“This Venerable Profession”
Moussé Ndiaye comes from
a Senegalese family of griots. Loosely speaking, griots and griottes, the
female practitioners, are oral historians, musicians, and poets. They
fulfill a variety of roles: genealogist, historian, spokesperson,
diplomat, musician, teacher, praise singer, master of ceremonies, and
advisor. Griots are prominent in many African societies, particularly West
African societies.
In a book on Griots
And Griottes: Masters of Words and Music (Indiana University Press,
1998), reviewed by Susan J. Rasmussen of the University of Houston in the
last issue for 2001 of Comparative Literature Studies, (Vol. 38,
No. 4, 2001), Thomas A. Hale traces the earliest reference to the griot in
a fourteenth-century account by a Berber visitor to the Mali empire. This
means that the oral tradition maintained by these bards, for whom the
power lies in the word, is over six centuries old. Because of their verbal
talents griots are different, and they assert considerable power over
people, elites and masses.
The two visitors who
played important roles in introducing griots to outside audiences were Ibn
Battuta, the fourteenth-century North African traveler, who provided a
landmark description of griots, and Alex Haley (in
picture), the twentieth-century
African American writer, who popularized their profession in his novel Roots.
Like other griots, Moussé
Ndiaye inherited this occupation from his ancestors and sees himself as a
facilitator and mediator. In reality, the many nuances of griots' roles,
like those of these other specialists, defy translation across cultures
and languages and there is perhaps no exact equivalent in English.
Hale finds considerable
variation in the standing of griots on the social scale within their
societies. For example in some origin tales the griots' ancestors are of
high status, while in others, they are of low status.
Nobles in many rural
communities still depend upon griots for management of their reputation,
but economic changes have altered relations between these parties
significantly, and griots now have audiences extending far beyond their
traditional noble patrons.
Over the years, very
little has been said about female griottes; and yet women seem to have
always shared the stage with men, and are particularly important as
singers. Hale suggests that this underrepresentation of female griottes is
due to the misleading outsiders' assumptions about gender, division of
tabor, and social status in African cultural and social contexts. These
mistaken assumptions are probably due to an androcentric bias.
The roles of griots are
becoming renegotiated through their travel as global performers, although
many performers nonetheless do return home and continue to perform before
local audiences. But in griots like Moussé Ndiaye, this renegotiation of
roles has not undermined what Susan J. Rasmussen calls “the ancient
pedigree of this venerable profession”.
Adrian Grima
22 January, 2002
by Alex Palmer Haley
Book
Description
This "bold... extraordinary... blockbuster..." (Newsweek
magazine) begins with a birth in an African village in 1750, and ends two
centuries later at a funeral in Arkansas. And in that time span, an
unforgettable cast of men, women, and children come to life, many of them
based on the people from Alex Haley's own family tree.
When Alex Haley was a boy growing up in Tennessee, his grandmother used to
tell him stories about their family, stories that went way back to a man
she called "the African" who was taken aboard a slave ship bound
for Colonial America. As an adult, Alex Haley spent twelve years searching
for documentation that might authenticate what his grandmother had told
him. In an astonishing feat of genealogical detective work, he discovered
the name of "the African"--Kunta Kinte, as well as the exact
location of the village in West Africa from where he was abducted in 1767.
While Haley created certain unknown details of his family history, ROOTS
is definitely based on the facts of his ancestry, and the six generations
of people--slaves and freedmen, farmers and lawyers, an architect,
teacher--and one acclaimed author--descended from Kunte Kinte. But with
this book, Haley did more than recapture the history of his own family. He
popularized genealogy for people of all races and colors; and in so doing,
wrote one of the most important and beloved books of all time, a true
Modern Classic.
HALEY, Alex Palmer
(1920-92)
American novelist and biographer, born in Ithaca, New York State, and brought up in North Carolina. He worked as a coastguard for 20 years from 1939, turning to writing only with the publication in 1965 of
The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Haley co-authoring the book after the assassination of the black activist.
Roots, published in 1976, was a phenomenal success, being adapted for television and winning a Pulitzer Prize the following year. Beginning with the life of Kunta Kinte, an African who was enslaved and taken to America, this
novel - or, to use Haley's preferred term for his realism, 'faction' -
documented the history of black Americans; its essentially optimistic approach rendered it accessible to a large white audience.
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