Her instrument was the preserve of men for hundreds of years, but the Gambian musician wasn’t fazed. She explains why she ripped up the rules – and is now remodelling African education
In west Africa’s griot tradition, it’s men who play instruments while women sing. But Sona Jobarteh was determined to change that and asked her father to teach her to play: today she is the first internationally successful female player of the kora.
As a girl, she “resented being a female – I didn’t want to be seen as a novelty, but to be accepted as an equal. I was majorly into football at the time and practised football even more than music. But I realised that even if you are the best, you are still on a women’s team, which – when I was young – was pretty rubbish. I thought, ‘there is no hope, you can’t be anything’. And the same with music. I didn’t want to be marginalised and told ‘you are good – for a woman’.”
At Norway’s adventurous Førde music festival in early July, Jobarteh, now 38, shows off how good she now is on a beefed-up version of the traditional song Kaira, her impressive kora playing backed – unusually for a kora player – by a full band of electric guitar, bass and two percussionists. During the track Gambia, a celebration of her homeland, she brings on her father, Sanjally, who lives in Norway. Like his daughter, he’s a griot from a line of hereditary singers and historians stretching back 700 years.
Jobarteh was 17 when she told Sanjally she wanted to learn kora, a kind of lute-harp hybrid: “He was very supportive.” She had always wanted to be a musician – she just didn’t know what kind. “I always wanted to create music on any instrument I could get my hands on,” says the spirited and talkative Jobarteh when we meet in a deserted hotel restaurant prior to soundcheck. She grew up in Gambia and the UK (her mother is English), where she studied western classical styles at the Purcell School for Young Musicians and then history and linguistics at Soas University of London. She didn’t need to take their music degree, she says: “Because the people at Soas learned from my family! So I decided to go to my dad and uncles – I had all the teachers I could dream of.” She practised during her Soas years while also playing guitar in her older brother Tunde Jagede’s band as they toured the world performing “mainstream music – R&B, reggae, hip-hop”. She had been confused about where her heart lay, then decided to follow her father’s tradition. “I’d prefer to have just one follower rather than do something that’s not me and have a thousand followers,” she says.
It wasn’t until Jobarteh was 28 that she felt ready to play kora in public – on a small international stage at the Alliance Français in Banjul, the Gambian capital, rather than at a traditional event such as a naming ceremony, where she might offend the male griots. “And it had to be with my dad, at his side,” she says. “That’s an affirmation for me and the family that I have his support.” By now she had also embraced singing – the Gambian griot Juldeh Camara (best known in the UK for his rousing work with Justin Adams in JuJu) convinced her she was good after hearing demos. While she was anxious, “it felt like a significant moment in my development”, she says.
