{
  "id": "griot",
  "title": "The Griot (Jeli)",
  "type": "oral-tradition",
  "summary": "The hereditary oral historians of West Africa's Mande world — living archives who carry a people's genealogy, history and music across generations.",
  "body": "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.\n\nThey 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.\n\nThe 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.",
  "culture": "Mande (Malinke, Mandinka, Bambara)",
  "region": "Mali, Guinea, Senegal, the Gambia — West Africa",
  "language": "mnk",
  "transmission": "oral",
  "tags": [
    "history",
    "genealogy",
    "music",
    "west-africa",
    "oral-tradition"
  ],
  "sources": [],
  "confidence": "documented",
  "contributor": "seed",
  "added": "2026-07-12",
  "updated": "2026-07-12",
  "url": "https://crowdh.com/knowledge/griot.html"
}