Historical Truth Summary

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Historical Truth and “truth” Contemporary historians, despite their tenacity and dedication towards unraveling the mysteries of the past, can never truly understand or reconstruct a historical narrative. As close as they come, history elusively slips away. For one, historians clearly lack the lived experiences of those who lived in the past. Historians, likewise, must grapple with the difficult and often incomplete textual source material that survives the test of time. West Africanists, however, often rely on oral tradition in place of written documentation to reformulate the past. However, it would be a monumental mistake to assert that West African cultures lack history simply because they transmit cultural and generational knowledge through …show more content…

Indeed, the griots who tell the story of Sundiata blend history and fiction extensively to metaphorically endow their characters with symbolism that reflects Malinke cultural values. Acceptance of one’s destiny, for example, reveals itself to be a considerably important cultural value based on the epic. After recruiting nine witches to do her bidding, the evil queen mother attempts to manipulate fate, directly contradicting the prophecy that Sundiata would become a king. She openly declared that “his destiny runs counter to my son’s, and he must be killed” Ironically, however, the plan backfires immensely and the witches decide to watch over Sundiata and act as his protectors. Here, we see that attempts to control your own fate—especially in opposition to prophetic declarations—are futile. This imaginative part of the story told by the griot becomes both historical and fictional as Irele described. On one hand, the interaction between the queen mother, the witches, and Sundiata did not factually occur. Yet the Griot still bestows a historical significance within the narrative by using Sundiata and the queen mother to represent the cultural importance of destiny in Malinke culture. Irele acknowledges the notion that storytellers imbue historical …show more content…

American Historian and author Trevor Getz reconstructs the narrative, often by inserting fictional events into the story from his own imagination. These fictionalizations do not just reveal cultural contexts for a predominantly western audience, but artistically and emotionally reimagines the potential lived experience of Abina and other historical actors. The early exchange between James Hutton Brew and Quamina Eddoo, for example, did not actually occur. Yet Getz relies on his own imagination to craft a scene representative of the broader historical period. For example, Brew tells Eddoo that “we have ways of getting around these laws” when asked about the legal technicality of slavery”. Here, Getz’s reimagination introduces the legal and historical conceptions of slavery found in 19th century West Africa. These historically particular understandings of slavery, in fact, are historically accurate. The characters of of Brew and Eddoo, therefore, take on a “larger significance” by representing something historically accurate for a universal time but not for an individual scene. Though the fusion of imagination and history in Abina parallels The Epic of Sundiata, this narrative differs because griots tell their stories to Malinke peoples. Historians studying oral traditions such as these, therefore, are outsiders looking in. Indeed, historians can only extrapolate the

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