Stories do have power..............

In many of these cultures, storytelling arts are professionalized: the most accomplished storytellers are initiates (griots, or bards), who have mastered many complex verbal, musical, and memory skills after years of specialized training. This training often includes a strong spiritual and ethical dimension required to control the special forces believed to be released by the spoken/sung word in oral performances. These occult powers and primal energies of creation and destruction are called nyama by Mande peoples of Western Africa, for example, and their jeli, or griots, are a subgroup of the artisan professions that the Mande designate nyamakalaw, or "nyama-handlers"(see, for example, discussions in Johnson et al; and Hale). This sense of special powers of the spoken word--as expressed in the following Bambara praise poem--has largely been lost in literate-based societies of the West:

Praise of the Word

The word is total:
it cuts, excoriates
forms, modulates
perturbs, maddens
cures or directly kills
amplifies or reduces
According to intention
It excites or calms souls.
--Praise song of a bard of the Bambara Komo society
(qtd. in Louis-Vincent Thomas and Rene Luneau,
 Les Religions d’Afrique noire, textes et traditions sacres; as cited in Gleason xxxvii)

Following a traditional griot performance of a spiritually-charged oral epic like Sundjiata, a Malian audience might ritualistically chant, "Ka nyama bo!" (which could be translated something like, "May the powers of nyama safely disperse!").
I hope some of the recorded professional performances that we listen to in class will demonstrate that African storytelling and orature are highly skilled performance arts. These living traditions continue to survive and adapt to the challenges of modernization facing Africa today, and have fused, in uniquely African ways, with newer creative forms and influences to enrich the global human experience and its creative expression.