Every Elder Is a Library

There is a saying, often attributed to the Malian writer Amadou Hampâté Bâ, that in Africa when an old person dies, a library burns to the ground. We have come to feel the truth of it on every expedition, in India as much as in Africa.

The knowledge an elder holds is not trivia. It is the accumulated, tested, irreplaceable record of how a community has lived in a particular place. A Maasai elder can name grazing grounds now buried under farmland and recall the precise relationship between a bird's call and the arrival of the herds. A village headman in Arunachal carries the genealogy of every household in his memory and presides over festivals whose meaning he must increasingly explain rather than assume. A monastery's custodian keeps chants that mean nothing on a page and everything in the air.

None of this is written down. That is not an oversight; it is the nature of oral knowledge. It survives by being spoken and heard, passed from one person to the next in an unbroken line. The line holds for as long as there is someone to tell and someone willing to listen — and both ends of that line are fraying at once. The young leave. The old remain, with libraries in their heads and fewer and fewer readers.

This is why so much of our work is simply sitting — recording voices, in their own languages, for far longer than any film will use. We are not after the quotable line. We are after the whole account, while the account still exists in the person who lived it.

We cannot save these libraries from closing. Time does what time does. But we can copy what is on the shelves before the doors shut. That, in the end, is what VIDFLIX is for.