The drum, the accordion, and the hands that hold the village up

Batuku is the oldest music of Santiago, and it belongs to women. There is no drum. The players sit in a circle with a cloth rolled tight between their knees — the txabeta — and beat it with their hands, building a pulse that starts loose and tightens until it will not let go.

Over that pulse comes the finaçon: sung verse, improvised, carrying proverb, judgement, and the reputation of people present. The woman who leads it is not decoration. She is the one saying the thing out loud, and finaçon is how a community argued with itself where nothing was written down.

Colonial authorities read all of it as noise and backwardness, and discouraged it for as long as they were able. It survived in the interior because the interior did not ask.

Two instruments. The gaita — a diatonic accordion — and the ferrinho, an iron bar scraped with a knife. That is the whole band, and it is enough to fill a yard.

Funaná is interior music: fast, physical, played at gatherings and made for dancing close. The colonial administration disapproved on both counts — too African in sound, too unsupervised in practice — and it stayed in the fields and the villages rather than the halls.

After independence it came out. Bands took the accordion line onto electric guitar and keyboard and made funaná a national sound, and later players carried it back toward the gaita and ferrinho it started with. What had been offered as evidence of backwardness became the music the country plays to itself.

Tabanka is a mutual-aid society. Neighbours are bound to one another by obligation rather than by contract: members pay in, and the society pays out — for a funeral, an illness, a house that needs rebuilding, a family that has run short. It kept people alive through famine when nothing else did.

It is also a festival, with its own calendar, its own procession, and offices held by named members. The word comes into Kriolu from Temne, where it meant a fortified village, arriving through the Upper Guinea trade and becoming, on Santiago, the name for a way of holding a community together.

Colonial and Church authorities were wary of it for exactly the reason it mattered: it organised people outside their institutions, and answered to itself.

Maize and beans, and what the interior learned to do with them. Katxupa — maize and beans cooked slowly, with whatever else the house has — is the dish the whole country claims, and it is a dish built for a place where food was never reliable. It is better the second day, which is the point.

Xerém takes the maize finer. The agricultural calendar and the social one are the same calendar: the rains decide both, and always have.