‘It’s in our blood’: Mali’s griots and musical enskilment

Film review of Da Kali: the pledge of the art of the griot (2013, 86 minutes) and Dò Farala A Kan: something has been added (2013, 69 minutes). French and Bamanankan, with English subtitles. Directed by Lucy Durán, edited by Michele Banal, and made with assistance from Lassana Diabaté.

‘We haven’t learned it. It’s in our blood. We live in it.’

(Mandé griot)

The Mandé griots of West Africa, or jeliw (singular jeli) as they call themselves in Mandenkan, are hereditary artisans who specialize in the arts of music, praise song, dance and storytelling. Their professional origins date to the thirteenth century, when the Mali Empire was founded by the renowned warrior-king Sunjata Keita. In Mandé society, griots are one of the so-called nyamakala ‘castes’, along with blacksmiths, potters, leatherworkers and other specialist artisans; and, like their counterparts, they practise endogamy. As nyamakala, griots possess the power to transform the world, and they do so with words. Speech is recognized throughout the region as a source of social power for diplomatically persuading, pacifying, evoking emotion, and inciting action in fellow human beings. In the past, griots served political rulers and the horon free nobles, reciting their genealogies and singing patronymic fasaw (praise songs) that glorify the heroic feats of their ancestors. In addition, they were delegated ambassadorial roles, acting as mediators between worldly and spiritual forces; their oral histories preserved the social memory of traditional culture, customs and morals; they were sanctioned to make political commentary; and, importantly, they provided entertainment for villagers and townsfolk. Today’s griots enjoy the patronage and fandom of a much wider spectrum of the population than in the past. National politicians and successful entrepreneurs with the means to hire them can employ griots to celebrate their lineage, ethnicity, accomplishments and ambitions in song. Their skilled oration and musicianship has earned them prestige across West Africa, and recording technologies have launched some individual griots to superstar status around the globe.

The griots’ art – and, more particularly, the ways in which their musical skills are taught and learned during childhood – is explored meticulously in two new documentary films directed by ethnomusicologist, record producer and radio broadcaster Lucy Durán. Durán’s films are outputs from Growing Into Music, a collaborative study between members of the music departments at SOAS and Royal Holloway College. The study documents children’s acquisition of musical skills in diverse cultural settings, including India, Azerbaijan, Cuba, Venezuela, Mali and Guinea. Growing Into Music is one of more than forty research projects funded by Beyond Text, a programme of the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) that aims to promote greater appreciation and understanding of how humans communicate across time and space using performance, sound, images and objects. This agenda aligns with a burgeoning academic trend to recognize, document and analyse humankind’s myriad ways of knowing and communicating beyond spoken language and text. Research on embodied forms of cognition and communication, for example, includes investigation into on-site learning, apprenticeship, and practice and performance in sport, dance, music, crafts and everyday tasks. Equally, it includes studies of the role played by gesture, posture, comportment and facial expression in communicating (or concealing) thoughts, ideas, desires and emotional states.

Durán’s films make significant contributions to several of these domains of inquiry. They demonstrate that griots’ oral recounting of histories, parables, legends and genealogies is intricately entwined with their physical performance of music, dance, gesture and carefully choreographed bodily comportment. Their focus on oral history and the ways in which it is learned, memorized and creatively transformed and updated by successive generations reveals that the griot’s art is a complex one, involving considerable mental dexterity. It also undermines the hierarchy imputed by an enduring divide between orality and literacy.

But, to my mind, the most provocative message delivered is that ‘You don’t become a jeli (griot); you are born one.’ This belief is widely shared and reiterated by griots. In doing so, they unambiguously capitalize on the hereditary status they enjoy and, relatedly, on...