Africa has just lost a monument in the person of Djibril Tamsir Niane. The historian known for, among other things, his work Soundjata or the Mandingo epic, published by Présence africaine, passed away on March 8 in Dakar following the Covid-19. This disappearance is a sad occasion to recall the contribution of this immense African intellectual to one of the most debated questions in recent times: the return of cultural objects to the continent. It was during a conference in Dakar dedicated to the Senegalese historian Yoro Khary Fall, who died in 2016 at the age of 67. Djibril Tamsir Niane was indeed able to bring a new angle of approach to this question. At the end of November 2018, therefore, in the Senegalese capital, the writer and historian had indicated that “we also need a restitution of documents of oral tradition collected by American institutions, including the Ford Foundation”.
Reference to the Unesco initiative of 1967
Within the framework of a round table entitled “The banker of historians”, the specialist in the history of Mandé recalled a fact of great importance initiated by Unesco in 1967. According to Djibril Tamsir Niane, the UN organization in charge de la culture had embarked that year on a campaign to collect African oral traditions. On the American side, the Ford Foundation had invested in this initiative and had therefore collected important elements of African heritage. According to the author ofHistory of West Africa “And the book Western Sudan at the time of the great empires, documents of oral tradition on El Hadj Oumar Tall have been found “in many American universities, especially in New York”.
Why oral traditions are also concerned
To support his thesis of a necessary restitution of documents from African oral traditions, Djibril Tamsir Niane had advanced that “oral tradition is an essential subject which has an inestimable value”. And to estimate “that it is still necessary today to proceed to the collection of the oral traditions in all the fields, environment and health, among others”. “The oral tradition is the great school where you learn everything”, he continued, assuring that “there is not a sector that it ignores”. For the famous and late Guinean writer and historian, “African oral traditions are testimonies of the past and can be skilfully exploited for the needs of history”. Quoted by the Senegalese Press Agency (APS), he recalled that “speech does not fly away, it remains”, especially as “the teaching of oral tradition is done through griots ”. An argument which justified on its own, in his eyes, that the restitution of African oral traditions is in line with that of cultural property on which Felwine Sarr and Béatrice Savoy produced a report submitted to President Macron at the end of last November.
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