A given compound might house several adult siblings and their families, or several co-wives and their offspring, as well as other relatives and friends. Frequently, restrictions apply to the telling of tales. In some areas, they may not be told during the farming season, and often they are not to be told during the daytime (both forbidden periods should be devoted to work). Ordinary social norms will apply: the audience will defer to the older members present, and younger members will require explicit permission to raise their voice. A session typically involves a series of shorter tales (which may be thematically related) rather than an extended narrative. Many tales involve songs or dramatic action, in which the audience may participate; the chantefable (cante fable) is a staple. Stories are frequently introduced by formulas that define the subsequent content as something set apart from ordinary discourse, and often invite the audience's attention and participation.
The narration of a tale involves much more than just the story. The teller will often provide different voices for the characters; idiophones to suggest action are common; and the teller will often mime some of the action. None of these features translates readily or easily into the printed medium. The verbal element of African tales, no matter how accurately reproduced, is almost always only a shadow of the original event. The professional storyteller appears to be rare. While a few individuals may earn some income from their performances, these are usually more specialized professionals whose output is not entirely comparable to the ordinary folktale: the initiate of mvett-performances in Cameroon/Gabon, the hunter's bard of the Mande world, or the karisi-spirit initiate who recites the Mwindo epic.
The stories they tell, in stylized and extensive performances, often embody the plots of well-known tales, and there is a clear continuity; however, the delivery and reception are quite distinct from ordinary storytelling. Such a performance is more formal, often involving an ensemble, music, and special occasions. The griot of West Africa (also known as jeli, gewel, gesere,or gawlo; local names vary, as do the social expectations) is more of a praise-singer and genealogist than a storyteller, despite the current image prevalent in America (probably since the time of the popular novel Roots, 1976). The association of griots and folktales is due more to literary invention than to actual practice. A good anthology illustrating the difference in content and style of ordinary narrators and griots in the Gambia area is by Katrin Pfeiffer, Mandinka Spoken Art (1997). In this region, the social category of “griot” is defined by lineage and includes members who may not actually be performers. The idealized vision of the older male storyteller, lore-master of the group (and so recalling bards and sages of other cultures), is an imaginary construct; the typical African storyteller is an older woman.
Within a culture defined by oral tradition, however, tales have a place beyond that of fireside narration; they are part of the common heritage of the group, and so they can be used, often elliptically or allusively, in the course of ordinary conversation. In some regions, part of the art of public speaking involves the appropriate and apposite use of tales and proverbs in the course of making an argument.
This point raises the question of generic boundaries, which in Africa are far more fluid than the theory of folklore genre classification might wish. Folktales coexist with innumerable other forms of local narrative, from the individual memorate to collective histories, cult stories, and imported religious materials, and particularly what might be called the “high art” of the African oral tradition: allusive praise poetry and more expansive epic recitations. Epics are not found everywhere on the continent, and they represent a distinctive performance genre that is not identical to Eurasian forms (the use of meter and music, for instance, render them far less “textual” than European literary examples). But epics, in their considerable variety, do employ the standard techniques and building blocks of folktale materials: pattern and repletion and hero-centered plots. There are of course significant differences in tone, reference, and sophistication, but the commonalities deserve recognition.
Motifs migrate very freely among these various genres, especially in the historical material that can be considered the common, secular property of the culture (specific cult myths are more restricted in their distribution). So a story of rivalry between stepbrothers (sons of different co-wives), which is part of the epic of Sunjata in the Mande world (Mali-Guinea), becomes an etiologic tale about social relations among the Kuranko (Guinea-Sierra Leone); and the story of the ring found in the fish's belly (ATU 736A, The Ring of Polycrates) appears as part of the history of the kingdom of Segou.
