Language choices reflecting social changes: multilingualism in the popular music of Guinean jelis

ABSTRACT

This paper explores multilingual popular music in the Republic of Guinea (West Africa) by focussing on hereditary musicians of Manding origin, known as jelis or griots. I demonstrate how jeli songs developed in the course of recent Guinean history as divided into three periods: the Colonial period (1898–1958), the Decolonial Socialist Regime of Sekou Touré (1958–1984), and the Liberalisation period (1984 – present). While the Colonial period featured the dominance of European music and languages in the public domain, the jeli music and Maninka language appeared at the forefront of Guinean popular music stage in the radically decolonising Socialist regime of Sekou Touré. The Liberalisation period saw a growing capitalist economy and the rise of Susu urban music. In this more competitive context, the jeli songs have become truly multilingual, featuring other local Guinean languages, mainly Susu and Pular, which now appear as mixed registers, or urban vernaculars, influenced by French through code-mixing and borrowings. The transitions between local languages, however, are constrained by the song structure, first, reflecting the actual patterns of multilingual language use in Guinea, but also potentially signalling more discreet identities of the musicians reinforced via using Maninka jeli family names as professional ‘brands’.

KEYWORDS:

• Postcolonialism
• griot music
• Manding
• translanguaging
• African languages
• urban vernaculars

Introduction

We label languages as ‘foreign’, ‘native’, ‘colonial’, ‘indigenous’, ‘urban’ and load them with complex socio-cultural signals. In popular music, choosing a language of a song, or switching between languages, is a statement on its own fleshing out the performer’s complex identities, but sometimes the musicians, who are driven by competing motivations, opt for more languages in order to reach larger audiences (Berger, 2003; Buschfeld et al., 2023; Carter-Ényì & Carter-Ényì, 2019). For these reasons, popular songs are increasingly attracting attention as a site for studying multilingualism, negotiated identities and language ideologies (Banda, 2019; Benson & Chick, 2020; de Goede, 2015; John, 2015; Sarkar & Low, 2012). Moreover, in the case of minor non-Western languages that mainly function orally and have little published sources, popular songs per se represent a rare source of publicly available recorded linguistic data deserving scholarly attention. Finally, popular music has been viewed as a cultural domain contesting the highly debated language education policies when it comes to the role of urban vernaculars (Alim & Pennycook, 2007; Makoni et al., 2010).

In this paper, I explore how global and local languages co-exist in the popular music of a postcolonial West African society, more specifically in the Republic of Guinea, ‘a hodgepodge of languages and ethnicities’ (Tinsley, 2015, p. 241) having French as its only official language. In this study, I take a dynamic look at the development of Guinean popular music from the colonial period up to the present time. I specifically focus on the popular songs performed by jelis, i.e. hereditary musicians of Maninka origin otherwise known as griots or griottes, whose music is based on the old Manding tradition; also referred to as Manden or Mande (Charry, 2000; Counsel, 2019); cf. mandingue in French. In popular culture, the jeli music has been largely modernised and influenced by other musical traditions, e.g. Cuban son before 1970s, and later by Western pop and Congolese zouk. This hybridisation resulted in the birth of recent styles sometimes called ‘funk mandingue’ in the 1980s, e.g. Mory Kanté (Ba, 2020), ‘pop mandingue’ or ‘afro-mandingue’ in the 2000s, e.g. Azaya (Seck, 2012/2022).

Current sociolinguistic studies of West African multilingual societies do not usually consider popular music but rather focus on everyday communication in general or in the context of education (Benson & Lynd, 2011; Dreyfus & Juillard, 2001; Khachaturyan & Konoshenko, 2021; Lüpke, 2016). At the same time, scholars of musicology tend to assume a close correlation between languages and specific musical traditions implying that traditional music tends to be naturally monolingual (Charry, 2000; Kubik, 1994). This is obviously not true for popular culture, including popular music, which easily crosses political and cultural borders, thus lending itself to multilingual language mixing particularly well (Alim & Pennycook, 2007; Banda, 2019; Buschfeld et al., 2023; Carter-Ényì & Carter-Ényì, 2019; Sarkar & Low, 2012, p. 406). The multilayered identities in francophone West African popular culture have been discussed to some extent for Senegal (Benga, 2002) and Ivory Coast (Akindes, 2002; McNee, 2002).

The history of Guinea stands out in the francophone West African context in many ways. Guinea was the first French colony that gained independence in 1958, undergoing strong decolonisation with dramatic consequences for the country’s cultural policy, including both language and music, during the regime of Sekou Touré (1958–1984). Guinea was the only African country to officially reject the colonial language (French) in favour of eight most widely spoken national languages in the domain of education (Benson & Lynd, 2011), although this policy did not survive after Sekou Touré’s death in 1984. In the musical sphere, the Guinean case is also somewhat paradoxical among West African countries. Guinean music was heavily politicised during the regime of Sekou Touré, and yet Guinean public orchestras, e.g. Bembeya Jazz, were an example and an inspiration for other West African countries in the early postcolonial times (Counsel, 2017).

In this paper, I tentatively divide Guinean history into three periods: the Colonial period (1898–1958), characterised by the French assimilation policy; (ii) the Decolonial Socialist Regime of Sekou Touré (1958–1984), marked by authenticité policies supporting local cultures; (iii) the Liberalisation period (1984 – present), characterised by growing capitalist economy and cultural globalisation.¹ The goals of the paper are twofold: first, to explore how the role of popular music developed in Guinea over time in the socio-cultural contexts of (de)colonisation and globalisation, and, second, how language choices made by jeli singers, the most salient group of professional Guinean vocalists, reflect those social changes.

Based on the Syliphone archive database (Counsel, 2015, 2017), I demonstrate that jeli songs, traditionally associated with the Maninka language in Guinea, were mainly performed in this language during the socialist period of Sekou Touré. From the late 1980s onwards, jeli songs became more multilingual featuring other local languages (mostly Susu and Pular) on a par with French. Based on the existing studies (Bender, 1991; Colomer, 2005; Counsel, 2004; Dave, 2014, 2019; Posthumus, 2016), publicly available recordings on YouTube and my interviews with today’s Guinean musicians, I argue that current multilingual tendencies in Guinean music appear as a result of the liberalisation of culture, the rise of Susu musicians and consequent competition for broader audiences.

The paper is structured as follows. The next section provides background information on Guinean demography, the jeli music tradition and the data used in this study. The third section explores the Colonial period showing that Guinean popular culture was then dominated by French and other European languages. The fourth section discusses the Decolonial Socialist Regime of Sekou Touré, characterised by the authenticité programme and the dominance of jeli songs in Maninka on the public stage. The fifth section investigates the latest development in Guinean popular music during the Liberalisation period, featuring the rise of Susu language and multilingual song performances in the jeli music. I discuss the findings and conclude the paper in the last two sections.

Background on the Republic of Guinea and the data

Ethnic populations and languages in Guinea

Today’s Republic of Guinea has around 14 million population² speaking as many as 40 local languages. The biggest local languages are Susu (Soussou, Soso) spoken in the region of Lower Guinea, including Guinea’s capital, Conakry (more than 1,670,000 L1 speakers in Guinea); Pular in the region of Fouta Djallon (3,266,000 speakers); and Maninka (Malinké) in Higher Guinea (more than 2,350,000 speakers; Bah & Bangoura, 2017). Conakry, the capital of the country and a big maritime port on the Atlantic Ocean, has approximately 1,660,000 inhabitants. No census data is available for the city itself but one can assume that its population reflects the demographics of the сapital region, where the most prominent ethnolinguistic groups are the Susu (37%), the Pular (34%) and the Maninka (18.7%) (Bah & Bangoura, 2017).

The only official language is French, the language of the former colonial métropole. It is used in education, administration, and as a lingua franca when the interlocutors are not aware of, or do not speak, each other’s language (Khachaturyan & Konoshenko, 2021). English is taught at schools and universities, and, despite its historically peripheral status in the country, it is gaining popularity among the younger urban population.

As demonstrated by Khachaturyan & Konoshenko (2021), most Guineans speak at least three or four languages. Those who grew up in Conakry, typically speak Susu, on a par with some Maninka and Pular, as well as some other languages depending on their ethnic background, and at least some French depending on their education level.

Traditional music in Guinea: the jelis and the Maninka language

One of the most salient West African musical traditions belongs to the so-called Manding culture (Charry, 2000; Counsel, 2019), associated with speakers of Manding languages mainly residing in Guinea (Maninka), Senegal and Gambia (Mandinka), Mali (Bamana), and Ivory Coast (Jula). Charry (2000, pp. 1–3) identifies three domains of traditional Manding music: the hunters’ music, the drumming music related to various life events, as well the music of jeli, a special caste of hereditary musicians.

Traditionally, the jelis have preserved the Manding oral history dating back to the old Mali empire (circa 1230 CE to circa 1550 CE, Charry, 2000; Counsel, 2019, p. 383), and they have also been engaged in praise-singing to the nobles. In pre-colonial times, they served as the court musicians for the Manding ruling families. The most common jeli instruments are kora and ngoni, both plucked lutes, and balafon, a wooden xylophone (Counsel, 2019; Dave, 2014). In the Manding tradition, men usually play the instruments, while women sing and provide rhythmic accompaniment.

The distinction between jeli and non-jeli musicians is still fundamental in the Manding society (Charry, 2000, p. 3), and as discussed below, the Maninka jelis have played a pivotal role in the history of Guinean popular music (Counsel, 2004). Since the Manding music originated in the societies speaking Manding languages, in Guinea, the traditional jeli songs were mainly sung in Maninka.

Other sources of local music in Guinea involve the Fula flute of Fouta Djallon, the polyphonic initiation music of Forest Guinea, as well as the farmers’ and the fishermen’s music of Lower Guinea (Bender, 1991, p. 5). These cultures encompass complex instrumental and choral music but no solo singing tradition comparable to that of Manding.

The data: Syliphone archive database, recordings and interviews

My account of multilingualism in Guinean music is based on three types of sources: the Syliphone archive database, studio recordings mostly published on YouTube and my interviews with the musicians.

The recordings of the earlier period (1960s–1980s) analysed in the fourth section were taken from the Syliphone archives of the British library comprising more than 6,000 recordings made between 1961 and 1990 (Counsel, 2015, 2017). The accompanying database of the recordings includes various types of metadata, such as the place of recording and, most importantly, the language(s) of each song, annotated manually by Counsel’s Guinean consultant (Counsel, personal communication, May 3, 2023). Although there might be occasional errors in the language labelling, it seems accurate in most cases. Counsel kindly shared with me the database as an Excel file, so I could process the language labels quantitatively.

More recent recordings (1990s–2020s) that I analyse in the fifth section are studio recordings uploaded on the musicians’ official YouTube channels; I did not consider live performances. Since I was mostly interested in the evolution of style and language in jeli music, I created a sample comprising available studio recordings of twelve prominent Guinean jeli musicians: MoryKanté (1950–2020), Sekouba Bambino Diabaté (b. 1964), Ibro Diabaté (b. 1966), Ba Cissoko (b. 1967), Moh Kouyaté (b. 1977), Petit Kandia (b. 1985), Azaya (b. 1989), Tenin Dyawara (b. 1990), Ibro Gnamet (b. 1991), Diamounou Condé (b. 1991), Djelikaba Bintou (b. between 1990–1995?), Manamba Kanté (b. 1996). With the help of Francis Phalalazar Loua, I then identified the languages in 72 songs performed by the singers from the list. In order to get a more detailed glance at the multilingual patterns in the songs, two songs were fully transcribed during a workshop at the Institute of Applied Linguistics in Conakry in June 2023. I discuss one of these songs (Kanté, 2021) in the fifth section. I do not publish full song transcriptions here for copyright reasons.

In order to arrange the interviews, I contacted the musicians via Facebook and Instagram. Unfortunately, the jeli musicians were harder to reach out to, so I decided not to limit myself to this professional group, but rather interview any Guinean singers, who were eager to talk to me, since they all could provide valuable information based on their experience. I made five approx. 50-minute WhatsApp interviews with contemporary Guinean musicians of various origins and making music of different styles. Among the jelis, I was able to talk with Moh Kouyaté, who is currently residing in France. I also had a short conversation with Manamba Kanté and a more extended one with her husband, Soul Bang’s, an RnB musician.

In the interviews, I asked the musicians about their personal and professional biographies, their music and language choices and their views on Guinean music in general. The interviews were carried out in French and automatically transcribed using Sonix, a publicly available software. All the musicians gave their consent to be unanonymously represented in my research, so I list my respondents in Table 1. Although my respondents have very diverse backgrounds, their views on multilingualism in Guinean music are remarkably similar. I further discuss this in the fifth section.

Table 1. Interviewed musicians.

Civil name	Stage name	Year of birth	Ethnic identity	Current residence	Music genre
Mamadou Kouyaté	Moh! Kouyaté	1977	Maninka, griot	Paris, France	Manding music
Falle Nioke	Falle Nioke	1987	Coniagui	London, UK	Electronic
Souleyman Bangoura	Soul Bang’s	1992	Susu	Conakry, Guinea	RnB, dance hall
Jean Richard Balamou	Légendaire (group)	1994	Kpelle	Conakry, Guinea	Hip-hop
Faba Kessing Fanoh	Légendaire (group)	1993	Koranko	Conakry, Guinea	Hip-hop

Colonial period (1898–1958)

Guinea became a French colony in 1898 after the defeat of the national resistance leader, Almami Samori Touré. It was then during the colonial period that European instruments were introduced in Africa, starting the history of African popular, i.e. Western influenced music (Bender, 1991; Emielu, 2011). Moh Kouyaté, a guitarist born in 1977 into a jeli family, told me that his grandfather was the first in their family to acquire a guitar during the colonial times (M. Kouyaté, personal communication, April 10, 2023). Apart from the guitar, saxophones and trumpets also arrived in Guinea during that period.

In the French colonies including Guinea, the metropolitan government adopted a colonial policy of assimilation in the course of their mission civilisatrice (Khapoya, 2016; Tinsley, 2015) in all cultural domains including language and music. In 1944, the colonial administration banned local languages from all public and private schools in French West Africa (Tinsley, 2015). It disseminated French and European music in schools, religious associations, and dance halls. The first Guinean orchestras, e.g. La Douce Parisette, were largely imitative. They played tango, waltzes, jazz and other European music (Bender, 1991, p. 6; Lavaine, 2010), see Benga (2002) for similar phenomena in Senegal. Unfortunately, I was unable to find any recordings from colonial times since the recorded history of Guinean music started shortly after independence (Counsel, 2015), but one can assume that European music was performed in French and other European languages.

During the colonial times, the jelis continued to perform as traditional singers, although their role was shrinking, since the noble courts were losing power as well (Counsel, 2004, p. 5). It is worth noting that, although the jelis were not necessarily monolingual and were capable of performing in languages other than Maninka, e.g. in Pular (Valentin Vydrin, personal communication, June 17, 2023), it is most likely that they still performed in Maninka, even when addressing their praise to non-Maninka nobility. The Guinean national anthem, ‘Freedom’, arranged by Fodeba Keita in 1958, presents an interesting historical case illustrating this matter.

The anthem is based on an old Maninka praise song performed in 1904, at the very beginning of the colonial times, by a jeli Korofo Moussa to the king Alpha Yayo Diallo (b. mid-nineteenth century – 1912), of Pular origin (Sano, 1963; Posthumus, 2016, p. 5). This praise song, straightforwardly entitled ‘Alpha Yaya’, sung by a Maninka jeli to a Pular king, was supposed to maintain peace and mutual respect in the multi-ethnic society. It remained in the common jeli repertoire ever since, and it has been generally performed in Maninka (Sano, 1963; Guinea Syliphone Archives), cf. its rendition by Sory Kandia Kouyaté (1937–1977), one of Guinea’s most successful singers, with Ensemble Instrumental de la Radiodiffusion nationale in 1975.³ The song is performed entirely in Maninka; its first lines are represented in (1).

(1) Alfa Yaya, Alifa Yaya, mansalu bέε man kan, tɔnɔ le ka ɲaji bɔ [Maninka]

Alpha Yaya, the kings are not the same, when someone supports you, you cry because of him

Ah boribali tununna n ma, tɔnɔ le ka ɲaji bɔ [Maninka]

He who does not disappear, we cry in his absence

For obvious reasons, no recordings of the original performance exist, but, based on more recent recordings, one can infer that the original song addressed to the Pular king was most likely performed in Maninka, see also Sano (1963).

Decolonial Socialist Regime of Sekou Touré (1958–1984)

Social background

As mentioned above, Guinea was the first French colony in West Africa to gain independence in 1958. Guineans voted ‘no’ at a constitutional referendum organised by Charles de Gaulle’s Fifth republic government in September 1958. The French reaction to the Guinean ‘no’ vote was punitive, and the colonial administration quickly left Guinea (Khapoya, 2016, p. 175). The Guinean government headed by Sekou Touré thus started building a variety of African socialism, keeping almost no contact with its former métropole. Sekou Touré’s period is by far the best documented in Guinean history, as well as in the history of Guinean music (Bender, 1991; Colomer, 2005; Counsel, 2004, 2015, 2019; Dave, 2014, 2019; Lavaine, 2010). It was characterised by the radical decolonisation of Guinean culture as well as by the heavy politicisation of Guinean music.

As for the language policies, the role of French was severely limited, and eight local languages, labelled ‘national’ (Susu, Maninka, Pular, Kissi, Kpelle, Loma, Wamey or Koniagi and Oniyan or Bassari) were chosen as media of instruction for primary and middle school levels (Benson & Lynd, 2011). In Touré’s Guinea, language was regarded as central to the nascent postcolonial national culture (Tinsley, 2015, p. 238), cf. a more general reflection on the role of language(s) in the postcolonial African cultures (Thiong’o, 1986).

Here is how Counsel (2019) describes Sekou Touré’s policy making in the musical domain:

some of the measures introduced in the early 1960s included barring foreign music from the national airwaves, forcing all private groups to disband, creating new state-funded musical groups in all major towns and regions, and instructing the musicians of the new groups in the modernisation of their local traditional musical styles. (Counsel, 2019, p. 384)

The new state-funded orchestras, e.g. Kélétigui et ses Tambourinis, Balla et ses Balladins, Bembeya Jazz, now worked as vehicles of political propaganda, but were still internationally successful because of the quality of their music (Counsel, 2019; Lavaine, 2010). Sekou Touré started building socialism, heavily influenced by the ideas of Pan-Africanism (Khapoya, 2016) and authenticité (Baaz, 2001). The task for the musicians was thus to return to the so called ‘traditional’ music for inspiration while modernising their approach to instrumentation and arrangements. As put by Counsel (2017, p. 3), ‘music that was once played on the kora and balafon was now played on the electric guitar and saxophone, so as to meet the sensibilities of a modern nation while retaining the authenticity of the original.’ Moreover, Guinean orchestras were the first in Africa to provide expansive orchestral arrangements of traditional epic narratives and stories.

By the late 1960s, Guinea’s cultural policy had successfully created a network of regional orchestras and musical groups that performed the ‘neo-traditional’ music in local languages. Still, despite the declared nationwide support of music, the visibility of musicians of various ethnic backgrounds and, consequently, their languages, was not at all even in the Guinean music of that period.

The dominance of jelis and the Maninka language in the Syliphone recordings

Sekou Touré belonged to a noble Maninka clan by origin and he was largely supported by jelis. For that reason, many musicians chosen for the first Guinean orchestras were of Maninka origin, and the orchestras performed old Maninka songs in new arrangements (Bender, 1991; Counsel, 2004; Dave, 2019), thus sowing the seeds ‘for Malinké music to dominate the music of Guinea during Touré’s presidency, and for the Malinké jelis to play a significant role’ (Counsel, 2004, p. 31). The jeli dominance can be immediately assessed via the dominance of the Maninka language in the recordings of that period.

The music of the new orchestras was recorded by Syliphone, a national record label, and a great amount of those recordings were preserved in the Syliphone Archive of the British Library. The Syliphone recordings strike the listener with their abundant multilingualism: first, on the regional level, since the archive features recordings from most remote places in Guinea, performed in 20 local languages, and second, on the level of individual orchestras, since the same orchestra commonly performed songs in different local languages, as well as in French (rather rarely) and in Spanish, due to the influence of Cuban son music. And yet, a quantitative analysis of the data reveals an unquestionable dominance of the Maninka language in the recordings.

Counsel (2015, p. 572) himself observes that songs performed in the Maninka language account for over 70% of Syliphone recordings. In the Excel table that Counsel kindly shared with me in April 2023, there are 9394 song entries, and 4833 (51.56%) of them are sung in Maninka only, with 151 more songs, where Maninka appears on a par with other languages, most often French. Some further statistics for the recordings made in Guinea in general and particularly in Conakry are represented in Table 2.

Table 2. Languages of the Syliphone recordings.

Language	Overall in Guinea	Conakry
Maninka	4833 (51.56%)	1373 (63.56%)
Susu	919 (9.78%)	320 (14.81%)
Pular	1076 (11.45%)	50 (2.31%)
Kpelle	347 (3.69%)	17 (0.78%)
French	230 (2.44%)	42 (1.94%)
Spanish	130 (1.38%)	62 (2.87%)
English	76 (0.81%)	10 (0.46%)
Other languages (including mixed)	1296 (13.8%)	169 (7.82%)
Instrumental	491 (5.22%)	119 (5.5%)
Total	9394	2160

Despite the apparent difference between Counsel’s (2015) and my calculations, the Maninka dominance is nonetheless clear in the data. As discussed earlier, the Maninka accounted for no more than 18.7% population of the capital region in the recent census (Bah & Bangoura, 2017), and there is no reason to assume that their proportion was bigger during the Sekou Touré’s period. Hence, 60% percent of the Conakry Syliphone recordings performed in Maninka do not proportionately represent the Maninka population but rather indicate the dominance of the Maninka musicians and their language during that period. Manding cultural heritage and aesthetic was indeed ‘at the façade’ of Guinean nationalism (Counsel 2015, p. 572), which explains why other local languages were less prominent in the Guinean stage of that time. Finally, note that songs fully sung in French or marked as including French elements, account for less than 5% of the recordings, illustrating the strongly decolonising language policy.⁴

Liberalisation period (1984 – present)

Social background and the rise of Susu music

A week after Sekou Touré died in 1984, a new government of Lansana Conté, of Susu origin, came to power in Guinea as a result of a military coup. The new government, albeit also authoritarian, chose liberalisation of the Guinean economy and restored French as the language of school education ‘aligning with European French interests’ (Benson & Lynd, 2011: 114). The eight national Guinean languages were no longer used in writing except for some language-specific initiatives, e.g. N’Ko (Tinsley, 2015), and Bible translations by foreign missionaries. The authenticité cultural programme was abandoned, and the state stopped supporting the musicians as civil servants (Colomer, 2005; Counsel, 2017), so they entered the capitalist market to survive.

Starting from the late 1980s and later in 2000s, new urban genres have become popular in Guinea, e.g. ‘neo-traditional’ music, reggae, hip-hop, then later dancehall, RnB and afrobeat (Dave, 2014, 2019). The new music styles have been mainly developed by Susu musicians (Colomer, 2005) and are often performed in Susu language, as well as in other major languages of the country (Maninka and Pular), but also in English and French.

For example, the best-known Guinean reggae musician is Mohamed Soumah, a singer of Susu origin, who performs under the pseudonym of Takana Zion (b. 1986).⁵ Souleyman Bangoura (b. 1992), another Susu musician known as Soul Bang’s, makes RnB music.⁶ Both Takana Zion and Soul Bang’s mainly perform in Susu, English and French, but also sometimes in Pular and Maninka. Soul Bang’s even has a song ‘Gnohouzo’, where he sings in Kpelle, the language of Forest Guinea, which is the most remote and the most exoticised Guinean region.⁷

Overall, two trends can be identified in the recent popular music in Guinea starting from the late 1980s. First, it is (i) a strong presence of Susu language, as the language of the performers themselves and the dominant language of Conakry, the capital. Second, there is (ii) a strong trend towards multilingualism, whereby the singers address the larger audiences in their own languages, mostly Pular and Maninka on a par with Susu. In their interviews, my respondents quite unanimously noted that in order to become a successful musician in Guinea, one must sing in Susu, but also in Pular and Maninka, cf. the following fragment of an interview with Falle Nioke, who makes electronic music:

(Interviewer): pour devenir une star en Guinée, il faut chanter en quelle langue? Quelle langue peut donner plus de succès? [In what language should one sing to become a star in Guinea? What language can bring more success?]

Falle Nioke (b. 1987, of Coniagui origin, currently resides in London; April 11, 2023): La langue soussou. C’est la langue qui est parlée plus que toutes les langues. Après c’est la langue poular et la langue malinké. [The Susu language. This language is spoken more than others. Then it’s the Pular language and the Maninka language]

Overall, Guinean musicians stress the importance of reaching their audiences in their own languages.

Souleyman Bangoura (b. 1992, of Susu origin, resides in Conakry; April 22, 2023): Si je chante en guerzé et qu'il y a des Guerzé déjà qui adorent ce que j'ai fait, tu sais que ça va leur faire plaisir encore de plus. Et voilà. Et si je chante en poular et qu'il y a des gens qui voient l'action, des Peuls qui m'adorent, ça ne va que leur faire plaisir. [If I sing in Kpelle, and there are the Kpelle people who already like what I’ve done, you know it will please them even more. That’s it. If I sing in Pular, and there are Pular people who see this, those who like me, this will only please them]

In this excerpt, Souleyman Bangoura, an RnB singer known as Soul Bang’s, suggests that singing in different languages pleases the audience. In the following fragment, Jean Richard Balamou, a rapper, draws a more radical picture. He states that the listeners reject the music if they don’t hear their own language, thus pushing the singers to include more languages into the songs.

Jean Richard Balamou (b. 1994, of Kpelle origin, resides in Conakry; April 28, 2023): On mélange tout pour que tout le monde se rassemble dedans. Parce que dans la musique d'ici, il y a une affaire de communauté aussi. Il y a des personnes, s’il n’a pas forcément entendu sa langue maternelle ou paternelle dans la musique, il ne prend pas le temps d'écouter si la musique est bonne ou pas dans sa, il repousse déjà. [We mix everything, so that everyone gathers there. Because in local music, there is also a community issue. There are people, if they haven’t heard their mother’s or father’s language in the music, they won’t take their time to listen whether the music is good or not; they already reject it]

Now, one might argue that the two identified trends, i.e. (i) the dominance of Susu and (ii) the trend towards multilingualism, are not particularly surprising, given that there are many Susu musicians on current Guinean stage and multilingualism in music is by no means new to Guinea, the older Syliphone recordings being also very rich in languages. To understand the real significance of these two trends, it is crucial to explore the music of contemporary jelis, the most elitist professional group of Guinean musicians tracing themselves to the old Manding tradition.

Multilingualism in the music of contemporary jelis

In the post-Sekou Touré era, the Manding music has remained strongly visible on the Guinean popular music stage, albeit somewhat modernised through the use of synthesisers and new rhythms. Still, it retains recognisable Manding scales and vocal melisma, sometimes also featuring traditional instruments, such as kora, and female choirs. My francophone consultants refer to it as ‘musique mandingue’ or ‘mamaya’, in the name of a popular Manding dance originating from Kankan, the capital of High Guinea⁸; and Internet resources sometimes also label it ‘afro-mandingue’ or ‘pop mandingue’ (Seck, 2012/2022).

Contemporary popular Manding music is performed by young Maninka musicians who claim jeli descendance in their social profiles as musicians. Some of them belong to well-known music dynasties, e.g. Manamba Kanté, the daughter of a jeli Mory Kanté, acclaimed as the most internationally successful Guinean musician, or Ibro Gnamet, the daughter of an extremely popular Guinean singer Ibro Diabaté. Unlike urban musicians, who often take nicknames, modern jeli singers tend to perform under their civil family names, because, in Manding tradition, the jelis come from specific clans recognisable by everyone, e.g. Kouyaté, Diabaté, Kanté, Cissoko (Sissoko) (Charry, 2000, pp. 99–100). Hence, in modern times, the jeli family names function as brands and markers of professional belonging.

While Maninka remains the primary language of Manding music, the trends for Susu presence and for multilingualism outlined above are strikingly visible in modern popular Manding music as well, especially among younger singers. Thus, older singers, e.g. Mory Kanté born in 1950, and Sekouba Bambino Diabaté born in 1964, usually sing in Maninka and in French, but the younger generations abundantly perform in Susu and also in Pular, together with French and Maninka.

I take the song ‘Hors de la zone de couverture’ performed by Manamba Kanté and premiered in September 2021 (Kanté 2021) as an example of jeli multilingualism. This song advises avoiding people who do not love us and coming closer to those who care more. It consists of an intro, two verses finished by a repeated hook line, a refrain and a final epilogue summary. The structure of the song with language labels is represented in Table 3.

Table 3. The structure of the song ‘Hors de la zone de couverture’ by Manamba Kanté (2021).

Part	Language
Intro	Maninka
Verse 1	Susu
Hook	Susu, French
Refrain	Maninka
Verse 2	Susu, Pular
Hook	Susu, French
Refrain	Maninka
Epilogue	French

Both Maninka and Susu seem equally salient in the lyrics. Maninka appears in the intro summarising the message of the song and in the catchy refrain, while most of the verses are sung in Susu, and the hook also includes Susu. Example (2) shows the hook in Susu with some French and the beginning of the refrain, which is fully sung in Maninka:

(2) Hook

[Susu, French] I mu rafan mixi naxan ma, a sa hors de la zone de couverture.

‘Someone who doesn't love you, put them outside of coverage zone’

Refrain (beginning)

[Maninka] N'i ye n fε, n ɲ'i fε, n'i tε n fε, n t'i fε

‘If you love me, I love you, if you don’t love me, I don’t love you’

The second verse is sung in Pular, which is clearly less salient in this song than the other languages. Finally, French has a special role, since it appears in the hook (hors de la zone de couverture) and consequently in the title of the song, as well as in the epilogue.

There are also some borrowings from French into the local languages, e.g. relation, forcer, retirer. Interestingly, the same idea is formulated in Susu in verse 1 and in Pular in verse 2, featuring identical French borrowings morphologically adapted in each language (3).

(3a) Verse 1, Susu:

A mu forsema, relasion mu forsema ‘it’s not forced, relationship is not forced’

(3b) Verse 2, Pular:

A forsataa, relasion forsataake ‘it’s not forced, relationship is not forced’

The song also features occasional examples of intrasentential code-mixing between Susu and French, as in the hook ‘a sa hors de la zone de couverture’, where a sa literally means ‘put him/her’ in Susu and the rest of the utterance is in French. In contrast, intrasentential code-mixing between the local languages is not attested, since the switches occur in different lines and correlate with the song structure, as in (2), cf. John (2015) on the formal structure of bilingual songs.

English in contemporary Guinean music

The presence of English, the international language of popular culture, is rather limited on the Guinean stage; cf. a similar observation related to Eastern and Southern African popular music by Makoni et al. (2010). It appears in reggae music, e.g. by Takana Zion, as well as in RnB, e.g. by Soul Bang’s, although Soul Bang’s admitted in his interview that his songs performed in English have been less successful in Guinea than those performed in local languages (S. Bangoura, personal communication, April 22, 2023). Also, urban musicians who work in dancehall and similar styles, tend to adopt English-inspired pseudonyms (e.g. Fish Killa, Ans-T Crazy), which symbolically connect them with the reference cultures, mainly in Jamaica.

Discussion

In this paper, I have explored the complex linguistic landscape of Guinean popular music in its historical context and its current state, with a focus on jeli songs. While jeli songs were traditionally performed in Maninka language in Guinea; they were marginalised during the Colonial period, which itself imposed European music and languages (mainly French) in Guinean popular culture. The Decolonial Socialist Regime of Sekou Touré, in contrast, put the jeli tradition at the forefront of the Guinean stage, making the Maninka language also the most visible in popular music. During the era of Liberalisation after Touré’s death, the jelis had to join the capitalist market and compete with rising Susu urban musicians. For this reason, the jelis have become much more flexible and versatile in their music, and their songs are now vividly multilingual. But crucially, rather than opting for international languages, e.g. English or French, as is often the case elsewhere in popular music (Berger, 2003; de Goede, 2015), Guinean musicians prefer singing in local Guinean languages, mainly Susu, Maninka and Pular, to cater for local audiences.

However, instead of employing linguistically homogeneous forms of local languages, Guinean musicians often use what can be described as ‘urban’ vernaculars or hybrid registers characterised by the high influence of French through code-mixing or borrowing, as in Manamba Kanté’s (2021) song. This study thus contributes to the ongoing discussion of hybrid linguistic varieties as a means of actual communication in many African societies reflected in popular music and thus empowered by added artistic value, suggesting that these varieties should be incorporated into the multilingual education policies (Makoni et al., 2010).

At the same time, I have demonstrated that the transitions between local languages (Maninka, Susu, Pular) appear through code-switching predicted by the song structure. The lack of intrasentential code-mixing between local Guinean languages echoes the observation made by Khachaturyan & Konoshenko (2021: 988) on the multilingual practices for Kpelle and Mano in Forest Guinea. In that region, code-mixing of a local language with French is rather widespread and represents someone as being educated and Europeanised, whereas code-mixing between local languages (Mano and Kpelle) is virtually not attested, except for cases of low language proficiency. Form-related code-switching between local languages attested in jeli popular songs also contrasts with more fluid translanguaging phenomena attested elsewhere in African music (Banda, 2019; Makoni et al., 2010).

My interpretation of structure-based code-switching in modern jeli songs is two-fold. First, it might reflect the actual patterns of code-switching and code-mixing in local languages vs. French attested elsewhere in Guinea. Second, structured code-switching between local languages, rather than more fluid code-mixing of the kind attested in e.g. Zambian music (Banda, 2019), may suggest that popular jeli musicians likely retain a strong sense of professional and ethnic belonging and present themselves primarily as Maninka musicians. This is also reflected in the way they stress their jeli descendance in social media and how they use family names as professional ‘brands’. And yet, modern jelis use other languages on a par with Maninka as a universal strategy to connect to larger audiences in Guinea.

Conclusions

Throughout the history of modern Guinea, popular music, and particularly the jeli music, has undergone complex changes pertaining not only to its musical style and content, but also to its language practices, as a response to the social changes in the country. To pin down its current complexity, I have illustrated the main patterns of multilingualism in one song (Kanté 2021), but a more systematic analysis of song multilingualism is needed for Guinean popular music. This goal requires transcribing and translating multiple songs featuring different languages, and it is a much more costly enterprise that goes beyond the limits of the present study. Still, this paper opens up a perspective for such research in the future.

Internet resources

Transcription software: https://sonix.ai/researchers

Guineas SyliphoneArchives https://www.bl.uk/collections/endangered-archives-programme-guineas-syliphone-archives

Digital libraries: www.last.fm, www.youtube.com, www.allformusic.fr, www.musiques-afrique.net

News websites: https://guineenews.org; www.gnakrylive.com; www.afrik.comwww.afroguinee.com

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Francis Phalazar Loua and the researchers of the Institute of Applied Linguistics in Conakry for their immense help in the course of this project. I also thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments that greatly improved the quality of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Kone Foundation (Koneen Säätiö) and the University of Helsinki under [grant number 0313471-7].

Notes

1 This periodisation should be treated with caution for at least two reasons. First, the Colonial and the Liberalisation periods include rather long time spans featuring complex social processes, hence they were by no means historically homogeneous. For example, as mentioned below, it was only in 1944 that local languages were officially banned from schools in French West Africa, including Guinea, but that was rather a culmination of earlier policies (Tinsley, 2015, p. 242). The second problem is that even the decolonial socialist period in Guinea cannot be straightforwardly placed on the timeline. On the one hand, the cultural decolonisation processes started at least in the early 1950s, several years before Guinean independence in 1958 (Bender, 1991, p. 2–3). On the other hand, the full-scale Socialist Cultural Revolution was officially proclaimed by Sekou Touré’s government only in 1968 (Dave, 2019, p. 1). Still, I take Guinean independence (1958) and Touré’s death (1984) as the most straightforward cut-off points in my periodisation.

2 https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/guinea-population/ accessed 24/04/2023.

3 Guinea Syliphone Archives: https://sounds.bl.uk/sounds/alpha-yaya-1001140199770×000004.

4 Counsel (2015, p. 572) also suggests that Fulbé musicians, who mostly sang in Pular, might have been dramatically underrepresented in the Syliphone archive, due to political tensions of Sekou Touré’s period. Since my current focus is on Maninka jeli musicians and their linguistic strategies, this issue is beyond the scope of this paper.

5 https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takana_Zion#cite_note-reggaefrance_20070606-3

6 https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul_Bang%27s

7 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VENEUPxClZY

8 https://www.mandebala.net/references/mamaya.php accessed 19/06/2023.