Vado Diomande
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Diomande Vado Diomande
Vado Diomande left New York for West Africa in early December. He went through Abidjan, the commercial capital of Ivory Coast, and to his hometown, a dusty speck of a village so small that it is not identified on many maps. There, in Tousingha, or on the road to it, Mr. Diomande, 44, bought five goatskins that authorities say he sent on a plane to a warehouse in Brooklyn, where he cleaned them and turned them into the drums that made the music he spent much of his life celebrating. The first time that Mr. Diomande, who lives in Greenwich Village, was obligated to inform authorities about his purchases was when he packed the shipments of goatskins to send them out of Ivory Coast as cargo.