West Africa produced some of the world's most influential musical systems — systems that, through the Atlantic slave trade, became foundational to virtually all popular music in the Americas.
THE MANDE MUSICAL WORLD
The Mande-speaking peoples — including the Mandinka, Bambara, Dyula and Soninke — inhabit a vast swath of West Africa from Senegal and Gambia through Mali, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, and Burkina Faso to parts of Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana. Their musical world is organized around the hereditary musician-historian class known as the jeli (plural: jeliw; also called griot in French-language scholarship).
The jeli tradition is one of the most thoroughly documented oral musical traditions in the world. Griots are not merely entertainers; they are the repositories of genealogical history, the keepers of praise-songs for noble families, and the intermediaries between the living and the ancestral world. The relationship between a jeli and the noble family they serve is hereditary on both sides — a Kouyaté family serves a Keïta family, generation after generation.
The primary instrument of the jeli tradition is the kora, a 21-string bridge-harp built on a calabash resonator covered with cowhide. The kora is tuned to a heptatonic (seven-note) scale that varies by region and tradition, and it is played with both thumbs and index fingers, producing a complex texture of melody, accompaniment, and bass simultaneously. The kora was probably developed in its current form in the eighteenth century, though its predecessors are considerably older.
Jali Musa Jobarteh, Toumani Diabaté, and Sona Jobarteh are among the most important contemporary kora players whose recordings are widely accessible. Toumani Diabaté's "Kaira" (Hannibal Records, 1988) — recorded in a single afternoon, entirely solo — is considered one of the finest solo recordings in world music.
YORUBA DRUMMING AND TALKING DRUMS
The Yoruba people of southwestern Nigeria have developed one of the most sophisticated percussion traditions in the world. Central to Yoruba musical life is the dundun (pressure drum, also called the "talking drum"), an hourglass-shaped drum whose pitch can be varied by squeezing the lacing that connects the two heads. In the Yoruba tonal language, pitch changes meaning: the dundun can approximate the tonal patterns of speech well enough to communicate specific linguistic content across a distance.
The batá drum ensemble — three double-headed drums of graduated sizes — is used in Yoruba sacred music, particularly in the worship of the orisha (divine spirits), above all Sàngó. The batá tradition came to Cuba with enslaved Yoruba people and forms part of the foundation of Santería religious music. Understanding the batá in Cuba requires understanding its Yoruba origins.
Kay Kaufman Shelemay's work on the transmission of Ethiopian Jewish music, and Christopher Waterman's "Jùjú: A Social History and Ethnography of an African Popular Music" (University of Chicago Press, 1990), both demonstrate how African musical traditions adapt and transform in response to colonial contact, urbanization, and the introduction of electronic instruments without losing their structural identity.
HIGHLIFE AND AFROBEAT
The twentieth century saw West African musicians engage creatively with Western instruments, recording technology, and global markets. Highlife — originating in Ghana in the early twentieth century — blends Akan musical forms with brass band instrumentation and guitar. Afrobeat — invented by Fela Kuti in Lagos in the late 1960s — fuses Yoruba musical structure, James Brown's funk, jazz improvisation, and radical political commentary into one of the most distinctive and influential genres of the twentieth century.
Fela Kuti's "Zombie" (1976) is both a musical masterpiece and a political document of the highest order: a direct attack on the Nigerian military government using traditional Yoruba musical vocabulary. The extended groove, the way the horns lock in with the rhythm section, the way Fela's vocal lines interact with the polyrhythmic drum and bass bed — all of this makes sense in both African and African-American musical terms simultaneously. It is, as ethnomusicologist John Collins has noted, a product of the Atlantic system rather than a purely "African" phenomenon.
GENDER AND MUSICAL LIFE
Women's musical roles in West Africa are often distinct from men's, and in some traditions, there are genres exclusively performed by women. Praise-singing traditions for women, lullaby genres, and communal work songs are often female domains. The assumption that the publicly visible griot tradition represents "West African music" obscures a large body of women's music that is no less sophisticated for being less well-documented.
SENEGAMBIAN SABAR DRUMMING
The Wolof and Serer peoples of Senegal and the Gambia have developed sabar drumming — a tradition of single-headed drums played with one hand and one stick, producing extremely fast and articulate patterns associated with social dances such as the ventilateur. The drum-and-dance event known as the sabar gathers the community for events such as weddings and naming ceremonies; the drumming both accompanies and provokes the dance, with the drummer responding to a particularly virtuosic dancer with a coded message in the rhythmic vocabulary. Patricia Tang, in "Masters of the Sabar" (Temple University Press, 2007), documents how this tradition negotiates between hereditary specialist (géwél) musicianship and a community participation ethic.
GHANAIAN HIGHLIFE AND THE GUITAR
Ghana's musical history is one of the richest in West Africa. The Akan, Ewe, Ga, Dagomba, and other peoples each maintain distinct musical traditions. The colonial encounter introduced the acoustic guitar (via Portuguese sailors as early as the seventeenth century, but most significantly via Kru sailors from Liberia in the late nineteenth century), and a distinctively Ghanaian guitar style developed: palm-wine music, played in the bars where palm wine was sold, eventually evolving into highlife. The two-finger guitar technique (thumb and index) of the palm-wine style also influenced the Congolese rumba and soukous styles of Central Africa, which in turn produced the lingala guitar tradition that has shaped popular music across the entire African continent.
CONGOLESE RUMBA AND PAN-AFRICAN POP
Congolese rumba — also called soukous in its faster forms — developed in the 1940s and 1950s in Léopoldville (now Kinshasa) and Brazzaville from the synthesis of returning Cuban son recordings (which had themselves originally drawn on Central African rhythms) with local Lingala-language singing and electric guitar accompaniment. By the 1970s, Congolese pop had become the dominant popular music across much of sub-Saharan Africa. Franco Luambo Makiadi, Tabu Ley Rochereau, and Papa Wemba are among the central figures of this tradition. The Congolese case illustrates how musical traditions move across the Atlantic in both directions: African rhythms cross to Cuba, are absorbed and transformed there, return to Africa via recordings, and produce a third tradition that is then re-exported to the world.
WOMEN'S MUSIC AND GENDER
Beyond the praise-singer traditions of the Sahel, women's musical roles in West Africa include the wassoulou tradition of southern Mali, exemplified by Oumou Sangaré, in which women's voices critique traditional gender expectations within a musical language drawn from hunter-society music, played on the kamalen ngoni (youth harp) derived from the hunters' donso ngoni. The Senegalese praise-singer Coumba Gawlo Seck and the Cape Verdean morna singer Cesária Évora similarly represent traditions in which female voices have become central to national and pan-African musical identity. The historic invisibility of women in some ethnomusicological literature is itself a research bias to be corrected, not a reflection of the actual diversity of West African musical practice.
EXERCISE: KORA TUNING ANALYSIS
Listen to a solo kora recording and attempt to identify the seven pitches of the tuning system. Notice whether the intervals match equal-tempered expectations. Read one account of kora tuning from a scholarly source (the Journal of the Society for American Music or Ethnomusicology journal, both available through university libraries) and compare what you hear to what the theory predicts.