To the birthplace of the blues with Mali's funky diva
(Filed: 04/10/2003)
Malian superstar Oumou Sangare rarely returns to her home region in the remote south of the country. Peter Culshaw accompanied her on a trip to this area of extraordinary musical richness
This week has seen the arrival of one of the most important world music releases of the year. Its author is Oumou Sangare, African diva and one of the world's great female singers.
'My music education was singing in the streets,' says Oumou Sangare
Sangare is one of those rare stars, like Bob Marley, whose appeal goes way beyond music. While in Africa she has become an iconic figure for the way she has expressed the concerns of women in conservative Muslim societies, Sangare is also a deeply funky woman. I wrote in Arts+Books last week about the "irresistible groove and joyous expression" of her single, Yala. If I had my way, it would be played every hour on Radio 1.
Stories about Sangare are legion. A powerful businesswoman and an influential figure in her homeland of Mali, she is not a woman to be trifled with. When she bought some land outside the capital, Bamako, a local official made the mistake of also selling the land to someone else, who went ahead and planted the fields. Sangare turned up with a bulldozer and mowed down his crops. She also had a quiet word with the President of Mali and got the offending official sacked.
It is not hard to imagine Sangare, in her preferred garb of traditional colourful African robes and Parisian stilettos, at the wheel of a bulldozer: she's chic but she's tough, a woman who bridges the divide between cosmopolitan and traditional Africa.
Sangare told me similar stories recently when I visited her in Mali. This is her describing her command performance to the King of Swaziland, who already has seven wives (his father had 32):
"Each year he has all the young girls, thousands of them, come out and dance naked in front of him. And each year he chooses another wife like that," she said. "He was sitting directly in front of me, with three wives on one side and four on the other, and I began to sing 'Polygamy is the worst of all things.' People cried out they couldn't believe their ears."
When Sangare produced her first album, 1990's Moussolou ("Women") at the age of 21, "it was a revolution," she says. The record directly addressed the problems of African women, but also expressed the joys of sensuality. "People had sung about love before, but not about lust," she says.
Even if Mali is not the most hardline of Muslim of countries (Islam here is mixed with earlier, more magical elements), coming from a Muslim woman, Sangare's album was, she says, "like a bomb". It was also a huge hit.
Her views on the lot of the African woman, and polygamy in particular, are formed from bitter personal experience. When she was two, her father took a second wife and emigrated to Ivory Coast, abandoning her mother, who was pregnant. Her mother was a singer whose main income came from the "sumu" the weddings and baptisms that you can see in the streets of Bamako. From the age of five, Sangare accompanied her mother and loved the atmosphere of the parties and soon found herself in demand.
"My music education was singing in the streets. What pushed me into music was to help my mother," she says.
Magnoumako, a song on Sangare's new album, describes the suffering of her mother.
"When she hears it on the radio, she switches it off. There were six of us in one room and she'd often cry because she had no means to feed us the next day."
Although she was born in Bamako, her parents were from the remote southern corner of Mali, a region called Wassolou, and much of her music is based on the idioms of that area, particularly the deep, ancient, bluesy music of the hunters. I joined Sangare on one of her rare trips back to the region.
Although much of the north of the country is dry or desert, the rainy-season landscapes of rice fields and woods in this area were intensely green. Sangare sat resplendent at the front of the bus, immaculately turned out in fact she wore 16 different dresses in the four days I spent with her. She was also accompanied at all times by her griot, or praise singer, a woman who was like her walking, talking, singing spin-doctor, announcing her and literally singing her praises at every stop.
I asked Sangare why she liked having her personal griot around. "It's the tradition," she said. "And the griot gives you courage."
The other function of the griots is to keep the oral history, remember genealogies (she can trace her family back 12 generations) and spread the news still an important function in a society that is 60 per cent illiterate. The Malian griot traditions are ancient: when the Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta came to Mansa Suleyman's court in 1355 and described the griots, he wrote: "I was informed this performance was already old before Islam, and they had continued to do it."
Just as old is the hunters' traditional music. If you wanted to point to one place that is the birthplace of the blues and thus of jazz and Western pop Wassolou would be a good candidate. We went to one village, Djilefine, to hear this music, where we found the hunters wearing jackets covered in small mirrors, and the hooves and tails of animals. The musicians radiated an ineffable, crumpled cool.
Their instrument is the doso ngoni, a sacred six-stringed harp. In the 1960s, a Wassolou boy named Alata Brulaye made the first kamala ngoni, "youth harp", which, as American guitarist and writer Banning Eyre wrote, caused "a calamity
hunter's songs were meant for the spirits. To play or even to hear them under improper conditions might upset the balance between the human and the spirit worlds."
The elders called it "samakoro" bed lice as it induced an irresistible itch to dance, and was used for secular and satirical songs. As it was tuned higher, equally shockingly, women also sang songs with the new instrument. As Eyre put it: "The craze was probably no more stoppable than the rock'n'roll that was upsetting British and American elders at about the same time." The instrument is a key element in Sangare's music.
Surveying this fertile, green world, I could understand the nostalgia many Africans have for a pre-colonial, pre-Islamic Africa. Sangare said she was proud of the stability of Mali compared with its war-torn neighbours, and equally proud of the extraordinary richness of the music here.
Sangare rose from poverty through singing in the streets, and is as much loved for her gutsiness as for her stunning voice. Everywhere we went, she was treated like visiting royalty, and back in Bamako she created a sensation by taking us to some of the funkier clubs in the capital, dancing to Malian hip-hop and remixes of her own songs.
Having stayed initially at the hotel she built near the airport, we incurred her displeasure by moving to a more central one, convenient for the music biennale that had just started. But we were lucky. Her only sanction was charging us the equivalent of two nights' accommodation for a steak and chips when we stopped at her hotel on the way home, and withdrawing her offer to get us upgraded for the flight back. The bulldozer, on this occasion, was not called on.
Oumou Sangare appears at the Barbican on November 23 as part of the London Jazz Festival. 'Oumou' is out now on World Circuit records.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2003/10/04/bmoumou04.xml&sSheet=/arts/2003/10/04/ixartright.htmlNon-Turkish Crimes Against Humanity