OLAC Record oai:soas.ac.uk:MPI1083389

Metadata
Title:		The history of Difyarè and its coranic school as recounted by five residents
		Oral histories of Difiyarè (Difiare)
		Documentation of Baga Mandori (Atlantic, NIger-Congo) (ISO 639-3:bmd)
Contributor (recorder):		Frank
Coverage:		Guinea
Description:		This recording session started out on the previous Sunday, when we drove to this village in order to present myself and the project to the residents and to propose to record the history of the coranic school founded by El Hadj Aboubacar Camara. We had decided to principally target the brothers and wifes of El Hadj Aboubacar Camara. They readily accepted this and we set the following Friday as an appointment. I have heard about this coranic school ever since my first stay in Koukouba, where the name Difiyarè kept popping up in conversations about coranic schools. The school is quite famous in the region and El Hadji Aboubacar seemed to do quite well with it. He was able to voyage to Mecca as well as build a stone mosque and a stone house for himself in this remote area of Guinea. @I will have to take pictures of this village on my second field trip. We principally proposed to hear the history of the coranic school, but p041 also wanted to talk about the settlement history. @ I do not know yet, if he did then. On Sunday I had only made an appointment with the first wife as the others were not present. Apparantly, the residents had informed the other wifes, who do not principally reside in Difiyaré anymore to come and join in the recording session.
		This project delivers the first in-depth linguistic documentation of any of the Baga languages spoken in the Basse-Côte region of Guinea-Conakry, West Africa. Baga Mandori (also Baga Ma(n)duri), the focus of this project, belongs to the Atlantic (Niger-Congo phylum) group of languages and is part of the Mel cluster. Baga Mandori represents one of the two linguistic communities – the other being Baga Sitemu – that still use a Baga variety in intra-communal communication to some degree. The language is, however, under pressure by Soso, a Mande language and the dominant lingua franca of the region. This project will employ an immersive research approach, which aims to deliver a diverse and integrated multimedia documentary archive that will combine linguistic documentation with community training and participation. Linguistic documentation will be in the form of a trilingual dictionary (Baga Mandori-English-French), an extensive grammatical outline, an orthography, and annotated and transcribed audio-visual material from a variety of linguistic genres.
		He could not give a specific age, but said that at the time of Guinea gaining independence his first son had already been born. If he was 20 years a the time, that would make him around 75 years old. He claims to be the founder of Difiyare, although I think he meant to say he is the oldest of the family still alive whose ancestors came to found Difiyare. In his lifetime he did not fish for sale, but he sold his palm oil to Kanfarandé (to the 'Whites' as he says). He is initiated into a secret society, but did not progress much. He was initiaded to /ambaanco#ng/, what the Susu call 'Simo' he said. He made a point of remarking, that he did not get to know anything of importance during his initiation. He went to visit his brother at Conakry several times, for a week or so.
		She was a child during Sekou Tourés time, but does not remember him taking power. Her first child was born during the year of Sekou Touré's death which makes me think that she is in her mid fifties. She made a funny remark when I asked her about how she would identify to people from outside and she said that she would most definitely say Baga, because people are frightful of them. [This is a common theme that I have encountered in talks, Baga are respected for their mystical powers also related to their sacred groves. This is the reason, why the careful remarks around initiation, which are made towards me should be taken with a grain of salt. She mentioned the Fidao (a ceremony held in honor of the ancestors (also to forgive them for their pagan ways (according to Mila)) for the Baga group which is held annually at Bitonko, when asked about her Baga Sitemu competence, to indicate the close (spiritual?) ties between the two groups. She also indicated that she currently stays mostly in Difiare and she is waiting for her children in Boké to get married so that she can go to stay with them every once in a while to rest. At the moment she goes to Conakry or Kindia where she has other children.
		He said he was a young man when Guinea became independent, but does not remember the Second World War. I thus believe he is around 70. He claims to have gone to Koranic School for 29 years at Bitonko and then went to study further close to Bintimodia. [I am not sure what to make of this claim, because as far as I know Bitonko does not have a famous Koranic school, it is mostly for young boys.] He is part of a Sèrè for mutual support during sickness etc. He says that he is initiated and saw Mbaancong, but that he did not go any further. He says that his mother is a griot. He is an interesting case, because he says that he would give his identity as Nalu, but does not speak Nalu nor lives with Nalu people. He is testimony to what Sarro mentioned as the fluid system of identities.
		She said that she had not given birth to a child yet, when Sekou Touré took power, which was when her second small brother was born. I estimate her to be around 65.
		She is identified by her place of birth. Place of birth was commonly used as a means of clear identification for women during the interviews. This was usually in response to me asking, how a person would be identified given the high number of homonymical incidents in a village. She had not yet given birth to a child and her body was not yet completely matured, when Sekou Touré took power. So I would say that she was about 10 years old then which gives an approximate age in her mid sixties. Note that she did not speak during the session, but sat in the picture, I do not know why that is.
		p001 is the main researcher in this project which he runs from the University of Florida. He is emplyed as a Visiting Research Scholar at the Center for African Studies. This is his second language documentation project. In the first documentation project he documented the Atlantic language Nalu (naj) spoken in close proximity to Baga Mandori (bmd).
		This consultant has gone to university for an equivalent of a Bachelor's Degree (Licence) in, in his words, "Sociologie specialisé en development locale et des organisations administratives." The consultant lives in Conakry now, where he went for his studies. The other places of residences reflect his school years. Kanfarandé is where the first part of the secondary education of children in the sub-prefecture of Kanfarandé takes place, if they do not go to Kamsar. From there students move on to Kamsar to study for their Baccalaureat. He mainly travels back to the village for visits, but he says that he travels for 'missions" around Guinea maybe once or twice a year. He has been to Kankan, (2 months), Gueckedou (1 week), Benin, Cotonou (2 months); the last trip was on a sort of national scholarship. As an additional note, the nick name is a short for Saïdou, where the last syllable "dou" is altered to Dös.
		Denilson is a nickname taken from a famous soccer player Denilson, although it is not clear to me which one and I forgot to ask. When I asked him about his grandmothers, he told me that he never met his grandmothers. He lives in Kamsar with this brother. He resides mainly in Kamsar. In his own estimation about 10 months, the rest of the time he is either in his home village (2 or 3 weeks, 3 or four times a year) or in Conakry. It is in Conakry where he goes and buys the clothes he sells on the market. He said he goes to Conakry about once a month. Apart from Kamsar where he did most his schooling after grade 10, and where he now lives, he lived for approximately five years 2008-2013 in Dalaba for his studies. Before that he resided in Kanfarandé for grades 3-10. He has been to Labé once for a few weeks.
Format:		audio/x-wav
		image/jpeg
		video/mp4
Identifier:		oai:soas.ac.uk:MPI1083389
		PD-50029-13
Identifier (URI):		https://lat1.lis.soas.ac.uk/ds/asv?openpath=MPI1083389%23
Publisher:		Frank Seidel
		University of Florida
Type:		Audio
		Image
		Video
OLAC Info
Archive:		Endangered Languages Archive
Description:		http://www.language-archives.org/archive/soas.ac.uk
GetRecord:		OAI-PMH request for OLAC format
GetRecord:		Pre-generated XML file
OAI Info
OaiIdentifier:		oai:soas.ac.uk:MPI1083389
DateStamp:		2018-03-30
GetRecord:		OAI-PMH request for simple DC format
Search Info
Citation:		Frank (recorder). n.d. Frank Seidel.