From the earliest times, people have told stories about the past. Often lacking a written language, they have passed these stories from generation to generation. We call such tales "oral history" or the "oral tradition."
Some of the best examples of oral history come from Africa. Africans developed writing long after the Europeans did, and therefore their histories were kept alive by word of mouth. Every village had an old man called a "griot" who memorized long narratives about the local tribes and families. The "griot" trained younger men, who listened to the oral histories until they knew them well enough to become "griots" themselves. This required remarkable feats of memory. Sometimes the training took as much as 40 years.
These stories have been the chief means of keeping records in Africa since ancient times. American Indians used a similar system to preserve tribal histories. In recent years historians have begun to tap this extraordinary source of information. In some cases, it can help us understand a tribe's altitudes. The stories describe how land was obtained, how people were named, and how rules of behavior were established. They also deal with the nature of the gods, with death, and with the physical universe. Thus we can learn what a people believes and considers important.
Historians can also learn what actually happened in the past, by checking the stories against other kinds of information, such as traveler's accounts or archaeological findings. They can trace families; they can obtain accounts of great battles; and they can discover why a city was abandoned or another one was built.
Oral history exists in almost every civilization, from the epics of ancient Sumer and Greece to the ballads of the Russian past. In recent years, thanks to the invention of the tape recorder, there have been systematic efforts to build up our store of oral history in many areas, from Presidents of the United States to the tellers of tales in Africa's villages.
