Thanks to the doggedness of Cynthia Schmidt, the musicologist, who decided to try again on the borders between Bo district and Pujehun district in the Senehun N’golahun chiefdom. In that attempt, she encountered a group of women led by a lady called Baindu Jabati who recognized the song and sang along with the tape. A lot of the words and the rhythms had changed, but the message of the song remained the same as Lorenzo Turner had translated it in 1931. It sang: “Everybody come together, the grave is restless. The grave is not yet at peace”.
Baindu Jabati recounted that the song brought memories of her grandmother who not only taught her how to sing the song, but then ritually compelled her to perform the song that in future will help her identify …show more content…
A lot of these researches risk ending up in frustrations due to the difference in the mentality of how memory is exercised. Rosalind Shaw’s Memories of the Slave Trade (2002), a result of a field research amongst the Temnes of Sierra Leone developed the thesis that slavery, like many other notable events of Africa’s past are remembered, but in a non discursive way that sometimes presents problems to the Western investigator. Making allusion to the conclusions of Ball that Africans did not take responsibility for the slavery, she opined that the overt gestures and manifestations of memory may seem dormant and abandoned, but that there are other forms of memory being exercised: “But if we are attentive to forms of remembering from those of verbally discursive admissions and projects of public memory, we find that beyond Bunce Island’s abject silence as a commemorative site, and beyond the awkward silences of Ball’s interviewees, the slave trade is not forgotten in Sierra Leone” (Shaw 2002, 2). The problem was not about whether they remembered these past events. It was therefore a question of how they chose to remember it. Shaw argues that history which is forgotten discursively is …show more content…
In the same vein, we attempt an analysis of the mnemonic elements of the films under review to assess how they resonate with the mnemonic cultural practices of the sub region. An approach of this nature always aims at finding out the common cultural practices that permit cross-cutting theoretical conclusions. Many scholars are of the opinion that the culture that has influenced the sub region with her own practices more than all others are the Mandé - a conglomeration of malinka-madinga speaking group between the north-east of Guinea Conakry and Western Mali (Hale 2007, 12). Through military conquest and through their Islamic evangelization, West Africa has been Islamized alongside its inculcation of the Mandé culture to such an extent that it is very difficult to distinguish one from the other (Shaw 2002, 80). Their most evident mnemonic institutions and practices that characterize the West African sub region with slight local adaptations here and there are predominantly the institution of the griot and the different forms of divinations; elements which we have just mentioned in the work of Shaw. Their presence in the films already analysed and in the culture in which these films are conceived is worth
Baindu Jabati recounted that the song brought memories of her grandmother who not only taught her how to sing the song, but then ritually compelled her to perform the song that in future will help her identify …show more content…
A lot of these researches risk ending up in frustrations due to the difference in the mentality of how memory is exercised. Rosalind Shaw’s Memories of the Slave Trade (2002), a result of a field research amongst the Temnes of Sierra Leone developed the thesis that slavery, like many other notable events of Africa’s past are remembered, but in a non discursive way that sometimes presents problems to the Western investigator. Making allusion to the conclusions of Ball that Africans did not take responsibility for the slavery, she opined that the overt gestures and manifestations of memory may seem dormant and abandoned, but that there are other forms of memory being exercised: “But if we are attentive to forms of remembering from those of verbally discursive admissions and projects of public memory, we find that beyond Bunce Island’s abject silence as a commemorative site, and beyond the awkward silences of Ball’s interviewees, the slave trade is not forgotten in Sierra Leone” (Shaw 2002, 2). The problem was not about whether they remembered these past events. It was therefore a question of how they chose to remember it. Shaw argues that history which is forgotten discursively is …show more content…
In the same vein, we attempt an analysis of the mnemonic elements of the films under review to assess how they resonate with the mnemonic cultural practices of the sub region. An approach of this nature always aims at finding out the common cultural practices that permit cross-cutting theoretical conclusions. Many scholars are of the opinion that the culture that has influenced the sub region with her own practices more than all others are the Mandé - a conglomeration of malinka-madinga speaking group between the north-east of Guinea Conakry and Western Mali (Hale 2007, 12). Through military conquest and through their Islamic evangelization, West Africa has been Islamized alongside its inculcation of the Mandé culture to such an extent that it is very difficult to distinguish one from the other (Shaw 2002, 80). Their most evident mnemonic institutions and practices that characterize the West African sub region with slight local adaptations here and there are predominantly the institution of the griot and the different forms of divinations; elements which we have just mentioned in the work of Shaw. Their presence in the films already analysed and in the culture in which these films are conceived is worth