What a griot is

The role is real, current and specific to particular societies in the Sahel and the savannah, and it is roughly eight hundred years older than any poetry night.

Griot is a French word of uncertain origin, and it is not what griots call themselves. The names used inside the tradition are more precise, and they are the words a young writer looking into this seriously will meet first.

jeli

The Bambara and Maninka word, used across Mali and Guinea. The plural is jeliw.

jali

The Mandinka form, used in The Gambia, Senegal and Guinea-Bissau.

jeliya

The craft itself, meaning everything a griot knows and does, rather than the person doing it.

jelimuso

A woman griot, whose work is centred on singing and on the ceremonies of a household rather than on instrumental accompaniment.

gewel

The Wolof word, used in Senegal, for a role that is comparable but not identical.

gawlo

The Fula word, used across the same region by Fulani communities.

What a griot does, and for whom

A griot does five jobs for a named family or community rather than for a general public, which is the first thing that separates the role from a performing poet.

• Holds genealogy, reciting the descent of a family back through generations, which in a society without written registers is a legal and social record as much as an entertainment.
• Keeps history, including the founding narratives of states and lineages, and performs it on the occasions when it is required.
• Praises, naming the qualities and ancestry of a person present, at a wedding, a naming ceremony or a public gathering.
• Speaks for others, acting as spokesperson, go between and negotiator, since a person of rank traditionally does not address a crowd directly.
• Advises and mediates, which is the least visible part of the job and often the most consequential.

All five are performed for people who are present and named. A griot is attached, by inheritance, to particular families, and payment is part of the relationship rather than a ticket price. That attachment is exactly what a poet on a stage does not have.

Where griots are found

Griots are found across the western Sahel and the Mande cultural world: Mali, Guinea, Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Burkina Faso, southern Mauritania and northern Ivory Coast. The tradition is not pan African and does not describe practice in, for example, Ethiopia, Nigeria's Yoruba south west or the Congo basin, each of which has its own and different oral specialists.

Within that area the role is carried by particular family names, and the names are recognisable across borders: Kouyaté, Diabaté, Suso, Sissoko, Cissokho, Konté. A person with one of those names is not necessarily a practising griot, but the name signals the lineage, and that is how the tradition is organised.

The instruments: kora, ngoni and balafon

Three instruments carry the tradition, and each belongs to particular families and repertoires. The kora is a harp lute with 21 strings, played with the thumbs and forefingers, and it is the instrument most people outside the region picture first. The ngoni is a smaller plucked lute with a skin soundboard, older than the kora and the ancestor of a whole family of West African lutes. The balafon is a wooden keyed instrument with gourd resonators beneath the keys.

One balafon has its own protected status. The Sosso Bala, kept at Niagassola in Guinea and held to date from the era of the Mali empire, was proclaimed a masterpiece of oral and intangible heritage by UNESCO in 2001 and incorporated into its representative list in 2008, with the family that guards it named as its custodians.

The Sunjata epic and thirteenth century Mali

The Sunjata epic is the central text of the tradition and the reason it is dated where it is. It recounts the founding of the Mali empire by Sunjata Keita in the thirteenth century, and it names his griot, Balla Fasséké Kouyaté, from whom the Kouyaté line traces its descent. The epic has never had a single fixed written version; it exists in the performances of the griots who hold it, which vary by family, by region and by occasion.

Its transmission is still scheduled rather than casual. At Kangaba in Mali, the sanctuary is re roofed every seven years, and the griots of the nearby village of Kela recite the epic as part of that ceremony. A poem that is performed on a seven year cycle by named families is a different object from a poem published in a magazine, and holding both ideas at once is most of what this part of the lineage teaches.

How a griot is trained, and why the role is hereditary

A griot is trained from childhood inside the family, by listening, repeating and accompanying an older relative to events, over a period measured in years rather than terms. In Mande society griots belong to the nyamakalaw, the hereditary occupational groups that also include blacksmiths and leatherworkers, which historically married within themselves and held a defined social position that was neither high nor low but separate.

This is why the role cannot be adopted. A person who learns the kora and studies the repertoire is a musician who plays griot music, and every serious account of the tradition is careful about that distinction. What a spoken word poet is describes a practice anybody can enter; being a griot is not that, and the difference is the point rather than a technicality.

What a poet with a microphone inherited

What a modern poet inherited from the griot is a set of working techniques and one argument, and neither of them is the title. The techniques are the ones any performer without a page needs: repetition as structure, rhythm that keeps a line intact, formulae that give the speaker somewhere to stand while thinking ahead, and direct address to named people in the room. The argument is that a poem can be a community's record rather than a private object, which is the claim The Black Arts movement made again in the 1960s and which The Nuyorican Poets Cafe put into practice in a room on East Third Street.

The Kouyaté and Diabaté families themselves have carried the tradition into recording studios and concert halls for decades, which is a reminder that this is a living practice and not a historical background to somebody else's art form. The lineage of the form places it alongside the other traditions this site describes without collapsing them into each other.

The other two griots, and the word in English

Two unrelated things dominate the word in English search results, and both deserve one sentence and no more. Griot is also a Haitian dish of fried pork, usually served with the pickled slaw called pikliz, and the spelling in Haitian Creole is more often griyo. Griot's Garage is an American car care company, whose engine cleaners and polishes account for most of the shopping results the word returns.

The word itself is in standard English dictionaries, which is why it also appears in the word lists that competitive word games are compiled from, such as Collins Scrabble Words in Britain. It reached a mass English speaking audience through Alex Haley's Roots in 1976, in which the author described tracing his ancestry to a village in The Gambia through a griot's recitation. Historians have since questioned parts of that account, which matters here for one reason: the popular English sense of the word arrived attached to a story about ancestry, and the working reality of the role is broader, more technical and considerably less romantic.