Anthony Struthers-Young
Keywords: Burkina Faso, Africa, Balafon, Drum, Toussian, Sambla, Birifor, Bwaba, Dian, Siamou
I was heading back from Djigouera, a Toussian village of southwest Burkina Faso. We had just picked up Emile and were stopping at a village called Djéri to meet a musician. Both Emile and the musician we were going to meet are griots, members of a traditional caste of musicians and storytellers in West Africa. Griots have many important cultural roles, including leading rituals and preserving the names of the ancestors of chiefs and other influential individuals. I had hired Emile to teach me the Toussian surrogate language and was about to spend a month learning how it works. The people of Djéri are Siamou, an ethnicity which neighbors the Toussian. I was curious whether the Siamou have a surrogate language and wanted to interview a Siamou griot to learn what I could about their balafon traditions.
As we were pulling into the village, I could see the clouds in the distance and knew that monsoon-season rains were not far off. After we exchanged greetings with the griot and his family, he went to get his balafon, an instrument that resembles a xylophone. It is the most important instrument for most cultures in this part of Burkina, and if a culture has a surrogate language, it will most likely be spoken on a balafon. Once he arrived with it, I began setting up my equipment, throwing an eye to the horizon. There was so much I wanted to learn but didn’t have the time to ask. I started with the most important question to me, “can you speak with the balafon?” and I was happy to hear that the answer was “yes.” From there, I began recording the pitches of each bar of the balafon. When he struck the fifth note, I hesitated.
“Did you hit the same bar?”
“No,” he said. “These two are twins.”
I didn’t have time to process. I moved to the next bar, feeling droplets of rain striking my arms. Once I had measured the pitch of each key, I rushed to get my equipment out of the rain and into the car, paid him for his time, and we left. As I was in the car, looking back at my notebook, I stopped and kicked myself. Twin notes with the same pitch? That makes the normally pentatonic balafon into a tetratonic one. That’s such a cool thing, but I didn’t stop to inquire what the significance of these twin notes are in the rush to escape from the rain. Clearly, there’s a ton of interesting things to learn about the many balafon cultures in Burkina, and I decided there to try and do a survey of as many cultures’ balafons as I could in the month I had left in Burkina.
The next day, I began learning how the Toussian balafon surrogate language works with Emile. I started with an interview, learning what I could about Toussian music culture and measuring the pitches of the bars. The Toussian balafon is a long, flat instrument. It can have any number of bars, but there tend to between 19 and 21. Generally, the griot plays it while sitting on a stool, holding the mallets between his index and middle finger. In concert settings, sometimes two or three griots will play one instrument at the same time, with musicians on both sides of the instrument. Griots start playing while they are children and are masters of the instrument—reversing the orientation of the instrument poses no difficulties for them.
As the weeks passed and I became more familiar with the surrogate language, Emile taught me several songs, and I could begin to grasp how important Balafons are in Toussian society. They are an integral fixture of most major events; each event has one or more songs associated with it. This repertoire includes songs for marriages, funerals, the planting and harvest seasons, circumcisions, etc. During the harvest and planting seasons, the griots will strap the balafons to themselves and walk through the fields, playing and singing at the same time—an exhausting undertaking during the sunny African summer. Learning both the surrogate language and some songs, I realized the musical mode and the speech surrogate mode of the Toussian balafon should not be conflated; the songs are subject to stylistic variation, ornamentation, and improvisation, and the pitches played might deviate widely from the pitches of speech. Because of this, the surrogate language must be studied on its own by asking the griot to play certain words and phrases.
So if the music played on the balafon is not the same as the speech surrogate mode, when and how is the surrogate language used by the Toussian? To be blunt, I’m not entirely sure. I was planning on exploring that question this summer, but COVID has delayed those plans so I can only give impressions and examples. You can’t immediately understand a surrogate language since it is quite ambiguous; understanding it is a skill you have to learn. Most young people don’t seem that interested in learning this, and according to Emile, it’s generally just the elders, especially women, who still can understand it. However, he uses it on a daily basis with his family—one of the first things that the children learn to hear on the balafon is “go get me a beer.” During a concert, he will tell his wife when he is ready to go to bed so she can go home and get things ready.
It’s not just his immediate family who can understand it. Circumcision ceremonies are communal and elders will schedule a day where all uncircumcised children go into the bush to undergo the ritual. As one might expect, some children are often frightened at the prospect and try to hide. If one of these children is seen, a griot will announce to the neighborhood that the child needs to be brought where the ceremony is taking place and women will leave their houses to bring them there. It seems, then, that the surrogate language is used both for personal and cultural purposes as banal as simple conversations to a means of conveying important religious and ritual messages.
While working with Emile, I met with a griot named Vie. He’s an important figure in the Bobo-Dioulasso music scene and leads a band which plays in cabarets across the city. The band members come from a number of ethnicities and they generally play Dioula songs which everyone in Bobo would be able to understand. However, he is Bwaba and can make and play balafons from both cultures. The Bwaba balafon is striking; unlike the flat Toussian, Siamou, or Dioula balafons, it curves up sharply, bending into a crescent. Just like its appearance, its sound is remarkable, as it is much deeper than the Toussian or Siamou balafon. Whereas the Toussian and Siamou can hit notes as high as 1200Hz, approximately the D above the treble clef staff, the Bwaba balafon maxes out at 520Hz, approximately the C one octave above middle C. Vie and Emile had a long chat about their respective balafons, and discovered a lot of similarities between them. According to Vie, two of the bars have curative properties, one of which is supposed to help cure certain ailments of pregnant women when played. This note is present in the Toussian balafon; it has the same pitch and heals the same illnesses. The Bwaba live rather far from the Toussian, at least two and a half hours or more by car going highway speeds—it’s fascinating to me how interconnected these traditions are even though the people practicing them live so far apart and speak unrelated languages.
I only had time to meet with one more griot before leaving Burkina, so I met with a Dian griot who had connections to Vie. The Dian are one of the Lobi ethnicities who inhabit the very south of Burkina Faso. The Dian balafon was long and flat like the Toussian and Siamou balafons, but just as the Bwaba balafon, it was tuned much lower. Its bars, though, were much thicker than the others, and when struck, they had almost a plucky, bouncy sound to them. In addition to singing normally, he often accompanied his music with a high wordless falsetto that followed the melody he played on the balafon. Soon after meeting him, I needed to head home, and left wishing I had the time to meet many more griots and hear them play their incredible music.
There are 63 different ethnicities in Burkina Faso; needless to say, my experiences have barely scratched the surface of the diversity of the customs and balafons of Burkina. My curiosity about the balafons hasn’t waned since arriving in the US, and I’ve been able to gain a slightly broader perspective reading other scholars’ work on the Sambla, Birifor, and Senoufo people. The Sambla have received a detailed and holistic analysis of their spoken and surrogate language. Laura McPherson has worked on both and found that the Sambla’s speech surrogate is incredibly nuanced and very productive. Any spoken phrase can be represented in the speech surrogate, and at some events the griots will talk with the attendees. If the interlocutor can understand the surrogate language well, these interactions can be rather intricate dialogues where the attendee offers a compliment and tip in Seenku, the Sambla’s language, and the griot responds, lips firmly closed, speaking only with the balafon (McPherson 2020). Like the Toussian, though, fewer people are learning how to understand the balafon surrogate language, so these dialogues are becoming rarer with each passing year. Lucas James, who has written a blog here, spent a summer working on the Birifor balafon. The Birifor live in Ghana and Burkina, and he has worked with griots on both sides of the border. He found that the Birifor have many phrases they can say on the balafon, but that there is no complete productive surrogate language (personal communication). Perhaps there was a productive surrogate language which existed in the past and has been lost due to disuse.
Hugo Zemp and Sikaman Soro published an interesting article on Senoufo balafons called Talking Balafons (Zemp and Soro 2010). The Senoufo live in Burkina, Mali, and Côte d’Ivoire; they worked with the Kafibele Senoufo in northern Côte d’Ivoire. They say that, like the Sambla, the Senoufo have both a music and speech mode and can represent speech well with the balafon. What struck me about the Senoufo examples they gave was that every example was played with both hands; generally for the Toussian, the surrogate language will be spoken with just one mallet, except when an octave is struck that marks the end of the phrase. Here, though, the Senoufo griot will play octaves which follow the same melody, occasionally diverging and striking an extra note. Here’s an example of that, from their article:
The data provided came largely from music and songs, so it is difficult to judge just how productive the surrogate language actually is. I have a hunch that the examples they gave are not true examples of the speech surrogate mode, and rather a music mode that has a strong correlation to the tones of speech.
I’ve made a chart which shows the interval between each bar for a given octave for most of the ethnicities I’ve discussed.1 These instruments are tuned by ear using intervals not found in western music, so writing it using western musical notations doesn’t really do it justice. Each vertical line represents an interval of 20 cents and semitones and tones are bolded. Many ethnicities have tuned their instruments so that the interval between the roots of the scale are slightly larger than a perfect octave. This should be interpreted as a stylistic choice, not an error.
I’ve talked at length about the instruments and music of these other cultures, but haven’t said much about their surrogate languages. That’s because I have a lot more questions than answers. I asked each griot if they can “speak” with their instrument and they all said “yes,” but that question raises several issues. Namely, how do the griots conceive of “speaking” with an instrument? If you have a couple of musical phrases that have meaning, e.g. the song reveille meaning ‘wake up,’ does that mean you can speak with an instrument? In our culture, the answer would universally be “no,” but that might not be the case in Burkina Faso. There are cultures in Burkina Faso which play the balafon but do not have a surrogate language for it. A notable example is the Dioula: they have a rich balafon tradition and no surrogate language, but the way they say ‘to play the balafon’ is bálá̰ fɔ́, literally ‘to speak the balafon.’ I ran into a similar issue in a Toussian village. We were dropping Emile off at his village, Djigouera. At this point I had worked a whole month on the surrogate language and knew mostly how it worked. I wanted to know if there were any other Toussian musical surrogate languages, perhaps spoken on a drum. We met with a drum griot and asked him if he could say “I came from Bobo-Dioulasso” on the drum he had at his feet. It was a large barrel drum played with a mallet. Without hesitation he said, “certainly,” and he began to strike the drum. He hit a note for each word in the sentence, but there was no difference in pitch. It was no surrogate language; no one would be able to understand it—it was much too ambiguous—but he was adamant that he could speak with it.
So how do we go about learning about a culture’s surrogate languages in efficient, unambiguous ways? Well, I think it merits a longer discussion and more thought than I’ve given, but it seems necessary to have some knowledge about the structure of the spoken language it’s based on. Only after a couple of elicitation sessions could you really determine how productive this purported surrogate language is.
1. The Birifor data comes from Northern Ghana, not from Burkina Faso (Godsey 1980). There might be significant differences the balafon tunings between the Birifor in Ghana and Burkina. Likewise, many ethnicities have several different types of balafons with different tunings, and tunings could vary between griots. These scales should not be viewed as comprehensive, but rather representative.
References
Godsey, Larry. 1980. The use of the xylophone in the funeral ceremony of the Birifor of Northwest Ghana. Los Angeles: University of California, Los Angeles.
McPherson, Laura. 2020. The talking balafon of the Sambla: grammatical principles and documentary implications. Anthropological Linguistics, to appear.
Zemp, Hugo and Soro, Sikaman. 2010. Talking Balafons. African Music 8.6-23.
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