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World Music Matters

Mali's "naughty girl" not afraid to speak out against violence in the north

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On her latest album Bamako Motel Malian singer-songwriter and model Inna Modja audaciously moves away from singing pop in English to embrace her African roots. Using the peul flute, kora and other west African percussion, but above all singing in her native Bambara, she addresses the people that “don’t like music and don’t like women” in the north of Mali.

Inna Modja
Inna Modja DR
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Modja was first mentored by Malian world music star Salif Keita and sang vocals with the Rail Band de Bamako. But as a solo artist she found commercial success singing easy-listening pop in English.

On this latest, third album she brings back all the different influences she grew up with in Mali, including rap.

“I’m going back where I started in Bamako and with the Rail Band,” she told RFI. “Rapping was one of the things I used to do back in the days. So I just brought it back and gave it a much more modern twist.”

“Modja” means naughty girl in Bambara, an affectionate nickname her mother gave her as a child.

“I was a bit of a tearaway,” she admits, “I always had my own opinions.”

She expresses them freely on her new album, speaking out in defence of women and girls and against the conflict.

One of the album’s most striking tracks is Tombouctou, a sassy mix of rapping in Bambara and African percussion. It ends with the words “We will keep on fighting, the light is coming” followed by gun shots.

“During times of war, women and girls are the most vulnerable people,” she says. “So I wanted to talk about them and bring awareness of their situation”.

But her message is for all Malians. “We should stand up and protect our people from the north: men or women, everybody. This war needs to stop.”

She acknowledges it was brave but commercially risky to release that song as a single.

“I am brave and foolish,” she says. “For me it was really important to have that song, even if people don’t understand it. I wanted the message to be out there.”

She wanted to speak directly to certain, dangerous, people in the north.

“Women have been forced to cover up in the north, music is banned, TV is banned, so there’s a kind of extremism that has seeped through the north of Mali. This is my own way of denouncing it.”

The video clip for the single is creative and upfront. Shot in black and white in the legendary photographer Malik Sidibé’s studios in Bamako, it features a woman, her face partially hidden, the word freedom painted on her naked breasts.

“It is daring," says Modja, "but in Africa a woman can mark the gravity of an event by taking off her clothes".

She cites the example of the wife of Patrice Lumumba – the leader of Congolese independence, assassinated in 1961.

“I had this picture [of Lumumba’s wife] in my head since I was a child. When her husband was killed she took off her clothes and went on a long march to show her anger and pain.”

Modja knows some people will find the video shocking, but stands by her decision.

“They want to scare people, make them back down, but we won’t back down. I won’t back down and Malian people won’t back down.”

The album features several duos. Franco-Malian hip hop artist Oxmo Puccino joins her on Speeches, in which she mocks decision makers who love the sound of their own voice but have little to say. Young people in particular are “sick of waiting for the crisis to end,” she says. “Whether you’re Malian French or American, young people need hope and opportunity today”.

That lack of hope and opportunity is now pushing many people to leave the African continent in search of a better life in Europe, a theme she explores in the song Boat People, featuring Malian diva Oumou Sangaré.

“I wrote the song two years ago after the terrible accident in Lampadusa in Italy,” she explains. “It’s terrible to be that hopeless, to have nothing to lose. I never thought that two years later the situation would be worse.”

Inna Modja plays upcoming jazz festival in Mali and the Festival du Niger in February 2016.

Follow her on facebook.
 

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