G is for Griot...and...G-pyramids...

is for

Guesting - which is what the foursome at Write...Edit...Publish... are doing today at the main A-Z blog...illustrating Genre. Chuffed, Glad you could say - because that's two of my favouritest blogfests in one post.  Okay now to the main business at hand  -

Take a listen to Dobet Gnahore, an Ivorian musician, here’s her Zina, powerful and heartbreaking and uplifting all in one - 

And here's Coumba Gawlo from Senegal, with her golden voice and Allez Africa - 

Griot - Much of African history, especially West African history, is transmitted orally. A griot is a living archive, a repository of the oral traditions, a historian, poet, story-teller, musician and/or eulogist. Since these oral bits of history are transmitted from one generation to another, this archiving activity is restricted to certain families in a locality. It is a hereditary art and science, keeping history alive. Griots make a living by recording births, marriages, deaths, war, famines, and other important events both individual and communal. Their role often extends to mediators and counsellors as well.

There are griot families all through West Africa, among the Mande peoples, the Hausa, the Fula, the Wolof, the Songhai, the Mauritanian Arabs and many other smaller groups/tribes. The corresponding word for griot (which has its roots in French) in the African languages are djeli or jeli in Mande, guewei in Wolof, and gawlo among the Fula. Families are endogamous, meaning that a person from a griot family traditionally marries into another griot family. I guess so that the histories are not lost or diluted. Where there are no written records, the preservation of the oral archives is crucial.  Many of the famous musicians from West Africa come from griot families, an example in the music above. Read about some modern griots here.

Groundnut pyramids -  Africa is a major producer of groundnuts (peanuts) accounting for roughly 47-48% of the total world production. Nigeria alone contributes a major chunk of the harvest in Africa, Sudan and Senegal are the other top producers. (Fun fact – in Arabic, groundnuts are called the “Sudanese beans”)

Source

Up till the 70’s, groundnuts were the single most important agricultural export crop for Nigeria, and these pyramids made of groundnut sacks used to be common in Kano, the main transport hub in Northern Nigeria. Sadly, that changed with the oil boom in the 70’s, and the share of agricultural exports in forex earnings fell from nearly 50% to less than half between 1971 and 1980. Production has risen 90’s onwards, but it caters mostly to domestic demand, the export performance has never quite recovered the same shine. There is some talk of replacing the groundnut pyramids with rice pyramids at present, as Kano is trying to incentivise rice production. Waiting to see what happens...

From the Safaris

Books n Stuff

Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014) was a South African writer and social activist and a Nobel Laureate in Literature.  She was an early bloomer, she published her first short story when she was just 15. Most of her writing concerns the effects of apartheid on the lives of South Africans, clear-eyed, concise, unsentimental and sometimes quite searing. She won the Booker jointly for The Conservationist in 1974, and won much acclaim for many of her other works. My own introduction to her work was through The House Gun published in 1998.

Marina Gasbe  - Not much is known about Marina, not even an accurate birthdate. She is from Kenya. Here is an excerpt from one of her poems - ‘The Village,’ which I found interesting.

Village of unending work.

Like a never dying spring,

Old women dark and bent

Trudge along with their hoes

To plots of weedy maize.

Young wives with donkeys

From cockcrow to setting of the sun

Go about their timeless duties…

(From The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry)

A very vivid picture she’s painted of a village abandoned by young men – they’ve all walked off at dawn to the cities for work – and the women carry on with the tending of animals and the planting of fields. Urbanisation! and its challenges. True for many nations in Africa.

Posted for the A-Z Challenge 2018