“At Your Service”: West African Griots in dialogue with researchers

Abstract

The function of the West African storytellers known as “griots” is to define for their audiences – or for researchers – a harmonious setting by providing information that strikes these audiences as personally and historically relevant. They are therefore trained to adopt a particular approach requiring them to anticipate audience expectations, which in turn means that anyone interviewing a griot must do so from a particular methodological perspective. All the same, the griots’ professional skill in placing themselves at the audience’s service should not be confused with the well-known practice, commonly observed in studies of oral tradition, of giving “socially desirable” answers, for that is usually either the result of some sort of pressure or is done as a gesture of courtesy.

Over the past hundred years the griots have been successful in using their professional skill to define harmonious settings for citizens of West African countries to set their histories in clearly defined narrative spaces. They have used the West African savanna landscape as a narrative space to enhance West Africa’s medieval history. That history featured a sultanate called Mali, but a characteristically Eurocentric tradition, the product of colonialism with origins in the first half of the twentieth century, has represented it as the “Mali Empire.”

In producing their narrative space for the Mali Empire griots have enjoyed a degree of leeway that is the result of three historical factors. Firstly, since the 1950s African history itself has been set free as an object of academic study; secondly, the interview techniques of French anthropology valued repetitive questioning; and thirdly, there has been an academic debate about whether or not epic even existed in Africa. The griots’ production of a narrative space for the tradition of the Mali Empire is illustrated through developments linked to the belief that the Mande peoples of West Africa do indeed possess an orally transmitted charter dating to the thirteenth century.