People of Western background tend to relate the terms `poetics` and `poetry` with particular kinds of features such as `meter` and `rhyme`. Ethnopoetics does not reject to involve these conventional features, but at the same time it pursues discovering of `something meaningful ethnographically`. This article discusses structure and style of texts of African oral literatures. Structure can be defined as a poetic frame on which texts are organized. Structure in this sense means the principles, according to which one linguistic unit (a sound, syllable, line, or stanza) appears following another. This article, focusing on African oral texts, expands the notion of structural stability to include not only `rhythm` derived mainly from meter but also `poetic balance` achieved in terms of correspondence across units dividing texts. In so doing, sets of new concepts will be introduced, two of which are expected to contribute to the future study of `poetics`: nested structure and nested style. The notions which underlie these new terms are the harmony and/or contrast between structure and style.