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Keita, the singer responsible alongside producer Marc Minelli for Electro Bamako, one of the most innovative albums of Malian music to appear in the last two decades. Both had their weight of feminine struggles and memories to bear. Both had particular issues that clouded their days. For Oumou Sangaré it was polygamy and forced marriage, scourges that remain very much alive in Mali and many part of Africa. Both had very personal meaning to Oumou herself. For Mamani Keita it was the experience of spending several decades in Paris trying to make it as a female émigré musician that left a burning desire to improve the lot of women in music and profession- al life in general.
V
alerie admits that finding female musicians with the requisite skills was hard. It was finding female instru- mentalists that proved the toughest challenge. Valerie and co didn’t have the luxury of a ready-made cohort of female Malian instrument players, like the famous Amazones de Guinée, the all-female band from Guinea who became one of West Africa’s most celebrated dance orches- tras in the 1960s and 1970s. All their members were drawn from the ranks of the military police. In other words, they were a state- funded outfit. State-funding for music in Mali disappeared in the 1980s, and sustaining a career as a female instrumentalist in the face of prevailing prejudice, a free-market music sector and all the other duties and chores a Malian woman is expected to perform, was close to impossible.
Apart from Madina Ndiaye, who later dropped out of the band (as did Oumou Sangaré, for reasons unclear), Valerie hired the remarkable Mouneissa Tandina, Mali’s lone female drummer. Her father played in the famous Segou Jazz, and with both encourage- ment and opposition from various men, Mouneissa managed to forge a career for herself, starting in the 1970s with Super Biton de Segou, one of the most famous and prolific of Mali’s ‘old school’ dance orchestras, and then with Super Rail Band, Cheick Tidiane Seck, Toumani Diabaté and Oumou Sangaré amongst others. She later formed her own band, Mali Moussou, the ‘Women of Mali’ and toured extensively in Europe.
“A women’s group really interests me,” Mouneissa says, “because I’m a woman, I’m a Malian. I’ve always loved playing with women. I’ve worked with my brother, but it’s better to work with women. It’s not easy in Mali. I have a husband who didn’t want me to carry on with music. It really bothered me. I fled the house… I left because of music, and went back to my own family.”
As for singers, there was a wealth of choice, and Valerie picked the best, starting with perhaps Mali’s greatest living griotte, Kandia Kouyaté, aka ‘La Dangereuse’. Despite the stroke she suffered back in 2004, she remains one of Mali’s most cherished female voices. Then there was Mariam Doumbia, half of Amadou and Mariam, the young griotte princesse Rokia Koné, the jazz diva and ubiquitous backing vocalist Pamela Badjogo, the Nigerian hip-hop songstress Nneka, the singer Mariam Koné, Malian rapper-vocalist Inna Modja and the up-and-coming Senegalese singer and songwriter Marema. Not to mention Mamani Keita, who became the Amazones’ chef d’orchestre. It was an A-team of Malian female vocal talent. Make that A+. They gave their first concert at Fiesta des Suds in Marseilles in October 2015 and, after lengthy rehearsals at the studios of Radio Libre, the Bamako radio station owned by Afro-reggae superstar Tiken Jah Fakoly, Les Amazones hit the road in the summer of 2016, playing festivals all over Europe.
The 45 minutes I spend in the Amazones d’Afrique dressing room backstage at this year’s WOMAD in Charlton Park, waiting for my interview, gives me a seductive taste of the working atmosphere of Les Amazones d’Afrique. It reminds me that in Africa, and almost everywhere else, a woman’s greatest strength is the company of other women. What I wouldn’t have given for a simultaneous trans- lation of the uproarious banter that fizzed around me, or even just a dram of that hide-tough female strength and solidarity.
“The immediate reaction to Valerie’s idea was that it was a good
thing,” Mariam Koné later tells me. “Everybody understands our strug- gle. We have to say no to the violence perpetrated on women, whether at home, at work, or in conflict zones. We have to say that we mustn’t be treated like objects. We’re human beings, just like men.”
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