The Story My Grandmother Never Wanted Us to Forget

Every dry season, when the harmattan carried dust across the compound, my grandmother would gather us under the mango tree and begin the same way: “Listen well, because after me there is only you.”

The story she told was not a legend. It was a record — of who our family were before the river changed its course, of the names of the people who walked from the north with nothing but seed and salt, and of the promise they made to the village that received them.

She never wrote it down. She said writing makes people lazy with remembering. But she repeated it so precisely that when we finally recorded her, at eighty-four, the words matched the ones we had memorised as children almost exactly.

This recording was made in her own compound, in Mandinka, on an ordinary Thursday afternoon. Children can be heard in the background. She asked that we keep that in, because, she said, a story without children around it is already half dead.