Abstract
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The West African empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhay had a professional class of historians who transmitted history orally and functioned as advisors to the royal court, mediators in international and national disputes, foreign relations experts, cultural and social anthropologists, officiators of rites of passage ceremonies, philosophers, musicians and entertainers. The art of history reached its highest level of organizational sophistication and aesthetic mastery among the Malinke/Mande historians known as jeli/jeliyu or popularly known as griots. Ever since the publication of D. T. Niane's Soundiata, ou L'épopée mandingue (1960), there has been a growing interest in Malian culture and history within the Western academy. For the last thirty years a steady stream of English texts on Mande culture are beginning to numerically rival the formerly French dominated discourse, however, Anglophone scholars lag behind their Francophone counterparts in their analysis of Malinke systems of thought and tend to occlude the theories and structural paradigms that constitute a Malinke historiography. A key question that has inspired this study, is why, in a culture that used Arabic script and had its own ideographic script, would the griots insist on systematically preserving history through the oral arts. The answer was found in the many interviews conducted with Malinke griots, scholars, musicians, and within the textual structures of the historical narratives themselves. The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate the origins, development, sociopolitical, meta-philosophical, and aesthetic functions of Malinke historical literature, its impact on the organization of knowledge and the shaping of Mande society and formulate from this study a theory of Malinke historiography and historicism.
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