The griot — jeli in Manding, gewel in Wolof — is West Africa's living library. For centuries, these hereditary praise singers, historians, and musicians have carried within their memories the genealogies of ruling families, the accounts of wars and migrations, the treaties and betrayals that shaped the political geography of the Sahel. They have transmitted this knowledge in performance, from master to apprentice, across generations that had no written alternative.
The vulnerability of this system to demographic disruption — to urbanisation, to the deaths of elderly masters without trained successors, to the economic pressures that draw young people away from apprenticeship — has been understood for decades. What has lacked until now is the institutional will and technical capacity to respond at scale.
The West African Oral Heritage Archive, launched in Bamako in September 2024 after four years of fieldwork across Mali, Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, and Burkina Faso, has recorded 14,000 hours of griot performance across 23 language traditions. The recordings are held in lossless audio at the British Library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France as well as at partner institutions in Bamako and Dakar, with open-access streaming available to researchers and diaspora communities through a platform developed at the University of Dakar.
The project's most technically complex element was the development of a notation system capable of representing the tonal and rhythmic nuances of kora and balafon accompaniment in a form that non-specialist musicians could read — a problem that occupied three years of collaboration between ethnomusicologists and software engineers.
"The griots are not dying," said project director Dr. Fatoumata Diabaté of the University of Bamako. "But they are mortal. We have given their knowledge a form of immortality that they themselves could not provide."