JOLA INITIATION RITUAL: MAPPING NO-1 The phenomenon of folkloric festivals and cultural identity in the contemporary Senegal region of the Casamance provides a unique opportunity to experience and describe customs that have dictated creative and functional experiences for over a thousand years in the western mid enclave of African continent. In seeking to understand this subject we are made aware of the changing textures of time and space and the beauty of physical universe existence, as well as the challenge of continental mapping and composite humanity. This is so because the essence of African identity can be sensed through its integration of individual and communal 'zones of experiences as well as the blending of multiple planes of consciousness (i.e. reception /hearing). This same sensibility can be viewed in African music as well and the spectra of this phenomenon encompasses the role of creativity as a transcendent factor that underlines (and 'cements') the aesthetic imprint of summation cultural identity and vibrational dynamics. The folkloric festivals of this region of the African continent has an added significance when seen in the total context of a changing African landscape and constantly shifting geo-political world order. Slowly but surely, the future of contemporary research into the aesthetic spiritual and/or functional components of African continental experiences (dynamics) will be based on examining the collected isolated fragments and recorded documents that were gathered through actual encounter experiences from the first and second wave of scholars that partitioned Africa- (starting from the second wave of documentation and travel records from the sixtieth century extending to the present era) as opposed to the possibility to experience an actual real time African ritual creative experience - that would allow for an opportunity to experience first hand and penetrate (learn) into the earliest continental 'genesi...
