What is a Kora
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 →