We record tales,along with ethnohistories (e.g., origin of the village), in African villages
after receiving permission from the local authority, usually the village chief. The recordings
are made in public, often with multiple speakers taking turns telling stories or talking about
past customs. The tales and ethnohistory belong collectively to the villages or their
ethnicities, under the authority of the chief and/or counsel of elders, and the western notion
of individual authorial rights is irrelevant. Nor does the identifiability of the speakers’ voices
or images raise any problematic issues in view of the unobjectionable nature of the content.
There are green shoots of cultural revival at the local ethnic level in the areas we work in
(chiefly SW Burkina Faso and central Mali). Because of language and culture erosion, along
with the ubiquity of western-style social and broadcast media, young people have little
exposure to traditional tales and ethnohistory. Precisely for that reason, they have shown the
greatest interest in these materials. Fortunately, young people generally know the local ethnic language/dialect well enough to easily understand the recordings. It is mainly for
them, and secondarily for future linguists, that we have lately begun making far more
recordings than we can ourselves transcribe or otherwise process as linguists.