SOURCE: Jansen, Jan. “The Sunjata Epic—The Ultimate Version.” Research in African Literatures 32, no. 1 (spring 2001): 14-46.

In the following essay, Jansen describes rehearsals for a Sunjata performance and explains what is missed by simply reading the text as compared with experiencing a communal performance.

In the last decades the Sunjata epic has enjoyed much attention as a masterpiece of African oral literature; at American universities it is often part of undergraduate courses on literature or world history. The Sunjata epic is considered part of the historical heritage of the famous medieval Mali empire: already in the fourteenth century the Arab traveler Ibn Battuta heard griots praising the king of Mali as a direct descendant of Sunjata. Although it is not certain whether the memory of Sunjata had at that time already been shaped in the literary genre of the epic, it is beyond doubt that Ibn Battuta's Sunjata...