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.