African Oral Resources Laboratory

The African Oral Resources Laboratory (LROA) is located in the heart of CIPCA.
It is the source, the reference.
It is a basis on which the team’s action is based: the knowledge inherited from the ancestral and contemporary oral culture.
Knowledge preserved in vernacular languages, and that its holders wish to preserve and share.
The coordinating members of the LROA therefore proceed to the collection on the ground, then to the transcription of the texts for the preservation and dissemination of this oral and aural heritage that it is urgent to safeguard.
We also want to associate this enhancement of cultural richness with the idea of creativity, whether through the intervention of partner artists, or by making known the authors of the oral texts collected and which are sometimes full artists.
This dual conservation ambition associated with creativity corresponding to an experimental dimension dear to the LROA since its beginnings in 2013.

LROA projects help to create a database, as important as possible, on African sound heritage.
Similarly, the organization of a cycle of lectures on the transmission of sound and cultural heritage allows members of CIPCA and guests to feed and update a more than ever needed reflection on the place given to African orality in contemporary societies..

Text of the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible cultural heritage : http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/fr/convention