Angelique Kidjo - Musician and Activist HARDtalk

Now on BBC News, it's time for HardTalk.

Africa has produced a host of world-famous musicians, but very few

of them are women. Why? Who better to ask than I guess today, Angelique

Kidjo, who has been hailed as Africa's veneer diva, known for the

passion in her voice and her fierce determination to help African girls

fulfil their potential. -- premier diva. Three decades ago she had to

leave her continent to become an international star. How much has

Africa and its music scene changed between then and now?

Angelique Kidjo, welcome to HARDtalk. Thank you for having me

here. You are one of Africa's biggest female stars, and that

brings with it a real sense of responsibility, being under

scrutiny. Absolutely. Do you find that difficult? No, I have nothing

to hide. I know where I come from. I may not know where I am going, but I

definitely know what the traditional music of my country has taught me to

do with my voice and my music, to empower people, to bring joy to

people, and to let people understand their own power and unleashed their

own power. And as a woman, do you feel a particular sense of

responsibility to, in a sense, like it or not, read isn't African women?

-- represent African women. Yes, I feel that very much so. I was raised

by two grandmothers and a mother that have a passion for theatre. And

in the 1960s, she decided to have a theatre piece on the life of the

King. In that time, when you decide to do something like that, G, it is

not easy. So she wrote the piece, directed it, auditioned all the

actresses and actors, did the costumes, and from that moment on, I

was taught that it is not because you are a woman that you are not

allowed to dream big. And in my case, I always say my case is one of

the kind, because I was lucky to be worn in a family where both parents

were educated, and were really dedicated and determined to put the

kids to school. Doesn't matter what we do after. So your mother was very

much a creative, independent role model for you. But when you started

singing, I know your parents loved it, when you are a kid, as in six

years old you are singing and singing fantastically well and

making a name for yourself as a child in your home country of Benin,

I know that has you gripe it became difficult to keep it going. The

taunting started when I was 12 years old. You would be coming home from

school and out of nowhere, Wang, a stone hits you on the shoulder. --

bang. Throwing stones at you, calling you a prostitute. Because

you are singing? Because I was singing. When you are a girl, you

are singing, there is no other way for you to succeed if you are not a

prostitute, and if you are a boy, there is no other way it you are not

a junkie. So sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, in Africa, the perception was

taken literally. So today, when a girl comes out and tells her

parents, I want to sing, I want to be music, the parents say, no,

that's not a job. The perception of an artist in Africa today is still a

problem. Even with politicians who do not think we are great

ambassadors for the country and the continent itself. The other thing

that I think people assume, and this may be wrong, but they assume the

young girl being brought up in Benin 40 years ago, is that you would have

in steeped in traditional music rather than music from all over the

world, the US and the UK, rock 'n' roll, as well as Yarran music. But

from what I understand from your parents were exposing you to all

sorts of stuff that wasn't just traditional. Yeah, my father played

banjo, I don't know why, everybody else played guitar, but that was my

dad. Keep us away in 2008. My mum and dad believed that as their

children, we had to lead our own lives and make our own mistakes and

make our own choices. My father's favourite phrase is, your weapon is

your brain. The ultimate weapon you have is your brain. Work on it. Open

up to the rest of the world. Don't be afraid to get out of this house.

They made us understand that the house was going to be an open

discussion place, that there would be no taboo subject, with the

exception of racism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism. I father said he

didn't want any hateful people in the house, he didn't have time to

that. So as a child I grew up like that. And every single human being

on this planet, everyday which possible, I heard them when I was

growing up. So I would come back and think, OK, what am by going to hear

today? And I was really a very curious child. When he was playing

you both music from Benin, from the traditional storytellers and all

that stuff, and then he was playing your records that he brought home by

James Brown and Otis Redding and even Jimi Hendrix, which did you,

the young and Chile, actually prefer? Both of them. Both of them,

because as I said before, I was very curious. My nickname in my father's

village is When-Why-How. If you don't ask questions, you don't know.

When the music was too far for me to understand, I would take it and go

to the traditional musicians and play this and say, you tell me that

all the music is the same from you play this. The funny thing is that

they can jam with Otis Redding, James Brown, all the music you bring

in, they would say, just pay it. So you have this incredibly open and

creative upbringing in your family, but I am also very aware that at the

time, and this is true of many African nations, not just Benin, the

country was ruled by a dictatorship. It was nominally Communist. As you

grow up, singing more and more, developing more professionally, by

the time you are a teenager, it was becoming more politically as well

socially very difficult for you. Absolutely. You are right about

that. Before the Communist regime, which arrived in 1975- 1976, the

radio, which when you put on the radio in Benin, you could hear

everything. All the way from traditional music in Benin,

conditional music player, Cameroon, the Ivory Coast, to the music of

rock 'n' roll from Great Britain. Everything was played. Even the

French music, classical music, they would play that on the radio. The

Communist regime arrived and said, OK, from now on we don't want white

people's music. We want your very morning, from the morning we started

at a.m. Until we finish, we just want revolutionary music every day.

It changed my life, it collapsed, because I was like... I don't want

that! Is that when you decided you had to get out? I decided to get out

when they started putting pressure on artists to write music about the

Communist revolution, and the people in power. And I was like, I'm not

doing that. My father always told me, do not use music for any

political party because they come and they go. You want to be neutral.

So here I am, 16 years old, I have to go and sing, and luckily for me,

I was touring around in Africa. So every time I was able to escape, not

to be that, until one day I was faced with the fact that I would be

in the country and I was singing in front of the head of state of West

Africa. And you feel dirty. You feel absolutely degraded. Because they

look at you, like, you sing and you me nothing. There are certain people

who can give a status in our countries, and they are the ones who

perceive you as a prostitute, because you are in front of them

singing. At 1.I told my father, if this is what singing is about, I'm

out of here. Which takes a seagoing to Paris in your early 20s and then,

Franco, spending the rest of the light travelling the world, but ace

first in Paris for many years, then settling in New York City in the US.

I just wonder, if you had not made your adult life in the west, whether

you think your music would have been fundamentally different. If you had

stayed in Africa. It would have been different because of the technology

that we don't have. Within have that in the 80s or the 90s. Now you have

studios in Benin, and pretty much everywhere in Africa, people have a

MacBook or a PC where they can be music now. The young kids today are

really savvy about that because of the internet. They can have sounds

here, they can get this. It was very difficult. My first album, believe

it or not, that are recorded in 1980, I had to travel, there was a

student loan for university that everybody has a right to have, I had

to take that loan to come to Paris on record my first album that

require Korea through -- broke my career through. So I knew I would

have to be recording and going and coming back and forth. I was a

professional. I wanted my sound to be different. I wanted my music to

embody not only the traditional music of my country but all those

wonderful artist that I had heard that allowed me to dream big. It is

a fantastic queue for people who know Angelique Kidjo's music, and

for those you don't, to get a little flavour of what you do. We are going

to play a track which is from your 2010 album Oyo which she performed

for the BBC recently. A look at this.

You are bopping away and you are making the move as well in much out.

It seems to me there is a lot going on in your music, and there is

really this mix of influences. Some people listening to albums like that

one, like you said, there is a problem here, because it is not

authentic. It sounds like it is manufactured from to many sources.

What is authentic? Shami music that is authentic. I can tell you if it

is not. Most of the time when people talk about traditional music in

Africa, it is like, well, it is music that may answer this work

plan, traditional music that they were playing, it is completely

different from today. We have trouble in Africa keeping those

instruments alive. Most of the young kids don't want to learn to play any

traditional instrument. They want to go to the city and make quick money.

The way to keep those instruments and that music alive is to make them

available in a way that the world can listen to. Therefore, if you put

them in modern music, you have to find a way forward to appeal to

everybody. That's what I do. Is it working? I noticed the other day

that on TV Africa has 50 million viewers across Africa now, but if

you switch it on in many cities across the continent, you find that

by and large it is a diet of the sort of urban music you might get in

the United States as well. It has its own African flavour. It is

based, it seems, a lot of that, on hip-hop and rap and urban sounds and

beads. Is that where African is going? Well, the thing is, rape will

not exist without African music. Soul music would not exist without

African music. Rock 'n' roll would not exist without, you know, there

is no music in the western developed world without African music. It is

what happened, the slaves, when they moved them from Africa, unwillingly,

they came with their culture. From a different part of Africa, the blues.

They took the drums away from them when they arrived in America. In

Cuba, they kept the drums. In Brazil, they kept the drums. He

listened those different types of music and you find Africa in the

rhythm. I have a lucky enough to be invited to a ceremony in Brazil. It

was the weirdest experience I have ever encountered. I was sitting down

and they were singing in Yoruba. I don't speak a word of Portuguese,

but I could sing with them, because I kept the song. What you tell those

people, because you come to Africa and you come to Brazil and you make

classical music that you must used to play, you don't have to do

anything with us. Every time people want to reduce African artists to a

cliche. That is the problem we have. You call it a cliche. For some

people it might be a sense of African pride and nationalism, in a

way. legitimately helpful to One of the greatest African

musicians, he always talked about defending African culture

against Western cultural He probably felt that

you had been seduced If you listen to him,

you hear James Brown in his music. Where did James Brown

take that from? Michael Jackson

emulated James Brown. It is always the story

of going back and forth, For me, music does not belong

to me as an African, What I have learned from traditional

musicians, you have to include What you have not done is write

highly political lyrics. You once said that

lyrics did not matter. The first album I made,

the meaning of it, if you look at the logo, see no evil,

hear no evil, talk no evil. In France, the country that

colonised so many countries In France, the country that

colonised so many countries They cannot even take the time to

help someone crying in the subway. In my country, when you come out

of your house, you see somebody, You cannot even say that in

a civilised and developed country? There was something you did

that was extraordinary and caused In 2006, you played in Zimbabwe,

in front of a huge audience, you basically said,

Robert Mugabe and his government, If you live by violence,

you will die by violence. You had to leave the

country the next day. Is it your determination to fight

against what remains of the African dictatorships and to be somebody

who leverages your fame When I was invited to go play

in Zimbabwe, it was my first concert Because I would meet

Zimbabwean artists. We would talk, we would do stuff

together and I never had a chance to do that.

Two days before I left, I received an email from an activist

saying to me, you cannot come here, you are a rare voice,

the only one we rely on, to speak for us.

If something is wrong you are the only person without fear to talk

about it. If you come here, it is like

you are giving your consent I reached out to Amnesty

International, Oxfam, UNICEF, I asked them

what the situation was like. My take on music is that

you have to go and play, even in a war zone, to understand

the worthlessness of being at war. You have to go to see the people who

are suffering, under siege. For me, going to Zimbabwe,

was to give something to them. Everybody said to me,

you have got to be really careful. When I get there, we have a press

conference with the French ambassador at the time

who put it together. someone said to the ambassador,

the secret service of he turned as white as a piece of

paper in your hand and he looked at me and he said,

no politics, I said, OK. I went on stage and said,

we cannot blame white people When our leaders become butchers,

what makes them legitimate? I want somebody to tell me,

when you are a man, does that mean you have to abuse somebody else,

when you are a President, the welfare of your people

is your number one priority. When you start killing them, there

is no way you can blame somebody for that. It does not matter why.

There was a dead silence when I said that.

His eyes were falling out of his head.

He was thinking we would end up in jail.

When you put that way, with your passion, I can understand

why you take on dictatorships in Africa.

And there are still dictatorships in Africa.

But it seems to me, it is more difficult when you address some

of the other issues, you talk a lot about the place

of girls and women in African societies, you demand equal

education, access to education for females, but there are issues

that are very difficult in African societies,

for example, the legal rights of women, inheritance,

polygamy, another issue, are you prepared to go into those

areas and to speak loud and difficult truths to Africans?

Until we change, whenever I go, the traditions that are not up

female genital mutilation, child marriage, how can a man of 45

people may not like that, but it's the way it is.

Unless we decide to take on the challenge of changing things

on our continent, no-one can make the change for us.

You can put billions of dollars in Africa,

if we are not educated enough to understand the world

in which we are living in, the power we have, how we can tell

the dictators in our country, go to hell, we do not want

Benin has a vibrant and a working democracy, but we still see child

trafficking, and in education, it is a completely unfair society.

Girls do not get the same fair shake as boys.

How can people like you fix this? Billion is in a little better shape.

The government that came in place, what they did,

But what they forgot to do, included in that package,

Polygamy, there are 40% of women in 2006, who said they still live

I was sitting in my hotel room, I jumped out of the bed,

Since four years, I have been working with UNICEF representation

in Italy, in the government of my country, to try to fix that.

The main problem regarding child trafficking is that more than 40%

of the children that are born, they have no birth certificate.

So here comes a government that says we do not have the means,

We can provide, with UNICEF from Italy, computers

It is up to the government to make sure those children,

To have the picture of the child, the family, so that nobody can come

I met the Minister of Defence, the Minister of the Interior,

and I told them, the ten days they give people to declare

the birth of the child, it does not work for everybody.

I want to get a sense of your vision of the future.

Where are you going to be investing your time and effort?

I will be investing my time in the world because Africa

But what I do for the girls that I put in school,

I don't want it to be anonymous. I want them to give me every cent to

go and meet those goals and talk to them.

beings are bringing to other fellow human beings.

We have to leave the politics out of it.

We have to create a different world, that is where the future

Thank you very much for being on HARDtalk.

You are welcome. We can go on for ever.