FINDING THE ONE

The strange and parallel lives of the West African kora and the Welsh harp

(English / Welsh)

 By Andy Morgan

AVAILABLE FROM:  Mwldan Theatr Shop

“…Morgan is a storyteller, whose poetic ear means he has the gift of using words with the same inventive skill that a musician applies to the notes on a scale…The ultimate test of a book about music is whether it leaves you with an unquenchable desire to hear the sounds being described…Morgan’s joyful book passed the test with flying colours…”  Nigel Williamson, Songlines Magazine (5/5 Stars).

The West African kora and the Welsh harp are ancient instruments that have come to symbolise entire peoples and cultures. They come from separate worlds that seem to have very little to do with each other, and yet, their stories are full of strange and striking parallels.

In Finding The One: The strange and parallel lives of the West African Kora and the Welsh Harp, Andy Morgan recounts the respective origins of the kora and the harp in the warrior culture of the old Manding empire of West Africa and the medieval kingdoms of Wales. In a pacey readable style, he examines how both instruments were intimately tied to ancient traditions of bards and powerful warrior lords, how these bards fulfilled the role of today’s journalists and histories, how the kora and the harp represented both temporal and spiritual power and how they fell from grace due to the ravages of history, only to be reborn in a renaissance of cultural pride.

The book was written to accompany the release of Clychau Dibon, the highly praised new album by Welsh harpist Catrin Finch and Senegalese kora player Seckou Keita. It tells the fascinating story of friendship, dreams and coup d’états that lead to their collaboration and delves into their personal histories, which are full of tragedy, comedy and an acute sense of place. It also includes a chapter about how the kora and Welsh harp are made, and the lore and legends that surround each instrument.

Andy Morgan has contributed articles about music and culture to The Guardian, Songlines, fRoots and many other publications. He managed the Touareg rockers Tinariwen before giving up the music business to concentrate on writing full time in 2010. His first book Music, Culture & Conflict in Mali was published by Freemuse earlier this year.

Finding The One: The strange and parallel lives of the West African Kora and the Welsh Harp is on sale at Catrin Finch and Seckou Keita gigs. It is also on sale from the following outlets:

Read some extracts from the book:

If your name is Keita,  you’re still royalty

Meths, gunpowder and the revival of harp making in Wales

How the kora came to mankind

For more information or preview copies please contact:

2 Short Extracts:

“It is said that the kora is so emblematic of the Manding culture of West Africa that it ‘speaks Mandinka’. It’s the king of Mandé instruments. Talk of royalty is apt. Originally, and still to a large extent, the kora is an instrument of power, not just spiritual power, but hard-edged temporal power. The role of the griot and his kora is not just to praise powerful men, but to represent them, to chronicle their adventures and manly exploits, to preserve the memory of their lineages all the way back to their original and most illustrious forefathers.”

“In those fractious and uncertain times, the bard and his harp were a warrior lord’s passport to immortality, his psychological armour going into battle, his jewel at feasts in halls and long-houses and his mouthpiece in times of pomp or political tension. In fact, so essential were the bards to post-Roman Welsh society that it was deemed necessary to regulate their art. That idea might seem strange to us as we try and imagine the government of today issuing laws dictating how an indie band from Manchester should behave; but less strange if we remember that the bard was all at once the news service, commentator and truth-teller of his day; its ‘media’, in other words. He was also the mouthpiece of power and the guardian of a precious oral heritage, which had no written texts or reference books to which it could anchor itself for posterity.”

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“I have now to add a list of their music instruments,” Park wrote, “the principal of which are – the koonting, a sort of guitar with three strings; the korro, a large harp with eighteen strings; the simbing, a small harp with seven strings; the balafou, an instrument composed of twenty pieces of hard wood of different lengths, with the shells of gourds hung underneath to increase the sound;…” The list goes on.

The uniqueness and value of Park’s account derives partly from the fact that he was the first white European to cast his eyes on whole swathes of land that are deep in the West African interior (and the first be able to confirm that the Niger River flowed west to east, thus resolving a geographical dispute that had lasted a century or more); and also partly to the fact that his was the first written portrayal of those lands. Africa, of course, has its own historians; but until recently, they carried their histories around in their heads, never on paper, transmitting them only in long spoken or sung epics that travelled no further than the ears of the audience seated in front of them. Their accounts are equal, if not, greater in value than Park’s. Their concept of history is also quite different. To them, history is not a fixed and rigid thing, an ultimate truth to be revealed slowly with painstaking research, but rather a story, a tale, that is constantly fed by family and clan imperatives, by the need to praise great men, by the vagaries of collective memory and the slow maturing of myths and legends.

In the collective mental archive of all these oral historians, the circumstances of the kora’s birth are richly varied. Some say that the instrument dates back to the 13^th century and was invented by the great and powerful king Sumaoro Kante, the man who was beaten at the battle of Krinia in 1235 by the greatest warrior and ruler West Africa has ever known: Sundjata Keita. Others say that it was Koriyang Musa, Sundjata Keita’s personal griot or bard who invented the instrument.

Others, like the modern Gambian griot Bamba Suso, whose version of the great Sundjata epic was transcribed and subsequently published by Penguin Classics in the 1970s, thereby becoming a kind of ‘fixed’ standard version of the story, also attributes the advent of the kora to Koriyang Musa, but with an important twist.

Here are some of the opening lines of Bamba Suso’s oration:

This tune that I am now playing

I learned it from my father,

And he learned it from my grandfather.

Our grandfather’s name – Koriyang Musa.

That Koriyang Musa

Went to Sanimentereng and spent a week there;

He met the jinns, and brought back a kora.

The very first kora.

Let’s set aside the conundrum that if Koriyang Musa was really Bamba Suso’s grandfather, then he must have lived in the 20^th rather than the 13^th century! What’s important here is Bamba Suso’s conviction that the kora was given to mankind by the djinns; in other words, the spirits.  On that ‘fact’, almost all of west Africa’s oral historians agree.

It makes sense. The best music always comes from the other side. The kora may be a manmade tool but it’s more than a spade, a hoe or an axe. Humans can channel their soul, all their feeling and their awareness of every immaterial force that governs their lives through the strings of a kora. In other words, to put it more poetically, with a kora they can commune with both their own and other spirits, especially those of nature. All music is a gift of the spirit for the spirit by the spirit. Depending on your degree of monotheism, the same could be said of the spirits plural. Yes, the spirits gave the kora to men and women and you only need allow a little poetry and metaphor into your world to understand that and accept it as fact.

The most common kora-birth story goes like something like this: A man called Jali Mady Wuleng – Jali Mady ‘The Red’ – was walking through the bush one day. Griots tended to travel a great deal, because part of their job was to fulfil ‘missions’ for their patrons or masters, often involving longs journeys to other cities and lands to solve all manner of contentious issues and disputes. Whilst walking on his own, Jali Mady heard this wonderful motion-stopping music and, looking round about him, found a spirit sitting in a hollowed out tree playing an instrument he’d never seen before. It looked a bit like the various harps that already existed in Manding society – the three-stringed bolon, or the seven-stringed simbin – but it was much larger, grander and more sophisticated than any of those, and it had twenty-two strings in all. Jali Mady used his considerable bardic skills to persuade the djinn to part with his kora, which it eventually did. And so the kora came to mankind.

(c) Andy Morgan 2013.

Extract taken from ‘Finding The One: The strange and Parallel Lives of the West African Kora and the Welsh Harp’ (Theatr Mwldan / Astar Artes 2013)

Available from:

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Mwldan Theatr Shop

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