Epic of Sundiata

The Sundiata Keita or Epic of Sundiata (also referred to as the Sundiata Epic or Sunjata Epic) is an epic poem of the Malinke people and tells the story of the hero Sundiata Keita (died 1255), the founder of the Mali Empire. The epic is an instance of oral tradition, going back to the 14th century and narrated by generations of griot poets or jeliw (djeli). There is no single or authoritative version. Material pertaining to the epic first began to be collected during the early 20th century in French Sudan, notably by the French elite school École William Ponty, resulting in the "modern" version of the tale as considered standard today, as published in "novelistic" form in French translation by Djibril Tamsir Niane in 1960 (English translation 1965).

The amount of historicity of the events portrayed in the epic is open to debate. There are some limited 14th-century Arabic historiographic sources available on the early history of the Mali Empire, notably the records of Ibn Khaldun. Therefore, the evidence of oral tradition may be critical in reconstructing the historical events of the period. Oral tradition necessarily undergoes significant changes over the course of several centuries, but scholars have nevertheless attempted to pinpoint elements in the epic that might reflect historical events.

The epic "reflects the early stages in West African traditions when different cultural influences were still coming together".

Written summaries of the epic existed in Arabic before 1890. During the 1890s, versions of the epic were collected by French officials and published in French and German translation beginning in 1898. Western-educated West Africans began to produce literary versions of the tale beginning in the 1930s. This was notably the case at the French elite school, École William Ponty, which staged a drama based on the story in 1937. This period represents the first interaction of the oral tradition with literacy and modernity, and the transformations undergone by the narrative in the context of the 1937 presentation ... eventually resulted in the form of the epic which became most influential in the 1940s and 1950s, before the first "novelistic" treatment by Niane (1960). The first line-by-line transcription of the epic as told by a griot was made in 1967.

...
Wikipedia