Baccalauréat · Série A · Anglais — 2020

TEXT — The last of the storytellers

Djeliba is ninety-two years old. He is a griot, and he knows by heart the genealogy of eleven families, forty-three songs, and about two hundred tales. Nothing of all this has ever been written down.

« My master died in 1961, » he says. « I received everything from his mouth, as he had received it from the mouth of his own master. That is how it has always worked. »

The problem is that Djeliba has no pupil. His two sons are in Abidjan; his grandson repairs motorcycles and finds the tales « too long ». For years, the old man refused every proposal to record him. « A tale is not a thing you keep in a box, » he would say. « It is something you give to a living person. »

He changed his mind last year. A young researcher from the University of Ouagadougou spent four months in the village, not to record him, but to listen to him — and to learn. She now knows sixty of the tales.

« She is a woman, and she is not from my family, » Djeliba says. « In my youth that would have been impossible. But a tale that dies is worse than a tale badly transmitted. »