Aging & Wisdom Quote by Sona Jobarteh

Tradition is often sold as a museum exhibit: glass case, velvet rope, no touching. Sona Jobarteh flips that posture into something closer to a living instrument. Coming from a musician who sits inside a lineage (the West African griot tradition and the kora’s inherited repertoire) while also pushing it outward, her point isn’t polite multiculturalism. It’s a power claim: continuity doesn’t require obedience.

The intent is pragmatic and slightly defiant. By insisting tradition “has to evolve”, she rejects the common move where “authenticity” becomes a cage, especially for artists navigating global stages where gatekeepers reward an exoticized, frozen version of “the old ways”. In that economy, tradition is treated like a brand promise. Jobarteh frames it instead as a process, something with agency that “grows with humanity”. That’s not abstract; it’s a reminder that people have always edited, improvised, hybridized. The idea that traditions were ever pure is usually nostalgia with better marketing.

The subtext also lands inside gender and authority. In many hereditary musical systems, legitimacy is policed by lineage and custom. Saying tradition evolves is a way of making room for new voices and new roles without severing the ancestral line. It’s a rhetorical re-tuning: preserve the root note, change the melody.

Context matters because she’s speaking from inside the tradition, not as an outsider requesting updates. That insider status gives the argument bite: evolution isn’t betrayal; it’s the oldest method of survival.