The Year of The Salia Koroma Vignette

Happy 2010, ye Happy Few!

As the heading to this post makes clear, I’ll try to make this year what I’ve chosen to call the “Year of the S.K. Vignette.”  The vignettes I’m referring to are the numerous short recordings Salia did for some international and local Sierra Leonean recording houses from the 1940s to the early 1970s. We shall have time and space to discuss the ‘circumstances’ and contexts of these gems.

May these gems increase your happiness, happy as you already are!

Yohmie, Dohmie, What’s What?

I wrote in my last post that I was going to tackle the word Yohmie, though I question the wisdom of such an enterprise even as I write, as definitions often do raise more questions than they can answer. So rather than aim at giving any narrow definition, I’ll opt for  descriptions. That’s cheating, you’d say; but you’re wrong.

A Yohmie (or Yohmeh, depending on the Mende dialect you speak), as Dr Kenneth Little pointed out in his 1948 article and translation of the song in the anthropological journal Man,  is a ballad. We run into problems (which can’t be discussed here) when he goes on to say that it’s like the European ballad, a composition forming part of the oral tradition and preserved as a musical (or literary) form.

While this may be true of the yohmie in general, it was slightly off the mark in the yohmie that he then went on to give a “free translation.” His view of the ballad as a communal production denies the individual composer’s role even where it’s patently evident. That may explain his ‘refusal’ to identify Salia as the “Mende accordionist in the employ of a Chief  in Middle Mende country.”

So here we are.  A yohmie is a narrative set to a song. It seeks to be lyrical at all times. It differs from the dohmie (or dohmeh, as our koh-Mende cousins would say) in that the latter is a spoken narrative, pure and simple. As exemplified in the Salia Koroma composition, the yohmie is distinguished, firstly, by its dramatic, narrative structure, in which its past-paced nature leaves us filling in the gaps from the vivid flashes of character and place descriptions. Secondly, the Salia Koroma ballad is intensely personal, setting it apart from the ordinary Mende narrative song that tells the story from a third person point of view.

So the ballad as we understand it has nothing to do with the popular notion of  it as a  romantic or sentimental song. Now here’s hoping that I shan’t have to come back to the subject.

“As We Meet Here, There’ll Be No Backbiting”

I’ve decided to put up the rest of the song Yohmie, so I’m posting the second instalment. Other segments will follow. My initial intention was to go no further than the poetic prelude I posted back in February; but try as I could, I couldn’t quite ignore the fact that, as a stand-alone,  it lacked something. This sentiment takes nothing away from the prelude. But the word “yohmie” means a ballad, which  is a sung narrative. (I’ll treat the word “yohmie” (ballad) in a future post in order to clear up any misunderstanding about the popular understanding of the term ballad. This is important, as my explanation will show.)

In  Part Two Salia Koroma narrates his run-in with Sapha, a sneaky Koranic teacher, and how he was finally able to evade Kamoh Sapha and his pupils. The time of the story was when Salia was a young man, or at least a youngish man. Teacher Sapha gives him a shilling, which Salia believes to be a token of appreciation. Little did he know that “the Muslim man” was ‘investing’ in his (Salia’s)  tour. He reluctantly agrees, only to find out that the man had two pupils instead of one, as he’d been told. Well, I don’t want to spoil the plot.  Enjoy!

Yohmie 2 is in the Salia Collection in the sidebar.

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 and male cousin).

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, 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)