Sundiata Epic Theatre (Mali, Mandé)
The Sundiata epic recounts the rise of Sundiata Keita, the first emperor of the Mali Empire in the 13th century. More than myth or history, it is a performed memory, transmitted orally by griots who embody history, ethics, cosmology, and law. The tale includes exile, prophecy, magical battles, and restoration of harmony. But it is also a moral world—a theatre of initiation, endurance, and kingship.
This is performance as epistemology—history not read but sung.
Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence
Foucault’s concept of the “care of the self” articulates a mode of subjectivation rooted not in obedience to law but in the formation of ethical being through continuous practices—speech, memory, self-mastery, ritual, and transmission. In the Sundiata Epic, such care is manifest not just in Sundiata himself but most fully in the griot—the traditional orator-historian whose voice links ancestral time to present identity.
The griot, in Foucaultian terms, is not merely a narrator. He is a technician of subjectivity—a practitioner of a discursive ethics. His speech is performative, shaping kings, teaching lineage, calling forth ancestral authority. The griot’s knowledge is not academic; it is embodied truth-telling, formed through apprenticeship, ritual listening, and historical memory. He is a guardian of cultural technologies that enable subjects to remember, choose, and become.
Sundiata, in turn, becomes king not because of divine right alone, but because he learns to inhabit the myth—to transform himself into one who has suffered, remembered, and finally integrated multiple planes of being: prophecy, exile, strength, and wisdom. This self-transformation is Foucault’s ethics in practice—a becoming-subject through narrative self-care and the aesthetics of conduct.
The griot does not offer mere entertainment, nor does the epic function as fixed myth. It is theatrical governance—a fluid, poetic process of forming selves, leaders, and moral communities. In Foucault’s late philosophy, such technologies of the self are the foundation for a resistant and creative life: the griot’s voice is a resistance against oblivion, a stylistics of remembering how to live.