After a major period of silence, John Johnson and Thomas Hale have published this volume in their African Epic Series. The Epic of Kelefaa Saane recounts the history of the Kaabu kingdom, a sixteenth- to nineteenth-century Mandinka kingdom of Senegambia (centred on modern north-eastern Guinea-Bissau but extending into Casamance, Senegal). This edition by Sana Camara is based on a 1987 performance by Sirifi Camara, which Sana Camara purchased as cassettes at the market in Dakar. A few months after, Sana Camara established a contact with Sirifo Camara and received permission to publish the recording; the latter died unexpectedly in December 2003.

Those who know publications of epic texts by the two editors will recognize their style in the format of Camara's book. Some dimensions of the performance (such as griots, poetic language, structure and narrative style, heroic content) are briefly but clearly introduced in a dozen pages. This short introduction is sufficient to prepare an undergraduate audience for reading the text of the epic – which is full of highly readable stories about conflict, rivalry, and warfare – since Sirifo Camara's narrative style is highly accessible.

So far, so good. However, the book's scholarly scope is limited. The author could (and should!) have profited from the firm basis for the study of African epic created by Johnson, Hale, and others since the 1970s, but he doesn't seem eager to relate his work to developments in his field of research. An example: on the one hand, he mentions the nowadays widely accepted idea that griots can make a narrative as long or short as they want, and that length is determined by the performance context; but, on the other hand, he seems to be proud to publish a version with a 3,203 line narration, where the two other versions published so far (by Gordon Innes in 1978) were (only) 780 and 533 lines, thus suggesting the ‘old-fashioned’ idea that griots are the keepers of orally transmitted fixed texts. Moreover, Camara does not mention additional material to his text (on website or CD-Rom), although this material must be available. Unfortunately, it is not mentioned where the original recording can be consulted.

I have to conclude with a number of critical remarks. In essence, this book is not a critical source edition. First, the introduction is too general, and too short for a complex phenomenon such as an African epic full of praise poetry. Secondly, the work lacks an effort to introduce Sirifo Camara, although he was widely known as a public figure, since he was appointed as a traditional historian by a radio station in Ziguinchor. This fact is probably related to his highly accessible style of storytelling. Thirdly, the 14 pages of annotation are too few for an in-depth understanding of complex episodes and lines. Fourthly, the annotations do not demonstrate an in-depth study of the text. For instance, annotation to line 2333 [2335] reads: ‘Timbuktu: Timbuktu is an ancient city in northeastern Mali that dates to the twelfth century.’ Other annotations are superfluous: there are numerous cases where the annotation consists of a single short sentence that repeats part of the line from the translation. Fifthly, the bibliography consists of fewer than forty references, and many of them are quoted only once for information that is so generally known and so widely accepted that it does not need a reference. Sixthly, there is no attempt to link the epic text to the history of Kaabu or to contextualize it within the historiography of Kaabu; there is, for instance, no reference even to the ambitious and voluminous Tarikh Mandinka de Bijini (Guinée-Bissau): La mémoire des Mandinka et des Sòoninkee du Kaabu by Cornelia Giesing and Valentin Vydrine, published in 2007.

Finally, the proofs do not seem to have been sufficiently checked: the line numbering in the text and the annotation are often not in step. Moreover, a sign for a Mandinka consonant is often transcribed as ‘ng’, but sometimes maintained, while another sign is in both the Mandinka and English transcription represented as ‘ñ’. I finish with a point that really struck me, but to which the author gives no attention – the ‘matri-centric’ dimension of the text: Kelefaa has a conflict on succession with his mother's brother, and there are several other references that emphasize maternal descent. Therefore, the Kelefaa tradition hints at a different political system than the patrilineal kinship discourse that is dominant in Mande politics.

In sum, this book is an excellent teaching tool: it will help students of oral literature, African literature, and African history deepen their understanding of praise poetry and epics, and it may increase their enthusiasm for the study of oral tradition. However, historians may yet need to view it as similar in status to a primary source – a text that still needs to be contextualized.