Kora All Africa Music Awards: Three Steps To Total Acceptance

Have you tried to look up the Kora All Africa Music Awards website lately? I have have and it's no where to be found. One would expect such a respectable Organization to have a website up and running all the time to tell funs what is going on.

We are already in march, some 8 months away from one of the biggest African artist gathering and recognition of the continent.

Yet there are no information what so ever on what kind of flavor this year's Kora is going to have. I searched the internet for any information on the Company managing the event and found the following phone number 011 27 11-884-8820. I called but nobody seemed to know what Kora All africa Music Award was about.

The web addresses www.koraawards.com and www.koraawards.co.za are not fonctional. Server not found is the error message that I got. Now the question is What is going on with the Kora 2007?

By now the world is aware of Kora All Africa Music Award (KAAMA). It's been around for over 10 years, 12 to be exact.

Critics are accusing the organizing body of the event of trying to sell the show to the American public. I do not necessarily disagree with them but i think one can argue that sponsorship is what keep KAAMA alive and therefore eyeing the American market is a pure marketing tactic. There are other things that are not what they should be for an organization that has been around for a decade. The first thing that came up when I was researching this article is the lack of information.

KAAMA does not have a fonctionning website, Yes that's right. Unless it's burried away under some obscure server in antartica.

Both www.koraawards.com and www.koraawards.co.za are no where to be found. I call a number that was listed as contact number. That number was in South Africa all right, but the people there knew nothing about KAAMA. That is just one of the problems. The award categories are all blurry to me.

There are definitely artists that are known all over the continent et they do deserve to get recognized for it.

The only category really that I have issues with is the one defined as traditional. Africa is all about tradition, how do you define traditional when 99.99% of the music out of Africa is tradition based? Some musicians are feeling left out and they are the most aggressive critics of KAAMA. Now they are trying to compete by scheduling their award ceremony on the same day KAAMA airs. Case in point, Kenyan Music award of 2006. Those critics are turning to their national awards and that, is not the way forward.