53 min
Music · Sona Jobarteh
Live at the World Music Festival Chicago
Her set at the twentieth World Music Festival, filmed by the city that runs it.
Overview
What does traditions of africa & the diaspora point to?
Across Africa and in the communities of the African diaspora in Brazil, Cuba, Haiti and beyond, spiritual life is carried by song, rhythm and ritual. In Yoruba Ifá and Òrìṣà devotion, Brazilian Candomblé, Haitian Vodou, Cuban Santería (Regla de Ocha), the Gnawa of Morocco, the zār of Egypt and the mbira ceremonies of the Shona in Zimbabwe, drums, voices and instruments open the way for the orishas, the lwa, the spirits and the ancestors to be present among the living. These are living traditions, passed on in families, temples and initiatory lineages, where devotion is shared in community and the ancestors remain close.
The ancestors are not the past. They are at the table.A central teaching within Traditions of Africa & the Diaspora
Teachers
Voices within this path.
Compare background, approach and format before choosing a teacher to follow.
Araba Ifayemi Elebuibon
Ifayemi Elebuibon, born in 1947 in Osogbo, Nigeria, is a babalawo, a priest of Ifá, the Yoruba tradition of divination and sacred verse. He began learning Ifá at the age of four and became a babalawo in 1967, following a family line in which his maternal grandfather held the title of Araba, chief Ifá priest of Osogbo. A poet, writer and linguist who publishes in Yoruba and English, he teaches about Ifá and Yoruba culture in Nigeria and the United States, including at Obafemi Awolowo University and San Francisco State University.
View profile →WA
Wande Abimbola
Wande Abimbola, born in 1932 in Oyo, Nigeria, is a scholar of Yoruba language and literature and a babalawo, consecrated as an Ifá priest in 1971. In 1981 the Ooni of Ife installed him as Àwísẹ Awo Àgbàyé, spokesperson for Ifá and Yoruba religion in the world. He served as vice-chancellor of the University of Ife from 1982 to 1989, has taught at universities in Nigeria and the United States, including Harvard and Amherst, and has written widely on the sacred verses of Ifá, among them "Ifá Divination Poetry". He founded the Ifa Heritage Institute and presides over the International Congress of Orisa Tradition and Culture.
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Yeye Luisah Teish
Yeye Luisah Teish, born in 1948 in New Orleans, is a priestess of Oshun and an Iyanifa in the Yoruba Lucumí tradition. She has taught since 1977 about the orishas, the ancestors and the rituals of daily life, and is the author of several books, including "Jambalaya". She speaks at gatherings on Africana religions.
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Babalorixá Sidnei Nogueira
Sidnei Nogueira is a babalorixá, the spiritual leader of the Candomblé terreiro Comunidade da Compreensão e da Restauração Ilê Asé Sàngó in Mairiporã, São Paulo, and holds a doctorate in semiotics. As a writer and educator he explains the Afro-Brazilian religion from within, with particular attention to the orixá Exu, who is often misunderstood, and to the religious racism faced by Candomblé communities. He teaches through lectures, interviews and online, in Brazil and abroad, including at MIT.
View profile →In memoriam
Dagara tradition · ritual
Malidoma Patrice Somé
Writer and teacher of the Dagara tradition (1956–2021), born in Dano in Burkina Faso and taken at the age of four to be raised by Jesuit priests. He later studied in the West and spent most of his adult life teaching ritual and initiation in the United States and Europe.
View profile →Artists
Musicians and singers.
Devotional music and chant from within this path, alongside its teachers.
Gnawa · Guembri
Hamid El Kasri
Moroccan maâlem, a master musician of the Gnawa tradition, born in 1961 in Ksar El Kebir and living in Rabat. Gnawa is a Moroccan spiritual and ritual tradition with West African roots south of the Sahara, carried within an Islamic frame; its ritual heart is the lila, the night-long ceremony of trance and healing. He sings and plays the guembri, the three-stringed bass lute, and brings together the Gnawa rhythms of northern and southern Morocco.
View profile →HB
Gnawa · Guembri
Hassan Boussou
Moroccan Gnawa maâlem, son of Maâlem Hmida Boussou, who leads the traditional group Boussou Ganga. Gnawa is a Moroccan spiritual and ritual tradition with West African roots south of the Sahara, carried within an Islamic frame; its ritual heart is the lila, the night-long ceremony of trance and healing.
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Zār Ritual Healing Music
Mazaher
Ensemble from Cairo, founded in 1999 through the Egyptian Center for Culture and Art, who keep the Egyptian zār alive. Zār is a ritual healing tradition with African and Egyptian roots, in which song, dance and polyrhythmic drumming are used to make peace with the spirits. The group is led by women, among them Umm Sameh, Umm Hassan and Nour El Sabah, some of the last living practitioners of zār in Egypt.
View profile →MA
Candomblé Song · Afro-Brazilian
Mateus Aleluia
Brazilian singer and composer, born on 25 September 1943 in Cachoeira in the Recôncavo of Bahia. His music comes out of candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian religion with Yoruba roots, centred on the orixás, and it carries the Yoruba singing and the percussion of the terreiros into song.
View profile →MC
Mbira dzavadzimu
Musekiwa Chingodza
Zimbabwean mbira master, born in 1970 in Mwangara village, Murewa, into a family of mbira players. He plays the mbira dzavadzimu, the mbira of the ancestors, the instrument of the Shona bira: an ancestral tradition in which the ancestors are called and spoken with through the night. He has played since he was five and is self-taught, learning by ear from the great gwenyambira.
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Mbira dzavadzimu
Forward Kwenda
Zimbabwean mbira player from Buhera, known for calling the ancestral spirits during mapira, the Shona ceremonies in which the ancestors are present. The Shona bira is an ancestral tradition, and he describes his playing as not being his own doing.
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Vodou Song · Houngan
Erol Josué
Haitian vodou priest, singer, dancer and ethnologist, initiated as a houngan in childhood by his mother, a mambo, and his stepfather. He sings the chants and the invocations of the lwa, the spirits of vodou, and speaks langaj, its liturgical language. Vodou is an Afro-Haitian religion with West African roots in Benin and Congo and roots among the indigenous Taíno: a religion, a way of living and a community, and not the caricature the word carries elsewhere.
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Hassan Hakmoun
Hassan Hakmoun, born in 1963 in Marrakech, is a Gnawa musician who was already performing at all-night healing and trance ceremonies (lila) in his teens. He plays the sintir, the three-stringed bass lute that carries the Gnawa songs to the saints and spirits, accompanied by voices and iron castanets (qraqeb). Based in New York since 1987, he performs and teaches Gnawa music internationally.
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Kora · griot lineage
Sona Jobarteh
Gambian kora player, singer and composer (born 1983) from one of the five principal griot families of West Africa, and the first woman from a griot family to become a professional kora player. She is the granddaughter of Amadu Bansang Jobarteh and a cousin of Toumani Diabaté, and runs a school in the Gambia that teaches the griot tradition alongside the ordinary curriculum.
View profile →Upcoming events
Upcoming events in traditions of africa & the diaspora.
Retreats, dialogues and online gatherings connected to this path.
Talks & videos
Selected talks.
Talks and conversations from teachers within this path.
63 min
Music · Sona Jobarteh
Kora Music from West Africa
A full concert with her band at the Franz Liszt conservatory in Weimar.
20 min
Interview · Malidoma Patrice Somé
Connecting with the Ancestors
Twenty minutes on the place of the dead in Dagara practice.
61 min
Interview · Malidoma Patrice Somé
On Ancestral Wisdom
An hour on what traditional teaching still carries, and what is lost when it is not passed on.
Listen
Recordings from traditions of africa & the diaspora.
Voices from this path and the schools within it, playing from the platforms the teachers publish on.
Olorum
Named for the Yoruba creator: twelve songs from the candomblé tradition of Bahia.
Fogueira Doce
Afro-Brazilian devotional song from a voice that began with Os Tincoãs in the sixties.
Cinco Sentidos
His first solo album after decades in Angola, recorded in his seventies.
Zar
The only album by one of the last ensembles still performing the Egyptian zar, a healing ceremony of possession and release.
Discernment
Clarity should include the human context.
These traditions are entered through a house, a terreiro or a lineage, and through a relationship with the people in it, so the first question is which house someone belongs to and who initiated them. They have also been caricatured for centuries, which means both that outsiders misread them and that the word alone attracts people selling things. Ask what is expected of you over years rather than weeks, and what any fee is actually for.
Ask about contextIs a statement philosophical, meditative, relational or practical?
Notice powerHow are authority, money, intimacy and complaints handled?
Include embodimentDoes the teaching make room for emotion, the body and nervous-system limits?
Keep agencyA useful teacher supports clear choice rather than demanding surrender of judgement.