The Oral History and Literature of the Wolof People of Waalo, Northern Senegal: The Master of the Word (Griot) in the Wolof Tradition (review)

If there is one factor that generally unites the study of oral as well as written African literatures in our times, it is that of an epistemological and sociopolitical impetus behind both. For good reasons, this impetus undergirds, and will for a time longer continue to do so, the study of most things black and African: namely, to give dignity in discourse back to the continent and to the things emanating therefrom. Keeping this in the back of our minds, we may usefully turn to Samba Diop’s book and there encounter yet another contribution to this ongoing process of discursive reclamation of “Africa”—its past and the transactions of that past with the present. Diop’s book deals with the Wolof epic of Njaajaan Njaay; it transcribes, annotates, and provides an interpretive gloss on aspects of the history of the Wolof of Senegal as these are sedimented in the performances of two informants, Sèq Ñan and Ancumbu Caam. Sèq Ñan performs the narrative of the founding of the Wolof nation by Njaajaan; he also provides a scripted record (in Arabic) of the first set of kings of the Wolof nation, and a verbal performance of the genealogy. Ancumbu Caam and his son Magate Caam are interviewed in the second appendix, and it seems that the Caams’ role in the book is to give insight into the modes of operation of griots as well as the process of apprenticeship—whereby the raconteur’s skill is transmitted from one generation to another.

We are ushered into the study with an introduction that offers prefatory information about such disciplinary details as scope of the study, fieldwork methodology, background information on the two informants, and the circumstances of the taping sessions. Chapters one and two supply texts of the narrative of Njaajaan, the founder of the Wolof nation, in Wolof and English translation respectively. The third chapter then provides a gloss on the tale, with annotations that gloss historical and cultural details that enable a richer understanding of the tale. As might be expected, Diop’s book also spells out the epic’s meaning for the people whose past it relates and perpetuates. Part two, composed of five chapters, is subtitled “Study.” The implication is that the narrative transcribed and annotated in part one is something of a raw material preserved and served up, as it were, for the critic’s analyzed lab or.

Diop’s book is a welcome addition to the ongoing efforts to collect and transcribe African oral-literary traditions. By the lights of the narrative and Diop’s analysis, we see an area of oral expressive practice that is by now incontestable: namely, the integral role of audience participation, and the conscription of audience communities within the narrative itself. Such audience communities, in being named, identify themselves and their history at the point and within the artistic fullness of the naming. It seems that Diop subscribes to a view of the oral material as documentation, more or less, of culture: “In this study, the question of traditions is viewed within the context of oral literature for it is Wolof oral literature that expresses the customs and beliefs of the Wolof people” (47). It may well be the case that oral tales encode the customs and beliefs of whole groups, but we may do well to keep in mind that “culture” is much more complicated (which is to say, elusive) than what the terms “beliefs” and “customs” imply. If it is true that we can identify beliefs and customs when we encounter them on the streets, my tendency would be to suggest that culture is less amenable to our conventional protocols of recognition. One is tempted, then, to caution against a conflation of what people believe or say they believe...