that for some groups in New Guinea, there is no word for colour, only a word for ‘paint’
because of the ritual significance of painting. And only white, black, red and yellow are
used in these paintings (on the body, on buildings, artefacts, and so on). Therefore,
when a child paints a picture and indiscriminately mixes blue and black in the same
area, it does not necessarily mean that the child does not ‘see’ the difference between
blue and black; it is more likely that the difference has no real meaning.
But only in rare cases did the above mentioned researchers use a series of sequential
or ‘story-telling’ pictures, or even entire picture books, to test the children’s responses.
That type of picture ‘reading’ has yet to be studied cross-culturally.
Do all the theories mentioned above hold up when examined in the light of children’s
literature and orature in developing countries? Is there even a surviving orature in most
of these cultures? Do they distinguish separate types of orature for children, or is all
orature for general audiences of all ages? Is there a special language used with and/or by
children? Does one find, in the literature and orature for children commonly found in
developing countries today, a mixture of the oral and the visual? Does the physical
entity that ‘holds’ children’s literature today (book, magazine, film, cloth sheet or scroll)
look different in developing countries than it does in countries with advanced printing
and reproducing technologies? If there are differences, is it because of cultural forces or
economic forces? What constraints on children’s literature occur in cultures where the
language exists in written form but in several different orthographies? What happens in
those cultures where written language is very far removed from the spoken language of
ordinary people?
These questions can be taken up in only the sketchiest fashion, because there have
been so few studies of comparative children’s literature, and even fewer of orature for
children, that include examples from many cultures. For example, the extensive work of
Iona and Peter Opie in collecting the playful language of English-speaking children
encompasses much orature for children, and their notes often compare or contrast
items from a few European cultures. But English is now the first language for children
in many cultures, and the orature of British children (particularly the nursery rhymes
and cumulative tales) was written down and transformed into fixed literary forms that
were often exported in book form to other countries. Few scholars have taken the
research of the Opies one step further, comparing and contrasting how the British
children’s orature they recorded has ended up in the children’s literature of other
cultures. And no one has yet taken this body of work and, using the theories of Parry
and his followers, attempted to identify what parts of it can be classified as pure orature
and what parts were kept alive mostly through print.
Orature does seem to be surviving in most cultures of the developing world, but it is
more and more a recorded orature, except for cultural groups who are still very isolated
from urban areas. And even such groups are coming increasingly under the scrutiny of
folklorists, ethnologists, anthropologists, botanists and others.
A number of African cultures (among them the Ewe and the Mbiti) can identify specific
orature that is aimed at children, as do some of the Native American cultures (Pellowski
1990:67–68). Based on personal observation, one can say that orature performed by
children (and passed on chiefly from child to child without adult intervention) is
probably even more specific to them, but there are so few persons who have collected
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