  The various peoples on the continent that came to be called “Africa” had constructed a variety of more or less complex societies of varying scale and scope many generations before fifteenth century encounters with acquisitive explorers and adventurers from the varying configurations of polities, regions, cities, and states that have been identified as Europe and from elsewhere. Several of these ancient societies—the kingdoms of Mali and Ghana and the royal dynasties of Kemet (Ancient Egypt), for example—had evolved complex social strata that included persons of accomplished learning. Some of these persons were stationed in institutions devoted to the production and distribution of knowledge and creative expression and to the preservation of that knowledge and expression in written and artistic works stored in libraries and other repositories and, in the case of works of art, incorporated into the ontologically-structured routines of daily life. Others, in social orders in which advanced knowledge was produced and mediated via oral literatures and traditions, were selected and trained to be griots: that is, persons with rigorously structured memories who thus became the living repositories, guardians, and mediators of a people’s and/or a political community’s genealogies and intellectual legacies, their keepers of wisdom. And in order to preserve shared, adaptive life across generations in all of the various social orders, it was socially necessary to construct and maintain interpretive orderings of natural and social realities, as well of creatively imagined origins and genealogies and constructed histories, by which to meaningfully order individual and shared life.