IMN - International Music Network

Thursday October 07, 2010

This article was originally published in the March 2010 (#66) issue of Songlines ,the world music magazine.

Trying to keep up in a conversation with Angélique Kidjo is like trying to catch a typhoon in a Tupperware box. From the minute she bounds into the room, her petite frame taut with energy, it’s clear that I am going to wear myself out trying. Instead, I sit back to enjoy being close to one of the greatest forces in African music, a creative energy with ten international albums to her name and another just out. A tireless campaigner for women’s health and education in Africa, an outspoken voice on everything from rape to the categorization tag ‘world music,’ and a prolific songwriter, Angélique Kidjo has succeeded in bursting out of what was expected from her as a girl growing up in the small West African state of Benin, becoming her very own brand of African superstar, with an energy and sense of humour that know no bounds.

But, she warns, that’s nothing. I should meet her mother. “Don’t even think about going to Benin and taking my mum to the market,” she laughs, throwing her head back and squealing at the thought. “I’m gonna feel sorry for your legs! She’s 83 and still running around. I’m like, ‘Mum! Stop!’ She says, ‘I don’t have time, the day’s going…’ I’m like…” Angélique hangs her head and pants. And when Angélique is 83? “I’ll still be myself because I’m gonna keep myself busy all the time. I never stop.”

Angélique’s energy, bountiful as ever as she approaches 50, seems to come from a unique upbringing: where her parents were strict but liberal with the freedom they gave their children; where education for both boys and girls was respected before anything else; and where laughter was everywhere.

“When you grow up in a poor country,” she says in her New York-accented English, “you go to the essentials. People don’t have time to complain because nobody’s going to listen to you.” But it was laughter that made her childhood in the coastal town of Ouidah special. “My dad was funny as hell,” she laughs, “he would come up with stories and you would laugh till you dropped dead. My mum’s the same. I grew up in a house where there was a lot of laughter, a lot of love, and a great sense of responsibility.”

Angélique’s parents, her father the head of the post office in Benin, fought the prevailing social and cultural issues so that their children could be educated equally. Her father’s family expected him to give his daughters away to be married once they reached their teens. “My mum was like, ‘Uh-huh,’” Angélique shakes her head, “and she made my father understand that this was not for discussion and non-negotiable. Thankfully, my father was a true believer of education, of girls and boys equally.”

But it was a sense of social justice that prevailed, and as a child Angélique was constantly sticking up for people who couldn’t defend themselves, to the point that her parents feared she would one day end up in a fight that would kill her. “I got this from my parents,” she says, “and also from the traditional singers of my country. When your history is not written, you count on storytellers and traditional singers in Africa to tell you who you are, what your family’s about and what is going on in your society. This is what I do with my music, because I am a witness of my time.” Benin is a tropical wedge of a country with Nigeria to the east and Togo to the west, on the southern edge of West Africa. It is the crossing point for more than 40 ethnicities – including Yoruba, Fon, Aja, and Fulbe – each with their own musical and cultural traditions. It’s most famously known as the birthplace of voodoo, before it was exported by slaves to the Americas, and is home to the Gangbé Brass Band [see feature in #58], some of whose musicians play on Angélique’s albums. It is one of those African countries that is seldom spoken about because little that is deemed newsworthy by the international press happens there. It doesn’t suffer ethnic or religious clashes, has a good human rights record and has seen three peaceful transitions of power in the last two decades. Culturally, the country of around eight-and-a-half million is thriving, with its unique culture of music and visual arts as vibrant as that of its gigantic neighbour, Nigeria.

But Benin has a murky past, and Angélique, as a young adult determined to sing her own music from her own score, was forced into exile, in order to avoid imprisonment. Between 1972 and 1989 the country was run as a Marxist state under Mathieu Kérékou who took over in a military coup d’état. Musicians, says Angélique, were forced to write songs supporting the regime, and she and many others were prevented from making any other kind of music.

“I refused to do that,” she says. “Whatever you wrote had to be about the regime and I was like, ‘I’m not going to do it’.” Her parents had always advised her never to align her music to any political ideology, “because things change,” and so, when it became clear to her parents that her insistence on making music was becomig a liability, she moved to Paris to study at a jazz school. It was six years before she was allowed to return home to Benin.

“The first time I went back, I was just happy to be back home, free, to be able to see my mum, my dad, my brothers, my sisters, the house where I grew up, the people I grew up with, to eat my mum’s food.” The memory of her exile weighs heavy on her face, as for the first time since we meet she stops smiling. “I wanted to reaffirm myself with all the things I had done.”

But the indomitable Angélique bounced back and her career, already off to a good start with a handful of albums recorded with jazz bands in Paris, as well as a hit album at home which made her a musical name across West Africa, soared. In the early 90s she was signed by Island Records, releasing an album that featured jazz saxophonists Branford Marsalis and Manu Dibango. It was to be the first of many starstudded albums and made the young singer an international name, known as much for bringing political and social issues into her music as for her high-profile collaborations with musicians from a whole range of genres.

“I’m open to everything,” she says, “that’s the beauty of music: it’s unstoppable.” On the album Djin Djin, which won a Grammy award in 2007, she worked with the unmistakably raw guitar riffs of Malian couple Amadou and Mariam, the rock guitar licks of Carlos Santana and the sweet R&B vocals of African-music lover Alicia Keys. On her latest release Oyo, she sings a rousing duet with multiple awardwinner John Legend, peppered by the Afrobeat horns of Antibalas, and covering an Aretha Franklin track, ‘Baby I Love You,’ sings a soul exchange with jazz singer Dianne Reeves. Is there anyone left that she really wants to collaborate with? “Anyone who worships music,” she says.

Rose Skelton
Songlines

read the full article in Songlines magazine, now on newsstands