The Griot (Jeli)

Among the Mande peoples of West Africa — in Mali, Guinea, Senegal, the Gambia and beyond — a griot (jeli or jali) is a hereditary custodian of the spoken word: historian, genealogist, praise-singer, diplomat and musician, all at once. Born into the role and trained from childhood, a griot holds in memory the lineages, treaties, victories and disgraces of the families and communities they serve.

They are the keepers of epics — above all the Epic of Sundiata, the founding story of the 13th-century Mali Empire, transmitted orally for some seven centuries before being written down from griots' own performances. Accompanied by the kora, ngoni or balafon, a griot can praise, mediate a dispute, negotiate a marriage, or shame a patron into generosity; their word carries real social weight.

The tradition is the clearest embodiment of everything a commons like this exists for: knowledge held not in text but in trained human memory, passed hand to hand. It is often summed up in a line attributed to the Malian writer Amadou Hampâté Bâ — that in Africa, when an old person dies, it is as though a library has burned. The griot is the library that refuses to burn.