Otto Paraploo
A Musicological Witness Portrait — Sona Jobarteh
Otto Paraploo
The kora has twenty-one strings divided into two parallel rows. The right hand plays one set, the left hand plays the other, and the two lines run simultaneously — bass register and melody register, rhythm and response, the deep grounding notes and the bright speaking notes braiding over each other in real time. The auditory cortex, encountering this, does what it always does when it hears simultaneous sound streams with different timbral and registral qualities: it separates them. Auditory stream segregation — the perceptual process by which the brain groups acoustic events into distinct sources — causes the listener to hear multiple instruments when there is only one. Multiple voices when there is only one player. Multiple people when one pair of hands is doing everything. The kora is built to produce this perceptual event deliberately. It is an instrument that sounds like a conversation between people who are, in fact, one person.
This is not a technical curiosity. It is the instrument's central argument. The griot tradition from which the kora comes — the five hereditary families of West Africa who have carried this instrument since the Mali Empire of the thirteenth century, performing the oral history of kings and harvests and wars and lineages for seven hundred years — is itself an instrument that sounds like many voices while carrying a single unbroken transmission. Every piece in the repertoire is a piece of oral archive. The music does not illustrate history. The music is the history. The jali, the griot, the player of the kora is simultaneously the instrument, the musician, and the record. One person holding seven centuries.
Sona Jobarteh was born in London in 1983 to a Gambian father and a British mother, and she heard the kora before she had words, and she touched it at three or four years old, and her grandmother urged her toward singing — the women's role, the women's tradition — and she refused. "Hated singing with a passion," she has said. The instrument she wanted was the one that was not hers to want. In seven hundred years of griot tradition, the kora had passed exclusively from father to son. Women griots sang. Women griots were praise poets and oral historians, keepers of lineage memory in the voice. But the instrument itself — the twenty-one strings, the bilateral polyphony, the one that sounds like many — was the inheritance of sons.
At fourteen she was sent to the Purcell School for Young Musicians in Hertfordshire — boarding school, composition major, one of very few pupils of colour in an institution that trained the next generation of British classical musicians. She had been trained at the Royal College of Music in cello, piano, harpsichord. She was classically formed, Western-formed, being made into the European musician the institution required. And on the library wall there was a kora. Ornamental. Broken. Someone had put it there as an artifact, a decorative object from a tradition the institution did not teach.
She began repairing it secretly, string by string, hoping no one would notice she kept taking it down from the wall. A late-night worker found her at it and gave permission. "Became my sanity," she has said. The broken kora repaired string by string in the margins of a British classical conservatory — this is what survival looks like before it becomes art. The instrument that the institution had hung on its wall as decoration became the instrument through which she could hear herself. Each string replaced in secret: the reclamation happening one filament at a time, quietly, after hours, in a building that was teaching her to be something that didn't include this.
The proprioceptive system — muscle memory, the body's knowledge of position and gesture — retains what the hands have done even when the mind has moved on to other things. The kora technique she had been absorbing since age three was in her hands while Purcell was training her fingers for other purposes. The tradition the school could not see was laying down its claim in the body through the act of repair, through the restringing, through the muscle memory of tuning each string to the correct tension. The body does not forget the instrument it first touched.
At seventeen she traveled to Norway, where her father Sanjally Jobarteh was working, and she asked him to teach her. This was the threshold. Sanjally Jobarteh — a master of the kora, a keeper of the tradition — could have refused on the grounds of seven hundred years of unbroken precedent. He did not. What he said instead has been quoted wherever her story is told: Don't want you distracted with idea of being female. Don't let that get into your head. Your ambition needs to be a good kora player. Not female kora player, just good kora player.
Read it slowly. What he gave her in that sentence was not permission. Permission implies the right to withhold. What he gave her was a reframing so complete it removed the category entirely. There is no female kora player in his instruction. There is only the standard — the good player, the skilled musician, the worthy inheritor of the tradition. The gender was not acknowledged as a relevant variable. He handed her the instrument and the demand simultaneously: be excellent. The tradition would have to accommodate the excellence because the excellence was what the tradition required.
The West African concept of fasiya — heritage, tradition passed down — contains within it both the continuity and the transmission itself. Heritage is not a static thing. It is an action. The tradition persists because it is continually handed from one body to another, the technique moving through the lineage the way water moves through limestone, shaping the channel as it goes. When Sanjally taught Sona, he was not breaking the tradition. He was performing fasiya exactly as it had always worked — master to student, hand to hand — and the fact that the student was his daughter rather than his son was a detail the tradition's essential logic did not require. The kora does not know who is holding it.
The kora's twenty-one strings are tuned to a pentatonic scale, but the instrument's modal character — the specific quality of its pitch relationships — belongs to the same family of natural intervals that predate equal temperament. The griot repertoire does not come from a Western harmonic tradition. It comes from a tonal logic developed over centuries alongside the instrument, inseparable from it, the music and the tuning system arriving together and evolving together and carrying each other forward through the centuries. When the kora plays a traditional piece from the Mali Empire repertoire — "Jarabi," the ancient love song that opens Fasiya; "Mali Ni Ce," the homage to the ancestral homeland — the auditory cortex of the Western-trained listener encounters the same productive disorientation it encounters with any mode that falls outside the equal-tempered grid. The filing system reaches for a category and finds the category slightly misaligned. The ear stays alert. The processing continues. The body leans forward slightly — not confusion exactly, but the specific heightened attention of a system that cannot recognize and dismiss, that must keep listening.
And beneath this the bilateral polyphony is still operating, the two hands still producing the two simultaneous streams that the auditory cortex is separating into distinct voices. The listener is hearing conversation — call and response, bass commentary beneath the melodic argument — and the conversation is happening inside one instrument, inside one tradition, inside one body that is simultaneously Gambian and British, classical and griot, the daughter of a master and a master herself.
The mirror neuron system activates when the body witnesses another body moving through skilled work at the edge of its capacity. The kora technique — four-finger playing, the thumb and index finger of each hand plucking alternating strings in the two parallel rows — produces movement that is small and precise and astonishing in its speed, the hands making decisions at the speed of conversation while the music speaks in two voices simultaneously. The motor cortex in the listener fires in recognition of movement it cannot perform and yet somehow knows. The recognition is felt as wonder before it is understood as admiration.
SOAS University of London. She had been formed at the Royal College and the Purcell School in the European tradition; now she was studying African Culture and Linguistics, completing herself in a different direction. And in the SOAS archive she found recordings — West African field recordings, manuscripts, the accumulated documentary residue of a tradition that had survived colonialism partly by living in the bodies of its practitioners rather than in institutions where colonialism could find and destroy it. The archive held what the griot tradition had always held: the record. The oral history now on tape, on paper, stored in a London institution — the same thing the broken kora on the Purcell wall had been: the tradition placed somewhere it was not supposed to be, waiting for someone who knew what it was.
She left SOAS with a degree in African Culture and Linguistics and the knowledge of what she was carrying. The British training and the Gambian inheritance were not in conflict. They were the twenty-one strings divided into two parallel rows. Two lines running simultaneously. One instrument.
In 2015 she released "Gambia" as a single to mark fifty years of Gambian independence, and the song's twenty-four million views — unofficial national anthem for a country of two and a half million people, the most-watched Gambian music video ever made — were not the result of viral mechanics or algorithmic promotion. They were the result of something older and more specific: diaspora recognition. The moment when the Gambian in London and the Gambian in New York and the Gambian in Paris and the Gambian still in Kartong all heard the same thing and felt the same thing and the feeling was: this is ours. The interoceptive insula processing the shift in heart rate and chest pressure that accompanies the specific emotion of recognition — not nostalgia, which is retrospective, but recognition, which is immediate, which is the present tense of belonging.
Wherever you are, never forget your homeland Gambia. For if you forget your roots, you turn your back on who you are.
The kora in "Gambia" uses the seruba — a traditional Mandinka drum rarely featured in contemporary recording, an endangered instrument she deliberately revived. This is the griot function operating exactly as it has always operated: the custodian of the tradition performing the tradition in a new context, keeping endangered forms alive through the very act of using them in a song that will be heard by twenty-four million people. The tradition survives not by being preserved but by being played.
I was in a room where the light had gone out of the afternoon — that particular late-winter moment when the darkness comes early and the day ends before you were ready for it — and I had Badinyaa Kumoo on the speakers, the 2022 album she spent seven years making while also building a school, and the kora came through and the auditory cortex did what it always does, it separated the streams, it heard the conversation, it registered two voices while one person played, and something in the chest shifted. The polyvagal shift was physical: something in the threat-detection system that had been quietly running all afternoon — the low-level vigilance that the body maintains in the absence of safety — stepped down. Social engagement activated. The breathing changed. Something in the room felt inhabited by more than one presence when it had been just me.
This is what auditory stream segregation produces when it meets the bilateral polyphony of the kora: the illusion of company. Not illusion exactly — the presence is real. The seven hundred years of griot tradition that the instrument carries are real. The ancestral pieces, the family repertoire, the Malian kings and the Gambian fishermen and the griots who sang praise to all of them — they are present in the playing the way sediment is present in limestone, compressed but structural, the thing that shapes the cave from within. I had never been to Gambia. I carry none of this history in my body. And yet the polyvagal system does not require shared history to shift. It requires only the acoustic evidence of another presence, another living intelligence, something that is here with you in the room.
The kora sounds like many when one is playing. The tradition carries seven hundred years in the fingers of the player. The room was inhabited before I understood why.
Also in 2015 she founded the Gambia Academy in Kartong — a school built entirely from touring income, twenty-one students and fourteen staff and a waiting list, on two and a half hectares of land she purchased, with an architectural design commissioned pro bono. The curriculum is holistic: academics, Mandinka language and culture, music and dance, business and entrepreneurship, martial arts. It is not a music school. It is a decolonization project in the form of a school, built on the premise that to be modern and African does not require abandoning African culture and tradition. That fasiya — heritage passed down — is itself a form of contemporary existence, not a museum.
She describes herself as educator first, musician second. This is the griot function made explicit. The jali was never only an entertainer. The jali was the community's memory, the keeper of genealogy, the advisor to kings, the person who knew what had happened and could say it in a form the community could hear. The Gambia Academy is the kora school that has no walls — or rather, that has walls she built with her own touring income, teaching the children of Kartong the same thing her father taught her: your ambition needs to be excellent. Not female excellent, not Gambian excellent, not postcolonial excellent. Just excellent.
Her son Sidiki, born 2010, played balafon on the album when he was twelve. The transmission continuing, the fasiya performing itself, the two-handed bilateral polyphony of the griot lineage handing the next generation into the stream.
The string that was broken on the library wall at Purcell. Repaired in secret, filament by filament, after hours, in a building that had not hung it there as a living tradition but as a decorative object. The hands that repaired it already knew the technique from age three, the motor cortex and the muscle spindles and the joint receptors all carrying the knowledge that the institution could not see.
Seven hundred years of father-to-son transmission. One father who looked at his daughter and handed her the standard rather than the limitation. One daughter who traveled to Norway to seek what should have been given automatically, who repaired the broken instrument in secret, who built the school on her own, who sang in Mandinka because the language is valuable and the twenty-four million people who heard it are evidence that the language knows this about itself even if the world that surrounds it does not.
The kora sounds like many when one is playing. The tradition sounds like the past when it is, in fact, the present. The bilateral polyphony of the two hands: two streams that the auditory cortex separates, that are in fact one. London and Gambia. Classical and griot. The broken string and the repaired string. The instrument that should not have been hers and that is, unquestionably, hers.
What the string held: everything. All of it. At once.
Musicological Witness Series
Otto Paraploo
February 2026
Category: Witness
Methodology: Wonderful Garbage
Style: Noir Song