Les Amazones d’Afrique: Taking the Crown

Les Amazones d’Afrique are a band born to fight. Over the last decade or so this mighty pan-African collective, this all-female supergroup, has taken on the patriarchy in ways cultural, political and transnational, wielding their powerful voices and formidable charisma like weapons.

“We are named for the warrior women of Dahomey, who for 200 years protected what is now modern-day Benin,” says Beninese vocalist/actress Fafa Ruffino, via Zoom from Togo. “Being a woman in Africa, being a woman anywhere, can be tough. We want women to rise up, be stronger together. To find joy. To move.”

Indeed, while Les Amazones’ latest record, their third overall, Musow Danse (Women’s Dance), contains all the elements that wooed fans from the get-go – the bold solos and glorious harmonies, the mix of genres and strength of conviction – it is also a container for something more buoyant, more effervescent.

Produced by Los Angeles-based Irish multi-instrumentalist and electro-shaman Jacknife Lee, the man behind albums for everyone from U2, REM and Taylor Swift to Malian diva (and former Amazone) Rokia Koné, Musow Danse is what it says: a dance album.

“Together we are an incredible musical force,” continues Ruffino, who joined the group for their second album, 2020’s Amazones Power, and whose vocals span gospel, soul and cultural styles from Benin and Burkina Faso to songs taught to her by her Ghanaian grandmother. “You can feel the effect we have when we play live. It is like we are suspended in space and the people are drinking our words. Women come up to us afterwards and tell us, ‘Sisters, we needed to hear this message from you today.’”

She pauses for a beat or two. “Africa for me is the best place in the world, but not when it comes to the way women are conditioned. So, we are trying to un-brainwash them. Our message is deep: women are suffocating. We want them to breathe.”

They sing as much on the potent single ‘Kuma Fo (What They Say)’, a tune delivered by the five main Amazones on this album: much-loved Malian singer and original member Mamani Keïta (whose 2013 album Kanou was a Songlines Top of the World); rising Burkino Faso star Kandy Guira (also a Top of the World with her last album, Nagtaba); Ivory Coast tour-de-force and Songlines regular Dobet Gnahoré – who was introduced as a member when the group played Glastonbury, Barcelona’s Primavera Sound and Morocco’s Gnaoua Music Festival in 2022 – as well as new addition, Congolese singer/actress Alvie Bitemo, and Ruffino, whose feminist awakening began at the knee of her activist mother, whose personal experience of excision (forced genital mutilation) and polygamy drove her to establish a women’s association in Benin.

‘Rise up,’ declaim the divas in their various languages, as percussion, bass, drums and synths crash and shimmer around them. ‘Life loves joy, let’s be happy.’

“It’s a song about seizing the moment,” says Alvie Bitemo, whose CV spans activism, stand-up comedy, musical theatre, modern jazz and roles in theatre and television. “We are telling women to take the floor without asking for permission. Each of us in the group has a different background. But we all treasure freedom. This is what links us to the African continent.”

On a Zoom from Paris, Bitemo flashes a smile. “Our producer Jacknife Lee understood our need to express ourselves, to be creatively free. As modern Africans we were open to whatever he brought us.” From his studio in Topanga Canyon, between stints working with U2 at their Sphere residency in Las Vegas, the Grammy-winning Lee approached this new collaboration with the same innovative, ‘EDM-esque’ verve he applied to Rokia Koné’s critically praised 2022 debut, Bamanan. As with Koné, there were no face-to-face meetings or collaborative jams. Files were sent. Vocals were pre-recorded (by producer Nadjib Ben Bella of Montparnasse Musique) and listened to until each voice was utterly familiar: Keïta’s muezzin-style melismas. Gnahoré’s cool and cogent wide range. The Nigerian Pidgin stylings of Nneka, an original Amazones member, who guest features on two of Musow Danse’s 12 original tracks (‘I know that we cannot continue like this,’ she rap/sings alongside Keïta on ‘Bobo Me’, ‘we call on all women’).

Then Lee set about experimenting: removing vocals, dropping them in, juxtaposing, bending, complementing. Adding live guitars, keyboards and analogue synths; hi-hat and hip-hop patterns and dirty back-to-front beats. There are likembe thumb-piano-like pings throughout the title-track, in which languages including Bambara, Ewe and Fon vie and blend. Elsewhere, Guira sings sweet and strong on the arpeggiated ‘To Be Loved’; Gnahoré reaches back from the future on the gritty ‘Kiss Me’; Bitemo takes a dazzling lead on ‘Mother Murakoze’, her lyrics telling – in Dondo, Lingala, Kinyarwanada – of motherhood’s rollercoaster.

Africa is there in the use of call-and-response, the sonorities particular to place of origin, the project’s collaborative nature. “Inclusivity is what Les Amazones is about,” says Ruffino, who celebrates the theme on ‘Queen Kuruma’. “We have done conferences in French high schools with teenagers, some gay and transgender. They tell us life is so hard for them. We say, ‘Come and sit with us. Let’s go forward together.’”

Taking inspiration, too, from the seminal 1960s female pop group, Les Amazones de Guinée, Les Amazones d’Afrique was founded in 2014 by Valérie Malot of French agency 3D Family in collaboration with Malian stars Mariam Doumbia and Oumou Sangaré, as well as the aforementioned Mamani Keïta.

“I saw how beautiful their lives were with their perfume, fashion, music and divinations,” says Malot, side-by-side with Bitemo on the Zoom’s split screen. “We connected, and in our conversations agreed that female repression is something that touches every woman. It is not a question of colour or culture.”

“Our enthusiasm at the start was so powerful,” she shrugs. “But it has really taken us ten years to become strong, make us a proper positive force. We came up against all sorts of walls but instead of giving up we built doors, went through them, and have never stopped. We’re a family where Rokia Koné found her voice to be an international artist. Oumou recently said, ‘Wow, I am so proud of what you have done.’”

A smile. “It’s like, ‘Yes, we can,’” she says.

From guests spots by the patriarchy-wrestling likes of multiple Grammy-winner Angélique Kidjo and revered Malian jelimuso (female griot) Kandia Kouyaté on République Amazone, their 2017 debut, Les Amazones have gone on to welcome a raft of multi-generational vocalists and musicians from across Africa and the diaspora, the instrumentalists and producers mostly (largely owing to a scarcity of female contenders) made up of men. Now, as with, say, WOMAD in the UK – which they stormed in 2020 and again in 2022 – Les Amazones d’Afrique have become a brand name, an indicator of quality no matter the names in the line-up.

This current incarnation of the supergroup is its most upbeat yet, as evidenced by ‘Kuma Fo’’s Morocco-filmed music video, in which the women don billowing primary-coloured robes to sing, stride and dance through a desert landscape. Fighting against serious concerns including domestic violence, forced marriage, FGM and unequal access to land remains central to their aesthetic. A group discussion filmed in Morocco finds the Amazones expounding in French on stories lived and told (“I know of a mother who came back from the river to find her two little girls covered in blood, mutilated by the grandmother and the aunts,” says Ruffino. “So it is women who also perpetuate this ancestral tradition, and women who must learn to stop these things.”)

It is a huge fight, says Ruffino. “We won’t see the results while we are still alive. The fight didn’t start with us, and it will not end with us. So, we need to hold tight and keep giving out these powerful messages, especially to little girls. They are the future ministers and policy makers. They are the flowers.”

If the pan-African language lyrics on Musow Danse feel less aggressive, more catchy, clubby and danceable, than on their previous records, it’s simply another stage – another door opened – along the journey. It’s the sound of a project in bloom, says Malot. “Everything we aimed for has come together on this album. It has not been a cool experience of smoking cigarettes in holders by a swimming pool,” she jokes.

“But the members of Les Amazones have always understood that to be in the struggle is to bring freedom and independence. Alvie, Mamani, Fafa, Dobet, Kandy, Nneka… all know that you have to be a fighter if you are a woman, particularly if you are born in a certain region of this planet. They know that we need to bring men in to help, to understand, because freedom benefits everybody.”

Bitemo nods, leans forward. “Each of us is bringing our own lives, languages and traditions to this album,” she says. “We are all our own queens. Queen Alvie. Queen Fafa. That for me is a key message of Les Amazones d’Afrique. You can be the queen of your life but no one is going to hand that crown to you.”

Another smile. “You have to take it.”

ALBUM Musow Danse is a Top of the World this issue, see p52

LISTEN ‘Musow Danse (Women’s Dance)’ is on this issue’s covermount CD, track 1

This article appears in the March 2024 issue of Songlines (#195) magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe today

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