Tuning in West African music

I mentioned something about this in a previous post about electronic
tuner but it might deserve a bit of explanation.
As a graduate student in anthropology and ethnomusicology, I study Mande
music. For background information, we could say that the Mande is a large
West African cultural area from which comes such interesting instruments
as the kora, the djembe, armpit drums, balas, etc.
According to at least one scholar, some balas are tuned very close to an
equiheptatonic scale (7-TET) +/- 1.7 cents. I'd be interested to
hear/see how much this differs from just major (and other related
tunings).
An interesting aspect of this is that every pattern is directly
transposable, which seems to be what bala players are looking for.
But precise tuning is "obscured" by the presence of "timbres" on the
calabashes that are put under keys.
I don't know if this is of any interest to you, but it shows that, maybe,
Ellis' work is still valuable in an ethnomusicological perspective.

As I said in a previous post, apart from academic interests I play sax in
an ensemble lead by a Malian "donsojeli" (artist-hunter) who plays the
donsongoni ("hunter's guitar", a 6-strings member of the kora family).
His tuning is close to the second mode of a major pentatonic scale with
some altered notes (especially the equivalent of the 7th). The members of
the ensemble try to tune themselves to his instrument but it's still a
tricky business.
I don't know if there's a "physical" model that might relate to his
tuning (for instance, using 5 successive simple ratios) but I'm quite
sure his tuning is non-arbitrary. Any idea about that?

Anyway, sorry for the long posts.
TIA for any help or comment.


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