Work Together
Bring the tradition into your building.
Farafina Kan designs residencies for schools, universities, and community organizations — from a single week to a full academic year.
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Residency hero
Mahiri working inside an institution (school gym, college studio) — a room that's clearly not the home studio, since this page sells to institutions who need to picture him in their own space.
Not an assembly. Not a performance with a Q&A afterward.
A residency means Mahiri and members of Farafina Kan are in your building repeatedly, working with the same young people over time, long enough for something to take hold. The difference between that and a one-day visit is the difference between an event and an education. We have done this work in public schools, charter schools, after-school programs, and university settings across the Washington region for twenty years. We know what a school day actually allows, what an administrator needs to be able to justify, and what happens to a group of students in week six that could not happen in week one.
Formats
K–12 School Residency
Weekly or twice-weekly instruction over a term, built around your schedule and your space. Drum, dance, or both. Culminates in a performance for the school community. Curriculum adapts by grade band — what a first grader does with a rhythm is not what an eighth grader does with it.
College & University Residency
Designed with African Studies, Ethnomusicology, Music, and Education departments. Lecture-demonstrations, studio instruction, and masterclasses. Academic rigor without sanitizing the cultural content. Available as a week-long intensive or a semester-long partnership.
Community Organization Residency
For arts centers, cultural institutions, faith communities, and youth programs. Structured around what your community already does, rather than dropped on top of it.
Rites-of-Passage Programming
A longer-arc residency using the Manding initiation structure as a developmental framework for young people — particularly young men — moving through adolescence. This is the deepest version of the work and requires real commitment from the institution.
What We Bring
- Instruments for every participant — no one needs to own drums.
- Instruction from Mahiri and, depending on scope, members of the Farafina Kan company.
- A curriculum built for your grade band, schedule, and learning goals.
- Cultural context taught alongside technique.
- A culminating performance, if wanted.
- Documentation and language your administration can use for reporting and funding.
Plenty of people can run a drum circle. Very few can tell your students where the rhythm came from.
Mahiri Fadjimba Keita is a certified professor of Tam Tam Mandingue International, the qualification system founded by Grand Master Mamady Keïta, who called him son. He studied directly under Famoudou Konaté and Djimo Kouyate. He has lived and taught in Guinea, Brussels, Asia, and Ghana, and he builds the instruments he teaches on. What that means for your students is accuracy. They will not learn a generic version of African drumming. They will learn a specific tradition, from a specific people, taught by someone who was trusted with it.
How It Works
1. Conversation — Tell us your setting, your students, your calendar, and what you are hoping happens. No cost, no obligation.
2. Proposal — We send a written scope — format, duration, staffing, curriculum outline, and cost — that your administration can review and approve.
3. Planning — We build the curriculum against your schedule and your space, and coordinate with whoever needs to be in the loop.
4. Residency — We show up, consistently, for the full term of the agreement.
5. Culmination — A performance, a demonstration, or a ceremony — whatever closes the loop for your community.
Not an institution — an individual drummer?
The Master's Circuit is a five-day advanced residency for intermediate and advanced drummers, hosted city by city. $500 per participant, minimum twelve drummers.
Tell us about your students.
Every residency is built from scratch, so the more you tell us, the faster we can tell you whether this is a fit. Please include your role, institution, city, type of residency, ages and number of students, timeframe, and budget range in your message.