Type “Africa” in the Google News search engine, and you’ll find a plethora of stories about poverty, AIDS, and genocide. Guy Djoken, the executive director for the UNESCO Center for Peace in Frederick, is hoping to instead highlight the contributions the continent has made to music and culture on Saturday when his organization hosts Frederick’s first-ever USA-Africa Day. The event will feature singers and other performers originally from Africa during an evening concert.
“We hope to have the whole community come out to see what Africa has to offer,” Djoken said. Scheduled performers include Cheick Amala Diabate, a master of the ngoni, and Jorrix, an up-and-coming hip-hop artist. The ngoni is a guitar-like instrument made from wood and cowskin.
Diabate, a native of Mali who has played at the Kennedy Center in D.C., called the ngoni the grandfather of the American banjo.
“It's a special instrument,” he said. In addition to performing his peaceful, uplifting songs, Diabate will also tell stories of his home nation. The musician said he is a griot, an African storyteller, who learned that trade from his father.
Griots are the glue of the African societies, Diabate noted. He recalled his father counseling married couples when he was young. “I'm still doing the same things in America,” Diabate said.
He said his cousin is Toumani Diabate, the internationally known Malian kora player who recorded an album with Taj Mahal and has appeared on a Bjork album. Jorrix, meanwhile, grew up in the west African nation of Cameroon. At the time of his birth, his family lived in New York City and his mother worked in Cameroon’s United States embassy.
But the family moved back to Africa a few months later. In Cameroon, everyday was a fight for survival and you thanked God when food was available, Jorrix recalled. “I can really say I grew up fast.
” To help support his family, Jorrix worked as an actor. When he was 17, in 1999, he moved back to New York to attempt a career as a hip-hop artist. The songs on his first CD, “The African Beast,” combines African melodies and beats with American-style rapping.
Some of his songs are tributes to family members, such as one that praises his mother, who raised him as a single parent. Another is from the perspective of a man trying to pick up a woman in a club. “I'm just trying to have fun,” said Jorrix, who’s real name is Alexandre Joris Yemeck.
The 25-year-old hasn’t yet returned to his homeland, although he hopes to someday to see friends and family. “I want to go back to Cameroon having accomplished something,” he said. When he returns, he noted, acquaintances will ask him for money, assuming he found fortune in America.
Since he left, his grandmother and three aunts have passed away. “I just hope I'll be able to see everybody else,” he said. Saturday’s event will also feature Rising Sun, a reggae band; Kwame Ansah Brew, an African drummer and dancer from Ghana; and Ikeja Ogba, a rapper from Nigeria.
Tastes of African cuisine will be available at the event. Djoken, an exile from Cameroon, said he is looking forward to again tasting vegetables like ndole and taro. “African cuisine,” he said, “is an art by itself.
News RSS