This weekends Kora Awards focus attention on African music. We consider the nominees, Africas peace song and Baaba Maal, last years best vocalist winner
Gwen Ansell
Theres crisis in Africa. A bunch of famous singers get together to make a song about it and, yes, yawn, youve been there, heard the music, and almost certainly own the T-shirt. Not this time.
Because So Why isnt an act of charity laid on poor hapless Africans by a Bob Geldof or a Quincy Jones. So Why is an African initiative not to raise money, but to change minds from a half-dozen of the continents best-known singers: Youssou NDour of Senegal, Lucky Dube and Jabu Khanyile of South Africa, Papa Wemba of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Lourdes van Dunem of Angola and Lagbaja of Nigeria, all working around a theme composed by veteran producer and keyboardist Wally Badarou. Its aimed at eradicating tribalism and the violence that scars its wake and the six, plus the 50-odd other Kora Award finalists, will premiere the song at the finale of this years awards tomorrow (October 4).
The song is part of a multi-pronged campaign, facilitated by the ICRC (International Committee for the Red Cross). Theres also a TV documentary and radio footage, a book of war photography including the work of Don McCullin and Douglas Kirkland, and a CD featuring not only the So Why theme, but individual tracks on war and tribalism from each of the artists involved.
Certainly, concedes Kole Omotoso, who wrote the books text, we learned from such events as We Are The World about the kind of infrastructure that was needed. But the absolute content is totally different. This is Africans, speaking to their own situation.
Jo Fox, ICRC regional information delegate, explains the strategy. Weve chosen the best communicators for the most difficult task: to make music for behavioural change. As Omotoso points out, African musicians have already achieved a transcontinental communication network. Youll see, for example, portraits of Lucky Dube in Accra, painted on walls in an indigenous style.
Radios and cassette-players are everywhere, and Fox hopes the message of the music will strike at the hearts of the youths caught up in ethnic violence, as it finds its way into the bars and brothels of the war zones.
Tribalism and ethnic violence are the campaigns targets because the idea of a state dominated by a single tribe, language or religion is a non-starter for Africa. Weve seen such attempts doomed in Europe. Now, with the end of colonialism and apartheid, we can begin to talk, albeit very guardedly, about the end of foreign domination in Africa.
Its a time for us to sit down and begin talking about development. States are just an artificial infrastructure, and there is no reason why any part of the state should become greater than the whole, says Omotoso.
The book, he feels, will work in a different way from the music. The impact of the book will have a longer time-frame. Well be targeting rebel leaders, the intellectuals in political movements but ordinary people too, because the book is a major institution in Africa and people do believe in the written word. We say: Book no dey lie.
Omotoso believes the experience of touring the war zones will also feed into the content of all the singers future work although some have already taken a political stance. Lagbaja, for example, who performs in a mask to underline his identity as the faceless one: everyman made his impact singing about what Omotoso calls the problematic of the state and the responsibilities of governance.
And Fox, who visited the war zones with the artists as they worked, believes the current record is only the beginning of a much larger collaboration. The environment created communication through music between people whod never even met before. In Shobashabane, in KwaZulu-Natal, just after the massacre, I saw Lucky Dube find a piano in a church hall and just begin thrashing it with the anguish of what hes seen.
Then Papa Wemba came in, and started singing, picking up Luckys theme, and his emotion. There were many moments like that.
The TV documentary (a Channel 4 co- production) which recorded those moments was silently slipped into SABCs schedules two weeks ago without announcement a sad contrast to the international attention it has received.
But the glitzier and more lucrative Kora event will let South African viewers at least sample the song. Says Papa Wemba, Its a cry for us, as Africans, to stop killing ourselves.
For Jo Fox, watching its creation, and the interaction between singers, boy soldiers, amputees, survivors, its also an object lesson in the value of music to lessen the pain.