This project informs the learners about the amazing cultural richness and variety of music and instruments in West Africa. This project connects the cultural dots by describing via documentary films how West African culture informed the nascent foundation of an American at large because no one forgets their culture in 60 days. 60 days at sea was the duration of the Middle Passage in the worst weather conditions. The string instrument of the successive medieval Empires of Ghana, and Mali i.e. Ngoni/banjo, and its musical heritage will shape the melodic, harmonic and rhythmic foundation of a nascent American culture through the banjo. This information is important to all Americans and particularly to African Americans who cannot find anywhere in the school curricula across the states of this nation any references to the wealth of their cultural traditions of origin. Traditions that have shaped America as we know it today. While Europeans codified the aesthetics of the movement in dance for example that we can witness in the Vienna Operas or the Paris Ballets, the reality is that the American people embraced West African aesthetics of the movement whether in the Charleston of the 19th century, LindyHop, Disco or HipHop of the 20th and 21st. This is also true of the foods of the American South, whether looking at the cuisine of Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and the reality that rice was introduced by West Africans in bondage only to become the Carolinas biggest economic engine...much needs to be said about our cultural traditions and origins to better understand our nation as a whole.
Learn More: https://www.pascalbokar.com