African Queen: On the Ground in Mali with Oumou Sangare

They’re really on us now. Motorbikes. From my vantage point, perched on the spare tire in the back of a two-week-old Hummer, I can see at least a dozen bikes tailing us through the
Bamako night. Their headlamps act like the beam of a stage spotlight. This is fitting—the riders aren’t interested in the Hummer, which is crammed with a cargo of junketing European music journalists; instead, their focus is on the driver, someone quite accustomed to the limelight. At the wheel, easing us through the streets of Mali’s capital, is Oumou Sangare, the regal singer adored across West Africa. Even though this is her hometown, the impromptu entourage is understandable. This is the Malian equivalent of seeing Beyoncé nonchalantly cruising through your neighborhood.

Outside the Hummer’s air-conditioned confines, Bamako’s warm night air is rich in smells—fish smoking on roadside fires neutralize the all-hours stench of car fumes that can choke the city. Faces appear and then quickly disappear into the Bible-black night as the truck glides past. Each time the motorcade stops at a junction, several more riders join the procession, the less timid ones pulling alongside the driver’s window to swap a quip or greeting. “They’ll never do me any harm,” Sangare shrugs, electing not to hit the accelerator to lose them. “They are the people that inspire me. I don’t want any barrier between them and me.”

Sangare (pronounced San-Gar-Ay) is a child of the street who, 20-odd years ago, was just another carefree youngster buzzing around town in similar fashion. Her extraordinary rise to international superstardom transported her from life as a pre-teen street singer locked in a difficult domestic situation (“When I was 12, the money I earned kept the family going”) to the concert halls of the Western world and a UN ambassadorship. But despite her jetsetting, Sangare is resolute that nothing will stand between her and the ordinary Malian.

The Hummer pulls onto the forecourt of the Wassulu Hotel, situated at one of Bamako’s busiest intersections. This is Sangare's hotel—not her hotel as in the place she’s staying, but her hotel. She owns the place. All the vehicles parked outside are emblazoned with posters advertising her new record, Seya, and the hotel’s booming sound system ensures that the immediate neighborhood intimately knows every note of it.

Seya marks the 40-year-old singer’s partial comeback after 12 years of self-imposed exile from the recording studio—an exile spent developing a portfolio of extra-curricular business activities and prioritizing her family. “When I came home between tours,” she says, “my son only knew the word ‘Papa.’ He didn’t know ‘Mama.’”

The new record is further confirmation of Sangare’s place in the great pantheon of Malian music, one that includes legendary figures such as Ali Farka Touré, Salif Keita and Toumani Diabaté. “She’s one of the all-time great singers from a country not lacking in that department,” agrees Nick Gold, co-producer of the Buena Vista Social Club and head man at World Circuit, the U.K. label to which Sangare has been signed since 1991. “Mali’s ‘Star Of Stars,’ they call her. Ali Farka Touré gave me a cassette of her first album Massoulou in about 1990. He didn’t recommend many artists, so this was unusual. I was blown away from the first notes and had it on repeat in my car for months. A rocksteady, slinky funk that pulled you in—and that voice! When I went to Bamako shortly after, I realized that she was a phenomenon. That cassette was being played everywhere—and I mean everywhere. It was the soundtrack of the city.”

It’s not only Sangare’s sound—that strident voice undulating over traditional instrumentation and a lugnut-tight electric rhythm section—that chimes with the Malian public. It’s her subject matter, too. The most outspoken and uncompromising of Mali’s musical exports, Sangare has always packed her songs with potent messages, tackling previously taboo subjects like female circumcision and forced marriage. And she’s unafraid of who hears them. She once sang an anti-polygamy song to the King of Swaziland—“he had three wives on one side and four wives on the other!” Sangare laughs before getting serious. “Polygamy is the worst thing that anyone can possibly do to a woman. I respect the choice of women who say they know what they’re doing and want to jump into the fire, but often they don’t have a voice. Their opinion isn’t asked for. For 20 years, I’ve been singing directly to women in Mali and Africa, telling them what’s really important is to have self-confidence. They can become autonomous and independent. Life isn’t a matter of depending upon men to bring everything home.”

Sangare practices what she preaches. Her non-musical business interests—the hotel, an orange farm, a company importing SUVs from China bearing her Oum Sang marque—provide jobs for around 60 people. “That’s what I prefer doing,” she says. “Rather than leaving the money in a bank account abroad, I’m much better off creating productive employment. After all, what I make in one evening for a performance abroad would take something like two months to make here in Bamako in my various businesses.”

Those performances abroad are in great demand, despite Sangare’s insistence on singing almost exclusively in her native Bambara tongue. “Even though I can’t understand what she’s saying,” Alicia Keys, her most high-profile fan and one-time collaborator, told Oprah Winfrey’s O magazine, “I understand what she’s saying.”

Sangare takes the role of chauffeur throughout our trip. One morning, the heat already overbearing a couple of hours shy of midday, she packs the journalists back into the Hummer for a road trip, West African-style. With several faces still bearing the effect of the “Oumou cocktails” (champagne and strawberry syrup) she administered just a few hours before, our destination is the Festival sur le Niger in the city of Ségou, a three-hour haul along a pot-holed highway seemingly designed to rearrange our internal organs. Every time Sangare brings the Hummer to a halt—whether for gas, food or to deliver boxes of her new record to roadside vendors—she’s again deluged by well-wishers. They don’t want autographs; they just want to drink in the sight of their national hero. Later that night, the adoration goes widescreen. When Sangare takes the festival stage, 12,000 or so Malians, all dressed in their Saturday-night best, are standing firm—they’re not going anywhere for the next couple of hours, even though it’s already 1 a.m. And when they see the singer, resplendent in a full-length white gown and scarlet headdress, they respond with a deafening roar.

After the euphoria of Ségou, our final night with Sangare is spent back in Bamako on the banks of the silent, majestic Niger River. Under a lemon-slice moon, and with the downtown lights twinkling on the far bank, we’re given a private, plain-clothes performance by singer and band. But—true to everything we’ve witnessed over the past few days—nothing around Oumou Sangare remains private for long. A crowd quickly gathers. As ever, it’s not a problem—on spying the uninvited guests, no hint of a frown appears on Sangare’s face. She just smiles and plays on.