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Examens nationaux
Baccalauréat · Série A · Anglais — 2020
BAC A — Anglais — Sujet type n° 5
Consignes
- Answer ALL the questions in English.
- Answers written in French will not be marked.
- Dictionaries are not allowed.
Reading comprehension
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. »