Oops, sorry.” Oumou Sangare has just hit another pothole on the road from
Bamako to Ségou, a four-hour drive that is scattering goats, drawing shouts
and stares and causing her new album, Seya, to jump and skip in the CD
player. “I was born under a lucky star,” she continues in French, manicured
hands at the wheel of her new silver Hummer. “God has given me good fortune,
so I try to set a good example.”
Sangare is widely regarded as the greatest female singer in Mali, West Africa
- which is saying something: the country thrums with musical talent. Here
are percussion ensembles, electric guitar dance bands, solo string
instrumentalists, singers, rappers, pop groups. A boom that began in the
Nineties has led to more Malian musicians signed to international recording
labels than those of any other African country: the soulful vocalist Salif
Keita; the kora player Toumani Diabaté; the Tuareg nomad band Tinariwen; the
singer/songwriter Rokia Traoré; and the blind husband-and-wife duo Amadou
and Mariam, recently invited (but unable) to perform at President Obama's
inauguration.
All of this has brought an influx of tourists, record producers and Western
musicians eager to collaborate: Manu Chao's kooky sound effects on Dimanche
à Bamako made Amadou and Mariam famous, so much so that next month they
launch a monthly jam session at the Jazz Café in London. No doubt their
friend Damon Albarn, who seems to be forever jumping onstage with Malian
musicians and blowing his melodica, will be there. Bono even recently said
in an interview of a song on the new U2 album that he wanted the vibe to
“have a nightclub-in-Tripoli feel, then move it on down to Bamako”. Indeed,
while Mali is one of the poorest countries in the world, saddled with low
literacy and a huge trade deficit, its music is a constant soundtrack that
uplifts and communicates. Devoted to the traditions of its major ethnic
groups - the music of the Mande griots stretches to the 13th century - Mali
has also spawned a new generation of artists who are mixing and matching
ancient and modern. And Oumou Sangare, the Songbird of Wassulu, is leading
them.
Sangare, 40, has enjoyed a career marked by innovation and outspokenness. Her
electric/acoustic sound draws on the funky styles of her parents' birthplace
in southern Mali's Wassulu district, a hunter's region where young people
dance frenetically to the karinyan iron scraper and kamalengoni “youth
harp”. Her lyrics, sung in Bambara, address the difficulties facing women in
this largely male-dominated society. Her local profile is enhanced by her
various business ventures and charity work for women and children. A
figurehead for a women's movement that is campaigning for change, Sangare is
beloved of everyone. “I like men,” she says, “and men like me.”
It's hard to imagine, say, Beyoncé or Britney driving themselves and several
passengers over 150 dusty miles to an event - the four-day Festival sur le
Niger in Ségou - they are headlining at midnight. Let alone stopping
regularly for petrol, dried baobab fruit, chunks of meat and a chat. “Oumou
...” marvel the young Malians clustered at the driver window, primed for her
arrival by the passing of a Seya-blaring, poster-covered Oum Sang SUV (the
specially branded cars she imports from China) some hours earlier. “Le star
des stars,” they recite, leaving the shade of huts and neem trees to gaze at
their icon up close.
“I will never forget my roots,” Sangare insists the night before, sitting by
the pool of the comfortably tatty Hôtel Wassulu - her very own éspace
culturel (restaurant/bar with live music) in Bamako - in gigantic brass
earrings, multicoloured boubou and purple-tinted hairpiece. “I advise our
youth against polygamy, arranged marriages, even female circumcision. I tell
them not to make the same mistakes our parents made.” A megawatt smile. “I
always stop to talk,” she says. “But here in Mali it is songs that
communicate the best.”
Bambara is the common language of Bamako's 20 or so ethnic groups (Sangare
speaks it, she says, with a Wassulu accent), all of whom live peaceably in
this village-like capital on the Niger River, the great artery that
stretches from Guinea down to Nigeria. Bolstered by the music programmes of
institutions including the Bamako conservatory (where Diabaté teaches) and
the Institute for the Blind (which Amadou and Mariam attended), the city has
become one of the best places in the world for live music. Friday night?
Check out the Hogon Club with Diabaté and his Symmetric Orchestra. Saturday?
Sangare may well be doing a turn at Hôtel Wassulu.
Ninety per cent of the population are moderate Muslims: scores of brightly
dressed women ride motorbikes around Bamako without veils (or, indeed,
helmets). “Malian women are amazing,” says Sangare, who zipped to gigs on a
Yamaha - a gift, like the Hummer, from a wealthy fan - when her career took
off in the early Nineties. “They are tough but feminine.” Women are playing
a greater role in Mali's development: “There have been many changes. Women
are free to express themselves, to love and choose a husband. I've sung hard
to support them. I have, I think, opened the way.”
The sudden arrival of an elderly woman griot praise singer interrupts our
talk: “Oumou Sangare is blessed!” she cries. “She does so much for women!
For charity! For Africa ...”
A hands-on hotelier with her genial husband/manager, Ousmane Haîdara, Sangare
is generally known to be found here when not touring, stopping in Paris
(where she has an apartment) or relaxing at home on the other side of
Bamako. She sits back, smiling, respecting a tradition that began to
celebrate the achievements of kings and chronicle the histories of
communities. Her son Cherif, 14, listening to rap on his iPod near by,
doesn't blink.
In 1989 she burst on to the scene with her debut cassette, Moussoulou (Women),
and shook Malian society to its foundations. Gorgeous, vertiginous and just
21, she spoke to men in ways they'd never been spoken to before. “Most
people admired my courage,” she says when the griot has finished
spin-doctoring. “Every household in Bamako had a copy of Moussoulou. My
mother was so happy that she cried!”
While many of Sangare's songs drew - and still draw - from the traditional
Wassulu repertoire, her lyrics came out of personal experience. The third of
four children, Sangare was just 2 when her father, an imam, took a second
wife and left for the Ivory Coast. Her mother grew too depressed to sing at
the sumu wedding and baptism celebrations held by the Wassulu community in
Bamako, as she had done in the villages of Wassulu a few years earlier.
“But when she did sing she would take me along and I would sing with her,”
Sangare says. “By 13 I was the main breadwinner.” At 16 she was on tour in
Europe with a songpercussion ensemble: “I met [the late Mama Africa] Miriam
Makeba, who told me I had a very great future, which gave me the confidence
to go back and start my own band. Then we appeared on Malian television and
an admirer sent me the Yamaha the next day. So I was determined to keep
going.”
There have been many gifts, large and small, since then. The Hummer, courtesy
of a Nigerian governor, is perhaps her most ostentatious yet; her
reconciliation with her father (before he died in a car accident in 2005)
the most precious. “I brought my father's new family over after I became
successful,” she says en route to Ségou. “I built them a house and sent him
on a pilgrimage to Mecca. It's important to forgive,” she adds, eyes on the
road. “Even though the scars remain for ever.”
Ségou is ordinarily a sleepy town, a springboard for tourists en route to
elsewhere. The annual Festival sur le Niger was founded in 2004 (with
support from artists, hotel owners and the Malian Government) to resuscitate
this former capital of the Bambara kingdom; now, for four days each January,
the place teems with bus-loads of older French tourists in mud-dyed garments
and adventurous young locals who've paid a tenth of the tourist ticket to
get in. Crowds throng its attendant craft markets and daytime performances
of traditional music and dance. Hotel accommodation is booked up early;
without anywhere to stay, many stay up all night, dancing in the town's
clubs until sunrise. Sangare's hotel isn't fancy: unperturbed, she parks the
Hummer next to the Oum Sang SUV then disappears inside to rest.
A wealth of big African names grace this year's bill: Les Amazones from
Guinea; the Senegalese popstrel Coumba Gawlo; the veteran Malian performer
and producer Cheick Tidiane Seck, whose deft arrangements on Seya -
Sangare's first international release since 2003 - push the boundaries of
Wassulu music. There is even a Portuguese group and a Venezuelan
percussionist. But it is Sangare, the new Mama Africa, that the crowd have
come to see. At 1am, under a crescent moon, they jostle for space in front
of the floating stage. Pirogues (local canoes) hover by the shore, craftily
avoiding security.
Sangare's eventual appearance - in white suit, chunky jewellery and red
headwrap folded origami style - is met with a roar of appreciation.
Surrounded by musicians, flanked by two young women backing vocalists who
dance and twirl calabashes, she delivers hit after hit as the whole of
Segou, it seems, sings along. “You have to use your lucky star well,” she
affirms on the wonderfully infectious Kounadya. And then, for a moment or
two, gazes up at the night sky.
Seya is released on Monday on World Circuit. Her tour opens at St George's
Hall, Bristol, on April 23 (details at www.myspace.com/oumousangare);
L'Afrik C'est Chic, hosted by Amadou and Mariam, is at the Jazz Café, London
NW1 (0844 8472514), March 15, April 26, May 24
