Mamadou Sanou was 6 when he first heard the father of Afrobeat, Fela Kuti, sing. In Dioulassoba, the old red-earth district of Bobo-Dioulasso, in western Burkina Faso, he rummages through vinyl records that a trader brought back from Ghana. He comes across a strange cover. A man is seated there in tight underwear, surrounded by bare-breasted singers drawing the outlines of Africa. This is Shakara, the cult record of the Nigerian musician.
The nervous riff of the guitar, the psychedelic solo of the keyboard, the voice of Fela Kuti singing in pidgin… “I didn’t understand anything he was saying but I started dancing”, recalls Mamadou Sanou, alias “Baba Commanding officer “. The Burkinabé is then too young to go to school, but he already has the fever of Afrobeat. He dreams of “singing like Fela” and spends his time dancing.
In Burkina Faso, far from the mythical clubs of Lagos, the artist is today one of the rare heirs of the “Black President” to merge the Afrobeat of the 1970s with the rhythms of Mandé, land of griots and traditional hunters located in the south of present-day Mali and eastern Guinea. Better known across the Atlantic than in their own country, Baba Commandant and his group, The Mandingo Band, will perform on Thursday April 20 in Montreuil (Seine-Saint-Denis) as part of the Banlieues Bleues festival and a one-day tour. thirty dates in the United States and France.
Charm hat
In the meantime, it is at the Sport Bar, one of the oldest orchestra bars in Ouagadougou, that we meet him. The saxophone howls, the dance floor ignites, the bodies vibrate in a sort of trance. Baba Commandant, with an inhabited look, jubilant behind his n’goni, the guitar of the dozos, the traditional hunters of the west of the country.
“It is a mystical instrument. When I touch it, it speaks to me, I respond to it, it’s its vibration that makes me sing,” slips the enigmatic 49-year-old musician. Descendant of the customary chief of the Bobo and close to the dozo brotherhood, Mamadou Sanou defends the Mandinka music heritage of his ancestors. On stage, he is accompanied by a balafon and does not take off his n’goni and his hunter’s charm hat.
The Bobolais never learned music, he “fell into it young”, says the one who, at 8, became the youngest dancer in a troupe in the city after bursting on stage during a show and impressed the audience. “Petit Madou”, nickname given to him by the locals the day after his performance, grew up to the rhythms of mask ceremonies and the sounds of “longas”, traditional drums.
The n’goni, from six to twelve strings, is normally reserved for dozo griots, holders of memory and singing the praises of hunters. But Mamadou Sanou is so fascinated by this instrument that he begins to make it on calabashes covered with goatskin, after asking “the blessing of the elders”. He learns to play alone, watching the musicians. “Before each concert, I have to crack kola nuts and pour some dolo [millet beer] on the floor to apologize to the ancestors,” he explains.
The dance troupe that hired him disbands when its choreographer dies. He is 22 years old and decides to “go on an adventure” in the capital. Like many artists in Burkina Faso, he begins by singing in the streets for a few coins and, “to survive”, sells djembes to tourists. Until a friend offers him to record a song. That day, in the studio, the horns are blowing highlife and the rhythm guitar is going “chak chak”. He hears the Afrobeat, the words flow. He recorded his first track, Juguya (“wickedness”, in Dioula), in a few takes. He shouts his rage there and recounts his galleys in Ouagadougou.
Hymn to Resistance
“Burkina Faso’s black punk”, as his friends call him in reference to the eccentric character he builds and his noctambulism, rocks the dolo cabarets on Sundays and the underground bars of Ouagadougou in the evenings. Issouf Diabaté accompanies him on feverish electric guitar solos. Their fusion style amazes.
In 2004, Camille Louvel, a young DJ living in the country, invited Baba Commandant to his bar. He is impressed by his mastery of n’goni and his acting. “His bulging gaze, his voice from beyond the grave, his trance… He was one of the only ones to do Mandingo Afrobeat”, reports the Frenchman, who co-produced his three albums. In 2012, on a pinnace going up the Niger River, on his way to a festival in the heart of the Malian desert in Timbuktu, he played a recording to Hisham Mayet, unearther of forgotten sounds and co-founder of the prestigious American label Sublime Frequencies, who decided to produce.
For eight years, jihadist violence has torn Burkina Faso apart, “Ouaga” has lost its madness and many scenes have closed. Baba Commandant wants to continue singing. “We can’t run away from our country, we need music, it feeds the soul and it brings us together,” he breathes. His latest album, titled Sonbonbela (“compose with the difference of the other”), is a hymn to resistance, courage and tolerance. “If you raise your left hand because you love no one, raise your right hand and no one will love you,” chants Baba Commander. “It means that we have to pay attention to others, otherwise we will leave you too, just as we left the Sahel,” he preaches.
