West Africa

Assembled from 19 blocks · 2 evidence · 19 related

1. Story
2. The Atlantic-facing region running from Senegambia around the Gulf of Guinea, together with the Sahelian belt inland, from which the majority of people embarked in the transatlantic trade were taken and from which the instrument families and rhythmic practices in this Journey derive. It is not a single musical culture and treating it as one is the commonest error in writing about this subject. Its interior savannah and Sahel — Wolof, Fulbe, Mande, Songhai and Hausa societies — carry the plucked-lute and hereditary-musician traditions, long-standing Islamic contact through the trans-Saharan routes, and a solo, ornamented, melismatic vocal style. Its forest and coastal zones — Akan, Ewe, Yoruba, Igbo and others — carry the densest drum-ensemble and polyrhythmic practice and a strongly collective, call-and-response singing. Gerhard Kubik's argument that the blues descends principally from the west-central Sudanic belt rather than from the coast turns entirely on that internal difference: it predicts a solo string-accompanied tradition with wavy intonation and no percussion, which is what rural Delta blues looks like, and which the coastal drum traditions do not predict.
3. Knowledge
4. West Africa
5. Connections
6. Kora
7. Ngoni
8. Akonting
9. The West African drum ensemble
10. The Middle Passage
11. The trans-Saharan routes
12. The trans-Saharan routes
13. The Kru seafarers
14. Highlife
15. The transatlantic trade in enslaved people operates
16. Jefferson names the banjar and its origin
17. Evidence
18. Kubik traces the blues principally to the west-central Sudanic belt rather than to the West African coast, identifying an "ancient Negritic" and an Islamic strand, and characterising rural Deep South blues as solo, string-accompanied, percussion-free, pentatonic and marked by wavy intonation. V55 verification basis: the book is cited as the standing authority and is named in the Journey's own declared references; it was NOT read in this session, and the account of its argument comes from retrieved summaries and reviews.
19. Roughly 12.5 million people were embarked in Africa for the Americas and about 10.7 million disembarked, across voyages conventionally dated 1501–1866. V55 verification basis: a retrieved search result attributed the figure of 12,520,000 embarked and 10.7 million disembarked explicitly to the database's own Estimates page, which is what this record cites; the database itself was not queried, and its estimates are periodically revised, so a curator should take current figures from it directly.