Rasta TimesCHAT ROOMArticles/ArchiveRaceAndHistory RootsWomen Trinicenter
Africa Speaks.com Africa Speaks HomepageAfrica Speaks.comAfrica Speaks.comAfrica Speaks.com
InteractiveLeslie VibesAyanna RootsRas TyehimbaTriniView.comGeneral Forums
*
Home
Help
Login
Register
Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.
March 28, 2024, 10:26:31 PM

Login with username, password and session length
Search:     Advanced search
25910 Posts in 9966 Topics by 982 Members Latest Member: - Ferguson Most online today: 75 (July 03, 2005, 06:25:30 PM)
+  Africa Speaks Reasoning Forum
|-+  AFRICA AND THE DIASPORA
| |-+  Our Beautiful People (Moderators: Tyehimba, leslie)
| | |-+  A Great Oral Tradition
« previous next »
Pages: [1] Print
Author Topic: A Great Oral Tradition  (Read 9376 times)
Bantu_Kelani
Service Member
*****
Posts: 2063


WWW
« on: June 21, 2003, 04:03:19 AM »

A Great Oral Tradition

The European colonial powers called Africa "the Dark Continent" when they began their explorations.  They saw it as a vast and dangerous place filled with savage people, but Africa has been home to many advanced, exotic civilizations.  Many have been buried beneath the sands of time, but we know of others, and archaeologists continue to uncover more clues about ancient African civilizations.
 
West Africa has a great oral tradition.  A griot is a learned storyteller, entertainer, and historian.  Often a griot will memorize the genealogy, or family history, of everyone in a village going back centuries.  American writer Alex Haley met a griot in 1966 that had memorized the entire story of the village of Juffure to a date two centuries in the past when his ancestor was enslaved.

"The old griot had talked for nearly two hours up to then . . . 'the oldest of these fours sons, Kunta, went away from his village and he was never seen again' . . . I sat as if I were carved of stone.  My blood seemed to have congealed.  This man whose lifetime had been in this back-country African village had no way in the world to know that he had just echoed what I had heard all though my boyhood years on my grandma's front porch in Henning, Tennessee."  
--Alex Haley, Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976)

A great deal of what we know about West Africa comes from the griots, but archaeologists are often surprised by new finds.  In the last fifteen years, scholars have concluded that civilization had developed in West Africa as much as one thousand years earlier than expected.  We now know that Africa had an Iron Age culture with cities and trade routes about 250 years before the common era.


Logged

We should first show solidarity with each other. We are Africans. We are black. Our first priority is ourselves.
Pages: [1] Print 
« previous next »
Jump to:  

Powered by MySQL Powered by PHP Powered by SMF 1.1.21 | SMF © 2015, Simple Machines
Copyright © 2001-2005 AfricaSpeaks.com and RastafariSpeaks.com
Valid XHTML 1.0! Valid CSS!