The balafon is a xylophone of wooden keys ranged over gourd resonators, the foundational instrument of Mande music. The Sosso-Bala is said to be the ancestor of them all. Oral tradition holds that it belonged to Soumaoro Kanté, the sorcerer-king of the Sosso, the great antagonist of the Sundiata epic. When Sundiata Keita overthrew Soumaoro and founded the Mali Empire in the thirteenth century, the instrument passed into the keeping of his griot, and the duty of protecting it was given to the family that became the Kouyaté. From the Sosso it took its name: Sosso-Bala, the balafon of Soumaoro. To play the original keys, in Mande understanding, is to touch the moment the empire was born.

What makes the Sosso-Bala extraordinary is not only its age but its unbroken custody. For roughly eight hundred years, the same lineage has kept it, the office of balatigui, or guardian, passing down the generations. Of the hundreds of traditions on UNESCO's heritage list, the Sosso-Bala is the one whose entire history has been preserved within a single family. The rules surrounding it are strict. The instrument lives in its hut and emerges for a single ceremonial playing each year. Only the balatigui may play it. It cannot leave Niagassola unless it is carried, by tradition, on the head of its official guardian. This is not a museum piece behind glass. It is a living object, bound by living obligation.

Niagassola's claim on history runs deeper still. According to some oral traditions, this country was the site of Dakadjalan, said to be the capital of Naré Maghann Konaté and the boyhood home of Sundiata Keita himself, the founder of the Mali Empire before he was a founder of anything. The exact location of the empire's early capital is debated by historians, and Niagassola is one of several places that lay claim to it. But the association is fitting. If the Sosso-Bala belongs anywhere, it belongs near the ground that the epic itself remembers, in the heartland where the Mande story begins.

Niagassola the settlement is younger than the treasure it holds. It was founded around 1810, succeeding an earlier city called Waranban that the Scottish explorer Mungo Park noted after passing through in the late eighteenth century. The town stood on a hard road. It lay along a slave-trading route that ran from Kangaba toward the Atlantic coast, where captured people were sold to European and American slavers, a trade whose human toll the region carried for generations. After the Mali Empire declined, Niagassola became one of the principal cities of the Manding region, by turns allied with and at war with neighboring Kangaba, a rivalry the arriving French exploited by favoring Niagassola. Today it is a quiet sub-prefecture near the Mali border, with three water pumps and no power lines. Yet in this modest place, once a year, the oldest balafon in the world still sings the song of an empire's beginning.