“Bande Sonore,” MansA’s series of group listening sessions, offers an immersion into tina, a musical and ritual practice rooted in the mandjuandadi of Guinea-Bissau. Amid threats of extinction and contemporary reappropriation, Daniela Da Fonseca Gomes Nazaré, a music journalist and founder of Okinka, explores this legacy of national liberation music.
Derived from the mandjuandadi, a form of women’s social organization unique to Guinea-Bissau, the tina is at once a form of music, a dance, an instrument, and a ritual. Far from being confined to the domestic sphere, it has also played a role in nation-building: it can be found in much of the liberation music of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde.
Like many centuries-old African traditions, however, the tina remains vulnerable due to a lack of documentation, which contributes to its invisibility and even its gradual disappearance. Today, a new generation of artists is reclaiming this heritage, reinterpreting it, and bringing it into dialogue with new sounds, thereby giving it a new contemporary relevance.
The speaker: Daniela Da Fonseca Gomes Nazaré, a music journalist and cultural curator, explores African and Afro-descendant music with a particular focus on West Africa and the Afro-Portuguese-speaking world. In 2024, she founded Okinka, an independent media outlet dedicated to African and Afro-descendant musical cultures.
