West African Folklore
The folk traditions of the Akan, Yoruba, Fon, Mande, Wolof, Hausa, and Igbo peoples, from the spider-trickster Anansi and the water-spirit Mami Wata to the masquerades of the Gelede, the Ifa divination system, and the great Sunjata epic of Mali.
In this section
Anansi the Spider
The Akan trickster of West Africa who stole the stories of the sky god and carried them down to the people of the earth in his woven bag.
Mami Wata and the Water Spirits
The great mother of the waters, half woman, half serpent, who rules the rivers, lagoons, and surf of West and Central Africa and the African Atlantic world.
West Africa is one of the most folklorically rich regions of the world. Across the long curve of the coast from Senegal to Cameroon, and inland through the savanna to the bend of the Niger, more than three hundred distinct peoples have built up, over two and a half thousand years of recorded history, an astonishingly complex body of stories, songs, ritual dramas, and spirit-cults. The traditions of the Akan of Ghana, the Yoruba of Nigeria, the Fon of Benin, the Mande of Mali, the Wolof of Senegal, the Hausa of the Sahel, and the Igbo of south-eastern Nigeria form the dense centre of this tradition.
The colonial map of West Africa is young — Ghana became independent in 1957, Nigeria in 1960, Senegal in 1960, Mali in 1960 — but the cultural map of the region is very old. The Sunjata epic of Mali is at least seven hundred years old; the traditions of Ifa divination are at least a thousand years old; the Odu verses of the Yoruba are of comparable antiquity. The folk traditions of the West African village have been the foundation of all the great modern West African arts.
The Akan of Ghana
The Akan of central and southern Ghana — the Ashanti, the Fante, the Akuapem, the Akyem — are best known to the wider world as the homeland of the spider-trickster Anansi. The Akan are also the keepers of the ntoro (the personal spirit) and the abusua (the extended family), and the traditions of the Golden Stool of the Ashanti are a central part of their folklore. The akwambo festival of the Akan, celebrated each August–September, is the great harvest festival, with the procession of the chief, the drumming of the Fontomfrom drums, and the pouring of libation to the ancestors.
The storytelling sessions of the Akan are themselves a formal art. The folktale session is held in the evening after the day’s work, and the audience is mostly children. The opening formula is “Ananse sem,” the story of the spider; the closing formula is “Ananse ba, na en’kosoe,” the spider’s son, and the tale is not to be told. The tales themselves are mostly short, witty, and instructive. They are the school of the village, and the Anansi tales of deception, vanity, and the small man’s victory over the great are the foundation of the Akan moral imagination.
The Yoruba of Nigeria
The Yoruba of south-western Nigeria and the neighbouring parts of Benin and Togo have built one of the most sophisticated folkloric systems in Africa. The Yoruba cosmos is populated by the orisha — the great gods, the children of Olodumare, the supreme deity. The most important of the orisha are Shango, the god of thunder and of the divine kingship of Old Oyo; Ogun, the god of iron, of the smith, of the road, and of the war; Yemoja, the mother of the waters and of all the fish; Eshu-Elegba, the trickster-divinity of the crossroads, the messenger between the gods and the humans. The orisha are the subject of the great Yoruba divination system, Ifa, whose verses — the Odu Ifa — number in the thousands and form one of the most extensive bodies of oral literature in the world.
The Yoruba masquerade tradition is one of the most spectacular in Africa. The Egungun masqueraders are the ancestors themselves, returning in long strips of brilliantly coloured cloth, swirled and whirled by the masqueraders in dances of great speed. The Gelede masqueraders of the Yoruba, recognised by UNESCO as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2001, are the celebration of the mother-power: the masked dancers, with their elaborate superstructures, dance in honour of the elder women of the community. The Egungun festival in the Yoruba calendar is one of the most important of the year, and in the cities of Abeokuta, Iseyin, and Oyo, the masked processions fill the streets for days.
The Yoruba folklorists and writers of the twentieth century are among the most important in the world. D. O. Fagunwa of Yorubaland wrote the first Yoruba novel, Ògbójú Ọdẹ́ nínú Igbó Irúnmọlẹ̀ (1938), a forest-adventure in which a hunter meets the spirits of the bush. Amos Tutuola of the Ondo Yoruba wrote The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952), one of the strangest and most influential novels of the twentieth century, in which a man follows his dead tapster into the bush and meets the spirits of the dead, the red-faced spirit of the egungun, and the goddess of the palm-wine. J. P. Clark-Bekederemo of the Urhobo-Yoruba wrote the verse-play Song of a Goat (1961) and the long poem Olokun (1969), both deeply rooted in the folklore of the Niger Delta.
The Fon of Benin
The Fon of present-day Benin are the keepers of the great spirit-cult of Vodun. The Vodun complex of the Bight of Benin — the spirits of the air (Legba, the trickster-divinity of the crossroads), of the earth (Sakpata, the god of smallpox and of the earth), of the sea (Mami Wata), and of death (Gou, the great masquerader of the dead) — has been carried across the Atlantic by the slave trade to become the heart of the Vodou of Haiti, the Candomblé of Brazil, and the Vodu of Cuba. The religious complex of West African Vodun, in other words, is the mother of an entire New World religion.
The Vodun of the Bight of Benin is centred on the coastal city of Ouidah, the great slave port of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Temple of the Pythons in Ouidah is the home of the snake-spirit Dangbé. The Door of No Return, the monument of the slave trade on the beach, is a site of memory for the entire West African Atlantic. The yearly Festival of the Vodun in Ouidah, in January, is the moment of the great return of the spirits to the city, with the procession of the Zangbeto, the great straw-masked guardians of the night.
The Mande of Mali and the Sunjata Epic
The Mande of Mali, Guinea, Senegal, and Gambia are the keepers of the oldest and most extensive epic tradition of West Africa: the Sunjata Epic, the story of the lion-child of Mali, his miraculous birth, his exile, his return, and his founding of the Mali Empire in the thirteenth century. The epic is a masterwork of oral poetry, with its own kora music (the twenty-one-stringed lute of the Mande), its own praise-name tradition, and its own professional caste of storytellers — the griots — known as jali in Mande.
The griot tradition of the Mande is among the most studied in the world. The great families — the Diabaté, the Kouyaté, the Sissoko, the Diallo — have been keeping the Sunjata Epic for at least seven centuries, and the names of their ancestors are themselves part of the epic. Banzoumana Sissoko, Sory Kandia Kouyaté, Fanta Damba, and Sali Sidibé are among the most celebrated modern griots. The Sunjata Epic has been recorded, transcribed, and translated by the Mande scholars Mamadou Diawara, Sibylle Finke, and the American folklorist David Conrad, whose Sunjata: A West African Epic of Sundiata is now the standard English version.
The Mande are also the keepers of the Fâ tradition, the Mande form of Ifa divination. The Fâ has its own set of maninkiri verses, its own order of diviners, and its own place in the Mande cycle of life. The great Sufi Islam of the Mande — the brotherhoods of the Qadiriyya and the Tijaniyya — is itself a folkloric system, with its own zikr (remembrance) ceremonies, its own shrines, and its own saints’ tombs.
The Wolof, Hausa, and Igbo
The Wolof of Senegal are the keepers of the griot tradition of the western Sahel — the gawlo, the praise-singer, the great singer of the mbalax music of modern Senegal. The Wolof are the heart of Senegalese popular culture, the home of Léopold Sédar Senghor, the first president and the great poet of Négritude, and of Youssou N’Dour, the great mbalax singer. The Sabbar spirit-possession cult of the Wolof, the Cayor of the precolonial Wolof kingdoms, and the Layène brotherhood of the Mourides are among the great folkloric systems of the western Sahel.
The Hausa of northern Nigeria, Niger, and the surrounding regions are the keepers of one of the great Islamic folkloric traditions of West Africa. The bori spirit-possession cult, the boko literacy tradition, the Hausa-Fulani emirate system, and the cycle of the Maguzawa — the surviving pre-Islamic Hausa religion — are among the great folkloric complexes of the West African Sahel.
The Igbo of south-eastern Nigeria are the keepers of the Mmanwu masquerade tradition, the Nri kingship of the dibia (diviners), and the cycle of the Mammy Wata water-spirits. The Igbo are also the home of the great folklorist Chinua Achebe, whose Things Fall Apart (1958) is the founding novel of modern African literature. Achebe’s novel is itself a major work of folklore, in which the kola ritual, the ikenga of the personal spirit, the ifijioku of the yam-harvest, and the egungun of the ancestors are the architecture of the story.
The Griot: The Memory of the People
No account of West African folklore is complete without the figure of the griot. The griot — known as jali in Mande, gawlo in Wolof, arale in Hausa, bajan in Fulani — is a professional keeper of memory: a historian, a praise-singer, a genealogist, a diplomat, a musician. In a region without written history for most of its long past, the griot is the archive. The griot is the one who knows the name of the king’s great-grandfather, the song of the great battle, the curse of the ungrateful son.
The griot’s tools are the kora (the twenty-one-stringed lute of the Mande), the ngoni (the smaller lute), the xalam (the Senegalese lute), the djembe drum, the talking drum, and the voice. The griot’s art is the praise-name — the sila of the Mande, the tindi of the Wolof, the kirari of the Hausa. The praise-name is a long, elaborate verbal painting of a person, in which the griot names the ancestors, recounts the deeds, invokes the baraka, and so creates, in sound, the public figure of the patron.
The griot tradition is one of the most studied in the world. The Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène made the griot the hero of Emitaï (1971) and Guelwaar (1992). The Malian singer Salif Keita — himself a descendant of Sundiata Keita, the historical founder of the Mali Empire — is the most celebrated modern griot of the Mande. The Senegalese singers Baaba Maal and Youssou N’Dour are the great modern heirs of the Wolof and Mande traditions.
The Survival of West African Folklore in the Americas
The West African folk traditions did not stay in West Africa. The slave trade, between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, carried the traditions of the Akan, the Yoruba, the Fon, the Mande, the Igbo, and the Hausa across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and the Americas. The Anansi of the Akan became the Anancy of Jamaica, the Brer Rabbit of the American South, the Bru Anansi of the Suriname forests. The Mami Wata of the Fon became the Maman Dlo of the Haitian forests, the Iemanjá of the Candomblé of Brazil, the Yemayá of the Cuban Santería. The orisha of the Yoruba became the saint of the Santería of Cuba, the loa of the Vodou of Haiti, the orixá of the Candomblé of Brazil. The egungun masqueraders of the Yoruba became the maskaron of the Caribbean carnival.
The survival of West African folklore in the Americas is one of the great folkloric stories of the modern world. The slave narrative, the gospel song, the blues, the jazz, the calypso, the soca, the reggae, the samba, the rumba, the marimba — all carry in their bones the West African folk tradition. The African-American literary tradition, from the slave-narrative writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through the Harlem Renaissance (Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston) to the contemporary novel (Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead), is rooted in the same inheritance.