Sundiata is preserved and performed by griots, a hereditary caste of West African bards, oral historians and musicians whose social role includes maintaining the genealogies and founding narratives of ruling families across generations. A griot's authority to perform Sundiata rests on training within this lineage tradition rather than on any written credential, and the same broad narrative can vary meaningfully in emphasis and detail depending on which griot family and region is performing it.
The version most widely read outside West Africa descends from the telling of the griot Djeli Mamadou Kouyate, gathered and rendered into written French and then English in the mid twentieth century, a process that necessarily fixes into print a performance that would otherwise exist as one telling among many living variants. Because griot performance is bound up with music, audience interaction and occasion, specialists studying Sundiata generally treat any single published text as a partial record of a tradition that continues to be performed and adapted rather than as the epic's single authoritative form.
Griot performance of Sundiata traditionally combines spoken narration with music played on instruments such as the kora, a plucked string instrument, or the balafon, a wooden xylophone, and a griot's standing within this tradition is bound up with mastery of both narrative content and musical accompaniment together, not narrative alone.