Then they told me something of which I’d never have dreamed: of very old men, called griots, still to be found in the older backcountry villages, men who were in effect living, walking archives of oral history. A senior griot would be a man usually in his late sixties or early seventies; below him would be progressively younger griots—and apprenticing boys, so a boy would be exposed to those griots’ particular line of narrative for forty or fifty years before he could qualify as a senior griot, who told on special occasions the centuries-old histories of villages, of clans, of families, of
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