Katenen Dioubate ... a.k.a. CHEKA

Among the Mandé peoples of western Africa, caste is destiny; among the Dioubaté clan of Kankan, Guinea, the men and women are born to sing. Whatever else they do—going into business, higher education, or homemaking—each generation of Dioubaté is responsible for learning its society’s history, its favourite stories, and its great people’s lineages, and for entertaining its audiences therewith in song. Each generation is responsible, in short, for serving the world as jeli (known in the West as griots).

Katenen Dioubaté took to her calling from a tender age. She made her public debut singing for her school at the competitive Sékou Touré Kan (festival) when she was all of 7 years old. Her school would win the festival every year until she graduated. Katenen’s teachers often let her miss lessons to practise her craft, with their desk as her stage and the class her audience. (Let her teachers explain whether they were nurturing a prodigious talent, or prolonging her schooling for extra annual trophies.)

With aunts and other family to foster her talents, Katenen was promptly performing at the array of community and public events that required the presence of a jeli—baptisms, weddings, parties—where her voice so endeared her to the people of Kankan that everyone began to call her chère Katenen, shortened in the end to Cheka.

By 1998, Cheka and her new husband were leaving behind the humid nights of Guinea-Conakry for the snowbound days of Toronto, where they would have three children together. In this new milieu, however, her spouse disapproved of her performing publicly. Her audience was reduced to fellow Guineans and others lucky enough to be invited to the parties or traditional occasions Cheka attended or hosted herself.

One of the dramatic changes brought by her husband’s sudden passing was that she could return to the spotlight, and return she did. Cheka made her Toronto debut in January 2007 at the NOW Lounge, an event in tribute to the late kora master Boubacar Diabaté, followed by an appearance at the Lula Lounge. At AfroFest Toronto the same year, she  shared the stage with world-renowned kora player Toumani Diabaté before an audience of 10,000 in a performance that was broadcast nationally on CBC radio.

Cheka then proceeded to spearheaded the establishment in Toronto of Mamaya, a secular West African festival observed the day after Tabaski (Eid al-Adha). This annual celebration of unity and equality was born, like Cheka herself, in Kankan; over successive generations, it spread to the neighbouring countries of Côte D’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Senegal. Mamaya has even gained a foothold in New York City. Cheka, however, was the one to inaugurate Canada’s first ever Mamaya event in August 2007. It will not be the last: Toronto’s second annual Mamaya is already being prepared for July 2008.

In the meantime Cheka is also busy both in the studio, working on her forthcoming CD, and at home raising her family. Cheka is currently working on her first international release while performing at festivals and special events with her group,"SnowGriots",.

In 2009 Cheka shared the stage with Ballake Sissoko another World-renowned kora player at Tribute community (Performing Diaspora) at York University where she was hired by York University to explain the history of Griot, and the meaning behind the Griot traditions, their role and dance thought music and songs at primary and middle schools in Toronto North York.