A great deal of the inspiration and content for Afropop Worldwide's "Fula in the House" program came from interviews we did with Senegalese superstar Baaba Maal, and with an adventurous, young researcher and writer from London, Katharina Lobeck. This feature presents extended excerpts from those interviews.

Baaba Maal spoke with Sean Barlow in New York on January 14, 2002.

SEAN BARLOW: Baaba, tell us about the Fula people in general.

BAABA MAAL: Fulani people are a nomadic group of person. You can find, I can say, all over Africa. And even sometimes, you can see some people who don't speak Fulani, but have the same way of living. The things that interest them, the things that they respect in their lives, the organization of their life, the way they practice the culture is always the same. Fulani people [speak] one language, [Pulaar]. The name can change from country to country. Some people call them Fulani. Some others call them Pulaar. Some others call them Peul. It depends of what country you are. But it's the same language. We understand each other from Cameroon to Senegal. We have the same way of living, the same way to see things in life. In Senegal, the Fulani people live at the north, near the River Senegal, between two places. The place which is really close to the river, there are the Fulani people who have lived there for a long time. They are not now nomadic. They stay in one place and have very big villages. They still speak the Fulani language. This is the same culture, but now they move onto agriculture or fishing.

The others still follow cows and other animals. These live in the upper part of Fouta, but they mix together. Sometimes the others who live up come in the village, and they have ceremonies together. They have the same musicians, same historians, same people who play the instruments, and they don't see a line between themselves. It's only the work that they are doing that show that these ones are still nomadic, and these ones are still living in one place now.

S.B.: We know that there are these different Fula communities, Fouta Toro in Senegal, Fouta Djallon in Guinea, and so on. How do they differ ?

BAABA: There is a proverb in Fulani from Fouta Toro who say, the language of the Fulanis people, the Pulaar, was born in the Fouta Toro. The language grow up in Fouta Djallon. And the language become like an old man at Masina--that's at the north of Mali. And they explain it. They say you can see a lot of musicians in Fouta Toro. The language they are singing is very [much] for ambiance, and when they are talking, it is really very straight, the communication. But when you go to Fouta Djallon, it's a little bit more mature. It's a lot of knowledge that goes with the talking. And when you go to Masina, it's lke an older person who is talking. He is using symbols. They use symbols. But we all keep and maintain the relationship between the three Fulani centers from Senegal to Guinea and to Mali.

Some people also say it's the tone of the speaking. The Fulanis from Senegal, they speak right away. When you go to Fouta Djallon, these people when they speak, it's like they are chanting. You can hear a melody in there. For example in Fouta Toro, you say "Tana Allah yma." "Do you feel allright?" "Tana Allah yma." In Fouta Djallon, they say "Tanala Toun." You see?

S.B.: Tell us about the song "Tara."

BAABA: The song "Tara" was created by the Bambaras, the Manding society from Mali, but they created it to sing praise song for the Fulani marabout, El Hadj Omar Tal, who comes from five km from where I live, Alwar. He traveled a lot and when he went to Mali, he did a lot of things, a lot of travels, but at the same time bringing a lot of things to these Malian people. And they wrote this song talking about his history and his way of living because he is very mystical, and they say everywhere he comes, the next day when he move forward he just go to the east. He never go to west, north or south. And they create that song. He comes from Fouta, the marabout El Hadj Omar. He stay there. He come in the morning. By the end of the day, he is the chief of the village, and the next day he is going to the East. That's the song. "Tara." He's gone. He's going.

S.B.: You've given us this cassette by Amadou Tamba Diop. What is his story?

BAABA: He is one of the old generation of musicians. You know, music in Africa is something that goes from generation to generation. Before I come with Mansour Seck into the music, there was a group of musicians who was singing and doing a kind of music that people called "wango" in general. Wango have different styles of song of dancing and movement. It is very popular. But before wango, there was another one which is more music. The musician come, and people are around him. And he sings songs reminding people of their life near the river, their life with the cows, their life in the ceremonies, and people come to give them money, to give them houses and things like that. And Amadou Tamba Diop is one of this generation, I think the only one left, who sings these old melodies where I think the generation before us take something from them, add something else, add percussion, add the talking drums and hoddus, and when we come, we change it also. We take it from the second generation, add keyboards, add horns, electric guitars and mix it. This is how music becomes something else and goes from generation to generation.

S.B.: Tell us more about this older music played by Amadou Tamba Diop.

BAABA: The main instruments that Fulani (in Senegal) use are the violin. We call it nyanuru. Wolof people call it riti. Fulanis, nomadic people, when they are in the land with their cows, they use it just to keep the time going, because it's a long day from early in morning to 5:00, you stay alone with cows. Sometimes in the middle of the day, you are not having a rest. You just play and remind yourself of your girlfriend, or your family, or your friend who did travel. And they use that one. If it's not the nyanuru, they prefer to use the flute. It's very important I think for a lot of nomadic people--not just Fulani in Africa, but all over the world--I think nomadic people like flute. It reminds you of the wind, traveling. It's a very pure instrument.

And the third instrument that they really adapt [is the hoddu.] Some people say it come from the Empire of Mali; other people say [it came from the] nomadic people. The Fula have a legend that says the hoddu, which is the ngoni in Mali, comes from Fulani people. I can't say. [But the legend says there was] an old man, with his three children. The first one was very conscious. When the old man die, he keep all the cows, the cattle, and every day take them inland, feed them, take them to the river, make them have drink and bring them back. And when they get the family, he is the one who was keeping the cows. The second one just went to the inland and start to work in the wood, to make things that people can use in the family, like calabashes. And he was giving these things to the older one. So the older one was also feeding him, giving him milk and cow, and millet sometime. Then there was the last one, who was young. Because he was young, he didn't get a lot of education from his dad. So he was more free. He didn't want to take care of the cattle. He didn't want to do any kind of work. At the end, when he was ready to have a family, he didn't have no job, so he can't do nothing. One day he come to the two brothers and ask them if they can give him a cow, because it's their heritage. So they give him a cow, and they say to him, "You are not working. We are only going to give you one cow." It's your fault you can't do nothing.

So the young brother, he go. He kill the cow, eat the meat, and take the skin of the cow. He go to his brother who was doing the things to use in the family, and say, "I want you to make a little instrument of music with wood." Then he take the skin of the cow and he put it on the instrument. He go back to his big brother and asks him if he can give him some of the hair of that tail of the horse. He make it like a string, and this is how he make his first instrument, which is the hoddu. So since then to now, he have no work. When the others go to do their things, in the night he come and take his instrument and play music for them. So this is why they say--like Barou Sall, who play hoddu. His family is traditional kind of griots, and Fulanis families who are noble, they have the same name of the family. But these people become noble, the others become griots. And these people have from generation to generation to sing praise for the nobles and to play music for them.

Who have the best job? I think it's the musician. I would prefer to be the musician I think.

Banning Eyre spoke with Katharina Lobeck in Rotterdam, October 2001. Katharina had recently returned from her second trip to Guinea. Presently, Katharina is writing her PHD dissertation on Guinean Fula music.

BANNING EYRE: Your work focuses on the Fouta Djalon in Guinea. Tell us about that area.

KATHARINA LOBECK: The Fouta Djallon used to be home to a Fulbhe theocracy in the past. It was an Islamic empire, very strong, very powerful, and a lot of that heritage is still felt up to these days. I've been working with quite a range of people from artists who live in villages, from girls who entertain themselves just singing and clapping, to very local musicians who play at weddings, naming ceremonies and so on and so forth, up to modern artists who try to chose more modern production for their traditional music. They have actually been quite successful with it, not internationally yet, but we hope that will change,

B.E.: Let's start with the village music. Tell us about a great traditional musician you worked with.

K.L: Mamadou Mamou is a singer from Lobe. He's not actually the greatest singer, but he works with the greatest flautists in the entire region, who ended up being my teacher. That's called Sory Maci. The band of Mamadou Mamou features the bass harp, the bolon , and flutes, various flutes, which are the most typical Fula instruments, as well as castanets and the calabash called horde, which you tap with metal rings. The players put ten metal rings on their fingers and it makes this beautiful rattling noise. They tend to go round to weddings and naming ceremonies and play their music and dance in an extremely captivating, acrobatic style. They are very spectacular and flamboyant--quite impressive.

B.E.: Is there an older, ceremonial basis for this wedding music?

K.L: I think this music has always been performed for life rites, especially weddings and circumcisions. But there is also one particular context which it is most famous for, which is called i hiirde, and those are evening gatherings, during which the entire village gathers, or especially young people gather, and listen to the musicians or bands. There used to be two particular forms. One was a sitting gathering, joodo hiira. The other was a standing up gathering. They had two particular kinds of music. Now the sitting one is very, very quiet. The instruments that would be played were lutes that were struck, and the whole atmosphere would have been very quiet and relaxed. The standing ceremony is called daaro hiira, and these were more invitations to dance, so the instruments would be drums, djembe, and the flutes. Those kinds of celebrations gave the people in the village a context during which they could gather and have a good time and enjoy themselves.

Daaro hiira would have been the most typical context for the flute music, not at all the joodo hiira. Because as well as two different sorts of music, you also get two different social categories. Thee musicians of the daro hiro would have been mainly coming from the slave status, whereas the musicians of the joodo hiira would have been nobles. So there's a very distinct social difference between the two events. The standing instruments were much more associated with excitement and dancing and were considered more appropriate for people of lower social status. I suppose it's a little bit like the difference between a rock concert and a classical music concert.

B.E.: How far back do these hiirde ceremonies go in Fula history?

K.L: This particular type I think is distinctive to the Fouta Djallon, and it resulted from the whole history of the region and the social hierarchy of the theocracy. But the Fulbhe are people are spread out all over West Africa. You find Fulbhe communities in Senegal, in Mali, Nigeria, Niger, all the way to Cameroon. And wherever they went, they developed very distinct cultural practices, and their musical practices are also quite different from place to place.

B.E.: The pentatonic flutes seem to be found in a lot of Fula communities.

K.L: The Fouta Djallon one is not actually pentatonic, but it's the one where they sing and play at the same time, so you intersperse sung notes with played notes and people make a lot of fun with it. They call it gimmicks themselves. "Oh yeah, the Fulas, they know how to do all the best gimmicks on the flute." But the flutes are very typical for the Fula people in general. One of the reasons is that the Fula were traditionally nomadic cattle herders, and I think all over the world you have this phenomenon where flutes tend to be the favorite instrument of shepherds. They are fairly easy to make. They are light to carry. So the Fulas being cattle herders, they are very much associated with flute music.

Now the particular type of flute is different from region to region. So people develop different styles of playing flutes and making them. What's particular about the flute tradition in the Fouta Djallon is the singing and playing at the same time. It's very powerful if you listen to that flute. It didn't leave me alone after the first time I heard it. I'm finding myself now writing a PHD on it. It's very powerful and very loud, and very, very beautifully ornamented. In the Fouta Djallon, the flute is actually heptatonic, whereas in other regions, the Fulbhe tend to play more pentatonic music. Like if you listen to Fulbhe music from Niger, you can hear much more of a pentatonic sound, which relates to the style of Ali Farka Toure.

One of the people who are actually very interesting are Omar Ka and the Fula Band. They are based in Holland now, and Omar is originally from Senegal, but his mother came from Niger. Now, the Fulbhe from Senegal play music very much like we have heard from Baaba Maal, very strong griot style. Now when I put on Omar's CD, I just realized it was completely different and I thought, he must be coming from Niger and I phoned up and he said, "Yeah, my mom comes from Niger." So you can identify different origins. But it is still related at the same time. It's a bit like the language. The Pulaar language is spoken in different dialects in different regions. So Fulbhe from different regions might take a little bit of time to really come to a complete understanding of their mutual dialects.

B.E.: Tell us about some more of the more traditional musicians that especially impressed you in Guinea.

K.L: One artist who people are constantly talking about to me is a guitarist and singer called Bah Sadio. I suppose you would call him a modern artist. He's supposed to be the first modern artist of Fulbhe music. He was forced into exile under the regime of Sekou Touré, who hit out quite strongly against the Fulbhe communities of Guinea. So he went to France and recorded an album there, and he tragically died of alcoholism in exile. His music is extremely powerful in its presentation. People even from the very young generation can still relate to that music. He wrote two very famous songs. One translates, "One Day I will Also Come Back to My Place." It was a very strong message of yearning to be able to go back home and it became immediately popular with the Fulbhe expatriates in France, in Senegal, in Sierra Leone, and so on. The other track that has become very popular is called "Djeereleele," which evokes a little bit of those gatherings I was talking about earlier. He talks about playing in the moonlight. I think it's a very important element of Fulbhe culture.

Bah Sadio is a fabulous singer. He studied also with one of the most important artists of Fulbhe music, which is El Hadj Moyyhèrè. He's very old now. I think he's coming up to his 90s. He's got a very unique style of singing, a very free style, very much spoken word, but the words he says are so meaningful and so deep that people can just sit glued to their transistor radios and try to find out what he was talking about. Being a very old man now, he has seen a lot of changes in the history of Fulbhe music in Guinea. He was recorded before independence, and assumed a reputation for ridiculing people in public, humiliating people, which was very much a feature of the nyamakala, the Fula artists.

B.E.: That word "nyamakala" also describes a professional class among the Manding people, including griots. Does the word mean the same thing here?

K.L: Well, that's a slightly confusing aspect. It means a very different thing for the Fulbhe. nyamakala is a Maninka word which refers to the class of artisans, including griots, blacksmiths, and so on. Now in a Pulaar context, the word has taken on a different meaning, and it refers to this class of musicians who were primarily found among the slave community, not exclusively, but primarily. So of very low social status, and treated with a lot of suspicion and very much associated with sorcery, and also with their ability of harming people, and their insolent speech. People tend to be quite scared of the nyamakala. People would always warn me that I shouldn't be hanging out with them too much. Now all those people who play those beautiful instruments like the Fula flute, and the djembe, the calabash, they are all part of the nyamakala. But the important difference is that in Guinea, for the Fulbhe, nyamakala is an artist who has decided to become an artist himself. He is not born an artist. And people usually struggle very hard to become musicians. Quite often it involves running away from home, breaking with your entire family, and risking a whole lot of things to actually become a musician.

It could be a family of a former slave; it could be the family of a griot; it could be the family of a blacksmith; it could be the family of a noble. At some point in their lives, they have made this decision to follow the nyamakala and to earn their life by making music.

B.E.: Once you make that decision, what do you have to do?

K.L: It's very different from the Mande context. The Mande griots are very much associated with singing people's genealogies, the history of the empires, the histories of kings, praise songs. Now the Fulbhe nyamakala also sing peoples praises, but in a very different way. It depends much more on the context. You might have a hiirde, one of those evening gatherings. Somebody might give you some money and you will sing his name. You might sing his friend's name. But you will not sing his whole geneology. The Fulbhe nyamakala don't generally do this. They might just sing, "Oh, thank you, Mr Diallo, for giving me 1000 Guinea francs, and I praise your wife and your beautiful children." But they will not recite the entire geneology. This is the work of the griots.

B.E.: And where does the insulting come in?

K.L: It has to be said that those things don't exist so much any more, and the nyamakala do try very hard to get away from that history because it does link them to a low social status, and to an insolent nature, whereas the nyamakala today very much regard themselves as artists and want to be respected as modern artists. But still, there is this history, and I think that in the past it must have played a role of social justice in a way, because there is a saying in Pulaar that says that the only ones that the people fear are the chief and the nyamakala, and the only one that the chief fears is the nyamakala, because he will tell you straight to your face where you are going wrong, and why, and he will not do it in any polite way whatsoever. But apart from this, there has also been a lot of association with just humiliation in order to gain money.

B.E.: People pay money to avoid being humiliated?

K.L: Exactly. If you meet with a nyamakala, and he asks you for money, or even more for food, and you refuse him to give it to him, than you risk "A" being harmed by his sorcery skills, and "B" being humiliated in public because it is stingy to refuse food to a poor person. So it's risky for you and generally not a good thing. But as I said, those things only exist in their rudiments now.

B.E.: So what do modern nyamakala sing about?

K.L: Fulbhe songs tend to be very sentimental and romantic. There's a long history of love songs. One of the songs that illustrates this best is this song called "Boulou N'Djouri" by a very famous nyamakala singer called Binta Laly. She now calls herself a modern artist because she has now released a few cassettes. She is a very old, very dignified lady who has been around ever since the first days of independence. And "Boulou N'Djouri" means "the source of honey" and it talks about spending a night with your darling, and she very poetically illustrates the whole situation and includes Pulaar proverbs, very profound proverbs, in it, and it's a very beautiful, very sentimental song. This version was recorded two years ago, but it goes back to an older song. She keeps reworking older songs. She's in her 60s now.

B.E.: Tell us about some of the Fula pop singers today.

K.L: One who really caught my attention when I first went to Guinea is a young singer called Lama Sidibe. Lama is interesting because he doesn't come out of the nyamakala tradition. He also decided at some point to become a musician, but he decided to study actually with the Manding griots, so his first local cassette was very much in a Mande style, and then Pulaar music suddenly became very popular in Guinea, so he did research on his own tradition in a way, and came out with a beautiful record called Falaama. One of the most outstanding tracks I think on there is a track called "Mamou," which he sings in praise of his home town, and you can hear very much traditional elements in there, such as the calabash shakers, the triplet rhythm which is really typical of Pulaar music in Guinea. And the flute. The flute is always the distinctive element of all Pulaar music that is being released in Guinea. All the Fulbhe artists have got a flute in there, and Lama Sidibe, his real strength is that he has got a very powerful, persuasive voice.

Another singer who has just released this year is a blind singer called Mama Yergue Barry, who once again has a very powerful voice. If you hear him singing next to you, it just blows you away. You kind of take three paces back. He also plays the calabash called horde. His album has just been immediately appreciated by mainly the Fulbhe community but also the other communities. It's a very good production done in Abidjan, and again, you can hear this beautiful Fula flute. So what most of the modern performers do is use elements of the tradition without sticking too closely. One of the elements they always use is the flute. The second one would be the content of the songs in a way, the idea of romance and love. And some of the local rhythms. But then they also combine those rhythms with the rhythms of zouk and soukous, which are extremely popular in Guinea.

B.E.: I'm curious about what you said regarding Sekou Toure's aggressive actions against the Fula communities. What was that all about?

K.L: I think one has to be careful talking about the Sekou Toure era as one era, because there were different phases. I do think that Sekou Toure tried to create a coherent sound of Guinean music, which would reflect Guinean pride and nationality, and would reflect a modern Africa. Now, he was Maninka himself, but I don't actually think that the fact that most music that was popularized under Sekou Toure is only because he was a Maninka. It's also due to the fact that the Mande people have this institution of griots, and the griots know history from the earliest days of the Malian empire. They are very much used to praising people, but also in a social role as political advisors and mediators. So they were in a perfect position to fulfill this role that Sekou Toure had been looking for to promote Guinean culture nationally and internationally, and create national unity. Now the Fulbhe artists at the time, singing more sentimental songs and love songs, wouldn't have served the same purpose. The fact that there was a lot of Maninka music during the first regime has very much to do with that.

Now, Sekou Toure's regime got increasingly paranoid the longer he stayed in power, and increasingly more oppressive. And he started lashing out against the Fulbhe communities around 1976 and after that. So that's kind of the second period, and most of the people who went into exile went after that time. And Fulbhe music wasn't really produced. There were a few artists, like the orchestras of Telemele, and Labe and Mamou, who play this beautiful Guinean orchestra sound, very much reminiscent of Bembeya Jazz and other orchestras. Coming out of Fula, but they would have been singing in Maninka as well as Pulaar. There were groups everywhere in Guinea. Every prefecture had a group, so Mamou, Labe, and Telemele are three of the most important regions in Fouta Djallon. Each of those three towns would have had an orchestra attached to them. They never achieved the fame of Bembeya Jazz or other bands that were based in Conakry, but they did play an important role at the time as well.

What we hear now is modern Fula music, which includes artists such as Petit Yero, Lama Sidibe, Binta Laly Sow, Sekouba Fatako, who are extremely popular in Guinea now. They have only really started doing so-called modern music since about 1995, 1996. It's a very recent phenomenon. Sekou Toure's "First Republic" broke down in 1984 with his death. I suppose it took producers awhile to establish themselves and to take on artists who sounded quite different from what had existed before. So this explosion of Fulbhe artists has only started around the mid 90s.

B.E.: Once they did start releasing these Fula pop recordings, did the music catch on quickly?

K.L: It was quite successful right from the start. The Fulbhe are the largest ethnic group in Guinea, so a lot of Fulbhe would have been pleased to be able buy a cassette sung in Pulaar, and hear their tradition modernized. At the same time, the appeal goes beyond the Fulbhe community because the sound of the modern music is very much alike whether you have a Maninka, Sousou, or Fulbhe artist. The production would be similar, and a lot of the beats that are used would be similar, which is one problem of Guinean production. But on the other side, it also means that whether you sing in Pulaar, Manika or Sousou, chances are that people from other ethnic groups might like your stuff as well.

Usually when you look at an album of a Pulaar artist like Binta Laly, she might put two songs that are more clearly rooted in her own tradition, and others that just fall very much into the so-called "variete" genre of popular Guinean music and use a zouk beat or a soukous beat and are very much accessible to everyone. I still think that artists mainly appeal to their own people because of the language. The message people transmit is very important, whether it's just praises, whether it's sentimental, whether it's historical, people like to listen to things sung in their own language. We all do.

B.E.: Well if the Fula are the largest ethnic group, I guess it's no surprise that their pop music would sell.

K.L: It's not surprising at all, especially when you look at the producers who sit in Conakry and you realize that they are all Fulbhe. It's actually surprising that it has taken so long.

B.E.: Any other modern groups we should know about?

K.L: One group that I would like to talk about is actually a rap group. It's called Kill Point. They are not exclusively Fulbhe--it's more mixed; they have got one Pulaar rapper--and as everywhere in Africa and all over the world, rap is one of the most popular genres now, especially among the youth. I was talking about the insolence of the nyamakala before. They actually dared to speak out against the system and the regime. They don't do this anymore. They take a much more moderate position. But now the rappers who come from a younger generation, actually take very much this social role of speaking their mind, possibly insulting, but definitely saying what they don't like. That's what the younger generation wants to hear; that's what they need to hear about. In Guinea, there are actually not many artists who dare speak out about the situation and politics. One of the people who have been among the first to do it, and the most successful are Kill Point. They rap in all the Guinean languages, in French and in English. None of the producers has decided to take them on. So what they did is to set up their own little company called Kill Point Productions, which is a very brave thing to do. It's very brave for a group of youngsters to try and break this network of existing producers in Guinea.

B.E.: So they actually criticize the government?

K.L: Exactly. They've been doing it for quite awhile now. Their latest album has just come out this year. It's called Le Combat Continue. They're immensely popular in Conakry, among the young people of Conakry. Kill Point are, I suppose, kind of heroes I think among the young generation, and have inspired a lot of rappers to do a lot of things. It's the youth that follow them.

B.E.: Have they been harassed for that?

K.L: I don't know, but I bet they have, because it's very very hard to say anything against the government in Guinea. It's a long tradition of oppression and there's a lot of mistrust that reigns. You can feel it in the whole society, that this country has been oppressed for a long time. It needs people like that who do speak out.

Watch for a future Afropop Worldwide program focusing on West African rap. We'll hear Kill Point as well as little-known rappers in Dakar, where Katharina Lobeck has been doing new research since we conducted this interview.