Salia Koroma: An Elegy Sung In A Stadium 2

We’ll continue here our examination of Mende Gendei as a lyrical and very coherent articulation of what it means to be alive, what its is to experience human triumph, to grow old, and to know that death is a certainty. However one chooses to attend to the song, it aims to speak directly to the careful listener.

This second part of the 1980 version of the song is a forthright address to the hosting chairman of the OAU Summit, President Siaka Stevens. Success doesn’t mean that one has a more favoured relationship with God. And in the Mende world view, two relationships matter more than the others in the hierarchy of family relationships: 1) father-son, and 2) uncle-nephew/niece (in which  the word ‘uncle’ is understood to refer to the mother’s brother).

Therefore, having no special relation with God, the successful person assumes the right attitude of humility in relation to other people, even the humble musician. And if the successful person wields political power, there’s the temptation to accrue to oneself god-like powers.  Salia cautions against this.

Then comes the blow. Our troubadour chooses to mourn the president whilst he’s still alive, to remind him of the grave that awaits him. To tell him that other wealthy, powerful and historical people have not been able to escape the fate that awaits all men. To underline his point, Salia Koroma gives a litany of chiefs that have gone on.

Some in this litany of chiefs have their lineages mentioned three generations back. Given the constraints of his artistic discipline, Salia can only give so much. No matter! This is an effort to urge the historically curious to dig a little deeper into their own history:

“Kai Samba, the Father of the people of Nongowa, did pass on/ In the same way as had his grandmother, Humonya.”

In doing this, Salia is simply giving a history lesson to his audience. Salia is linking Paramount Chief  Kai Samba to the pre-Protectorate King Nyagua, who had inherited from his father Faba a kingdom which encompassed the whole of present-day Kenema District, part of Kono District, part of Kailahun District and portions of Pujehun District. Salia is telling the listener that if you go backward in time, Kai Samba goes back to Madam Humonya, to her mother Madam Matolo, to Matolo’s husband Faba, to Nyagua, Faba’s son and inheritor, to the great warriors who had fashioned the Kpanguma State more than two hundred years before.  (My thanks to the Kenema District Development Association website, History of Kenema, Arthur Abraham).

Salia in this litany is very much walking the listener through a cemetary, pointing to graves with no headstones, saying names and stories that transcend time  and space: “That’s Demby over there; that’s his brother, and their father’s over there, and the grave you see over there reclaimed by the forest and time is Honna, their grandfather. You should’ve seen them in their day. Now come with me. There’s Yavana. There, Kajue; Yambasu is here, just over  here under the great ceiba tree… It’s hard to tell who’s there, it’s so bushy here…

In short, nothing protects against the inevitable end: not wealth, not power, not even a powerful and old lineage. Perhaps the human desire for wealth and power, and the hunger for the admiration of one’s peers can’t be curbed. But a sense of perspective can’t be forgotten either:

One can not wish the Earth for oneself/Eh… there in is emptiness.

Salia Koroma: An Elegy Sung In A Stadium

The third section of  Mende Gendei (the second portion in my edited version) is an elegy, and the main subject is how the powerful, the wealthy and the famous will eventually heed the call of the earth. They may be unwilling to depart, but they’ll go when the silent, hungry earth summons them. This particular version is sung to the august gathering of African despots gathered in one place for the opening ceremonies of the 1980 OAU Summit in Freetown. (The Organisation of African Unity is now the African Union.) The song is addressed to the host, Siaka Stevens, but the general audience is this group of despoilers of their own peoples.

Salia Koroma begins his meditation on death with a list of praise names  to the host and an appeal to the host’s generosity. But are the praise handles really extolling the host? Or rather, are they names one would wholeheartedly and readily assume? (Lagula bettu= Drooping Lips; fohfoh monjoh=beetle muncher.)  Salia masks criticism, even ridicule, with impressive verbal dexterity. Is it just verbal deftness, though? Here again one needs to dig a little deeper to get at the wit and linguistic inventiveness of our troubadour. I’m loath to call Salia a praise-singer. This is because listening to his songs, it’s quite clear that if  the patrons were flattered it wasn’t because he was buttering them up, but in spite of what he said about them to their face. If they were flattered it was because of his very presence in their courts (Sama geh loh a Ngoimoh=The Prince’s end is the Musician).  He didn’t find his being and meaning in them; it was the other way round. What’s the tree without the forest? Or the raging fire without the billowing smoke? The crocodile’s an animal of dread, but what is it without the pool?

So that if on this day Salia appeals to the president’s munificence it’s not because he considers himself of a lower social rank. If he appeals to the president’s generosity, it is the better to tell him of their common sonship in God’s creation. It is the better to tell him that he, Salia, had served some of the most influential leaders that emerged with the Protectorate, people whose lineages predated the Protectorate and the modern entity of Sierra Leone. Isn’t Salia older than the president by a few years? In other words, he’s telling the president that he, the president, was new; on the other hand, what he, Salia Koroma, represents was ancient; the culture and the history he’s served all his life predate the post Stevens was glorying in on that day. Salia was impressed with the pomp so magnificently displayed. He was even willing to commend the host for the show. But why the proud silence? Why the vaunting? Perhaps the president thought of himself as God’s beloved son?  A nephew, perhaps? Did he perhaps consider himself the equal of God? Power does that. Wealth does that. Fame does that. Where’s the sense of proportion? Consider…

(More to come on An Elegy Sung In A Stadium)

“Here Lies The Earth, Silent!”

Mende Gendei 2 is actually the third section of the song. I skipped the second portion proper of the song because of its variability. The first and third sections are almost always the same across versions.

This section is culled from the 1980 version. All Salia has done is tweak the third section (my 2nd section) to fit the occasion, otherwise we’ve the same litany of the departed, the same words.

As with the first section I put up, I shall be commenting at length on the song in future posts. In the mean time, enjoy!

See in the Salia Collection for Mende Gendei 2.

Salia Koroma: On Love 2

In my previous post I noted that Salia uses love as a “gateway” theme in the song Mende Gendei. I went on to highlight the different aspects of love as seen through the eyes of the artist. Love has its highs, emotional and physical. Love is a refuge.

But Salia points out that the high and the low go together; love faces mortal threat on the inside, and the lovers need always to have their shields up in order to deflect the blows aimed at them; once the shade-giving tree is brought down, everyone is exposed to the harsh sun.  Salia seems to be saying that the greatest threat to love isn’t the beloved’s waning interest. Rather, it’s the jealousy of others, those who aren’t necessarily over the moon about the lovers’  apparent happiness. Some of the envious are hard-pressed to hide their envy, hate even, for that’s what it ultimately is. Their scowling faces betray them only too well.

What I need to state now is that these reflections on love between a man and a woman is actually a global reflection on the relation between Salia Koroma the artist and his patrons.  It’s especially about his relationship with P.C. Kposowa of Bumpeh Ngao(commonly refered to as Bumpeh Tabema, Bumpeh-on-the Tabe). Paramount Chief Kposowa had been more than a patron of the arts; in Salia’s telling, he was both a friend of, and confidant to, the Chief. A commoner like that, albeit a gifted one, wouldn’t necessarily be appreciated by other powerful people at the court. This council of chiefs mayn’t have looked favourably on this ‘foreigner;’  Mende, yes, but a stranger/commoner in their chiefdom anyway. When Gary Schulze (Music of the Mende of Sierra Leone, Smithsonian Folkways) saw Salia Koroma with what he believed was the musician’s own Landrover, wasn’t Salia using his patron’s vehicle?  With the Chief’s passing, wasn’t Salia suddenly confronted with the hostility of the powerful, hostility he may have ignored while his patron was still alive? Wasn’t that the same situation at the other courts? In short, yes. Pettiness, envy and blind hate undermine every human relationship.

Salia Koroma teaches us this lesson. He’s learnt that nothing lasts: not love, not friendship, not fame, not wealth. Everything passes. Pointing this out isn’t a jaded view of humanity. The third section of Mende Gendei (the second part in our ‘video’ montage, coming later) makes this all too clear.

Salia Koroma: On Love

Strictly considered, Mende Gendei is a meditation, in highly poetic language, on power, wealth, and fame. The song starts out with the intensely personal (Part 1), then moves on to the ‘national’ (Part 2),  and finally on to a ‘universal’ take on the natures of those reflections (Part 3). Salia Koroma, in order to tackle those themes, begins with a reflection on love as a ‘gateway’ theme. So to understand this song fully one would’ve to start at the beginning, with the opening lines, and then move in gradually.

Sweet & Sour: Salia begins the song by evoking the essential nature of love, the two forces that operate in tandem at its heart: sweetness and transience, excitement and pain, the summit and the base, life and death. The heart that soars with love, the heart that  promises everything can also be filled with the most unbearable pain when everything falls flat.

Ndoma nƐni, ndoma Ɛ lo (Love is sweet, love doesn’t last). 0′ 12″-16″

Nya lii, nya, i vawe’a  ha nya ma (I, how my heart’s troubled today!) 0′ 49″-54″

Beyond Words: Name the lover who, in their right mind, sets out to describe love, unless they intend from the outset to be trite? And because love can be so overwhelming an emotion, the honest lover admits their powerlessness to describe the ineffable:

Eee…ndoma nƐni/Ngoli i bƐni nya la (Eee.. love is sweet/I just can’t sing it).

But if love’s pleasures are mostly intangible, those pleasures can be physical also and no less exhilarating (probably even more so):

KpƐkpƐ nƐvƐ/Ndapi nƐ’i kpukƆma taa (Cleaving to, inseparably/Bed-tussling is such a thrill).

A Battlefield Too: Sweetness and bitterness co-exist. If things don’t grow flat with habit and the passage of  time, there’re other forces at work to undermine and ruin the initial sweetness: the meanness and jealousy of others.

Ngi wulia wƆ maha jƆhun ngƐ ngi bawoa/I rushed into a royal marriage thinking it a sanctuary

MƐma kƆ mia nya ho’a bƆma/Little did I know I was entering a war. 3′ 06″-12″

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(More on Salia Koroma: On Love in my next posting)