Le Mystère de la Kora de Sissoko

Back in November 2013, when I saw the band Thee Oh Sees perform at Terminal West in Atlanta, I noticed a note taped inside of frontman John Dwyer's guitar case.

"Dear Luggage Inspector," the note read.  "If you open this guitar case, please close it properly.  It's my life.  Thank you very much."

I don't know what prompted Dwyer to write the note, but I have to believe it wasn't entirely preemptive.  It's hard not to imagine that someone somewhere did not properly close the case after an inspection and that Dwyer, a professional musician whose livelihood depends on his instrument, experienced some degree of loss and/or damage.

In today's news, Malian musician Ballaké Sissoko is claiming that following a flight from JFK to Paris, the TSA destroyed his kora.  A kora is a 21-string Mandinka harp built from a large calabash gourd cut in half and covered with cow skin to make a resonator and with a long hardwood neck. Sissoko and other musicians from Mali perform beautifully complex music with the instrument in a truly unique and wonderful tradition native to sub-Saharan Africa.  

The kora and Mali's musical heritage are so culturally significant to the region that jihadists have threatened to destroy the instruments and cut the tongues out of singers.  Sissoko lives in Paris and has evaded the jihadists, but when he arrived home from his American tour and opened the case to his kora, he found it destroyed.   The instrument was in pieces, the neck ripped from the body, the strings yanked, and the bridge taken off the leather soundboard.  Inside the case was what appeared to be a TSA advisory, written in Spanish, saying that the case had been picked for a physical inspection to search for “prohibited items.” 

The TSA denies opening the case, alleging that the case was screened with a scanner and since no alarms were triggered it passed through security without being opened.  But someone somewhere along the line must have opened the case, because this type of damage doesn't just happen "in transit."

John Dwyer's note in his guitar case is testament to the fact that instruments do get damaged by baggage inspectors.  On top of that, Trump has recently announced an expansion of his racist travel ban that will exclude all Nigerians from entering the country.  Ballaké Sissoko's name, while Malian and not Nigerian, just might have sounded exotic enough to some over-zealous TSA employee that he opened the case anyway in spite of it passing the screening and dissembled the instrument looking for contraband, explosives, drugs, anything (the note said they were looking for "prohibited items").  

Frankly, that theory sounds more plausible to me than the instrument just dissembled itself in transit.