Togo - West Africa - page 900

West African Musical Styles
While many of West Africa's mega-successful artists might be classified as 'Afro-pop',
thanks to commercial sales at home and/or in the West, the region boasts a gamut of dis-
tinctive musical styles. The following are just a few of them.
Sterns Music ( www.sternsmusic.com ) is the Amazon.com of the world-music scene, allowing you to
search and buy from a large range of West African and other CDs and DVDs.
Afrobeat
Co-created by the late, great Fela Kuti, Afrobeat is a hybrid of Nigerian highlife, Yoruba
percussion, jazz, funk and soul. Fela, a singer, saxophonist and band leader, and one of the
most influential 20th-century African figures, used Afrobeat to give voice to the oppressed.
His onstage rants, tree-trunk-sized spliff in hand, were legendary. A succession of govern-
ments tried to shut him up. When he died of AIDS in 1997, a million people joined his fu-
neral procession through Lagos. His eldest son, Femi, has picked up the baton, releasing
fine albums such as Africa for Africa and reopening his father's Lagos nightclub, the
Shrine. A host of Nigerian creatives - percussionist and singer Tony Allen, rapper Weird
MC, Fela's youngest son, Seun - keep the flame alight. Afrobeat continues to cross over in-
to dance mixes and hip-hop and reggae projects.
SALIF KEITA
Salif Keita stands on a floating stage on the Niger River in Segou, south-central Mali, and unleashes his powerful
voice on an adoring 10,000-strong crowd. An attacking band on instruments modern and traditional - electric gui-
tars, the long-necked kamale ngoni lute - back the pale, self-contained man known variously as the White Horse,
the Malian Caruso and the Golden Voice of Africa. A fleet of pirogue boats, having drifted up as close as possible,
sways on the water.
'I am black/my skin is white,' sings Keita, as a tall albino dancer with yellow braids throws shapes. 'The differ-
ence is on purpose/for us to complete each other.'
The song is the title track of Keita's award-winning 2010 album La Difference , a work that references his re-
markable background: born a despised albino to a family descended from Sundiata Keita, the popular warrior chief
who founded the Mali empire in the 13th century, Keita was subject to ancestral rules that forbade nobles from
making music.
'It was easier for me to rebel since I was an albino', says the musician, whose Malian-American wife, Coumba
Makalou, heads the US-based Salif Keita Global Foundation, which is dedicated to highlighting the plight of
people with albinism.
'I was already an outcast', Keita adds. 'I left my family village and went to live on the streets of Bamako. I met
homosexuals' - other outcasts - 'who helped me, who gave me clothes and shoes and then sent me to sing in bars.'