No one — not school bullies, a repressive government, and least of all white music journalists — will tell the African diva what to do. Will Hodgkinson reports.
Angelique Kidjo is railing against the European critics who have accused her of making “inauthentic” African music. “Who are they to tell me what is African and what isn’t?” says Kidjo, her voice rising in indignation as she thumps the meeting-room table of her record company’s office in a way that suggests it might well be a substitute for a music critic’s head. “Did they grow up in Benin and hear the music I heard? No? Then shut up!”
While I quickly scratch out my next question about whether her music is truly African or not, Kidjo holds forth on slavery, women’s rights in Benin, China’s exploitation of African resources and pretty much every other sociopolitical issue affecting the continent today.
But she never sounds more irate than when talking about critics of what has come to be known as world music. Having survived everything from abuse to political exile and racism, it seems that a bunch of white music journalists are small game for this tiny 49-year-old woman, who is fast taking the place of the late Miriam Makeba as the great diva of African music.
We are in Paris, the city Kidjo fled to in 1983 after Benin’s then-communist government made her recording career all but impossible. She has been responding to ongoing criticism that her combination of traditional African songs and American soul dilutes an already threatened musical form.
The idea behind her latest album, Oyo, was to represent the music she grew up with, which means covers of Curtis Mayfield’s Move on Up and James Brown’s Cold Sweat alongside Togo singer Bella Bellow’s signature song Zelie and the Benin lullaby Atcha Houn. Intended as a homage to her parents, Oyo is a celebratory, joyous record. But it certainly doesn’t fit into the average Westerner’s idea of what constitutes African music.
“Since leaving Benin I’ve realised that my father was way ahead of his time,” says Kidjo, as she reflects on the reality of her musical upbringing. “I took it for granted, thinking every kid in Africa grew up listening to James Brown and Otis Redding. Actually, we heard them because my father was open-minded. For example, he always said: ‘You’re going to school, whatever happens, because otherwise you’ll just be an assisted person.’ This was so unusual — to want girls to have an education — that people used to call him a white man.”
Kidjo’s father, who worked for the post office, shared child-rearing duties with her mother, who ran a theatre troupe. “So-called friends would come over and say to him: ‘How can you let your wife do this? Who wears the pants in your house?’ And my dad’s answer was always the same: ‘Love cannot be a jail. I must give my wife freedom.’ He was a very special man.”
The influence of her father’s attitude goes deep. Kidjo today runs the Batonga Foundation, a charity set up to give girls across Africa a secondary and higher education. And she claims that the Western musicians she works with — Alicia Keys, John Legend and the inevitable Peter Gabriel are among the roll-call of past collaborators — are still frequently surprised when faced with an educated, forthright African woman. In an argument that initially sounds paranoid but gets increasingly convincing, Kidjo states that this is related to a worldwide denial of the legacy of slavery.
“I sang on a hip-hop track in Germany recently with an African-American rapper,” says Kidjo, who has a tendency to combine personal recollection with political reflection. “We were doing these TV shows, and he said to me: ‘How come you speak English so well?’ He thought I was going to have a bone through my nose. He believed all Africans still lived in mud huts. That is the image of us they teach in American schools.”
I suggest this can hardly be the case in a country with an African-American president. “Even today African-American schoolchildren will be told: ‘Your people sold you. We just bought you to save your ass’,” she says, eyes flashing. “Slavery, a crime against humanity, is being denied and that is why people remain so ignorant of Africa. The Jews have rightly ensured that nobody will ever forget the Holocaust. But there has been a concerted effort to remove slavery from the minds of the people.”
Kidjo’s fighting spirit might well have come from her decision to be a singer in a country where that profession is ranked alongside prostitution. “When I was a little kid, everyone thought my singing was cute. Then I became a teenager and it was hell on Earth,” she says, looking as though she’s about to burst into tears, albeit in a rather theatrical way.
“One day after school I heard someone shout ‘Prostitute!’ A boy threw a stone at me and suddenly everyone was rubbing sand in my hair, spitting at me. I came home, shaking from head to toe. My grandmother sat me down and cleaned and braided my hair, and I told her I didn’t want to sing any more. She said: ‘Are you going to let stupid people tell you what to do with your life? Do what you have to do.’ To this day that advice is what has kept me going, and what has guided me.”
Kidjo is now a huge star in Benin. But she claims that the country’s perception of musicians as layabouts and ne’er-do-wells is still there. “The problem we have in Africa is that unless you are a traditional musician telling the stories of your people through songs, you have no respect in society,” she claims. “Being in a band is not considered a job. As soon as you hit the stage, if you’re a boy you’re a junkie, and if you’re a girl you’re a prostitute. And it’s worse now that everyone has access to television and the internet. How do you convince a mother to let her girl sing when she sees videos of pop stars almost naked, mimicking the sexual act?”
At Kidjo’s first major concert, staged in Togo and funded in part by her father’s retirement pay, she got into trouble for refusing to sing songs praising Benin’s communist party. She continued to refuse to toe the line and her decision to leave Africa came after appearing at a concert staged for government officials. “It was so bad,” she says, holding her head in her hands. “These men, the age of my father, were looking at me like I was a piece of meat. After that I decided that I would either get out of the country or commit suicide.”
Banned from touring, she fled to Paris under the pretence of attending a cousin’s wedding. “I was only allowed to leave because the customs officer at the airport was a fan of my music,” she says. “For the next six years I couldn’t speak to my parents because their phone was tapped. It was hell.”
She survived by cleaning, babysitting and working in a hair salon. “I did every job under the sun apart from selling drugs and being a prostitute,” she says. “I worked as a backing singer and used the money to pay for music lessons at a jazz school. On the first day two white girls said to me: ‘You’re African, right? Jazz is not for African people.’ But that’s where I met my husband and that’s where my career really started.”
As the interview winds to a close, I suggest that, given everything she has been through, Kidjo has got to a point in her career where she can dictate the terms by which she does things. She disagrees. “My whole career has been dictated by the songs I love,” she says, concluding the subject of conversation by folding her arms.
“Will I collaborate with someone famous if it means doing a song I don’t like? Hell, no! That has not made my life easy. But that’s the way it is and that is the way I am.” —