IN THEIR COMMUNITY
IN THEIR COMMUNITY
The Same Vision, Arrived at Separately
Parakou, Benin · March 16, 2026
Africa Sings Partnership Meeting
Africa Sings was founded in 2019 by Dr. Daniel Dama with a mission that sounds immediately familiar to anyone who knows Scriptura’s work: to promote peace, social cohesion, and the experience of living together through arts, culture, music, and Christian witness. By 2026, the organization was active across Mali, Senegal, Togo, Burkina Faso, and Benin — training children and young people in music composition, collecting and notating Fulfulde Christian songs before they could be lost, and gathering Fulani communities once a year for a three-day festival.
When Bio Athanase presented Scriptura’s work at their March meeting, Dr. Dama recognized something immediately. He said the two visions should be harmonized — that “the advantage would be that the basic text already exists,” and that the work is to encourage communities to use it in their own Sunday worship.
Then he articulated his own framework, which he calls the three R’s:
- Recovery — the mapping of a community’s musical arts.
- Redemption — the use of God’s word in those local artistic styles, grounded in the Psalms.
- Restoration — bringing every art, every culture, every community to celebrate God in its own culture, with the Psalms.
It is, in three words, the same thing Scriptura is building toward. Arrived at independently, in a different country, through a different path. The two organizations had been pursuing convergent visions without knowing each other existed. Now they do. A joint ethnodoxology seminar for pastors is planned for 2027.