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P RO L O G U E An Invitation to War April in Mali is burning and dusty. It is the time of the harmattan, a desert wind that blows from the north, from the Sahara, carrying with it not only inescapable heat but also the grit of desert sand. The temperature can reach a low of 90 degrees Fahrenheit at night and quickly climb from there once the sun is up. It is a difficult month to get through, long after harvest when food stocks are getting low, well before the rains set in when new crops can be planted. In April of 1985, I was living in Bamako, the capital city, within a griot family’s compound in the Ouolofobougou district of the city, regularly attending the functions at which griots perform, the weddings and naming ceremonies that are the average city griot’s professional venues. I had, by then, undergone more than a year of informal apprenticeship within the Mande griot community, principally within the ethnically diverse circles of the city where the Bamana, Maninka, or Soninke identity of the griot took second place to the status of griot itself. In the company of other griot women ( jelimusow ), I attended these ceremonies, learning to sing or shout out the appropriate praise lines for members of various noble families, to dance in flamboyant style to the jembe and dunun drums, and to announce the gifts given by one noble to another in elaborate speech so powerful it could make people weep. I too had been praised in public before audiences large and small by some of the most popular and exciting young singers, the women who were the new trendsetters in urban griot settings, and I had toured with one of the most active griot troupes at the time, the Groupe Ambiance. I was known in griot circles as Jeneba Jabate, a “European” woman who lived and performed like a griot, and many of the best-known griots of the time were close friends. I was comfortable in my life as a jelimuso. But I hated April, and wanted nothing more than to escape to someplace cool and moist where I could breathe deeply instead of being suffocated by the harsh, hot wind from the north. Instead, I was taken to the inferno of Kita and into the war of the griots there. Early one scorching morning, Adé Jabate, one of the jelimusow living in Bamako who had adopted me as an apprentice and as a younger sister, a mountain of a woman with soft, pillowy cheeks, stood huffing and puffing on my doorstep, having climbed the two flights of steeply inclined cement stairs that led up from the courtyard of the griot family’s compound where I lived to the door of my apartment within it. Wiping at her brow with the corner of her boubou1 and tilting her head back in her appraising way, she wheezed her words out through deep sucking breaths. “Eh! Jeneba! It’s been a while! I just had to come over here to tell you the news! You hear?” I was surprised to see her because Adé had never come alone to visit me in my home before, even though I was living with her cousin’s family. In the Mande world, the person who disturbs herself to go to another’s house shows deference to that person, an attitude that would normally have been out of place for Adé to show; I was her dɔgɔmuso, her younger sister, and normally if she wanted to see me she would send for me and I would go to her. Her manner was also exceptional in that she was getting right to the point without the lengthy greeting that would normally have been appropriate given that it had been several days since we’d seen each other. I interrupted her to ask her to sit down while I got her a glass of cold water from my fridge. “Older sister, what’s up?” I called from a few feet away in the kitchen. She was emanating excitement, not urgency, so I followed her cue and left formality aside.2 She dabbed again at her face as I handed her the water. “A celebration. All the Jabates. They’re going to have a celebration for all the Jabates. And you have to come. You’re a Jabate too, so you have to come. I had to tell you...

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