West Africa has a great oral tradition. A griot is a learned storyteller, entertainer, and historian. Often a griot will memorize the genealogy, or family history, of everyone in a village going back centuries.
A great deal of what we know about West Africa comes from the griots, but archaeologists are often surprised by new finds. In the last fifteen years, scholars have concluded that civilization had developed in West Africa as mush as on thousand years earlier than expected. We now that Africa had an Iron Age culture with cities and trade routes about 250 years before the Common Era. |
