If music is the international language, you don’t need an interpreter to speak to one of Africa’s greats, right? Larry Schwartz puts the theory to the test.
It’s a truism that music is an international language and you certainly don’t need to understand French to get the meaning of Serge Gainsbourg’s controversial late ’60s duet with Jane Birkin, J’taime.
But the language barrier is all too obvious when I attempt to conduct an interview with the Senegalese singer and bandleader Youssou N’Dour over the telephone with the help of an interpreter who asks me to keep the questions brief and translates my questions not into N’Dour’s native Wolof tongue but into French.
I have no problem with using an intepreter, in principle. But in this case, three seems to be a crowd.
I ask a question about a new CD that N’Dour has recorded with an Egyptian orchestra, and am told it is “a very special and personal album that describes the colour of my religion”. Colour? I must have misheard.
I decide to ask the intepreter to tell N’Dour that I’ve read he speaks “halting” English. Is this true? If so, can we skip the French?
Someone laughs. “Youssou is saying he can speak English,” the interpreter says. “But when he found out he had an interpreter he wanted to respect the fact that there was an interpreter and that he expresses himself much better in French.”
Finally, N’Dour’s voice shines through unmediated. “If you want me to speak in English…” Hallelujah!
Youssou N’Dour is a superstar in Africa thanks to his soaring vocals and his style of music, “mbalax” (“rhythmic accompaniment”), which blends west African and Afro-Cuban influences. He has collaborated with Peter Gabriel and Neneh Cherry, toured with Paul Simon, and been hailed as “Africa’s artist of the century” by Folk Roots magazine.
“If any Third World performer has a real shot at the sort of universal popularity last enjoyed by Bob Marley,” Rolling Stone’s Brian Cullman wrote, “it’s Youssou, a singer with a voice so extraordinary that the history of Africa seems locked inside it.”
Thanks to a series of highly regarded albums and the 1988 Amnesty International Human Rights Now! tour with Peter Gabriel, Bruce Springsteen, Sting, and Tracy Chapman, N’Dour was already a world music superstar when he first visited Australia, for the inaugural Womadelaide festival, in 1992.
He remembers being impressed by Aboriginal music and recalls similarities to his native Senegal in the mix of indigenous and Western cultures. But he has not been back since.
He has, though, maintained his popularity in the West, and must have left his American fans feeling frustrated when he cancelled a US tour after the invasion of Iraq. “When war is happening somewhere, I prefer to stay at home,” he says, “with my kids, my family.
“At the same time, I’m with the movement against war and, you know. I think really making the music in the country involved with something like war is not really a good thing. This is not against the American people. It’s against the government.”
N’Dour was recently appointed UN Food and Agriculture Organisation goodwill ambassador. He is a revered figure in his own country where enthusiasts have reportedly urged him to seek political office.
Though he has no such aspirations, he clearly has the greatest admiration for a legendary African political figure he met earlier this year. When he travelled recently to Cape Town, South Africa, to perform in an AIDS benefit concert with performers including Bono, Annie Lennox and Paul McCartney, N’Dour was thrilled at last to meet Nelson Mandela, for whom he had named a 1985 album.
N’Dour says he was deeply moved when Mandela thanked him for his support during his long imprisonment. “You know, I was crying because he is someone who symbolises positive things in Africa, not the bad things they show.”
He says his confidence in the future of Africa is buoyed by the increasing facility of youngsters with new technologies, but he concedes that with troubles such as war and famine, it remains “a really difficult continent”.
N’Dour was born in Senegal’s capital, Dakar, on October 1, 1959. His father, Elimane N’Dour, was a car mechanic. He is the eldest of 14 children, his mother one of two wives. “My father was really behind me to stay at school and learn a lot of things and maybe to become a doctor or lawyer or something like that,” N’Dour says. “I work very hard to tell him this way is going to be better.”
His mother, Ndeye Sokhna Mboup, was a well-known traditional praise singer, known as a griot. “Griots are kind of storytellers,” he once explained. “Before we had radio or TV they kept all the stories.
“I think I get all my background to be a singer because of my mum. I learned a lot of things from my tradition. But at the same time, I use my tradition to talk about what’s happening now, not only about the past.”
N’Dour has been singing publicly since the age of 12, when he was asked to join a musical theatre group. He says his four children remind him of how he missed out on a conventional childhood.
American soul music was an early influence. An uncle had a record store and played him records by Marvin Gaye, James Brown and Wilson Pickett. “A long time ago when (slaves) left Africa, they left with music also,” says N’Dour, for whom the American music sounded all too familiar. “When I heard Cuban music or soul music, it touched me like part of something from here. This is why I say Africa is the mother of the other styles of music.”
As the interview draws to an end, I ask N’Dour how many languages he actually speaks. Three he says, two Senegalese languages and French. Then he laughs and says, in English, “And maybe four”.
The Sunday Age, 29-Feb-2004
Larry Schwartz Writer 