Creativity Quote by Sona Jobarteh

Jobarteh’s line lands like a quiet jailbreak: success, she suggests, wasn’t just about mastering an instrument, but about refusing the room it’s usually played in. The kora isn’t merely a harp-lute; in much of West African tradition it sits inside a tightly policed cultural ecosystem, historically tied to male jeli (griot) lineages, apprenticeship norms, and expectations about who gets to be a public carrier of memory. By saying she would “never enter myself into the cultural context”, she’s naming a strategy that’s both pragmatic and radical: sidestep the gatekeepers rather than beg them to unlock the gate.

The phrasing matters. “Consciously made a decision” rejects the myth that trailblazing is accidental; it frames gendered barriers as structural, not personal. She’s also refusing a familiar demand placed on women in heritage arts: prove you “belong” by submitting to the tradition’s social codes. Instead, she decouples the instrument from its inherited policing and relocates it into a global performance economy where virtuosity can circulate without the same local sanctions. That’s not a neutral move; it risks being read as betrayal, dilution, or “not authentic”. Jobarteh anticipates that charge by grounding her choice in survival and agency rather than provocation.

The subtext is sharper: tradition can be beautiful and still be an apparatus. Her success becomes an argument that cultural preservation without renegotiating power is just preservation of hierarchy, with better acoustics.