00:04That sound is a thousand years old and right now one 27 year old from Dakar is the last person
00:14standing between it and silence. When I started studying and learning modern instruments after
00:25graduation I thought if I continue with that what will become of traditional music so I reconnected
00:33with African instruments traditional instruments and I was able to give them value.
00:43Meet Amadou Sisoko he plays 12 ancient instruments but his mission is radically modern
00:53and reinventing an old culture. It's our ancestral valley here we are young we move well but in a
01:04little while we will also play the kora and that is our life it is our heritage and it was
01:12used
01:13for many things to heal people to transmit messages to transmit energy and to help also
01:21the powerful kings. So the kora has more than 2000 traditional songs and each song has a story.
01:30For over a thousand years the griole was West Africa's living library. No books, no archive, just one person,
01:42one instrument and a memory that stretches back to kings.
01:47It wasn't just musicians or singers who were griots. Even writers during the Mandinka era were griots also.
01:58The role of griots in society is to preserve history and pass it down from generation to generation. In this
02:06house
02:06before me there were hundreds of people. After me there will be others. That's how we pass it on from
02:15generation to generation.
02:21Young people in the car are on tech talk. They're listening to Afro beats. I'm a piano, drill. Not their
02:30own music.
02:31Amadou's fix to fuse the kora with dum-dum, percussion, slam poetry, contemporary dance and electronic layering.
02:42Beats that hit like I'm a piano. Amadou's TikTok clips mix griot stories with viral dances.
02:49Why do I say you shouldn't forget where you come from? Because if you forget where you come from, you
02:59lose your value.
03:00If you lose your value, you are nothing. You are empty. And when you have culture, you have an identity.
03:08A person without identity, without culture is an empty person. So that's why we must keep ancestral values.
03:19It's not enough to be a Senegalese musician, but you have to be an African musician.
03:27He organizes workshops at this cultural center in Dakar that turns scrolls into skills.
03:34This year, he is building a festival. Not just for the tradition, but for the generation that has not decided
03:43whether to carry it.
03:45The festival demonstrates ancestral values of the neighborhood and of Dakar as a whole in Senegal.
03:52Because the festival is rooted in tradition, so the essence, the important thing is that all Senegalese people will witness
04:02the tradition, its meaning and significance of tradition.
04:07If the HR festival fails, it's because the next generation will lose what they need to know, but we'll do
04:16everything we can to ensure the festival does not fail.
04:20Because all this festival, young children from 7 or 8 up to 12 will experience culture.
04:29They'll see the competitions, the compositions, they'll see performances in the streets, they'll see concerts, they'll grow up with this
04:41tradition.
04:41Amadou Sisoko is not trying to preserve a museum piece. He is trying to start the next chapter of a
04:52thousand years.
Comments