Innovating the Academic Pedagogy of Oral African Literature in Cameroon's Higher Education: From Text to Digital Technology and AI Images and Videos

This paper argues for a systematic reconfiguration of pedagogical practice in higher-education courses on African oral literature by moving beyond an exclusive reliance on textual transcription and translation toward an integrated, ethically-grounded multimodal pedagogy that centers performance, context, and digitally mediated representations. Grounded in decolonial and constructivist pedagogies and informed by digital humanities practices, the study draws on a mixed-methods action-research project carried out in three universities (West, East, and Southern Africa) between 2021 and 2024 involving curricular redesign, instructor workshops, student praxis labs, community-partnered documentation, and pilot AI visualization modules. Primary data comprise classroom observations, interviews with instructors, focus groups with students and cultural practitioners, analysis of student artifacts (audio/video/AI-generated images), and usage metrics for digital repositories. Findings (n = 20) identify pedagogical, technical, ethical, and institutional enablers and barriers: notably, that multimodal instruction improves students’ embodied understanding of performance, that AI-generated imagery supports metaphor comprehension when co-curated with tradition-bearers, and that ethical protocols and community consent frameworks are essential to avoid cultural extractivism. The paper details a replicable pedagogical framework—The Performative-Digital Integrative Model (PDIM)—that prescribes steps for syllabus design, multimodal assessment, community partnership, digital-archival standards, and safe AI use. It concludes that while digital and AI tools substantially expand pedagogical possibilities, their deployment must be accompanied by robust cultural governance, capacity-building, and critical reflexivity. The paper offers concrete curricular templates, assessment rubrics, technical toolkits, and an agenda for further research including large-scale studies on learning outcomes, sustainability models for digital archives, and predictive analytics to map trajectories of oral-tradition transmission in digitally-mediated contexts. Keywords: pedagogy; higher education; ethics; digital humanities; African oral literature; AI-generated images; video; performative learning; decolonial education; cultural heritage