Daniel Laemouahuma Jatta
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Daniel Laemouahuma Jatta is a Jola scholar/musician from Mandinary, Gambia, who pioneered the research and documentation of the Jola folk lute, the akonting, as well as the related Manjago folk lute, the buchundu, in the mid-1980s. Prior to Jatta's work, these instruments were largely unknown outside the rural villages of the Jola and Manjago throughout the Senegambia region of West Africa.
In the 1960s, scholars and writers began to seriously examine the traditional music of West Africa in their search for the roots of the blues, jazz, and the other music forms that had emerged in the African Diaspora. However, in this quest there was very little study and documentation of West African string instruments done other than in the overall context of general musical and cultural traditions. For the most part, the only string instruments to receive specific attention were those of the griots, such as their plucked lutes (e.g. the Mande ngoni, the Wolof xalam, the FulBe hoddu, the Soninke gambare) and the kora, the 21-string harp-lute of the Mandinka griots.
(Griots are male members of hereditary music/word artisan castes found in certain West African Islamized peoples with similar tripartie caste systems. The griot phenomenon is limited to the various peoples of the Mande language family -- some 53 related ethnic groups, such as the Bamana [also Bambara], Mandinka, Malinke, Susu, Soninke and so on-- as well as the non-Mande Wolof, the western FulBe [also known as the Fula, Fulani and Peul], Songhai [also Songhay], Sereer, Lebu, and Tukulóor.)
In 2000, Jatta presented his research findings and introduced the Jola akonting at the Third Annual Banjo Collectors Gathering, an annual international conference of the foremost collectors and scholars of 19th and early 20th century banjos. The annual Banjo Collectors Gatherings also serve as the principal forums for the presentations of new research on the banjo's history and organology.
Jatta's presentation, in which he performed on the akonting and showed film footage of other Jola musicians playing the instrument, made for quite a sensation. Up until that point, the conventional wisdom was that the wooden-bodied plucked lutes exclusive to the West African griots, such as the Mande ngoni and the Wolof xalam, were the archetypes for the earliest forms of the banjo, the gourd-bodied banjar and banza first made and played by enslaved West Africans in the New World, from the 17th century on. Daniel's proposition that gourd-bodied non-griot folk and artisan lutes-- like the Jola akonting (Senegal, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau), Manjago buchundu (Gambia, Guinea-Bissau), the Gwari kaburu (Nigeria), and the Frafra koliko (Ghana), to name but a few-- were the more likely candidates was nothing short of revolutionary.
Since than many museums around the world have updated their collections to include the akonting and other members of the West African folk/artisan lute family while banjo historians and ethnomusicologists have begun to broaden the range of their focus to include these instruments as well griot instruments.
