griot

plural griots

1. A West African storyteller who passes on oral traditions; a wandering musician and poet.

   Yet the critics of writing weren’t entirely wrong. In oral cultures, bards carried epics in their heads; griots could reel off centuries of genealogy on demand.

   2025 October 26, Kwame Anthony Appiah, “The Age of De-Skilling”, in The Atlantic

   3 more examples

   Griots may be the chroniclers of an important family or of a group of people — like the Bambara hunters’ griot — or itinerant poets and musicians who extol the praises of the person who has hired them for a special festivity.

   1995, Françoise Pfaff, “Sembene, A Griot of Modern Times”, in Michael T. Martin, editor, Cinemas of the Black Diaspora: Diversity, Dependence, and Oppositionality, page 118

   When ethnographers are asked to read their works to gatherings of Songhay, elders, they, too, are considered griots. Ethnographers, however, usually consider themselves scholars, not griots. They prepare themselves for their life's work in a manner altogether different from that of the griot.

   1997, Paul Stoller, Sensuous Scholarship, page 15

   I decided that it would be better for a griot to take us back into the legend, rather than me, a contemporary man. Griots have deeply marked me. I already narrated my first film, Ta Dona, in the same way that a griot would have.

   2003, Melissa Thackway, “Interview I: Adama Drabo, director”, in Africa Shoots Back: Alternative Perspectives in Sub-Saharan Francophone African Film, page 183

plural griots

1. countableuncountablecookingA Haitian dish of fried pork.