| Sumario: | Enslavement and transplantation of Black Africans in the New World led to dispersal of African cultures that have left a permanent imprint on African American and Caribbean literatures. The result of the twinned historical event is that in works of African and Black Caribbean writers there are great affinities that are traceable to explorations of a common heritage of African cosmology and oral tradition. The essay is a contrapuntal cum comparatist reading of Derek Walcott's Ti-Jean and His Brothers and Wole Soyinka's A Dance of the Forests using culture and postcolonial theories to examine plot, setting, characterization, theme, and language in the two plays. The essay gains insight from the principle of the African continuum. The study discovers that the animist worldview shapes the imagination of the two playwrights with little influence from the Western literary tradition. It concludes that there are more resemblances than divergences in the authors' deployment of history and resources of oral traditions.
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