The Future Emerges from the Past: Tradition and Modernity in Dani Kouyaté's Keita!: The Heritage of the Griot

204 The Future Emerges from the Past: Tradition and Modernity in Dani Kouyaté's Keital: The Heritage ofthe Griot1 Jeanne Garane University of South Carolina Whoever knows the history ofa country can read itsfuture. —Djeli Mamoudou Kouyaté At first glance, Keital:The Heritage of the Griot appears to be "a straightforward tale of the incompatibility between tradition and modernity" (Gray 1144). The film alternates between episodes from the oral Epic of Sundiata (set in the thirteenth-century empire of Old Mali) and the conflict created when Djeliba Kouyaté,2 the "traditional griot" or bard who tells the tale, travels from his rural village to Ouagadougou, the urban capital of Burkina Faso, on a "mission" to initiate Sundiata's descendant, young Mabo Keita, into the "meaning of his name." It is the imperative to tell the story, and thereby to carry out the initiation, that generates scenes from the epic itself, while during pauses from the storytelling, conflict arises when Mabo becomes so involved in the story that he begins to fail in his Western-style school, where lessons are taught in French. The tension between what could be categorized as the "traditional" wisdom and ways of the pre-colonial past, represented by Djeliba, and the "modern" lifestyle adopted by Mabo's parents in Ouagadougou is emblematic of a number of apparent oppositions present not only in the film itself, but in contemporary African cultures. Examples of these as they appear in the film include: orality versus literacy, a category which subsumes oppositions between oral and written history; indigenous versus imported (Western/French) pedagogical methods; the use of an African versus a European language in everyday life; a hierarchy based on clan authority structures versus national governmental authority; a daily schedule TRADITION AND MODERNITY IN DANI KOUYATE'S KEITA!205 based on agrarian needs versus urban "work" time; religious versus secular law; women as bearers and keepers of tradition versus women as harbingers of change. Despite these oppositions, to characterize the film as one that chooses to maintain "simplistic either/or dichotomies" between "tradition and modernity" (Gray 1144) is to miss two important points. First, as V.Y. Mudimbe writes in The Invention ofAfrica, it is because of the colonizing structure itself that "a dichotomizing system has emerged, and with it a great number of [the] current paradigmatic oppositions ..." (4) enumerated earlier. Second, because the film engages with them, it dramatizes the "dichotomy of existence permeating modern African history" (Ukadike 167). Consequently, Kouyaté's film investigates what Mudimbe identifies as an intermediate, diffused space of marginality, itself inherited from colonialism. According to Mudimbe, marginality designates the intermediate space between the so-called African tradition and the projected modernity of colonialism . . . this marginal space has been a great problem since the beginning of the colonizing experience; rather than being a step in the imagined 'evolutionary process' [the passage from the former paradigms to the latter], it has been the locus of paradoxes that called into question the modalities and implications ofmodernization in Africa. (4-5) In its use of the Epic of Sundiata to question the implications of modernization in the Mande world, Keita inhabits this locus of paradox. On the one hand, the filmic medium itself has undeniable links with neocolonial structures. And while Keita may critique neocolonialism in Burkina Faso and the Mande world,3 it nevertheless relies on partial funding from French sources to accomplish this goal.4 On the other hand, if and when it is available to local audiences, film is more accessible than printed materials to a public rooted in the oral tradition. In Keita, for example, the Epic of Sundiata is told in JuIa, a Mande language widely understood in West Africa. And while some parts of the film are in French, this would not impede the overall understanding of the film and the issues it raises to nonFrench -speaking audiences. Rather than dwelling on a Manichean incompatibility between "tradition" and "modernity," then, Kouyaté proposes a syncretic approach, articulated in Djeliba's proverbial warning to Mabo: "Always remember that it is an old world, and that the future emerges from the past." In addition to the reminder that knowledge of the Mande past must be...