Mande refers to a large collection of West African ethnic groups who can be found in Mali, Senegal, the Gambia, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, the Ivory Coast, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea Bissau and Liberia. Mali is still regarded as the centre of its culture and is the spiritual and political home of Mande griots (bards, raconteurs or oral historians). Kangaba is the cultural centre to which griots from all over Mande return every seven years for the Kamabolom, a celebration and reaffirmation of their Mande cultural identity through the art of the griot. While griotism is found in the whole of Mande diaspora, I have chosen to look at the art form as practised among the Mandinka, who are now mainly distributed in an arc of some eight hundred miles, extending from the mouth of the Gambia River in Gambia and Senegal to the interior of the Ivory Coast (Atkins, 1972: 6).