Daniel Laemouahuma Jatta

Daniel Laemouahuma Jatta is a Jola scholar and musician from Mandinary, Gambia, who pioneered the research and documentation of the akonting, a Jola folk lute, as well as the related Manjago folk lute, the buchundu, in the mid-1980s. Prior to Jatta's work, these instruments were largely unknown outside the rural villages of the Senegambia region of West Africa.

In the 1960s, scholars and writers began to seriously examine the traditional music of West Africa in their search for the roots of the blues, jazz, and the other music forms that had emerged in the African diaspora. However, in this quest there was very little study and documentation of West African stringed instruments done other than in the overall context of general musical and cultural traditions. For the most part, the only stringed instruments to receive specific attention were those of the griots, such as their plucked lutes (e.g. the Mande ngoni, the Wolof xalam, the Fula hoddu, the Soninke gambare, and the kora (the 21-string harp-lute of the Mandinka griots).

Griots are male members of hereditary music and word artisan castes found in certain West African Islamized peoples with similar tripartie caste systems. The griot phenomenon is limited to the various peoples of the Mande language family - some 53 related ethnic groups, such as the Bamana (or Bambara), Mandinka, Malinke, Susu, Soninke, and so on - as well as the non-Mande Wolof, the western Fulas or Fulani (Fula: Fulɓe; French: Peuls), Songhai (also Songhay), Sereer, Lebu, and Tukulóor.)

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