With our 2 for 1 offer at PizzaExpress Matt Hughes Where am I Oops, sorry.” Oumou Sangare has just hit another pothole on the
road from Bamako to Ségou, a four-hour drive that is scattering goats, drawing shouts and stares and causing her new album, Seya, to jump and skip in the CD player. “I was born under a lucky star,” she continues in French, manicured hands at the wheel of her new silver Hummer. “God has given me good fortune, so I try to set a good example.” Sangare is widely regarded as the greatest female singer in Mali, West Africa – which is saying something: the country thrums with musical talent. Here are percussion ensembles, electric guitar dance bands, solo string instrumentalists, singers, rappers, pop groups. A boom that began in the Nineties has led to more Malian musicians signed to international recording labels than those of any other African country: the soulful vocalist Salif Keita the kora player Toumani Diabaté the Tuareg nomad band Tinariwen the singer/songwriter Rokia Traoré and the blind husband-and-wife duo Amadou and Mariam, recently invited (but unable) to perform at President Obama’s inauguration. Sangare, 40, has enjoyed a career marked by innovation and outspokenness. Her electric/acoustic sound draws on the funky styles of her parents’ birthplace in southern Mali’s Wassulu district, a hunter’s region where young people dance frenetically to the karinyan iron scraper and kamalengoni “youth harp”. Her lyrics, sung in Bambara, address the difficulties facing women in this largely male-dominated society. Her local profile is enhanced by her various business ventures and charity work for women and children. A figurehead for a women’s movement that is campaigning for change, Sangare is beloved of everyone. “I like men,” she says, “and men like me.” It’s hard to imagine, say, Beyoncé or Britney driving themselves and several passengers over 150 dusty miles to an event – the four-day Festival sur le Niger in Ségou – they are headlining at midnight. Let alone stopping regularly for petrol, dried baobab fruit, chunks of meat and a chat. “Oumou …” marvel the young Malians clustered at the driver window, primed for her arrival by the passing of a Seya-blaring, poster-covered Oum Sang SUV (the specially branded cars she imports from China) some hours earlier. “Le star des stars,” they recite, leaving the shade of huts and neem trees to gaze at their icon up close.
“I will never forget my roots,” Sangare insists the night before, sitting by the pool of the comfortably tatty Hôtel Wassulu – her very own éspace culturel (restaurant/bar with live music) in Bamako – in gigantic brass earrings, multicoloured boubou and purple-tinted hairpiece. “I advise our youth against polygamy, arranged marriages, even female circumcision. I tell them not to make the same mistakes our parents made.” A megawatt smile. “I always stop to talk,” she says. “But here in Mali it is songs that communicate the best.”