Oumou Sangaré interview: “Africa can evolve while preserving certain traditions that are worth preserving”

Oumou Sangaré’s latest album, Timbuktu, is a cry of pain for her beloved country, a cry that articulates the pain and bewilderment of millions of her fellow Malians. What in God’s name is happening to their once gentle land? Many people – politicians, foreign governments, diplomats and generals – think they know the answer. But their prescriptions have failed to heal Mali’s wounds. They’ve only made them worse.

See also: The Rough Guide to World Music – Mali

On the album’s title-track Oumou sings, ‘Malians, where is our historical greatness? Where is our reputation as a country of peace, of understanding and friendship?’ When I ask her if she can answer her own question, she lists a few stock reasons for Mali’s current torment – politics, radical Islam – before admitting her own bewilderment. “What’s happening?” she goes on. “I’m asking myself the same thing. And I’m often at a loss to find an answer because I don’t understand people anymore. I don’t understand Muslims who come, who take people, who kill them. Those terrorists came to Mali but found that it’s already a Muslim country. But they demolished some of the tombs of the 333 saints of Timbuktu. That really shocked me.”

‘Those terrorists’ were finally booted out of Mali’s northern regions by the French army in January 2013. The world seemed to think that the country was back in safe hands; problem solved, job done. But almost a decade later, the situation is worse than ever: two coups in the last 18 months; two thirds of the country in a state of anarchy; tribal war flying the false flag of jihad and spreading southwards; a collapsing economy; a crumbling education system and everywhere disillusion, bewilderment and fear. It’s become too dangerous to travel overland to most parts of a country the size of Western Europe, even for Malians. And Mali’s neighbours – Niger and Burkina Faso – have both been badly infected by the chaos.

Things are so bad that France, the old colonial power, recently announced the withdrawal of its special ‘anti-terrorist’ forces. Most Malians cried good riddance (France is more hated now by ordinary Malians than at any time since independence in 1960). The military junta promptly invited Russian mercenaries belonging to the infamous Wagner Group to carry on the fight against ‘terrorism.’ Wagner goons don’t even bother to hide their contempt for human rights. They just torture and execute ad lib before presenting their host country with a hefty invoice, which they’re always happy to settle in return for natural resources and mining concessions. Welcome to Colonialism 5.0. They tried it in Libya, Sudan, Central African Republic and Madagascar. Now they’re trying it in Mali. And Malians love Russia for it. Cry beloved country.

There are Malian artists who have avoided expressing their pain in song, invoking the old trope that it’s bad to mix politics and music. But that’s never stopped Oumou. “When I’m happy, I create. When I’m upset, I create,” she says. The brazen power of her debut album Moussolou, released in 1989, with its unvarnished denunciations of forced marriage, polygamy and female oppression and its sensuous evocations of love-making, set the tone for all her future work. But to tackle the disintegration of her homeland, she needed time to think, she needed some distance from the chaos – luxuries that her success has long denied her. “After the release of my first album, I never stopped,” she says. “I didn’t have a single month’s holiday. I’ve always been running around, all over the world, doing my music, my other things.”

Watch Oumou Sangaré - Wassulu Don (Official Video):

Then, just when Oumou was in the middle of a two-week visit to New York, the pandemic struck. After three months of lockdown in the Big Apple, she was going a bit stir crazy, so looking around for somewhere relatively close but less frantic, she stumbled across Baltimore. “I learned that it was a very historic city where some of the first blacks had arrived in North America, so I had to go there. And when I got there, I loved it. There were so many trees. It was calm. I made lots of friends there, black and white.”

Lockdown was “an unexpected blessing,” a respite not only from being Mali’s most famous female star, but also from running a business empire. Oumou is one of Mali’s most prolific female entrepreneurs, with her hands in the hotel business, car imports, rice production, tourism, taxis and more. “Suddenly everything stopped,” she says with palpable delight. “It was forced on me but, for the first time in years, I could draw breath. Even though I was working a lot, I also had a lot of time to myself.” Time to write songs with her long-time musical companion Mamadou Sidibé, master of the kamalengoni (‘youth harp’). Time to think about the sorrow and confusion at home, and about her mother Aminata and her son Chérif, whom she spoke to often and at length via WhatsApp. “I always knew they were important to me, but I suddenly realised just how important,” she says.

And time to think about Timbuktu, for so long a byword in the European imagination for an impossibly distant place, but now at the heart of Oumou’s being where it became for her a multi-faceted symbol of nationhood and national pride, of tolerance and multiculturalism, of learning and of family. “Timbuktu is a holy city, a very important city,” she says. “When I talked to my American friends, their dream was to go and see Timbuktu one day. ‘We can’t die without having seen Timbuktu,’ they would cry. But all of a sudden [the jihadists] came to destroy that city.”

That destruction meant more than pulverised tombs and splintered mosque doors. It was a desecration of the values that underpin Malian society, values without which the only prospect is endless conflict and suffering. ‘The poets, the writers and the griots of Mali are asking the question: Where have our ancestral values gone?’ Oumou sings on ‘Timbuktu’. ‘Those values will disappear completely if we’re not careful.’ She sums up the intangible treasures Mali once possessed in abundance but is now rapidly frittering away in one phrase that frequently trips from her mouth during our interview: La Tradition.

For the paradigm of the modern Malian woman – outspoken, outward-looking, world-wise, tech-savvy – Oumou’s devotion to La Tradition is surprisingly deep and enduring. It was signalled at the outset of her career by her decision to go against the wishes of her producers, who wanted to ‘modernise’ her music, and put the kamalengoni, and by extension the traditional culture of her ancestral region of Wassoulou in southern Mali, at the very heart of her sound even though she herself was born in the capital Bamako and barely even visited Wassoulou during her childhood. It was a revolutionary move that wrested Malian music away from the domination of the Mande griots and Cuban-inspired dance orchestras and enabled traditional flavours from the regions to bathe in the spotlight for the first time. That devotion has, if anything, grown deeper in the intervening years. Oumou’s last album, Mogoya, was an homage to La Tradition, the title being the name of a pre-Islamic belief system centred on community, kindness and cohesion that for centuries gave ordinary Malians their moral bearings.

“I thought about La Tradition a lot [in Baltimore],” she says. “My mother is a very, very traditional woman. She’s always been like that. And I had the immense good fortune to be totally imbued with that tradition by her. That tradition is in me. It’s who I am. People from Wassoulou say that I’m even more imbued with the culture and traditions of Wassoulou than the people who actually grew up there! And those traditions are crucial because they teach you about the importance of being together, of treating each other properly, with respect and consideration. In fact, it’s mogoya, but Wassoulou style.”

La Tradition also lies at the heart of a debate around identity and morality that rages in Mali, just as it does everywhere in this globalised world. Malians are asking themselves who they are and on which belief system they should base their true values and future prosperity. Islam? Capitalism? Democracy? Europe? The Middle East? Or none of these, but rather something homegrown that predates the arrival of the white Europeans with their capitalism and their democracy, or the Arabs with their Islam. Something rooted in old animist beliefs and expressed in countless traditional rituals, dances, songs, masks, puppets, clothes and ways of being. Something loosely codified in the precepts of mogoya, that has been passed down orally from men to boys and women to girls for centuries, but whose signal is drowning in the clamour of war and modernity.

For the violent jihadists and that ever-growing section of the Malian population who are turning to less forgiving and more rigorous Middle Eastern strains of Islam for guidance, animism is the devil incarnate – backward, worthless, evil. But for Oumou, a more Malian equilibrium between Islam and ancestral traditions is urgently needed: “If we don’t find it, we’ll be completely lost!” she says with passionate emphasis. “Our great-great-great-grandchildren won’t know who we are. Are we Arabs? Are we perhaps European? We don’t know. The struggle is to bring Africa back. We have to find out who our ancestors really were, how they lived before the Arabs, before the Europeans. The battle is right there. And if Islam doesn’t create space for it, then we have to go and find out who we are ourselves.”

Where once the young women of Bamako wore tight jeans and lipstick, they now increasingly wear the hijab. For some, it’s a fashion statement, fuelled by a fascination with the glitzier side of Middle Eastern culture, epitomised by Dubai. Others wear the hijab out of a sense of duty, to their husbands, their religion. Or as protection against the predatory stares of men. “In our tradition, the woman was always a queen among the Africans. She wasn’t even obliged to hide her breasts… [We see more hijabs] because we’re no longer African. We’re more Arabic than African. I’m a Muslim. I believe in God. I practice my religion. But I’m not OK with the idea that I have to hide away my body and only show my eyes. Absolutely not! When God put me here on earth, I was completely naked,” she bursts into a fit of joyous laughter.

Oumou knows that it’s impossible to go back to “Africa before, before, before,” as she puts it. Nor is it desirable. She has fought all her life to try and end certain traditional practices, such as polygamy or female genital mutilation. “Those traditions have to be wiped out,” she says. “But there are certain traditions that make life happier.” She cites Japan, with its respect for tradition and its hyper-modernity, as an example. “I want Africa to become like Japan. Japan is the most modern country in the world, right? Japan is also one of the most traditional countries in the world. Africa can evolve while preserving certain traditions that are worth preserving. It’s doable.”

The alternative is cultural and moral amnesia. “When you forget everything, you fall silent. You have no reference points anymore.” The French have a very good word for it: déboussolé. It means ‘deprived of their compass.’ A mind without its compass is ripe for colonisation by foreign powers and alien ideas. Empires have long tried to rob their colonies of their history, their culture and traditions, all the better to subdue them. A young Malian kid toting a machine gun with his fellow mujahedeen out in the bush of central Mali is no longer in touch with the elders who, in traditional society, would have ensured his education. The state education system doesn’t even exist in many parts of the country. A jumble of alternatives have filled the void: religious preachers, Facebook, Instagram, satellite TV.

And, of course, musicians. They’ve always been part of the mix. “Back home, we’re seen as educators,” Oumou says. “We educate with our words. When we see something gaining ground in society, we speak out about it.” She takes her role as an educator very seriously.

Despite her professed bewilderment, Oumou knows the answer to that ‘what’s happening to Mali’ question. It has little to do with democracy or the lack of it: “Democracy has brought us nothing,” she says. “I think we should be allowed to try something else.” It mocks the attempts by foreign powers to fight Islamist insurgencies with military might alone, a policy that failed miserably in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Somalia, and is now failing in Mali.

No. Malians suffer because they no longer know who they are. Only the pillars of La Tradition – mogoya, the griots, traditional music and dance, animist rituals, the education of the elders – can support a better future. “Mogoya is our ground, the basis of who we are. When a stranger comes to your house, you go hungry to make sure they get fed. You make sure that everyone gets fed before you do. Everything is shared as equally as possible. Family, community, those are the most important things to us. That’s our tradition. It’s what has supported us and given us strength for centuries.”

This interview originally appeared in the June 2022 issue of Songlines magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe to Songlines today