studies the relationships between Africans and books, reading practices and policies to promote reading in Africa. The reader discovers how reading is increasingly perceived in Africa as a new form of entertainment, directly related to the expansion of school-based education. Reading is practiced collectively, either in evening gatherings or in public readings with the local community. The era when the oral culture was opposed to the written culture seems to be over, although in Africa knowledge is never transmitted exclusively in writing.