Finding the Sosso-Balla in West Africa

Early on in his new book, “Custodians of Wonder,” BBC Travel writer Eliot Stein tallies some recent effects of globalization, a process that seems to only speed up. Nine languages, he notes, are lost annually; half of the world’s current languages could go extinct within the next 100 years. Nearly 3,000 villages in Spain could turn into ghost towns and 896 villages in Japan are estimated to disappear by 2040, as younger populations migrate to cities. 

In this context, “Custodians of Wonder” (out tomorrow via St. Martins) feels like a crucial act of preservation — an attempt to document cultural marvels that are, as Stein puts it, at the edge of disappearance. Stein traveled the globe to meet the last people keeping ancient traditions alive, from Scandinavia’s final night watchman to the Peruvian bridge master who reconstructs a bridge out of grass every year in the tradition of the fabled Inca road system. 

In this adapted excerpt, we meet Balla Kouyaté, one in a long line of West African “djelis,” men who function as living history books to preserve stories, culture, and traditions. Some, like Kouyaté, play a xylophone-like instrument called the balafon. Stein joined Kouyaté, who had relocated to America, in a journey back to Mali and Guinea. There, Stein would come to understand a centuries-old tradition and become one of the first foreign journalists in history to see the Sosso-Bala, an 800-year-old balafon that dates back to the founding of the Mali empire.

NEARLY 800 YEARS AGO, Sundiata Keita founded the largest and greatest kingdom in West African history: the Mali Empire. At its height, around 1300, it stretched for some 2,000 kilometers west to east, from the Senegalese coast across 10 modern-day nations, and for much of the early 14th century, Mali was the wealthiest empire in the world.

When Sundiata took the throne, he appointed a man named Balla Fasséké Kouyaté to be the guardian of a sacred instrument called a balafon. The precursor of the xylophone and marimba, a balafon is made by carefully cutting 21 wooden slats into different lengths, fixing them atop hallow calabashes, and striking them with mallets wound with the gum and sap of a rubber tree. Kouyaté’s job wasn’t just to play the balafon, but to be the empire’s official chronicler, memorizing its history and sharing it with the public as he played.

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Ever since, in an astounding tradition that continues to this day, male members of the past 27 generations of the Kouyaté family have learned to master the balafon and serve as living history books, preserving the ancient stories, culture, and traditions of the more than 13 million Mande people living across West Africa. These chroniclers, as anyone who read Alex Haley’s book Roots may remember, are called “griots” in English. But in the Mandinka language of West Africa, they are known as djelis. The word “djeli” means blood, and it is said that just as people can’t live without blood, a Mande community can’t live without a djeli.

To be a djeli is a birthright, and over the centuries, these ancient balafon-playing bards have served as equal parts historians, praise singers, and ambassadors of the kings and communities they serve. They memorize and recite national epics, recall family genealogies with encyclopedic fluency, announce births and deaths, oversee important family events, and facilitate marriages among bashful couples.

Remarkably, the original balafon that Sundiata first bestowed to Kouyaté eight centuries ago still exists. Known as the Sosso-Bala, it is kept in a round mud hut in the remote 150-person village of Niagassola, Guinea, which has no running water or electricity. All modern balafons descend from this instrument, and it cannot leave the village unless it is carried on the head of its official guardian, known as the balatigui. In fact, it is only brought out of the mud hut once a year for a single ceremonial playing during Eid, and only the balatigui is allowed to play it.

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In 2001, the Sosso-Bala was proclaimed by UNESCO as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Of the 678 global traditions, practices, and human expressions on the list — which include things like Argentine tango, Chinese calligraphy, and Indian yoga — the Sosso-Bala is the only that’s entire history has been maintained within a single family. When it was proclaimed, the son of the balatigui and the heir apparent to guard the Sosso-Bala was a man named Balla Kouyaté. But at the time, Balla wasn’t living in Mali, Guinea, or anywhere in West Africa; he was an undocumented immigrant hauling canned food off trucks at a convenience store in Albany, New York, by day and gently tapping the wooden bars of his balafon at night to not wake up his roommates.

Balla still lives in the U.S., but his situation is quite different these days. The 49-year-old has been featured as a session player on more than 45 albums, including two Grammy Award-winning recordings by Yo-Yo Ma. His music has been archived in the Library of Congress; he’s performed at the Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall, and Lincoln Center; and he’s led demonstrations at Harvard, MIT, and the New England Conservatory, where he currently teaches a class on musical improvisation. In 2019, he was named a National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts, the U.S. government’s highest honor in the folk and traditional arts. But while this award was received with a swell of enthusiasm back in West Africa, virtually no one in the U.S. had ever written about him or his family’s astonishing legacy.

And so it happened that in 2022, after a weeklong search to connect the dots from a 13th-century emperor to Niagassola, Guinea, to an address in Medford, Massachusetts, I sent a hopeful email to a man I’d never met, asking if he’d be willing to meet me, to tell me his family’s story, and to let me follow him back to the place where it all started.

Within 30 minutes of hitting send, I received a call from a number I didn’t recognize. It was Balla, and the first thing he told me was, “I’ve been waiting for an email like this for more than 20 years.”

I had no way of knowing at the time, but Balla’s life had recently been overshadowed by grief. Three months earlier, his wife, Kris, had succumbed to cancer, leaving Balla all alone to care for the couple’s 15-year-old son and 14-year-old daughter. As Balla told me, Kris was more than just his partner; she was his anchor and biggest supporter. She was also instrumental in his success. Kris was the one who filled out each of Balla’s grant applications, who found him teaching positions, and who arranged access to a studio at Harvard, where she worked as a media technician, so he could record his debut album in 2007.

When I met Balla at his Medford condo, he was putting the finishing touches on an album that had been five years in the making and that he had dedicated to his late wife. It not only features his brothers and cousins as bandmates, but also his two American kids on backing vocals in Mandinka.

Ten days later, I joined Balla and his children on a journey back to Mali and Guinea that he had been planning since Kris’ passing. As he explained, it was a chance to come home, to heal, and to remind the kids of their roots. Along the way, I set out to understand how this 800-year-old tradition has survived, to meet the balatigui, and to seek his permission to become one of the first foreign journalists in history to set eyes on the Sosso-Bala.

FOR ALL ITS dazzling prosperity, one of its most striking aspects of the Mali Empire is how little the outside world knew about it at the height of its power, and how little people still know about it today. Chances are if you were to stop people on the street outside of West Africa and ask them about the Mali Empire, a few may vaguely recall the fabled city of Timbuktu, but the majority are likely to have never heard of it.

One of the reasons for this is that the Mali Empire was a notoriously secretive place. In fact, only one first-hand written account of it exists. As a result, much of what scholars now know about it — how Sundiata issued one of the world’s first human rights charters, how he was better known as Mari Djata (meaning “The Lion King”), and how the story of Africa’s real-life Lion King is what inspired the Disney film — comes directly from djelis like Balla.

As Balla explained, once upon a time, the only djelis were the Kouyatés, but over the centuries, this social caste of musicians has expanded to include other families, such as the Diabates and Sissokos. And while the balafon may be the most famous djeli instrument, it’s far from the only one.

Google “djeli music,” and in addition to balafon performances, you’ll find renditions of ancient epics, folk songs, and modern Afropop performed by men on the djembe (a goblet-shaped drum), the ngoni (a lute-like instrument widely believed to have inspired the banjo), and the kora (a sort of 21-stringed harp that produces one of the world’s most enchanting sounds). Women can also be djelis and usually specialize in singing historical narratives. These days, djelis are essentially the pop stars and divas of Malian music, and if you wander into any cafe or club in Mali playing music videos, you’ll notice many of the artists have the last name Kouyaté.

Balla’s father performed across West Africa and taught each of his sons the basics of the balafon, but Balla took to it in a way that none of his eight older brothers had. When he was 12, he dropped out of school and started performing for farmers outside of Niagassola with his mother. He was so small his mother placed him on top of a large rock, and while she sang and played the karinyan (a sort of two-handed cowbell), Balla performed historical epics for hours on end, as teams of 25 men plowed the fields to the rhythms of the family’s synchronized beat.

As word of his balafon ability spread, Balla started getting asked to perform at baby showers, coming-of-age ceremonies, and weddings from Mali’s capital, Bamako, to Niagassola. By 18, he began accompanying his sister, Kaniba, a well-known singer, on tour to Burkina Faso, the Ivory Coast, Senegal, and the Republic of the Congo. Soon, musicians across West Africa began asking Balla to record with them, and by the time Balla was 26, he was one of the most in-demand session players in West Africa. But Balla didn’t just want to back up other artists; he wanted to do his own thing. So, in 1999, a year after his father became appointed as the guardian of the Sosso-Bala, Balla did something previously unheard of with the ancient instrument: He started playing two at the same time.

“With one balafon, you have seven notes. With two, I tune them so that I can make 12 and a half notes, and lots of quarter notes. With this [full chromatic scale], I can play any music in the world — traditional djeli music, but also music that a balafon is not supposed to play.”

I had never heard a balafon before, let alone two, so before our trip, I went to Queens, New York, to see Balla perform. The instrument sounds like a much richer marimba, with the hollowed-out calabashes below each slat acting as a resonator, amplifying each woody note. For the first hour, Balla played traditional djeli music. As a Malian woman belted out joyous epics in a piercing vibrato, Balla looped a syncopated, head-nodding rhythm behind her. Later, when an American blues band asked Balla to join them onstage, he used his double-balafon setup to seemingly tap into a deeper range of human emotion, darting off on rolling, improvised solos and wringing a sense of pining and pain from his family’s ancient tool of praise.

Naturally, this decision to break from tradition was met with controversy, especially within Balla’s family: “My father thought I was out of my mind. In our culture, no one had ever played two balafons. He thought it was out of line. But when I explained it to him, he started to accept it. I said, ‘Dad, I don’t just want to keep this tradition alive. I want to bring it to more of the world.’” And so, a year later, Balla followed his sister and boarded a plane for the U.S.

Two years later, Balla recorded his own album, Sababu. Its success and his subsequent tour led to collaborations with Yo-Yo Ma (who asked him to join his Silkroad Ensemble), banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck (whose family remains close with Balla), and guitarist Ben Harper (who cried the first time he heard Balla play, saying it tapped into something deep within his African roots).

Mali is one of the world’s great musical cradles, and its sounds have been beguiling foreigners ever since the medieval explorer Ibn Battuta provided the only surviving eyewitness account of the empire. In his book, The Travels of Ibn Battuta, he describes the emperor’s djeli, whom he identified as a Kouyaté, playing an instrument “with sticks to produce a wonderful sound.”

Centuries later, enslaved Malians would bring their melisma singing style, call-and-response narration, and knowledge of making plucked and strummed stringed instruments like the kora and ngoni to the cotton fields of the American South, leading many musicologists to declare Mali to be the origin of the blues. When you listen to Malian superstars like the late Ali Farka Touré, whose pensive, spiritual guitar riffs born from a life working the land led him to be dubbed “the African John Lee Hooker,” it’s often difficult to distinguish between Malian folk and Mississippi blues. But as Touré famously said, “This music has been taken from here [Mali]. I play traditional music, and I don’t know what the blues is.” African Americans would later mix and morph these West African sounds into jazz, rock & roll, soul, funk, and hip-hop.

Since djelis were the only social caste permitted to play music in the Mali Empire — and in its former territories long after the empire’s collapse — they are likely the ones who introduced many of these African traditions to the New World during the slave trade. This makes their legacy doubly important: Not only have their long memories and handed-down epics formed the backbone of Mali’s history, but their transplanted sounds helped form the backbone of much of Western music as well.

Indeed, it was a Kouyaté who wrote Mali’s national anthem. The call sign of Radio Mali is a refrain from the Epic of Sundiata that Balla Fasséké Kouyaté first performed. And stories recounted by generations of Kouyatés have inspired Malian films and soap operas. This is the legacy that Balla was born into.

As Daouda Keita, the director of the National Museum of Mali, told me, “We are a society of oral tradition. Only the djeli knows that history, and the Kouyatés are the original djeli. They preserve the collective memory of our people. If we lose them, we lose the history of our culture.”

Eliot Stein is a journalist at the BBC. This story was adapted from his forthcoming book, ”Custodians of Wonder: Ancient Customs, Profound Traditions, and the Last People Keeping them Alive.”