African letters

Abstract In the introduction to the first edition of his collection of tales (published in 1947), the late Birago Diop explains the circumstance in which he came to produce the work that has secured for him an enduring place in the corpus of modern African literature. Ascribing the tales to the family griot, Amadou Koumba, Diop downplays his own participation in their composition; he makes the modest claim that his role was limited to transcribing the tales as he heard them from the griot in their original versions in Wolof and translating them into French so as to make them accessible to a wider audience of readers. It is this condition of their gen eration as written texts that is reflected in the titles of the first two collections, Les contes d’Amadou Koumba and Les nouveaux contes d’Amadou Koumba. The griot’s name is conjoined to the material that Diop presents as a way of insisting upon its true provenance.