Gastón: In another conversation you mentioned that in your country every musician plays a social role within the community, that there is a connection between what is played and the social role of musicians

Souleymane: In Africa, the musicians whom we call griots—which can also be women—have a special place in the community, but among instrument players every instrument also has a special role. For example, he who plays the dum dum must first learn all the other drums, because dum means deep and it is the heartbeat. It is the Ph.D. of instruments, and when you get to play it you are already old. You must first know all of the other languages. For example, when I began to play, I learned Bambara, which is the language of Mali. Then the one from Guinea, and when I got there the first thing the master asked me was if I had learned Bambara. If I hadn’t I couldn’t be there. After five or six years my master told me “this is the limit to my knowledge, now you must go learn the language of such and such,” and so on until the master tells you: “Since you already know all the languages you must now take care of the whole house”; and it is when you play the dum dum, you can now play with anybody. Of course, when one gets there one’s hair is already gray. This is why we say that the elder plays the dum dum, even if he is young, because it is a manner of speaking. An elder in Africa is the one who knows, the age doesn’t matter.

Gastón: How would you compare these roles with those in Western ensembles?

Souleymane: Maybe the most important difference is that the one who plays solo in Africa is the novice, the apprentice. In the West the one who plays solo is supposed to be the best. The typical rock guitar player is the star or the pop diva. In Africa this is the one who knows the least, who doesn’t know all languages. This is why he is in charge of improvisation, because he is searching for the road. A road she or he has lost. But the one who takes care of the rhythm is the one who must fix things when the improviser gets lost. He is the one who reminds him of the right road, what music should be, and from which the novice mustn’t stray too far, but just a bit due to his inexperience or lack of knowledge. This happens in all kinds of music, be it traditional, classical, jazz, or contemporary. He who keeps the beat, using maybe the bass or the contrabass, or sometimes the director, is the one who allows improvisation but gives notice to the divas and soloists to go back home. In Africa this is only possible because of the elder. Without him everything would be chaos. The good musician plays with others. A soloist is unthinkable in Africa because he is not performing according to the essence of music, which is listening to others. The ideal would be having, at the same time, the technique and the company. Artists, if we may use that term in Africa, are the intermediaries between god and humans. And this also happens with sculptors, poets, not just musicians or storytellers. Those who offer happiness and knowledge to others are the intermediaries because men cannot understand the gods by themselves.

Gastón: What is the relationship between music and the gods?

Souleymane: In Africa we believe that many gods retire. For example, the god of rain. People make the rhythms, the specific chants to get rain, but if, for example, the rain doesn’t come, the god of rain is fired. People go in search of another god, and in order to do that they need a musician-storyteller because artists can make that connection, the mediation. However, today with globalization, modernity has ruined this a great deal. Traditionally musicians only worked with music. The community would build his house, would provide him with food, every year peasants would give him part of their crops, rice, beans, bananas, dresses for his wife, so that he could only play. It was a life dedicated to artistic creation and communicating with the gods. An artist cannot be a musician today and a construction worker tomorrow. If an artist must earn a living it should be through music and through teaching music and storytelling to children. He is the people’s maker because he is part of the process of transmitting tradition. Transmission is a very important word in Senegal. For sculptors who make masks and for theater artists it is the same thing. This is how society was organized. After colonization many things changed. There were universities. Historians must learn there, and those who do not attend are just peasants and should stop doing music. We had the government which came from France with French law. For example, many shamans were jailed for practicing traditional medicine. This happened because there was a law in France then that stated that it was unlawful to practice unofficial medicine. To put it differently, during colonization those who kept the traditional knowledge of the community went into hiding because they were very afraid of being sent to prison. Now not only us, the natives, but people from European universities go into the bushes to find shamans who can explain to them about certain roots and plants, which they know are good for our health, but the damage has been done.

Gastón: Obviously, it was unthinkable for African people that something traditional could be illegal. How was music affected by French colonization?

Souleymane: No African would have ever thought that something from nature, which was intended to heal, could be a reason to be jailed. But a European could because it somehow threatened their power, the hegemony of a type of science, and rationality. So, in order to protect their families, people in Senegal stopped talking about the tradition until it was almost extinguished. Only very recently Western culture understood there is more than one way of thinking and understanding medicine. What is paradoxical and contradictory about it is that such a way of thinking goes against Greek philosophy, which is supposed to be the cradle of Western philosophy. Knowledge in Greece was not dogmatic, it was open; one could contest others’ ideas, and a philosopher could oppose his master. But the colonial system, as many other institutions do, forgot its own essence and denied other thought systems. The same thing happened with music. Not even curiosity led people to listen to it; it was simply labeled as inferior. It is only in modern times that Western curiosity has tried to fix such errors. And the reason for doing this is a negative one: the West has exhausted its musical search, got to the limit of its superiority, and now is in need of the others. Many Africans do not know their traditions because they were educated in the colonial system, and they were sent to the conservatory in Dakar. By doing this they were not allowed to be part of the transmission of the tradition. This is, they can read music but as we say in Africa “they cannot listen to music.” Obviously, with independence, this situation began to change, but it is a very recent change from a historical perspective, since 1960, and from 1965 in many countries like Mozambique. It was many years, three hundred years, of damage to traditional cultures.

Gastón: How has this lost cultural dynamic been recuperated?

Souleymane: To a great extent by following the steps of the slave trade, because those who left as slaves took those traditions with them and, due to the isolated life they had in America, kept them. Meanwhile in Africa, the elderly died and the young were educated in the colonial system. To put it differently, there was no continuation in the transmission of tradition, which is so important for keeping culture alive. By following the path of slavery we have been able to recuperate stories, tales, myths, and we have reencountered folklore. It is possible to say that real African music is in Latin America. Musically speaking, slavery made people from different places in Africa play together, for example all of those who were in the Western coast: Benin, Togo, Nigeria, Mali, Senegal. All of those closer to the coast were enslaved, but once they got there [America], and even on board ships, they did not speak the same language. In order to communicate they had to play the drum and this is why they kept and transmitted the tradition. We lost many of those languages during colonization. Before, a town could speak to another by playing the drum. When the Cubans began coming to Africa in the sixties and seventies (and many are still coming), the old percussionists told their pupils: “listen to this because it is the original drum.” The African paradox is that in order to learn how people played in the past one has to go to the Caribbean, Cuba, Puerto Rico. When I listened to the musicians in Cali (Colombia), I knew it was the pure rhythm, and not just the rhythm. There was a boy who sang in a really high pitch. A voice we have lost. This register is ethnographically studied in universities, it is something isolated that does not exist as a tradition anymore. We say it is a voice from the soul, with a really high register because the soul leaves the body. We call it “ba,” which is the soul going away. Something similar happens with Cuba and Brazil. They have rhythms we do not play anymore. There is a gap that lasted three hundred years. Somehow we have the two ends of the process: the moment of departure (what is played in Latin America) and what is left after the colonization process (how people play nowadays in Africa), but there is a huge gap between both. What we can do is try to establish a connection between both ends of the rope to whatever extent possible because there are many things that are irrevocably lost.