Jules Ekona Jatta

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Jules Ekona Jatta of Mlomp, Casamance (Senegal) is master of the akonting, the banjo-like folk lute of the Jola, a Senegambian ethnic group.

What follows is an excerpt describing an encounter with Ekona from an account by English banjoist/banjo historian Nick Bamber of his trip in 2004 to the Casamance region of Senegal to learn more about the Jola akonting firsthand:

(Note: Nick follows the practice of the Casamance Jola and spells the name of the instrument as ekonting, which is the French transliteration.)

Sandwiched in the middle of my 7 days in Youtou were three days in another village called Mlomp, home of Jules Ekona Jatta, cousin of Daniel Jatta.... Mlomp is only about 12 miles northwest from Youtou but in this part of the world that's a long way, especially as the terrain in between is a complex of river tributaries and lagoons (or flood plain, don't know how you'd describe it but land covered in several feet of water with mangrove growing here and there). So I took the Youtou village boat downriver to the road bridge (Pont de Niambalang) and then a bus along the potholed road that Ulf has previously described. The highlight of the bus trip was when the guy who was collecting the bus fares apparently jumped out of the driver's window as we were driving along. In fact he had hauled himself onto the roofrack.

Mlomp is rather different in character to Youtou. The dwellings tended more to be grouped in family compounds with extended families living together in the same compound. It was generally more spacious than Youtou though correspondingly there was less of an intimate sense of living inside the forest.

Ekona, like most of the Jola I met, was an excellent host and was delighted to meet another mad white man looking for the roots of the banjo. I was installed in a mud hut with thatched roof on one side of the main courtyard. After I signed off for the night and was drifting off to sleep Ekona began playing and singing in the yard outside my door. It is hard to describe this music if you haven't heard it. When the ekonting is played with the bugarabu (drums) and is accompanying a group of singers and dancers it is dynamic and lively with rhythms which lie over a basic pulse. With just a solo ekontingist singing and playing the music felt more personal and reflective. The rhythms were often more complex and transcribing them in Western notation would be a difficult if not totally pointless exercise.

Listening to Ekona I had the sense that I was hearing music that quite possibly had not changed much in hundreds of years. There was little obvious trace of the North African influence which was present in the music of the Serer and certainly the Wolof. All the Jola music I heard was pentatonic and I was reminded of the music of the Baka (Cameroon and Gabon). My Wolof host in Dakar also confirmed that when you go down south to the Jola area of Casamance this is the start of the forest belt ("real Africa" he called it) which extends southwards (and eastwards!) all the way along the West African coast down as far as the Congo.

If the ekonting tradition in Youtou is waning then in Mlomp it is alive and well thanks to Ekona and his nephew Remi. Also all the girls in Ekona's extended family as well as his neighbour's girls could dance and didn't need any prompting if they heard the ekonting being played. They just started dancing! It seemed that they learned to dance just about as soon as they learned to stand up and walk.