° Angélique Kidjo ° ° Angélique Kidjo °

rying to keep up in a conversation going to Benin and taking my mum to the expected him to give his daughters away to be with Angélique Kidjo is like market,” she laughs, throwing her head back married once they reached their teens. “My HERE’S trying to catch a typhoon in a and squealing at the thought. “I’m gonna feel mum was like, ‘Uh-huh,’” Angélique shakes her tupperware box. From the sorry for your legs! She’s 83 and still running head, “and she made my father understand that LOOKING minute she bounds into the around. I’m like, ‘Mum! Stop!’ She says, ‘I don’t this was not for discussion and non-negotiable. Troom, her petite frame taut with energy, have time, the day’s going…’ I’m like…” Thankfully, my father was a true believer of it’s clear that I am going to wear myself out Angélique hangs her head and pants. And education, of girls and boys equally.” AT YOU, trying. Instead, I sit back to enjoy being close when Angélique is 83? “I’ll still be myself But it was a sense of social justice that to one of the greatest forces in African music, because I’m gonna keep myself busy all the prevailed, and as a child Angélique was a creative energy with ten international time. I never stop.” constantly sticking up for people who couldn’t albums to her name and another just out. A Angélique’s energy, bountiful as ever as she defend themselves, to the point that her tireless campaigner for women’s health and approaches 50, seems to come from a unique parents feared she would one day end up in a education in Africa, an outspoken voice on upbringing: where her parents were strict but fight that would kill her. “I got this from my everything from rape to the categorisation liberal with the freedom they gave their parents,” she says, “and also from the KIDJO! tag ‘world music,’ and a prolific songwriter, children; where education for both boys and traditional singers of my country. When your BENIN Angélique Kidjo is fast Angélique Kidjo has succeeded in bursting girls was respected before anything else; and history is not written, you count on out of what was expected from her as a girl where laughter was everywhere. storytellers and traditional singers in Africa to gaining a reputation as not only a growing up in the small West African state “When you grow up in a poor country,” she tell you who you are, what your family’s about formidable singer, but also one of of Benin, becoming her very own brand of says in her New York-accented English, “you and what is going on in your society. This is Africa’s leading female role models, African superstar, with an energy and sense go to the essentials. People don’t have time to what I do with my music, because I am a in the vein of her late friend Miriam of humour that know no bounds. complain because nobody’s going to listen to witness of my time.” But, she warns, that’s nothing. I should you.” But it was laughter that made her Benin is a tropical wedge of a country with

Makeba. Rose Skelton catches up JOSHUA JORDAN;WATSON TOM meet her mother. “Don’t even think about childhood in the coastal town of Ouidah Nigeria to the east and Togo to the west, on with her on a recent visit to London special. “My dad was funny as hell,” she laughs, the southern edge of West Africa. It is the m ain portr a it Jer em y Llew elly n-Jones “he would come up with stories and you crossing point for more than 40 ethnicities – would laugh till you dropped dead. My mum’s including Yoruba, Fon, Aja, and Fulbe – each the same. I grew up in a house where there with their own musical and cultural traditions. was a lot of laughter, a lot of love, and a great It’s most famously known as the birthplace of sense of responsibility.” voodoo, before it was exported by slaves to Angélique’s parents, her father the head of the Americas, and is home to the Gangbé the post office in Benin, fought the prevailing Brass Band [see feature in #58], some of social and cultural issues so that their children whose musicians play on Angélique’s albums. could be educated equally. Her father’s family It is one of those African countries that is seldom spoken about because little that is deemed newsworthy by the international press happens there. It doesn’t suffer ethnic or religious clashes, has a good human rights record and has seen three peaceful transitions of power in the last two decades. Culturally, the country of around eight-and-a-half million is thriving, with its unique culture of music and visual arts as vibrant as that of its gigantic neighbour, Nigeria. But Benin has a murky past, and Angélique, as a young adult determined to sing her own music from her own score, was forced into exile, in order to avoid imprisonment. Between 1972 and 1989 the country was run as a Marxist state under Mathieu Kérékou who took over in a military coup d’état. Musicians, says Angélique, were forced to write songs supporting the regime, and she and many others were prevented from making any other kind of music. “I refused to do that,” she says. “Whatever you wrote had to be about the regime and I was like, ‘I’m not going to do it’.” Her parents had always advised her never to align her music to any political ideology, “because things change,” and so, when it became clear to her parents that her insistence on making music was »

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