When people ask Sona Jobarteh what it takes to master the kora, she repeats something her grandfather used to say: “understand that you will die a learner.”
Her grandfather was Amadu Bansang Jobarteh, a kora master remembered as a major figure in Gambian musical history. She brings up his saying when she is asked what international audiences get wrong about African music, and her answer starts with the label itself.
“In my understanding, ‘African music’ doesn’t actually exist, because I wouldn’t know how to define it.”
It is an unexpected answer from someone about to be honoured for her contribution to African culture.It is also a way into her story, which is ultimately about what it means to carry a tradition forward while allowing it to change.
The Award and the Work Behind It
From 8 to 11 October, the Silicon Valley African Film Festival (SVAFF) will present Jobarteh with its Icon Award in San Jose, California. Its founder, Chike C. Nwoffiah, describes the prize as “our film festival’s highest award. We don’t even give it every year.”
SVAFF’s own materials call it the Cultural Icon Award. The 2024 honourees included the Malian director Souleymane Cissé, the South African actor John Kani, Nigeria’s Richard Mofe-Damijo and the American filmmaker Julie Dash. Cissé died in February 2025, and the festival remembered him again at its 2025 edition.
The net is cast wide on purpose. Nwoffiah says the festival looks at people working in film, television, music, “any kind of practice in the creative world,” and then asks a second thing of all of them.
“They’re very good in acting, they’re very good in music, they’re exceptional, everybody knows them. Then the other question, then what? What else are they doing with this?”
For Jobarteh, he says, the answer is education, and specifically the school she founded, The Gambia Academy.
“She’s redefined what education ought to be on African terms,” he says, describing her work there as a “redefinition of what mind liberation for the African ought to be.”
Before that, he offers a blunter summary of the person: “outside of her mastery of music and the work that she continues to do all over the place, she is the ultimate intellectual.”
He describes “her hands-on moulding of the Academy and her hands-on moulding of the students,” and points to video clips of her speaking at international conferences, “talking about redefining development from a new lens.”
“Not only is she known for her outstanding and inspiring work in this domain that everybody knows her for, but it’s also important that her work off the stage is just breathtaking and inspirational.”
“She’s such a proud daughter of the Gambia and a proud daughter of Africa, and she wears that proudly,” he says. Of how she presents herself anywhere in the world: “You don’t need to be told because there is an Africanness to her, whether it be in her clothing, whether it be in the way she carries her jewellery.”
“She embodies all of the things that we’d like to see in an award recipient,” he says.
Jobarteh responded to the interview questions in writing, with the interview facilitated by Victoria Lissong Richards-Ohwotu, founding director and president of Sunu Reew Medical Mission (SRMM).
She was “really honoured to hear about it,” she said. She has “a lot of respect” for Nwoffiah, and for the work of sustaining a festival for as long as he has. The recognition, she said, is “not only for what people most visibly associate with me,” meaning herself and the kora, “but also for the huge amount of work I have dedicated my life to in education.”
The Five Percent
When asked about the biggest misconception about her, she says:“The greatest misconception about me is that I am a singer, a kora player and a musician.”
Her explanation is arithmetic, setting touring aside, she says, the time she spends actually making music, compared with the time she spends running The Gambia Academy, writing curricula and overseeing teaching, “would be about 95% to 5%. And even that is being generous.”
She says she now barely picks up the kora unless she is going on stage.
“It isn’t an ideal situation. I would love to have more time to spend on my music, as I did when I was younger. However, it is the nature of the work. Work that is pushing for cultural reformation and a reformation of mentality is not a part-time job. It is a life.”
She is clear that this is not a grievance: “That isn’t a complaint, because it is also a recognition of just how powerful music is.”
She lists what the work involves: “I am committed to young Africans, motivating them to become contributors to their society; mentoring them, teaching them, grading and assessing them; writing curricula; managing staff; running the Academy; developing partnerships; raising funding.”
The Gambia Academy opened in 2015. According to its own website, it began in a rented building with 21 students, and it has been funded for over ten years from her music earnings.
The school teaches a standard academic programme with African history, culture and music built into the day. Jobarteh has said elsewhere that it is not a music school.
“Music is my facilitator. It is my communicator. It is a means through which I can spread my messages; it is not the end in itself.”
“My mission through education is to inspire people to contribute meaningfully to society, to connect with people, to invite people into the work and into the wider conversation.”
Then she makes the point directly: “So the music is the tool. Education is the mission to which I have committed my life to.”
The Kora and Its History
A kora has 21 strings, run up a long hardwood neck through a halved calabash covered in cowhide, and it is played with the thumbs and forefingers of both hands.
Most museum and scholarly accounts place the emergence of the kora around the eighteenth century, among the Mandinka of the Kaabu region, in what is now Guinea-Bissau, Senegal and The Gambia. The Scottish explorer Mungo Park described the instrument in 1799. Oral tradition credits a jeli named Jali Madi Wuleng, and one popular version of the story says he found the instrument in a cave while searching for a runaway bride.
The people who play it belong to something older.
Jeli, often rendered as “griot” in French and English-language accounts, are hereditary musicians, oral historians and counsellors, traditionally attached to ruling families. Mande memory traces the office back to Balla Faséké Kouyaté, jeli to Sunjata, the founder of the Mali Empire in the thirteenth century.
The “700-year” figure that appears in many press biographies of Jobarteh runs two ages together. The jeli tradition is associated with the thirteenth century, while the kora itself is several centuries younger.
Jobarteh belongs to one of the principal jeli families, the Jobarteh, also rendered Diabaté. Her cousin is the Malian kora player Toumani Diabaté.
Within these families, the right to play the kora has passed largely from father to son, and Jobarteh describes the position she has made for herself in measured terms.
“It has been very significant for me to have created a space for myself within such an important and ancient tradition.”
Gender and Inheritance
The familiar version of this story is simpler: a woman entered a tradition that had been dominated by men and broke a barrier.
Nwoffiah notes plainly that the kora “for hundreds and hundreds of years within her culture has been situated and seen as an exclusive preserve of men.”
But he is wary of how the story travels.
“Sometimes also we frame some of these things as from a Western lens and it’s important we don’t tell these stories from a Western lens because within the culture it wasn’t as if she was breaking or committing an offence or breaking this taboo that had punishment,” he says. “It’s just cultural practise.”
In Mande music, the division of labour is familiar. Women, the jelimusow, are the celebrated singers, while men traditionally take the instruments.
What Jobarteh did was take up the instrument, and Nwoffiah credits her family for making that possible.
“But then she comes in with this amazing energy, this amazing spirit, this amazing talent of playing this complicated instrument,” he says.
“She gets the blessing of her father,” he says, noting that she plays with her brother. The men around her, in his telling, could have said no and did not. Instead, they “demanded excellence from her.” The family, he says, “ought to receive credit for also creating an enabling environment for her.”
Jobarteh offers further insights to this,“It wasn’t actually my ambition at the beginning to try to make my mark in any particular way. I was genuinely pursuing something that I was incredibly passionate about.”
Only afterwards, she says, did the wider meaning arrive, “Being female has inevitably caused many people to be inspired by the possibilities for women, not only within this tradition but within other traditions as well.”
She then turns the question towards the direction of survival rather than symbolism.
“I think we need to be willing to innovate in order to preserve our traditions and ensure their continuation. We need to utilise a larger pool of our population to ensure that preservation, rather than limiting participation to one group on the basis of gender.”
Nwoffiah points to an effect he can see for himself. Search for female kora players today, he says, and “very good ones” turn up, “young, up and coming.”
He is careful with the claim,“I’m not saying it’s all because of her, but she is in the forefront of a lot of this movement.”
He goes on: “she literally brought in a whole generation of players of the instrument, admirers of the instrument and those that could not understand the language and the voice of the [kora]. So in the practise itself she’s a change maker.”
Beyond “African Music”
Jobarteh has played for audiences who have never seen a kora and, as she puts it, “may have never even set foot on the African continent.”
“Music is something universal, and it has brought me closely in touch with the reality that there is one human race,” she says.
“Sadly, part of the world has spent centuries committed to defining race into subcategories. However music demonstrates very clearly that humans are humans, and that we have the innate capacity to connect, to respect and support one another, and to experience a genuine sense of equality.”
She values the chance for listeners “to genuinely experience someone else’s culture,” and to build respect “rather than simply plugging into a global narrative shaped by dominant cultures.”
Nwoffiah, who says he is a fan and not a scholar of her work, describes what he has seen at her concerts.
There is usually a point, he says, where she gets the audience to sing in her language, and “she makes them roll their tongue and taste that language.”
His reading is that “the brain connects a language to a moment of joy,” and the words stay there.
“That is the power that sometimes our artists do not even know that they carry,” he says. “But Jobarteh literally lives it and presents it.”
She has become, he says, “one that can interpret the language and the music of the kora to the entire world and creates an environment where people are invited into this experience.”
He also argues that she has moved the instrument beyond the vocabulary that used to be applied to African music: “multicultural and this and ethnic.”
“When Sona straps on the kora, steps on stage, it is pure joyful music,” he says. “It is classical music, high end, high level.”
For too long, he says, “our stories as people of African ancestry have been told through lenses that are removed from our realities.” Jobarteh, in his description, “stands in her dignity and excellence and lifts up the voice, the language, the culture, the song of Mama Africa.”
What the wider world overlooks, Jobarteh says, starts with the category itself.
She says “African music” is a term that grew out of a Western viewpoint “in which the Western understanding of ‘everyone else’ becomes the reference point and the centre point.”
Her own tradition she calls “Mandeng”, and she notes that there are musical forms within her own country that she knows nothing about, never mind across a continent she describes as holding “over 1.5 billion people and over 3,000 distinct cultures.”
“The western viewpoint on ‘African Music’ innately diminishes, compresses, and simplifies the incredibly complex nature of the musical forms that exist across Africa.”
“Each of these traditions can take a lifetime to master,” she says.
That is where her grandfather’s lesson returns. These forms, she argues, are “as complex as one another” and “as challenging as one another to attain, acquire and master.”
She adds a criticism that turns inward:“We as Africans have also increasingly adopted terminology that is rooted in a western viewpoint and rooted in a history of Western cultural supremacy.”
What SVAFF Represents
Nwoffiah’s account of SVAFF sits close to Jobarteh’s own argument about cultural representation.
The festival, he says, exists to push back against what he calls “the Tarzan narrative of Africa”, which he says still circulates in dominant media more than 60 years after many African countries gained independence.
He welcomes technology that lets African creatives “create with their phones and just broadcast to the world without having to go through gatekeepers, which is a great thing.” The work that remains, he says, is “to unpack, to basically reclaim our stories and the way we are perceived and the way we are recorded in history.”
He placed the festival in Silicon Valley deliberately, near the headquarters of Google, Adobe, Netflix and other technology companies.
“Why don’t I create a space in the middle of all of this stuff… and set a plate, if you will, a dinner plate of African stories right in the middle,” he says, so audiences can see Africa “from the standpoint of the Africans and not what they probably think they know.” What happens next, he says, is that “Africa gets encountered on its own terms, in its own voices.”
He recalls an unnamed retired vice president at a major technology company whose portfolio included Africa for 12 years. After two days at the festival, he says, she told him: “I just came to your festival for two days and realised that I knew nothing about Africa. That for the first time, I sat still and I allowed Africa to talk to me through your screen.”
Her earlier trips, as he relays her account, were “visiting on a jet, coming in, staying in high-rolling hotels for two, three days at a time, jumping from country to country, and I became the expert in the company on Africa.”
That is also how he describes the purpose of the Icon Award.
When the festival created it, he says, the point was never to crown “the best in the thing.”
“Every award is subjective,” he says. “We could easily give 500 awards every year and we’ll still have enough.”
He has travelled across the continent on projects and describes what he finds as “sheer phenomenal”, so he does not want the list of recipients read as complete.
Instead, he wants it to serve as a window onto “the sheer talent, genius, joy of the African creative expression” that exists in Africa and its diaspora.
His clearest explanation comes when he imagines someone picking up a festival brochure years from now and finding the names of past recipients.
“That can be a syllabus for them,” he says.
If a reader studied those people, “that would give me a whole different appreciation and raise the dimensions within which I understand Africa.”
That is also where Jobarteh fits, Nwoffiah says each recipient is known for the art form that brought them to public attention, “just like Sona and the kora,” and that reading further reveals “all the other work that they’re doing.”
For this year’s award specifically, he says, the aim is to point people towards The Gambia Academy, “so that people can understand and see Sona beyond” the kora.
He is firm about what comes first: “as a Film Festival, we have to be grounded in films.” This year’s programme features 76 films from 33 countries, and he says the festival is “humbled and honoured to be in a position where we can curate that experience.” He describes filmmakers meeting from filmmakers meeting from “all corners of the planet” and forming relationships that can cross “colonial boundaries and borders.”
The weekend will also include, on Saturday afternoon, what he calls “a reset for an amazing, colourful, and joyful African fashion show,” and an opening night where, he says, “it’s like a who is who in Silicon Valley, they come into our space and they’re all revelling and enjoying and relishing the African experience.” But for Jobarteh, the moment Nwoffiah singles out is the fireside chat planned after she receives the award.
The Legacy She Wants to Leave
Jobarteh does not describe a legacy in terms of recordings, she describes it in terms of people.
“I am now reaching a point where I can see the results of that work. My senior students have progressed into the Academy’s senior programme and have successfully established their own African-based businesses, rooted in the mentality I have spent the last 11 years working to instil in them: pride in their African identity, pride in their history, an understanding of where they stand in the world, and a determination to contribute meaningfully to the progress and development of Africa.”
She is specific about what she wants them to understand.
“The objective is for them to understand that development should not depend on international aid. It depends upon the minds, skills, knowledge and dedication of young Africans themselves, investing economically, physically and mentally in the development of their own societies.”
