Twenty-One strings.Lineage.
The Cissokhokunda have built and played the kora for generations — and now they will build you one.
What a kora is, and where it came from
Most people arriving here have never held one. Twenty seconds, then the shop.
Twenty-one strings
A calabash gourd cut in half, covered in cowhide, with a long hardwood neck and a tall notched bridge. The strings run in two ranks, one either side of that bridge, played with the thumbs and forefingers while the remaining fingers grip two upright handles. A harp and a lute at the same time, and nothing else is built like it.
The Mandé world
Originated in West Africa. As per the Cissokhokunda Dialys, the kora was invented by their ancestor Diali Madi Wuleng Sissoko. The first piece he composed, Kelefaba, is still the first piece a kora player learns anywhere in the Mandé world — the alphabet of the instrument.
The same origin, told by Dialys of the same house: Foday Musa Suso · Alhaji Papa Susso
A Diali (Griot) is more than a performer
A Diali is a hereditary oral historian: a living archive of a community’s histories, poets, genealogies and memory, who happens to carry all of it in music. The role is not a job somebody chose. It is the hereditary right of the Dialys, passed from father to children — seventy generations of it by the family’s own reckoning, which is something close to two thousand years.
What a Diali carries, and why it matters
Ten minutes on the role itself — the Diali as archive, as witness, and as the thread a community keeps its own history on.
PBS Documentaries · if the player will not start, watch it on YouTube →
The SCM Merch Collection and Instrument Shop
Koras, ngonis, balafons and djembes, built and selected by the Cissokhokunda themselves — not sourced, not badged. Alongside them the SCM Merch Collection: the family’s own artwork on shirts, prints, caps and bags.
Instruments ship from Senegal and from the US, quoted per order, because a kora is large, light and fragile — the US stock saves a transatlantic leg and the customs wait that comes with it. Merch ships worldwide.
Kora Camp — two weeks inside a Diali family
Twelve places. Eight in the first group. Two kora masters, Mamadou and Atab, teaching by hand position on twenty-one strings — which is why the number is small and why it will not grow. When these are gone the next chance is a year away.
The camp is two weeks, so the full stay is $1,845 — or $1,995 with a kora provided. $195 holds your place, non-refundable and credited in full against the total; the balance spreads across twelve monthly payments of $138 (or $150) and falls due 60 days before departure.
Everything but the flight
Airport pickup and drop-off, lodging at the Kora Camp compound, three meals a day plus snacks twice daily, daily kora teaching, dance, djembe, oral history, cooking, every guided excursion and the final showcase. You book one thing: the flight.
Nothing is added on arrival. There is no tipping expectation, no excursion sold to you on the day, and no equipment hire.
Only these channels are ours. Kora Camp is arranged through +221 78 838 1879 on WhatsApp, info@korainstrument.com, and this website. Nowhere else.
If somebody contacts you offering places, transport, lodging, lessons or instruments on our behalf — or asks you to pay through a different account, a money-transfer service or an agent — they are not from our family and they do not speak for us. We have not authorised anyone to sell the camp, collect money or make arrangements in our name.
Please be careful with approaches like these, and do not send anyone money on our account without checking with us first. Write to info@korainstrument.com or message the number above and we will tell you straight away whether it came from us. We would always rather answer the question than see somebody lose their money.
What people ask before they reserve
The answers in full. Anything not here, ask Ibrahima — he is on the Kora Camp page, bottom right, and he answers these instantly.
Meals are cooked on site and eaten together, three a day plus snacks, and the Cissokhokunda are there across the two weeks to teach. The cooking lessons come out of that same kitchen. Tell us about allergies or dietary needs when you reserve — it is cooked fresh rather than catered, so it wants a little notice, and with notice it is not a problem.
Most first-time visitors take the provided instrument. A kora is a large, fragile thing to carry through three airports.
A lineage of kora masters
The Cissokhokunda are a Mandinka Diali family from Bignona, in the Casamance, in the south of Senegal — a house where the kora was never a hobby and never a career choice, because it was simply what the family did and had always done.
What is taught here is not one player’s method. It is a lineage: five kora masters of one family, each of whom learned it from the one before, carrying the Mandé tradition forward and now handing it on past the region it came from.
One name, many spellings. Suso, Susso, Sissoko, Cissokho and Sisoco are the same Mandinka name written down by different colonial administrations — Suso in English-speaking Gambia, Cissokho and Sissoko in French-speaking Senegal and Mali, Sisoco in Portuguese-speaking Guinea-Bissau. One house, one lineage, whichever way the pen fell. The same is true of Diabaté, Diébaté and Jobarteh.
A branch, not the whole tree. Many other Dialys — of the Cissokhokunda, and of other Dialikunda families — travel and perform across the world, carrying the kora and its music to audiences far from Casamance. The Dialys named here are one small part of a very large house.
Listen while you browse
The long-form instrumental — 40+ minutes of solo kora, with one of the great Cissokhokunda Dialys. Put it on and look around the shop.
Performances
Where we play — festivals and stages across The World. New dates will be announced here first.
Be first to know
No spam, only tour news.
Book the Cissokhokunda Dialys for your event
Concerts, Festivals, cultural programs, and collaborations — reach out directly.
The Kora Masterclass
Taught by the Dialys themselves — technique, tuning and repertoire, passed on the way it was passed to them. It is not open yet. Recording is under way. Join the list to know it early.
Four modules, various pieces
Origins, technique, the stories and the repertoire, subtitled in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. Mandinka words stay in Mandinka.
Join the list
One email when it opens, and nothing else. Everyone on the list gets first access and the opening rate.
One list, everything on it
New releases, tour dates, Kora Masterclass openings and Kora Camp dates.