This paper emerges from a childhood shaped by African folktales, told through song, gesture, and moral questioning in familial and communal settings. Drawing on this performative tradition, I examine how African folktales have moved from orally transmitted narratives to written texts, classroom materials, and now digital and algorithmic objects of study. I present “Moral Ecology of African Folktales” (digitalafricanstorytelling.com), a Digital Humanities project that builds an online archive and exploratory infrastructure for studying African folktales with and against contemporary AI-driven methods. Currently, the project includes 385 folktales from five African regions, annotated into 55 themes derived from moral, social, and cosmological concerns in the stories. These themes inform a relational database and interactive dashboard designed to visualise narrative patterns, moral motifs, and regional variations.
Methodologically, the project uses computational pattern detection and thematic querying to trace how recurring figures (such as the tortoise) and moral scenarios shift as stories move through transcription, translation, recirculation, animation, and algorithmic analysis. At the same time, I argue for a cautious deployment of AI techniques so as not to erase the performative, sonic, and situated dimensions of the narratives—the voices of narrators, the music that accompanies stories, and the contexts in which they are told. Finally, the project experiments with centring African knowledge systems in digital research design by grounding the data model in African moral categories and narrative logics.