This weekend, Carleton French Professor Cherif Keïta performed the “Epic of Sundiata” with accompaniment by Trio da Kali, a group of Mande musicians from southern Mali for the British Library in London.
Keïta was invited to tell the life story of his own ancestor Sunjata Keïta, the king and founder of the Mali Empire in the 13th century, which has long been passed down through song and spoken recitation. The performance emphasized the arts and culture of Mali through a demonstration of the epic genre (fasa), oral storytelling, and Mande griot music.
The Trio da Kali, three Jali musicians descended from a famous line of West African griot musicians, played at Carleton in 2014, where they were impressed by how well Keïta translated their music for his French 206 class. Keïeta was invited to join them at the Singing Storytellers Conference later that year at Cape Breton University in Canada for what would be their first collaborative performance of the Epic of Sunjata. The British Library saw video footage of this performance and thought that its costumes, oral nature, and Medieval period origination was a perfect fit for their exhibition entitled “West Africa: Word, Symbol and Song.”
Not only was Keïta featured in two performances in London, but he also led a workshop, where he explained the musical and storytelling components of the performance. He also gave a presentation entitled “Sunjata Fasa as a Matrix of Mande Personhood” on a panel on West African Francophone Literature, where he explained the oral performed nature of the Epic of Sunjata and drew distinctions between the African oral Epic and the Western written Epic.
Keïta’s collaboration with the Trio da Kali took him from Canada to London; he hopes that the tour will soon be brought to the US, and maybe even Carleton, so that more people can develop an understanding for ancestral traditions and culture.