By Lisa Vives, Global Information Network<\/p>\n\n\n\n
NEW YORK (IDN) \u2014 For those unfamiliar with African superstar Angelique Kidjo, her unflinching views on everything from the colonial mentalities of her French schoolmates to African politics and American history and her decision to call out slavery in her music can be found in a recent freewheeling interview with a New York magazine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cPeople were very ignorant about Africa,\u201d she recalled of her early encounters at a school in France. \u201cThey asked me, \u201cWhen you\u2019re grocery shopping, do you go there on the back of an elephant?\u201d And I said \u201cYes, and I have monkeys that carry my groceries!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Kidjo has strong opinions on climate justice, police brutality in Nigeria, corruption in Africa and the United States which she shared in an open-ended discussion with staff reporter Julian Lucas of The New Yorker early this month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI knew more about the country of my fellow students at the Centre d\u2019informations musicales, a jazz school, than they knew about my country,\u201d she declared. Later, classmates told her that jazz wasn\u2019t for Africans. \u201cThat was funny,\u201d she said. \u201cBut nothing stopped me. I feel sorry for people who are ignorant. If you don\u2019t see the beauty in Africa, there\u2019s no beauty in you.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Kidjo continued to defy expectations during her stay in France (she now lives in Brooklyn). When recording her first album, \u201cBatonga\u201d she chose her own outfit for the cover \u201cbecause of all the clich\u00e9s and exoticism around African women.\u201d People had expected her to wear a boubou. \u201cMy parents didn\u2019t raise me in a village,\u201d she pointed out. \u201cThey raised me in a city. You ain\u2019t gonna put me in no boubou, man!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Kidjo takes up climate change on her new album \u201cMother Nature.\u201d She sees it impacting the poorest of the poor in Africa. \u201cWe know it\u2019s bad to cut trees. But what alternatives are we offering? To tell poor people, on top of poverty, you have to watch yourself die from hunger?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her views turn to politics. \u201cWe never had independence in Africa,\u201d she says bluntly. \u201cI don\u2019t know how we ended up being the richest continent on the planet, with our resources controlled by a mafia of rich countries and CEOs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve accepted that Africans have to live in poverty for the rest of the world to live large \u2013 \u2013 but that\u2019s not going to work. Unless rich countries take responsibility for their impact on the lives of poor people and build a system where resources are shared equally, we are not going to survive.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Kidjo can be seen in the movie \u201cThe Woman King\u201d starring Viola Davis and John Boyega. Inspired by actual events, the movie dramatizes the exploits of the Dahomean Amazons, a legendary all-female military unit in what is now southern Benin. [IDN-InDepthNews \u2013 21 February 2022]<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Photo: Angelique Kidjo. Source: Elbphilharmonie. Credit: Fabrice Mabillot<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Lisa Vives, Global Information Network NEW YORK (IDN) \u2014 For those unfamiliar with African superstar Angelique Kidjo, her unflinching views on everything from the colonial mentalities of her French schoolmates to African politics and American history and her decision to call out slavery in her music can be found in a recent freewheeling interview […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6039,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,26,16,32],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-6036","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-africa","8":"category-culture-art-religion","9":"category-news","10":"category-regions"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6036"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6036\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6037,"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6036\/revisions\/6037"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inpsjapan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}