page_title: Sub-Saharan African music traditions
section_title: Northern
hierarchical_section_title: Sub-Saharan African music traditions / West Africa / Northern
caption_attribution_description: Guide du musée en plein air consacré à la culture des Diolas à Boucotte en Casamance (Sénégal) jouant de l’écontine, instrument de musique traditionnel
context_page_description: In many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, the use of music is not limited to entertainment: it serves a purpose to the local community and helps in the conduct of daily routines. Traditional African music supplies appropriate music and dance for work and for religious ceremonies of birth, naming, rites of passage, marriage and funerals. The beats and sounds of the drum are used in communication as well as in cultural expression.
  African dances are largely participatory: there are traditionally no barriers between dancers and onlookers except with regard to spiritual, religious and initiation dances. Even ritual dances often have a time when spectators participate. Dances help people work, mature, praise or criticize members of the community, celebrate festivals and funerals, compete, recite history, proverbs and poetry and encounter gods. They inculcate social patterns and values. Many dances are performed by only males or females. Dances are often segregated by gender, reinforcing gender roles in children. Community structures such as kinship, age, and status are also often reinforced.
context_section_description: Complex societies existed in the region from about 1500 BCE. The Ghana Empire existed from before c. 830 until c. 1235 in what is now south-east Mauritania and western Mali. The Sosso people had their capital at Koumbi Saleh until Sundiata Keita defeated them at the Battle of Kirina (c. 1240) and began the Mali Empire, which  spread its influence along the Niger River through numerous vassal kingdoms and provinces. The Gao Empire at the eastern Niger bend was powerful in the ninth century CE but later subordinated to Mali until its decline. In 1340 the Songhai people made Gao the capital of a new Songhai Empire.
  The Hausa people are one of the largest ethnic groups in Nigeria, Niger, Sudan and many West and Central African countries. They speak a Chadic language. There are two broad categories of traditional Hausa music; rural folk music and urban court music developed in the Hausa Kingdoms before the Fulani War. Their folk music has played an important part in Nigerian music, contributing elements such as the goje, a one-stringed fiddle.
  The originally nomadic/pastoral Senegambian Fula people or Tukulor represent 40% of the population of Guinea and have spread to surrounding states and as far as Sudan in the east. In the 19th century they overthrew the Hausa and established the Sokoto Caliphate. The Fula play a variety of traditional instruments including drums, the hoddu (xalam), a plucked skin-covered lute similar to a banjo, and riti or riiti (a one-string bowed instrument similar to a violin), in addition to their vocal music. They also use end-blown bamboo flutes. Their griots are known as gawlo.
  Mande music: the music of Mali is dominated by forms derived from the Mande Empire Their musicians, professional performers called jeliw (sing. jeli, French griot), have produced popular  alongside traditional  music. Mande languages include Mandinka, Soninke, Bambara, Bissa, Dioula, Kagoro, Bozo, Mende, Susu, Vai and Ligbi: there are populations in Burkina Faso, Mauritania, Senegal, The Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone and Liberia and, mainly in the northern inland regions, in the south coast states of Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin and Nigeria.
  Wolof music: the Wolof people, the largest ethnic group in Senegal, kin to the Fula, have contributed greatly to popular Senegalese music. The related Serer people are notable for polyphonic song.
  In Senegal, The Gambia and Guinea-Bissau the Jola are notable for their stringed instrument the akonting, a precursor of the banjo while the Balanta people, the largest ethnic group of Guinea-Bissau, play a similar gourd lute instrument called a kusunde or kussundé, with a short A#/B drone string at the bottom, a top F# string of middle length and a middle C# string, the longest. Top string stopped gives G#, middle string stopped is D#.
  Songhai music, as interpreted by Ali Farka Toure, has gathered international interest for a minor pentatonic lute-and-voice style that is markedly similar to American blues.
  The Senufo or Senoufo, living in southern Mali and the extreme western corner of Burkina Faso to Katiola in Côte d'Ivoire with one group, the Nafana, in north-western Ghana. The Senufo are notable for funeral and poro music.
  Among Gur-speaking peoples the Dagomba use the lunga talking drum and a bass drum with snares called a gungon,  as well as the flute, gonje (goje) and bell. as well as  molo (xalam) lute music, also played by Gurunsi peoples such as the Frafra. Similar styles are practised by local Fulani, Hausa, Djerma, Busanga and Ligbi speaking people. Drummers in Dagbon are storytellers, historians, bards of family ancestry who perform at events called sambanlunga.
  The Gurunsi, the Lobi, the Wala and the related Dagaaba people of Ghana and Burkina Faso and are known for complex interlocking (double meter) patterns on the xylophone (gyil).
  The Mossi people, whose Mossi Kingdoms in present-day Burkina Faso, withstood their Songhai and Mende neighbours before falling to the French, have a griot tradition. Also djambadon. also  brosca.
caption: Jola man at Boucotte in Casamance (Sénégal) playing the akonting
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