The empire in one voice

Over two evenings in Saga, the jasare Nouhou Malio told the epic of Askia Mohammed in Zarma-Songhay, 1,602 lines of it, while an American scholar recorded. What that recording kept, and what the radio left out, show where our history lives.

On 30 December 1980, in Saga, a small town on the Niger River two miles downstream from Niamey, Nouhou Malio began to tell the epic of Askia Mohammed. He told it in Zarma-Songhay, with Soumana Abdou beside him on the molo, a three-stringed lute, and people gathered to listen. An American scholar, Thomas A. Hale, was recording. The jasare, the griots who keep genealogy and history among the Zarma and the Songhay, had probably been passing this epic from voice to voice since the seventeenth century. Hale later wrote that Malio's telling would be the first version of it to appear in print line by line.

Malio had learned his art the way the jasare learn. He began with his father, who died before Nouhou was grown, and later, in Saga, he trained many young jasare himself. The scholar Sandra Bornand, who has studied the Zarma jasare, describes a long, very structured apprenticeship and an art with a name for each kind of speech. Genealogies are kaayi ceeyaŋ, literally calling the ancestors. Epics are wangaari deede, warriors' stories. It is a whole literature with its own genres, and it is carried in speech.

The epic as Malio tells it begins before its hero is born. Seers have told the ruler Si, as the epic calls Sonni Ali Ber, that any child of his sister Kassaye will kill him and take his throne. Si kills seven of her infants. Then a genie from a city under the river promises her a son who can kill Si. She accepts. Her servant gives birth to a girl at the same time, Kassaye switches the babies, and the boy, Mamar, grows up as the servant's son, in Si's service. When he is grown, his father comes up from under the river with a white horse, two lances, a saber and a shield. Si is at an outdoor prayer ground. Mamar gallops straight at him and stops at the edge of the prayer mat, then does it again. The third time, he strikes with the lance.

Then Malio turns to his listeners. On lines 176 to 178, Hale notes, he switches abruptly from the past tense to the present and speaks to them as if they were standing at the prayer ground. "Did you see him?" he asks, in Hale's translation.

Askia Mohammed ruled the Songhay empire from Gao between 1493 and 1528, at its height. Scribes around Timbuktu wrote his story in Arabic chronicles, with names, dates and eyewitness accounts. The jasare kept it in Zarma-Songhay, in their voices, with the genie, the white horse and the three gallops. Hale calls the two accounts different and complementary. One was kept in ink, the other in speech.

Malio's telling took two evenings, the second on 26 January 1981, and came to 1,602 lines. In 1990 Hale published the Songhay with his English translation in Scribe, Griot, and Novelist. By the dates the encyclopedias give, 1915 to 1986, Malio did not live to see the book. His voice is still there. The opening, lines 1 to 194, can be heard on Columbia University's World Epics site, twelve minutes and forty-five seconds that begin with Malio bantering about the arrangements for the evening.

A recording is one way a voice travels. Radio is another, and Bornand shows how much a channel can shape what people believe they have. Niger's national radio began broadcasting some griots' epics in the 1980s, she notes. But facing listeners they cannot see, griots tend to choose tales of entertainment that suit everyone, so much so that some young Zarma who know griots' stories only from the radio believe their culture has no epics. The epics were there the whole time, in Saga and in the voices of other jasare. What reached those young listeners was what the channel carried.

Hale's recording is why Malio's telling can still be heard today. Much of what is said in Zarma, Hausa and the other languages of the Sahel is never recorded at all, and the tools on people's phones still mostly expect them to type, often in another language. At Namu we record voices too, with the agreement of the people who lend them, and from those voices we build technology that can hear and understand the languages of the Sahel.