Dave Kobrenski - Djoliba Crossing

Authors note: this e-book is intended as a companion to the print edition, which contains dozens of full-color paintings, drawings, music transcriptions, photographs, and more.

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When I embarked on my first trip to West Africa nearly twenty years ago as a budding ethnomusicologist, artist, and performer, I might have told you that I was in search of two things: music and adventure. As for the first of those, landing in Guinea was like striking gold. I arrived in Conakry and ventured east, enchanted by the winding trail of the Niger River and the peoples who lived alongside it. What I found was a land whose diverse population thrives on their musical traditions, and whose history and identity are woven into the fabric of the music that enriches every facet of their daily lives. I had a hunch that I would spend a lot of time amongst these people, exploring their music and traditions, but never did I imagine it would prove to be an ongoing musical journey of two decades and counting.

As for my second interest, I should have been careful when I asked those impish spirits of Africa for adventureor at least I should have been more specific. Outwardly, I got almost more adventure than I could handle. Africa tested my resolve and fortitude on numerous occasions. Inwardly, however, is where the real adventure took place. I could not have known at that young age what kind of philosophical and spiritual quest would result from my journey into West African music and culture. For here was a land where spirits mingled with the living, the souls of Ancestors resided in sacred groves of trees, and the plants, soil, rocks, rivers, and everything else were infused with a dynamic living energy called nyama. Immersed in this way of seeing, I sought to understand how a cultures epistemologytheir innate manner of understanding the world around themshapes the kind of society they create. It was easy to see that a culture who regards the rivers and earth as alive and sacred will treat them with respect, while a culture who sees them as mechanistic and soulless will consume and destroy them. And it was clear which culture I came from. What was less clear was the story of how we got this way.

And so what started as a youthful expedition into a new and exciting land turned into a long process of reckoning. My own beliefs about the world around me were cast into the spotlight for examination, and then brought firmly to trial. Deconstructing the worldview I was raised with was akin to pulling apart the life raft upon which I was afloat. Once that raft was disassembled, I had only one choice remaining: learn to swim. I came to Africa for adventure, and I found it in the adventure of learning, and of finding my own way in a world that teeters between brilliant potential and environmental catastrophe.

These two journeysone outward, a quest for music, and the other inward, a quest for understandingwould take me back to Africa nearly every winter over the course of a decade. During these winter-long excursions, I immersed myself thoroughly in the traditional music of the Malink people. I experienced this music in the Hamanah region of central Guineathe birthplace of instruments like the djembe, and according to some anthropologists, the place where some of the worlds earliest musical instruments evolved. With my notebook, tape recorder, and sketchbook, I set out to explore, learn, and document what I experienced there.

My journey would only continue when I arrived back on the shores of my own country. Armed with backpacks full of field recordings, books of hand-scrawled music notations, and stacks of new drawings, I was a peaceful soldier of culture, teaching and sharing what I had gained in Africa. Rhythm became the language I spoke by day and in which I dreamt at night. But the conflict between my ideals of a culture living in sync with the rhythms of nature and the reality of the Western way of life drew me ever deeper in a philosophical quest. The music of West Africa became my ticket into more complex realms of culture and knowing. Im still riding that train today.

What you will find in this book is how these curious adventures in Africa began. I present this travel-worn collection of drawings, paintings, stories, and musical notations to serve as a celebration of Malink music as well as an attempt to chronicle just one of the many ways in which humans have created meaning and expressed themselves through culture. On the surface, it is a travelogue, adventure story, and sketchbook. But more significantly, this is a book about glimpsing in the everyday dust of existence the potential for diverse expressions of being. Its about seeing past the tattered common cloth of life to the veil of mystery which hangs just beyond, and finding that every moment is infused with its own peculiar magic. In the end, perhaps the ultimate goal of undertaking such a voyage is to restore our childlike wonder at it all.

Donning an old pack, passport in hand, and leaving behind the familiar in order to experience another culture is, ultimately, a journey into what it means to be human. If we are open to the experience, it is an excursion into the collective hopes and dreams of countless humans who have come before us. In taking this journey of exploration we may discover that who we are is comprised of who we wereand who we were is a fire still kindled by the old cultures that steadfastly protect the embers of their traditions in the face of a modern world that seeks to sweep the past away like ash.

Herein, then, is my attempt to celebrate the exuberance and richness that the Mand peoples have brought into the world, and the simple gifts of friendship and open exchange they have extended to an oft-wayward but always receptive world traveler. May future generations continue to praise their ancestors for preserving their great lineage and the story of how they came to beand may it serve as a beacon for other travelers embarking on that path into unfamiliar territory.