The Role of Storytelling
Introduction | Storytelling | Drumming | Doudou N'Diaye Rose | The Mandinka Epic | The Mandinka Story

 

People have told stories for a long time. As long as there has been language and words, people have told stories. Before language and words, people have told stories. They have told stories through images, signs, and sounds. They have drawn images on cave walls, on stone, and wood. They have carved out meanings. They have created songs and rhythms.

Stories are one way that people make sense of the world in which they live. Most stories have a beginning, a middle, and an ending, but some stories do not. A story can tell you about something that you feel but that you can't explain in the usual way.

Stories can tell us about something that is true even if the story is made up. We can tell when a story is true by the way it makes us feel inside. When we hear something that makes us feel happy or sad, or makes us dream of wonderful things, or takes us on a trip in our imagination, or makes us feel real, then that story is true. True stories take us on journeys in our imagination and feelings. They help us know what is possible. After we hear, or read, a true story, we carry that story around inside of us. It becomes part of who we are. And, in a way, we become a part of the story.

All people have told stories about the world around them. Some of those stories have come to us because one person told them to someone else, who told them to someone else, who told them to someone else... Some stories come to us through music as sound and rhythms. Sometimes these sounds and rhythms have been handed down as a teaching from generation to generation. Sometimes the whole history of a people can be expressed through songs, and rhythms, dance, and performance. For all people, before there was the written word, there was the sound.

Histories and stories of a people that come to us in a spoken and sung form are part of what is called an oral tradition. Oral tradition means that the information, the stories, are told rather than written down. Sometimes, a people have both a written and an oral tradition. Oral traditions have a different way of being alive than written histories. Because people hold the oral tradition in their memory, and sometimes the story changes with the telling, oral histories can be more fluid, more dynamic, more alive, than written histories. This doesn't make them less true, just different than written histories.

The stories told by the drums, the stories told by the dancers, the stories told by the singers, and the writers are all part of our world. They are part of a specific people, but then they are also part of the stories of all people on the Earth. We help to keep the story alive when we hear it. We have our place in the story. And in turn we all have our story to tell.

In West African storytelling, the griots are the keepers of the culture, as their amazing memories and storytelling abilities allow them to keep alive the culture, history, and genealogies of their people.

 

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