Prior to Jatta's work, these instruments were largely unknown outside the rural villages of the Senegambia region of West Africa.
However, in this quest there was very little study and documentation of West African stringed instruments done other than in the overall context of general musical and cultural traditions.
The griot phenomenon is limited to the various peoples of the Mande language family - some 53 related ethnic groups, such as the Bamana (or Bambara), Mandinka, Malinke, Susu, Soninke, and so on - as well as the non-Mande Wolof, the western Fulas or Fulani (Fula: Fulɓe; French: Peuls), Songhai (also Songhay), Sereer, Lebu, and Tukulóor.)
Jatta's presentation, in which he performed on the akonting and showed film footage of other Jola musicians playing the instrument, made for quite a sensation.
Up until that point, the conventional wisdom was that the wooden-bodied plucked lutes exclusive to the West African griots, such as the Mande ngoni and the Wolof xalam, were the archetypes for the earliest forms of the banjo, first made and played by enslaved West Africans in the New World, from the 17th century on.