About Us

Successors at Butetown

Meet the team

  • N’famady Kouyaté

    Artistic Director
    N'famady Kouyaté is our Artistic Director and an energetic master musician from Guinea, West Africa. Malinké in origin, born into a griot/djeli family; where the djeli have hereditary responsibility for preserving traditional Mandingue culture through the sharing of ancient rhythms, songs, and stories. N'famady is a master balafonist, singer, percussionist, multi-instrumentalist, and the founder of Les Héritiers du Mandingue (a traditional Mandingue-modern fusion group in Guinea). N'famady is now resident in Cardiff, Wales and has been working on a number of solo and collaborative musical projects, as well as leading participatory music workshops.

  • Cathryn McShane-Kouyaté

    Managing Director
    Cathryn is best known as a British Sign Language-Welsh-English interpreter that has worked on screen but also in theatre. Cathryn has also been an active member of the Samba Galêz dance team since 2009 and took over as their permanent dance lead in 2021. Cathryn has over 30 years experience of community arts (especially carnival) as a dancer, maker, and parade coordinator (including Carnifal y Môr to open the National Eisteddfod in Cardiff Bay in 2018), but her passion is for joyful high energy dance of all genres. Cathryn began by taking on the role of project manager for The Successors of the Mandingue in 2019 and has successfully managed several Arts Council and British Council grant funded projects, as well as community arts workshop programmes and initiatives.

Built on love, Shared with joy!

The Successors of the Mandingue is a unique company in Wales that exists to promote and share West African culture and heritage through music and dance activities. In a short space of time we have developed some amazing partnerships and have delivered some truly joyful and meaningful projects, both in community arts engagement and professional artistic collaborations and performances.