Matthew Krouse
This year’s Kora All Africa Music Awards enjoyed the high degree of pomp and ceremony of those preceding it. As usual, the now-kosher Sun City is the real winner, providing a comfy platform upon which African music can prove its glamour’s worth.
The extravagant setting, evoking the mud Djenge mosques of Mali, successfully conveyed its message: contemporary African music is a natural inheritor of forms and expressions of generations past. The flowing robes and impeccable Afro-European combinations of the guests’ attire seemed to attest to one fact: even with its humble beginnings, African pop is finally the magnificent creature it was always cut out to be. The presence this year of Nelson Mandela and Michael Jackson attested to this fact.
Even Mandela’s unanimous popularity, though, couldn’t mask an unavoidable truth. Like the continent itself, African music is far from united. Tables of French-speaking supporters hailed their heroes only, while South Africans cheered only the names they knew. There was a small moment of synergy when Brenda Fassie won the award for best female artist in Africa.
Somewhat of a misnomer, this category was really the “audience choice” award, a result of a live phone-in conducted during the Kora presentation. The male recipient of this category was Femi Kuti who did a provocative rendering of his song Bang, Bang, Bang.
In receiving their awards one could sense two artists with distinctly different profiles. Fassie, of course, took the award as a sure sign of her own greatness, while Kuti took the opportunity to say some words about the HIV crisis in Africa. Most poignantly, he mentioned his father Fela Kuti who died of Aids in 1997.
It was a night of continual surprise, with African stars falling out of the sky. By the time Jackson went up to receive the Lifetime Achievement award there were near- hysterics. One got the feeling, though, that he had received the award merely to provide an appropriate platform upon which to give Mandela the R1-million for his children’s fund. But what the hell.
Above the endless yacking it was Jackson’s falsetto, “I love you Africa”, that seemed to ring truest. After all, what more was there to say?