 It has such power to tell stories, music in itself, even without words, music tells stories and music connects with the past, it connects with identities, it connects with history, it connects with personal histories. And so that's why I think music and history makes such a wonderful combination. To deal with the history of the whole region, who is very crucial in the perspective of the history of West Africa, because of the geographical position of Senegal, is a very small space. But this small space had the chance to have all the ecological systems of West Africa, the Sahel, the Savannah, and the forest and the mangrove, all together at the peak at the end of this continent. And at the same time, it is the summary, the summary of the whole of West Africa that you can find in this small space. And so I think our identity can be explained by the ecological factor, but also the historical factor dominated by the importance of the Atlantic since the 15th century. And so we can say today what is permanent is the diversity of the identities that we can find there, but also the brassage, the mixing of all these identities all together. It is with human generation that feels Gambia and Senegal are two different countries. My father never accepted that and he never believes Gambia and Senegal is not one country because these words were not in his vocabulary when he was born and growing up. The concept of Senegal has been given to us by foreign colonies and Gambia also has been given us by foreign colonies. So it is we who should come out with the acceptance or the denial. Are we going to stay called ourselves Gambians and Senegalese or are we going to call ourselves Africans or Senegalese? So this song is about that. There is a lot of power and a lot of energy and you can help this person. I think that Gambia ended up having a decisive role in the national liberation struggle. I think that Gambia also ended up saying no, we want our freedom, our musical expression and we want our truth, our identity and our history. So religion as far as Guinea-Bissau is concerned, it both continues from the youth point of view, but it is also a discontinuity. So religion going back to what we had yesterday from Maneka, I would like to use that word. Religion in Guinea-Bissau is more of a gumbe rather than a practice of one particular belonging that may be without Catholicism, Islam or Protestantism. Or African tradition of religion for that matter. I'm not talking about gumbe religion here as a mixture or mixing. I struggle with that word in my book and in other articles that I have published. I use the word creolisation, but creolisation I'm using here not in the sense of mixing, not in the sense of putting things together, but it is a dialogue. In Partisiad's word it is energy field in which things come together. They may not necessarily mix, but they have a form of communicating. And most of the time we play only two chords. One and five. It's one and five. Thank you. When he says a role, we speak of fifteen years. Because a few years ago women already married at thirteen. Normally that shouldn't be done because they are premature. No, they are not young yet. For me they are girls and I don't accept that. But it is the traditional way to fight against that. She is twenty three, she got married when she was eighteen. She had a daughter as her child when she was nineteen. I still think of myself as being young, very young, and I could still enjoy life. Youth is a kind of gendered category. But John, you somehow interpret youth as a kind of age category. And I think that no longer applies to many West African countries, like also what Maikani also used to say. People enter into marriage at a much, well, men enter into a marriage at a much older age. So I think youth is a kind of gendered category. But John, you somehow interpret youth as a kind of age category. You enter into a marriage at a much older age. So I think youth has become a very flexible category. And I think that is also what Al-Sindahan-Wana mentions when she speaks about youth in weight hoots. If Kanran comes out, it is accompanied by about ten young men. Well, they can vary in age. They can be, you know, from six onwards to sixteen. And so the status of the Kanran depends on the age of the people that come to the youth. So clearly this whole heritageization of Kanran comes with new forms of audience, performer-audience relationships. Anyway, just to make the point that although this process of objectification is clearly happening particularly to the performance, meanwhile, youth are still experimenting, exploring new possibilities and continuing to produce an entertaining performance with respect to all the regulations that Elvis and UNESCO might want to implement. What is amazing is about how Senegambia was linked to Louisiana, but also especially what Boeba-Karabari called La Senegambide Cide, Southern Senegambia. The peide-resicuteur, the land of the rice growers, I call it rice land. Something else also survived in Louisiana. Some of you probably know what I'm talking about, the Mardi Gras Indians in New Orleans. This is a way for the black people to acknowledge the help they got from the Indians in the early days of Louisiana, of French Louisiana. Earlier you talked about people singing around the Kankurang. I also heard people singing around the Kankurang about Mamachori. Sabare, Mamachori, Sabare. And Mamachori according to what I was told is Mamajombo. Mamajombo is a deity of fecundity and the protector of mothers and their children among the rice growers of Kazamaz and Guinea-Bissau. And Mamajombo is everywhere until today in Louisiana. They don't call her only Mamajombo, Mamajombo. There is a song, I mean it is a poem. Be careful what you do or Mamajombo, the god of the Congo and all you are the god of the Congo will hood you. In descent communities is something that's passed down from one generation to the next within a griot family. You have to be in the bloodline and that's the way the Sabare knowledge gets passed down. But when you have these situations in which many griot drummers are going elsewhere to Europe, to North America, you start having a shift I think from the importance of the descent community to the affinity community where you have new groups of people, new communities who are not born into the tradition but have come to know Sabare just through their love of drumming. Most of my performance for so many years of being here they are either a band context or a collaborative context so I mostly can play my own music. Either I'm playing Brazilian music or collaborating with different people where you bring something and then you kind of twist it a little bit so that it makes it more interesting to give them a platform to express themselves so it kind of loses the pure traditional context so that way of working, it kind of makes you always keep that in mind in your compositions. So therefore, yeah, that kind of changes a lot the way I approach Kora. The sense of listening to a lot of other instruments I can like to listen to a lot of different instruments. So I'm trying to really change my passion because the Balakon is something that is very fast. In Europe here, we don't really understand what Balakon is today we don't really understand it, it's too fast. If I try to play while people are asleep they listen to my music while I'm asleep. The song I'm going to play is a very old song. So in ancient times, when you play it, you play it like this. I tried to sleep and listen. Now if you want people to listen to this or to do what they are relaxing then you try to do it. And this is the original bit. Fission, convergences, divergences, boundaries and transcending various levels. So for me as a linguist, it always meant that I found it was an essential task for us to try and make sense of this dichotomy of your Kazanot where we have more than 30 named languages and a great cultural convergence yet this extreme multilingualism and the maintenance of these very complex repertoires. So you have this fusion, this mixed passage that we have evoked all the time yet you have this maintenance of we are Bailuk in some context we are Gujjahar, Nandianjahar in some context we are Jola in other context. That's not seen as a contradiction but as a particular contextualized social political identity. So small vulnerable groups that needed to maintain these close ties and needed to multiply alliances and they could not become similar because at the same time this was the epicenter of these transatlantic slave trade so they needed to be able to other groups or individuals because they needed to participate in the slave trade in order to be able to protect themselves at the same time so it's a very dialectic identity and I think maintaining multiple identities and indexing them also through different languages in different contexts was a strategic tool to maintain that so it would be similar and different in the right context. The thing that has been remarkable for me, the thread that has bound it all together is the holistic way in which we have to view of the region and of course that's one of the things which makes our job or certainly my job teaching in this city difficult because of course Western academia divides into discipline and categorize and one of the things we've seen is just how inappropriate that is as a way of thinking about this region. This has been a great conference it's so good to have history and music brought together it's so great to bring in all of these people from all over the world, multilingual conference and a conference in which people have been laid back and not constrained by having to read boring papers not one single person has gone to sleep during any of these sessions which is the highest praise I can give it it's been fun and it's also been a fantastic learning curve for most of us I think. Great, great conference.