A NIGHT OF STORY AND SOUND
Night gathers over the Sahel. The sun leaves a last golden seam on the horizon and the air cools enough for breath to feel like silk. People drift towards the compound: not in haste, but with the sure-footedness of those who know exactly where their history will appear. A mat is unrolled; a calabash is set down. Lamps are lit. In the half-shadow, the griot tunes the kora—twenty-one strings falling into place like stars finding their constellations. Beside him, the balafon’s wooden keys wait, and the ngoni’s lean neck glows with oil. He clears his throat, smiling because he has seen this gathering before—many times, over many years—and because he carries tonight what was given to him by his elders, and what he will give in turn to the young who sit wide-eyed at the front.
“Hear me!” he calls, and the phrase, a ritual key, unlocks the room. “The world is old, but the future springs from the past.” A low ripple runs through the listeners. The drummer tests a heartbeat rhythm with his palm. And then the names begin: Sogolon and Sundiata; Soumaoro of Sosso; Kassaye and her son, the reformer-king; the old Ghana of Wagadu, with its serpent of gold and drought; the Ozidi who was born standing; Bayajidda at the well in Daura; Oduduwa descending by chain; the Golden Stool that refused to touch the earth. The room is no longer a room. It is Mali and Songhay and the forest delta. It is a red plain before dawn, a river mouth at high tide, a king’s court under a canopy as long as memory.
This is how West African epics live: not as pages in a silent book, but as breath, music, invocation, and reply. They are poetry carried by voice and instrument, expanding and contracting with the evening, faithful to the bones of the tale yet alive to the mood of the moment. What follows is a guided journey through that world: how these epics are made and remembered; where they come from; what they are about; why they endure; and what values they weave into the societies that tell them. Along the way you will meet heroes and mothers, kings and tricksters, spirits and saints. You will hear the repeated line—“No one can cut the road of destiny”—and feel why people still gather when a griot says, softly but with complete confidence, “Listen.”
WHAT COUNTS AS AN EPIC HERE?
The word “epic” often conjures Homeric voyages or armoured warriors on Mediterranean shores. West African epics share the same scale of feeling and consequence, but their form is distinct. These are long, ceremonially performed narratives, usually sung or chanted by specialists—griots (Mandinka jeliw/jeli; Soninke gesere; Wolof géwël; Yoruba àkúnkọ; among others)—accompanied by instruments (the harp-lute kora; the plucked ngoni/hoddu; the xylophone-like balafon; the talking drum). They can take a single night or several to perform. They are not fixed word-for-word texts; they are living compositions with a stable spine—characters, episodes, decisive scenes—around which each performer weaves style, proverb, praise-name, and local aside.
The griot is not only a singer. He (or she; there are distinguished women griots and praise-singers in many traditions) is genealogist, diplomat, satirist, historian, and ethicist. Apprenticeship can take years: learning family lineages; memorising praise epithets; mastering the rhythm of end-stopped lines, the musical cues that lift a stanza, the art of slowing a moment until the audience leans in as one, then cutting it clean with a single ringing phrase. A great griot knows when to stick to the old telling and when to change the lens to speak to the present—how to praise without flattery; how to chide without public shaming.
Because these epics are performed, they are also social events. They mark coronations, weddings, funerals; they honour guests; they console a community after hardship; they answer a child’s question about where we came from and why our customs look like this. Call-and-response is not decoration—it is structure. When the griot intones “He walked,” the audience answers “He walked,” reinforcing memory by echo, knitting listeners into the act of keeping the past.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: EMPIRES, KINGDOMS, AND COURTS
If you place a finger on a map from the Senegal River east to Lake Chad, and from the Sahara down to the forest zone, you trace a thousand years of kingdoms whose names now sound like poetry: Wagadu (ancient Ghana) in the Sahel; Mali rising in the thirteenth century from Mandinka heartlands; Songhay extending along the Niger with Gao and Timbuktu as jewels; Jolof uniting Wolof-speaking peoples in the Senegambian corridor; the Hausa city-states flowered around Kano, Katsina, Zaria; Yoruba polities—Ife, Oyo, Ijebu—knitting sacred kingship with a bustling artisan economy; Akan states—Denkyira and Asante—building federations round an animate symbol of sovereignty, the Golden Stool. Further Futa Tooro and Futa Jallon where Fulɓe (Fulani) reformers tied pastoral codes to Islamic learning; the Niger Delta’s Ijaw villages where masquerade and tale interwove by mangrove light.
Trade bound these regions: gold and kola nuts, salt and cloth, leather and books. The Sahara was not a barrier but a road; camel caravans ferried scholars and Sufi saints along with merchants. Arabic literacy arrived with Islam, and in places like Timbuktu the pen complemented the string. But beyond the mosque and the scribe’s mat, the genre that explained how a people came to be—how a king earned allegiance, why a law was given, what happens when pride outruns obligation—was the epic. It was the charter and the conscience, set to melody.
MAJOR EPICS: A CATALOGUE OF HEROES AND FOUNDINGS
What follows is not exhaustive; it is a compass. The titles differ by dialect; the bones are recognisable.
Sunjata/Sundiata (Mandinka/Mande, Mali). The exile-and-return of Sogolon’s son, prophesied founder of Mali. Born unable to walk, mocked by a jealous co-wife, he rises, learns, gathers allies in exile, and returns to break the sorcery of Soumaoro Kanté at the plain of Kirina. He rules with justice, codifies the Manden Charter, and unites clans under law. Signature line: “From this day forth, the son of Sogolon shall walk.”
Dausi/Wagadu Cycle (Soninke, ancient Ghana). Four eras of rise, fall, and return. Gassire’s Lute tells of a prince who chooses song and fame over duty, costing Wagadu its strength. Later Mamadi slays the serpent Bida that demanded yearly human sacrifice in exchange for prosperity; the curse that follows brings hardship but moral cleansing. Refrain: “Wagadu disappeared, and was found again.”
Askia Muhammad (Songhay/Zarma). Muhammad Ture—“Mamar Kassaye,” son of Kassaye—overthrows the Sunni dynasty, reforms the empire, elevates scholars, and travels on the hajj. Prophecy and strategy entwine; Islam and indigenous powers negotiate a new order. A mother’s cunning saves the infant destined to rule.
Ozidi (Ijaw/Ijo, Niger Delta). A ritual-dramatic cycle: Ozidi the Younger, trained by his sorceress grandmother Oreame, avenges his father’s murder by six treacherous champions. Battles are waged in body and spirit; masquerades and chants fuse theatre with rite. The hero must be cooled afterwards, lest vengeance consume him.
Bayajidda (Hausa). A stranger prince slays the serpent that keeps Daura from her well. He marries the queen, fathers the Hausa Bakwai (the seven legitimate city-state dynasties) and—through the concubine—ancestors of the Banza Bakwai (seven allied states). A map turned into kinship.
Da Monzon of Ségou (Bamana/Bambara). A chronicle of campaigns, alliances, betrayals; a study in realpolitik and the ethics of manoeuvre. The kingdom’s ton (warrior associations) and the figure of the cunning general (e.g., N’Golo Diarra) show organisation as heroism.
Bitòn Mamary Coulibaly (Bamana/Bambara). Founder of Ségou’s ton and de facto state-maker. Discipline and ceremony forge a polity; reputation works alongside force.
Kelefa Saane/Sane (Mandinka, Senegambia). A chivalric warrior famed in kora repertoire; magnanimity and pride duel within one breast, and tragedy follows as surely as a drumbeat.
Ndiadiane Ndiaye/Njaajaan Njaay (Wolof). A charismatic being emerges from water, unites peoples into Jolof, and founds a template of sovereignty endangered by hubris. A covenant story.
Samba Guéladio Diégui (Fulɓe/Fuuta Tooro). A hero-king whose restraint—pulaaku, the Fulani code—anchors courage. Exile teaches measure; return tests mercy.
Silâmaka e Poullori (Fulɓe). Paired heroes, brothers in bond if not in blood, whose loyalty is tested against tyrants and temptation. Friendship as a political virtue.
Fodé Kabba (Fuuta Jallon; Fulani/Mande convergences). A later epic-shaped cycle on Islamisation and the charisma of holy war; debates about just force framed in familiar epic terms.
Oduduwa & Moremi Ajasoro (Yoruba). Founding and refounding. Oduduwa descends to shape land and kingship; their descendants spread to Oyo and beyond. Moremi’s cunning sacrifice saves Ife from raiders—she gives up what she loves for the city’s survival—thereby teaching that queenship may be a cost borne, not merely a crown worn.
Osei Tutu & the Golden Stool (Akan/Asante). The Golden Stool descends; it is the soul of the nation. To touch it is sacrilege; to protect it is duty. Komfo Anokye’s priestly power entwines with statecraft; unity is ritual as much as treaty.
(There are more—Egba and Ewe cycles, Igala and Nupe stories of origin and ordeals—but the above form a core you will encounter in any long conversation with West African performers and historians.)
HOW EPICS ARE PERFORMED: THE CRAFT OF MEMORY
The music is not accompaniment; it is argument. The kora sets a tonal world in which praise-names ring: “Sogolon’s son, Lion of Manden, hunter who bends the iron staff, baobab uprooter.” The balafon’s interlocking patterns allow the griot to lean on repetition as a structural pillar. Repetition is not redundancy; it is intensification. “He walked; he walked; he walked,” the audience replies, and in the echo, time dilates until the return itself feels like an achievement we share.
Formulae—set pieces—help carry length. There are standard openings; there is the catalogue of allies (listen to Sundiata’s list unfurl like a banner: Kamandjan of Sibi, Faony Diarra, Tiramaghan of Kaabu); there is the praise of a horse (how it stamps; how the dust blooms under its hoof); the incantation scene (Oreame stooping to draw a chalk ring). Between them, improvisation breathes: a proverb bent to a new situation, a sly comment about a current chief’s miserliness, a gesture towards a child at the front—“You with the keen eyes: remember this line; it will be yours to repeat one day.”
Griots mark social rhythm. At a marriage, they weave two lineages; at a funeral, they ease grief by tying a life into a larger rope of names; at a political ceremony, they remind the powerful where their right comes from and what it is for. A good griot can raise courage before a battle or lower the temperature after an insult. The art lies as much in what is left unsaid as in what is sung outright.
THEMES THAT CROSS BORDERS
Destiny and Prophecy. West African epics love the forward-striking arrow of fate. “A child of an ugly woman will rule,” the hunter tells Maghan Kon Fatta; Sogolon, not beautiful to the eye, becomes the vessel of destiny. Kassaye hears that her son will topple a dynasty; danger shadows her pregnancies, and cunning saves one life to save many. In Wagadu, prophets warn Gassire; he hears only the part that flatters him. Destiny is never a lift that carries a passenger; it is a road a hero must walk on blistered feet. Prophecy gives a destination; will, patience, and counsel provide the miles.
Exile and Return. Many heroes leave under a cloud—mocked, threatened, or outmanoeuvred. Exile grows them: Sundiata learns statecraft in Mema; Samba Guéladio learns restraint; heroes of Fulani cycles practise composure until it becomes strength. Return is not merely re-entry; it is proof that distance has distilled the self. When a hero returns, he brings not only force but a new ethics to the land.
Justice and the Limits of Revenge. Ozidi is vengeance sharpened into a spear. One by one he strikes down the men who murdered his father. But the saga insists on a cooling. Unchecked fury risks becoming what it hates. The greatest line in Ozidi’s ending is not shouted; it is Oreame’s quiet, ritual: the water runs over her grandson’s face, and his eyes lose their red edge. Justice must be fierce; it must also be bounded.
Leadership and Legitimacy. Epics are arguments about rule. Askia’s story justifies a revolution by piety and organisation. Da Monzon’s chronicles test the difference between cunning and duplicity. Bayajidda transforms violence into kinship—after slaying the serpent he marries the queen and fathers a civilisation. In such tales, right to rule rests on courage and restraint, yes, but also on a deeper social contract: a ruler who hears, who keeps his word, who honours women and elders, who balances severity with mercy.
Friendship and Loyalty. Silâmaka and Poullori are two strings tuned to the same key. Their bond is not sentimental; it is political and moral. Loyalty binds a coalition—Sundiata’s allies come because they trust his justice. Betrayal unravels kingdoms—Gassire’s vanity causes negligence; fraternal deceit in Wagadu’s second age sets up a fall.
Spirits and the Supernatural. In these epics, the visible world sits lightly on a wider reality. A buffalo-woman’s power enters a human line; a river genie fathers a reformer; a serpent sits astride a city’s prosperity. Protective amulets are not stage props; they index relationships—with ancestors, with place, with God. Islam enters and converses, not by bulldozing but by reinterpreting: charms become verses, saints take the place of forest powers; and yet the vocabulary of spirits endures because it speaks a truth about dependence and humility.
THE CENTRAL ROLES OF WOMEN
Strip out the women and West African epics collapse. Not only because mothers carry heroes to term and keep them alive through conspiracies and shortages, but because women choose, bargain, counsel, warn, betray, forgive, and transform the political field.
Sogolon Kedjou—buffalo-born, patient, often mocked—is the epic’s moral fulcrum. Her pain gives Sundiata his first reason to stand. When he uproots a baobab so she will never be denied leaves for her sauce again, the gesture is domestic and cosmic: a son restores dignity to a mother; a future king declares what his reign will feel like.
Kassaye’s endurance is the engine of Askia’s saga. She outwits a tyrant who kills her children; she bargains with spirit and fate; she hides what must be hidden; and when her son rules, he carries her name ahead of his own.
Nana Triban, Sundiata’s sister, infiltrates Soumaoro’s fortress and returns with the one fact that breaks a sorcerer’s invulnerability. It is a woman who finds the thread.
Oreame, grandmother in Ozidi, is a strategist and a priest. Without her chalk circle and songs, the boy’s blade would be wasted on phantoms. She also embodies the ethic of limits, cooling the hero when the blade thirsts beyond justice.
Queen mothers in many polities are king-makers; their praise or displeasure colours legitimacy. Moremi Ajasoro burns with a different fire: she gives herself to the enemy to learn their secret and frees Ife at the cost only a mother can measure. Her tale is a severe mercy—a reminder that the city’s life sometimes exacts unbearable personal prices.
Women as catalysts, as checks, as conscience: the epics elevate the proverb into law—“Never offend the women, our mothers.” This is not sentimental. It is structural recognition: power that dishonours mothers is brittle; power that honours them endures.
SPIRITS, RELIGION, AND DESTINY
One need not choose between the buffalo’s hoofprint and the prayer bead. The old religions of West Africa and Islam did not exist on separate planets, and the epics show us a world in negotiation. Diviners read kola nuts; marabouts tie leather amulets with Qur’anic verses. A serpent demands offerings; a courageous youth ends the bargain in blood; the drought that follows feels both physical and moral. Ancestral shrines receive libation; Friday mosques gather scholars. The world is porous: dreams warn; birds carry messages; a horse refuses to cross a line traced in chalk.
Destiny threads through this weave. Fate here is not fatalism; it is a covenant. Prophecy declares the shape of things; human beings still must consent, endure, and act. The line often spoken—“No one can cut the road of destiny”—is half comfort, half admonition. If you are meant to lead, you cannot forever hide from your task. If you are meant to fall, no charm can finally save you from the consequences of your own pride.
INDIGENOUS VALUES: WHAT THE EPICS TEACH OPENLY AND BY EXAMPLE
Courage. Not merely the ferocity of the charge, but the quieter courage of waiting in exile, of enduring mockery without breaking, of returning without bitterness. Heroes bend iron staffs and also sit at the feet of elders until they are ready.
Honour and Keeping One’s Word. Oaths matter. A leader who promises and forgets cracks the bowl that holds his power. Praise-names are earned through consistency.
Generosity. A great ruler feeds singers and strangers; he opens his granary in the lean season. Stinginess is mocked in epics not because singers fancy more coins, but because meanness signals a crimped soul unfit for stewardship.
Respect for Elders and Griots. Memory is a public good. Those who carry it deserve honour not as flattery but as infrastructure. When a king listens to his griot, he listens to the country’s longer mind.
Restraint and Composure. Fulani pulaaku names it; other peoples practise it: the beauty of self-command. Not every provocation deserves reply. In epics, the man who cannot swallow anger often chokes on it later.
Justice with Mercy. After victory, the best kings reconcile. Sundiata binds former enemies into alliances. Askia reforms rather than merely replaces. Mercy is not softness; it is strategy guided by ethics.
Reverence for Women and Mothers. Already spoken: it is both a moral and a constitutional principle. The Manden Charter’s spirit—protect women, children, the weak; condemn slander; honour hospitality—flows through tale and law alike.
Hospitality. To feed a stranger is to invite blessing. A hero often receives decisive aid because he treated someone kindly when he had no reason to.
Truth and Satire. The griot can cut a big man down to size with a line. Epics teach leaders to accept admonition cloaked in praise. To be above satire is to be below wisdom.
THE EPICS AND HISTORY: MEMORY WITH A POINT OF VIEW
Do these epics tell history? Yes—and not the way a ledger does. They preserve names, places, battles, laws, successions, alliances; they keep alive the geography of hearts—why a decision felt just, how a defeat felt like a moral consequence, when a drought seemed like the world holding its breath. When they embroider, they are not merely ornamenting. They are unblushing about the moral interpretation of events. Soumaoro is not just a rival; he embodies tyranny. Gassire is not merely a gifted prince; he is a warning in elegant boots. This clarity helps a community remember not just what happened, but what it meant, and what it should mean the next time a similar choice arrives at the palace door.
The arrival and diffusion of Islam form a crucial chapter. Askia’s epic casts reform as destiny; Dausi reframes prosperity in ethical terms (gold without blood); many cycles incorporate Muslim saints and courts. Yet the forest and river gods do not simply vanish. Where a modern reader hears contradiction, a listener hears complement: order and protection can speak many dialects. The result is not confusion but a supple pluralism, a pragmatic search for balance enforced by story.
MODERN-DAY IMPACT AND CONTINUING LIFE
These epics are not museum pieces. They are sung in Bamako courtyards, at Saint-Louis festivals, in Kano’s ceremonies, in Ife’s commemorations, in Port Harcourt’s theatres, in Conakry’s open-air nights. They are taught in schools as literature and as heritage. They appear in novels and plays, films and animations. Kora players carry Sunjata’s melodic DNA into jazz clubs in Paris and New York. Young poets remix Wagadu’s refrain into spoken word. A playwright re-stages Ozidi as a contemporary meditation on justice, dressing the six traitors in crisp suits and making the grandmother a chorus of women who refuse silence.
On the civic side, these epics give language to public virtue. Politicians are compared—favourably or with a raised eyebrow—to the great names. A president is urged to “be a Sundiata” in unity; a reformer is praised as “a son of Kassaye” for cleansing a ministry. Activists quote the Charter of Manden when arguing for dignity: “Do not ill-treat women, our mothers.” When debates about religion turn sharp, the Askia story is offered as a model of reform done with learning rather than zealotry. The epics provide a reservoir of symbols that are ours, not imported, and therefore persuasive.
In diaspora, they travel differently. A Mandinka family in London plays a recording of Kouyaté’s voice when a child asks why the family name matters. A Wolof student in Berlin writes a thesis about Ndiadiane Ndiaye’s charisma and reads it at a community centre, eyes bright with the thrill of seeing her grandparents’ tales in academic dress without losing their rhythm. A Nigerian filmmaker in Toronto shoots a short: a boy named Ozidi who must cool his rage by learning to box, guided by a grandmother with chalk and rosemary. The old story enters new rooms and, because it is true to human shape, it finds accommodation.
HOW TO LISTEN, HOW TO READ
If you hear an epic, let time do what it does on river water: slow it. Accept repetition as a ladder the griot is building for you. Learn the praise-names—“Keita, Lion of the Manden,” “Bida of the nine bends,” “Oreame of chalk and storm,” “Askia, son of Kassaye.” Hear the proverbs as if your grandfather had just cleared his throat to deliver them. If you read a transcription, remember that print flattens music; lean your inner ear towards rhythm. And do not demand a perfect concordance among versions. Variation is not error; it is life. Different towns remember differently; different families emphasise their ancestor’s part. The spine holds; the face changes; the person remains.
SOME SCENES TO CARRY WITH YOU
A boy stands using an iron staff and bends it into a bow by the force of his rising. “From this day forth, the son of Sogolon shall walk.”
A grandmother draws a circle in chalk and says in a voice that brooks no dispute, “Not a hoof beyond this line.” The demon crosses his tail into the ring and thrashes; the grandson’s blade finishes what the spell began. Afterwards she pours water over his head and whispers, “Cool.”
A serpent lifts a jeweled head at a well; a bride does not scream; a young man whose name has the sound of a drum strikes once, twice, thrice; the head falls; a curse rides the air; the city must learn to be honest without the serpent’s gold.
A mother who has buried seven infants walks to the river and bargains with a spirit because life is not a thing one gives up on. Years later, she sits behind a curtain while a court hails her son as reformer and ruler, and though the songs praise him, the griot sings her name first.
A man who wants to be sung more than he wants to serve hears his lute sound sweet only when sorrow and loss have given him depth; too late, his song costs a city its walls.
A queen offers herself as spy and returns with the secret that saves a city. She pays, and the city remembers.
CULTURAL BACKGROUND: ROOTS OF THE GRIOT’S AUTHORITY
Why do people listen when a griot speaks? Because he stands at a junction where multiple roads meet: lineage and law, memory and music, praise and sarcasm. He knows who your grandmother’s brother married and why that matters now. He knows the boundaries of farms and the histories of feuds. He can say in a single polished phrase what a politician spends an hour chasing. He confers legitimacy: to raise the old song at a coronation is to place the new king under the eyes of the ancestors. He also restrains: the whisper of a satirical couplet can puncture a parade of vanity.
Griot families are often endogamous, their arts inherited like a chest of instruments. But the art is not sealed; outsiders have entered and become masters; women have stepped to the front of the mat and led with brilliance. The point is not blood purity; it is transmission. A thing worth keeping must be taught hand-to-hand, voice-to-ear. In this sense, the epic is not merely content; it is a method for making adults—stable, courageous, witty, ethical.
THE POLITICS OF PERFORMANCE
Who pays the griot? Often the powerful; sometimes the village; sometimes a family to mark a rite of passage. Does that bias the story? It can. But performance is a negotiation. A griot can praise a stingy patron by praising generosity so lavishly that he invites the man to step up to the image being sung. He can recall, innocently, how a former king gave more. He can insert the proverb: “A calabash with a narrow mouth cannot be filled.” Laughter does the work that a lecture cannot.
Some epics—Dausi, Askia—are explicitly political: they justify or caution; they present models of reform; they embed the idea that law binds even the lion. Others—Ozidi—turn the political lens inward: what happens to a community that tolerates treachery? What does it cost to cleanse it? The moral is not that violence saves; the moral is that violence, wielded under women’s wisdom and then cooled, can restore order in a fallen world—and that building institutions to avoid needing an Ozidi again is the real victory.
LANGUAGE AND STYLE: HOW THE EPICS SOUND
West African epic diction is a pleasure. Epithets are not mere adjectives; they are cognitive maps. “Uprooter of baobabs” is not a boast; it is a reminder of the day Sundiata made a garden a kingdom. Ideophones—sound-symbolic words—paint action: a horse does not simply gallop; it “guguru-guguru” across the plain. Parallelism and antiphony make sense memorable: “He slept as the young sleep; he woke as the old wake.” The audience’s interjections—“Awo!” “Na’am!” “Eh-heh!”—are not filler; they signal comprehension, consent, delight.
Indirection is an art. Satire, parable, and proverb carry criticism in a country where direct confrontation may be dangerous or merely impolite. A griot can say, “The hot soup burns the lips that do not blow,” and everyone present—especially the man with the new power—understands the injunction to patience without anyone losing face.
MODES OF THE SUPERNATURAL
The supernatural is not a cheap effect; it is a grammar of causality. Spirits stand for temptations and bonds. The serpent Bida converts human lives into economic boom; slaying him says “no more easy prosperity bought with unseen cruelties.” The buffalo-woman’s line says that strength can enter a family by ways the court does not understand, and that mocking what looks “ugly” may be insulting the very source of your future. The genie-father in Askia’s epic reads, today, as a way of saying that a reformer must have power from beyond a corrupt order—he must be fathered by a river that outlasts the palace.
Syncretism is not muddle; it is a careful art of inclusion. When Islam arrives, spirits do not disappear; they are placed in a new taxonomy. The deities of grove and river are demoted to jinn; saints take on mediations once attributed to forest elders; the Qur’an names what proverbs had gestured towards. The epic registers this change in scene after scene: the marabout hands an amulet that contains a verse; the warrior bows on a mat before battle and then throws the charm in the moment of clash. Faith becomes both moral horizon and practical tool—never merely a badge.
THE EPIC AS CHARTER
Several epics function as charters—documents (in song) that say who we are and what the law is. The Charter of Manden, aligned to Sundiata’s assembly at Kouroukan Fouga, sets norms still cited: the rights of women and children; the condemnation of hunger, slavery’s abuses, and slander; the duty of mutual aid. Bayajidda’s tale maps the human landscape—seven city-states as siblings, with the politics of elder and junior; conflict is natural; obligation binds.
Yoruba cycles on Oduduwa and Moremi fix a cosmology of kingship: the king sits at the centre of a world that is both physical and spiritual; he is “not alone”—elders, priests, market-women, and deities stand in a web; when one strand snaps, the stool shakes. Asante’s Golden Stool is a portable constitution: to attempt to sit on it is to attack the people; to protect it is to be worthy of office.
MODERN RETELLINGS AND RESPONSIBILITIES
To retell an epic is to take a responsibility. Fidelity does not mean stiff quotation; it means keeping the structure and the deep moral lines intact while letting the surface breathe. A novelist who gives Nana Triban a more interior voice must not erase her decisive act. A playwright who relocates Ozidi to a modern oil-town must keep the grandmother’s cooling, or else the piece says revenge is enough, which the original never claims. A teacher in a secondary school who assigns Sundiata must let students taste the music—play a kora clip or have the class chant a line—so the text is not mistaken for a silent, Western-style poem.
There is also the responsibility to breadth. West Africa is not one language; epics speak Mandinka and Soninke, Hausa and Wolof, Yoruba and Akan, Fulfulde and Ijo. A curriculum that only knows Sundiata misses the river delta’s masked theatre; one that only knows Ozidi misses the Sahel’s charters; one that knows neither misses a continent’s self-accounting.
WHY THEY ENDURE
Because they are good stories—this cannot be said too simply. A child leans forward when Soumaoro’s cloak rustles with fetishes and skulls. A grandmother nods when Sogolon is mocked and knows the taste of that humiliation. A young man ashamed of his temper hears Oreame’s cooling and recognises the ritual he needs. A councillor hears Gassire and promises himself to choose service over show. A woman who has lost a child hears Kassaye and cries and is comforted by the fact that a mother’s grief once changed an empire.
Because they carry values without tasteless sugar. They put courage and mercy and restraint and generosity on two feet and send them into battles where failure has consequences. They teach, but they do not nag.
Because they can change clothes without losing their body. They survive translation—from Mandinka to French to English to film to schoolbook—because at core they are built on scenes that human beings recognise: a birth under threat; a walk in exile; an ally’s betrayal; a duel that is also an argument; a feast where a satirist is allowed to work; a law read aloud and applauded; a mother remembered at a coronation.
Because they make communities. To say “We are children of Sogolon” or “We are children of the Golden Stool” is to build more than pride; it is to build obligation. Pride without obligation becomes empty nationalism. The epics refuse that emptiness; they attach pride to law, to mercy, to hospitality, to elders, to women, to the poor.
A FEW MEMORABLE LINES (AS THEY ARE OFTEN PARAPHRASED IN PERFORMANCE)
“The world is old, but the future springs from the past.” (A griot’s warrant.)
“From this day forth, the son of Sogolon shall walk.” (A boy becoming himself.)
“No one can cut the road of destiny.” (A proverb that comforts and corrects.)
“Never offend the women, our mothers.” (A line carried as law.)
“Gold that drinks blood turns to drought.” (Wagadu’s lesson.)
“Cool the warrior, cool the town.” (Ozidi’s closing rite.)
CLOSING REFLECTIONS: THE FUTURE SPRINGS FROM THE PAST
Return to the compound. The lamps are lower now. Children sleep with open mouths, hearing still the kora in their dreams. The griot, sweat shining on his forehead, has set the tale down gently. People stir, talk softly, stretch. Someone laughs—the kind of laugh that loosens envy and tight shoulders. In the shadow at the back, an old woman wipes her eyes and says, “It was like that when my grandmother told me.” At the front, a boy holds an invisible bow of iron in his hands and tries to feel how it would be to stand for the first time. The drummer’s last stroke is like a door quietly closing.
What will the next century’s epics say? That depends on us. Epics are not only what we keep; they are what we deserve. If we honour mothers, we will deserve to keep Sogolon’s name. If we insist on justice without cruelty, we will deserve to keep Oreame’s chalk. If we welcome the stranger and feed the poor, we will deserve to keep the Charter’s words. If we love fame more than duty, we will hear Gassire’s lute and understand that the sweetness in its sound comes from a sorrow we should not repeat.
The epics of West Africa offer a compact: remember us, and we will remember you. Sit by the lamp; listen; echo the line; teach the child the reply. The world is old, but the future—ours, and theirs—springs from the past.
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