The Songbird of Wassoulou 📸

It’s quite rare to have African musicians visiting our little capital. That’s why when I saw that Oumou Sangaré is singing live I just couldn’t skip it.

She is a Grammy Award-winning Malian Wassoulou musician, but I actually came across her when I heard her sing "Imagine" for the Herbie Hancock album The Imagine Project.

Sangaré is an advocate for human rights and has done a lot for women in her native country, encouraging them to work in co-ops to gain some independence, and opening some businesses of her own to support that. To an average Westerner today, freedom of choice of marriage for example is one of the most logical things. Not so in Mali, and she’s been very vocal about that.

She believes that the artists have the power to influence communities and instigate change far more than politicians: ”While you're an artist, you're free to say what you think; when you're a politician, you follow instructions from higher up.”

There’s a lot of energy in the African music, and the rhythms are completely different from what we know in the West. The whole band was dancing along to the kora beats and it felt like being in one of those YouTube videos with a 3-year-old African kid dancing like she took professional dance classes.

It’s fun to see the cultural differences in the audience as well - the African natives in the crowd stood up at the first 30 seconds of the first track and rushed to the front to dance away the whole evening and eventually even joined the band on the stage. Most locals took a lot longer to warm up. Nonetheless, by the end of the night everyone was dancing.

Overall, it was a really unforgettable experience and I wish I had more diverse photos for you but I mostly just wanted to enjoy the show.