Fatoumata Diawara — a psychedelic journey through sound and spirit at Joy of Jazz

2 Nov 2024

Although the Joy of Jazz spaceship landed and departed Johannesburg a fortnight ago, looking at Vuyo Giba’s photographs of Mali’s Wassoulou punk-rock dervish left Bongani Madondo still reeling from the magic of it all.

A week after the 25th anniversary of the Joy of Jazz musical fête whipped audiences into a frenzy in Johannesburg last month, something much calmer was in the offing for me.

Or so I thought. How wrong I was.

I received a stash of black-and-white shots through which the photographer presents a series of cinematic noir frames featuring the performance of Paris-based Malian sensation Fatoumata Diawara.

“My life is strange. I started speaking early. I had so much energy. I wanted to say something through dance. I danced all the time. I couldn’t hold back. I danced in the streets. I danced everywhere.” (Fatoumata Diawara, Songlines, October 2011)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfMDqUSgbck

The instruction was simple enough: you might need to check this unknown photographer. Cautiously soaking in each photograph frame by frame, I instantly knew the Gqeberha photographer, Vuyo Giba, who had travelled from the Windy City with neither sponsor nor place to “squat” in Sin City, would not remain obscure forever.

In her brief, taut, tight and unforgivingly nocturnal, and yet novelistic visual narration, Diawara is enshrouded in black. Although she is bathed in the pathos of the night, the photos are striking for their gleaming, animated and extraterrestrial mien.

Psychedelic rock dervish

The spotlit single character in this photographic novella could have turned out deeply unsettling, wicked, scary even, were she not such a spirit-stirring figure: a psychedelic rock dervish out on a 21st-century African metropole night. Dystopia has never looked so entrancing.

There’s Diawara grimacing, jutting out of Giba’s photo frames and leaping deep into the night. Snapshots of flamenco in flight.

Some in the visual arts space claim photography is not an art form, but rather a technical vocation. It is true that the two mediums draw, figuratively and as an expression of extraction, excavation even, from different techniques. And yet the work of photography’s most dedicated and gifted practitioners is steeped in the mould of working painters.

As with figurative art, even abstract expression, the most visionary practitioners are aesthetically concerned with the same philosophical questions. Timeless photography is concerned with the same kind of roaming and searching. It is no different, at its depth, from a traveller’s reconfiguring eye.

Though much of the origins of photography served both an anthropological and a reportorial role, the medium has shown over and over again its unwillingness to be yoked to the burden of reportage.

If it is not art – and I’m not convinced ’tain’t – it at least aspires to the highest state of art’s consciousness. If, specifically under review here, Giba’s work is not art, then locally, nothing else is. If it is not art, perhaps it performs even a bolder undertaking. Her work exists in that liminal visual no-man’s register between prayer and dreams.

It can free the viewer to dream even as it teleports them to a specific place and time. It inspires, perhaps even evokes, out of sheer imagination, one to ask themselves questions about things it has cropped out of view. What it leaves out is as compelling as what it leaves in. Deceptively, the most cunning imaginative photography can plant the visual seeds through which the viewer can imagine a whole lotta love; and host a whole orchestral concert in their head.

This is what Giba’s set of images proposed to me. They simply took me back to a show I was struggling to forget.

They compelled me to wrestle with what I might have seen or not: what was that? What I might have felt or not, and not acknowledged then because, you know, some artists need weeks, months, years to make sense of.

Metaphysical concerns

Ultimately they forced me to deal with metaphysical concerns: is there logic at all to art? Is art merely a wing of the entertainment industrial complex or a form of ritual and/or philosophical pursuit? What do we mean by mere entertainment? Does the question too easily hark back to the old and outdated divide that perhaps never existed in the first place, between mass culture and artistic expression — the fiction of a hermit genius chiselling away on desolation row for only a few in the know?

These photos themselves did not provide me with easy answers. The joy of it all, though, is that I could not resist their pull. I found myself reliving the experience of seeing Diawara perform. Not only did they take me back to that moment, but they did one more thing: got me travelling at a snail’s pace deep into myself.

Admittedly, this cauldron of cannibalising capitalism, complete with the comically tall, bronze effigy of Nelson Mandela in the middle of all that bling, is not the sort of place easily associated with air-altering magic. However, once a year, something inexplicable happens, right in the retail bowels of it all. This, on my computer screen and this, in my memory vault, was one of those moments.

Fatoumata Diawara at the the 25th anniversary of the Joy of Jazz concert. (Photo: Vuyo Giba)

Insofar as visual curatorial discharge goes, in which Diawara descends onto a South African stage channelling Busi Mhlongo (Zulu psychedelic “seer”), Nothembi Mkhwebane (Ndebele prog-rock star), and, well, a Shoshone Native American sage, all in one tightly wound energy ball, and proceeds to time travel back home and beyond, in the process wilding out way beyond the realms of human perception, takes gumption too rare in the contemporary performance arts.

With each and every out-there minute, in which the artist fed off the audience’s entranced devotion, as though a marabout wrestling spirits only she is privy to, she whirred, working herself into a trance. She spun and spun, like an ancient Moroccan dervish dancing to the Master Musicians of Jajouka around the tomb of the saint, Sidi Hamid Shikh. Although Diawara is not Moroccan, she is just as influenced by African Sufi traditions as she is by animism.

Denke Denke

There’s a dance style in Mali known as Denke Denke. On the sleeve of his album, Niger, named for the mystic river coursing through the region, Malian guitarist Afel Bocoum describes it thus: “Denke Denke means hitting your feet hard off the ground while staying balanced. It is a dance of provocation, particularly when a girl knows she is well-shaped and has pointed breasts.

“With hands in the air, a jump to the sky, both feet hit the ground hard and land straight. The dancer spins and, this time the face and the chest, pointy breasts, point to, and taunt the sky.”

As she wheeled and wheeled, akin to a Gnawo mystic in an exorcism ritual, so did the audience’s heads. Unbeknownst to us, we were woven into the spirit of Denke Denke. It was soon apparent she was too overwhelmed by the occasion of this being her first trip to South Africa.

To me, this was a reminder also that South Africans often underestimate the historical, political, spiritual and economic symbolism the land beams to millions of continental and diaspora Africans, and greater swaths of the world. We tend to conceptualise and language places of magical and spiritual powers as anywhere but here: West Africa, the Congo, Asia, the magical realism hagiography of Latin America. Dizzily we move on, like “rolling stones, no direction home”.

“Ai-louve you. This is my first time here. Ai, louve you.” And so we be loved.

Fatoumata Diawara at the Joy of Jazz concert in Johannesburg. (Photo: Vuyo Giba)

Then, again, she spins and spins, like a little girl showing off a new maxi dress. Only the one she had on, an ankle-length Kente print number she hurriedly copped at the Kwa Mai-Mai Market on the morning of her performance, transposed her into a witch spinning, like a Denke Denke princess, at 200 beats per minute.

Definitely a “witch” you need in your corner when things go pear-shaped. Not that I know what witches look like. And to refer to women as “witches” in 2024 stretches credulity, but those who “felt” it know some metaphors must just be left as they are: dancing on the brink of our logic, colonial constructs and women’s lib. Like describing the late Prince as elfin, and Icelandic surrealist pop innovator Björk as a pixie. It’s the only way words can enrage you into a contextual perceptivity.

Mobile gadgets’ torches ablaze in the air. For a few seconds, it is anticipatively quiet. Suspense. I could feel the wined-out hot breath of the gentleman behind me. The heartbeat of the lady beside me. And in that scary moment, my heart went: boof, boof, too. Then, again, there she was. Phrrr! Phrrrr! Off she went. Spinning.

Insofar as the art and power of live performance goes, Diawara was a bit overwhelming, not as tightly controlled as what some perceive a jazz artist vibes like – and thank God, she’s not a jazz artist, but something much more, besides.

It is a silly vocation to try to slot artists into genre-pen colonies of style. There is a case, though, to be made for Diawara’s live stage set as the roar of an African indie star. In the same vein as some contemporary Mali pop acts such as Amadou and Mariam, Diawara’s performance is an ode to rock’s indie genius African roots.

Her band play a toxic mash of traditional, devotional music, shot through with fast, spacey, hard rocking, guitar attack style prog-rock. Bedfellows, as it were, then, of the moody assault of Radiohead, the Blk Jks and Mars Volta. What she did on the night of the flying genies, though, was tap into her two, true, live performance predecessors on these stages: Victoria “Busi” Mhlongo on one hand, and Maria Balboa Buika, aka “Concha”, on the other.

Looking back at the 25-year history of Joy of Jazz, Diawara’s performance – and this is what Giba’s profound images evoke – provided if only symbolically, a third and missing ring in Peter Jackson’s trilogy, Lord of the Rings.

Let us forget for a minute that JRR Tolkien, magic maker nonpareil, whose mythopoeic fantasies Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit are universally acclaimed as “literary magic”, was, by dint of birth, a South African. On second thoughts, nah. Let us not strain for such true but tenuous levels.

And yet it is within the uitlander (foreigner) Tolkien’s “African” heritage, an Africa unencumbered by geo-locus, an Africa of the mind and of the soul; an Africa at home in Gujarat, Brooklyn, Haiti and Africa in Manchester, that perhaps we can fully appreciate, in the pantheon of folklore, Diawara’s magic genie. Her performance, propelled, as spaceships are, by the live engine that is her band, was quite her-storical, hysterical and theatrical, too.

Still within the imaginary conversation with Tolkien’s magic: it can be said that Diawara’s performance was itself the symbol or, perhaps provided therein, the third ring of the Lord of the Rings, of our imagination. As cinema magic’s believers know, there are three powerful rings in the world of Lord of the Rings, namely: Vilya, Narya and Nenya.

The three, as with Mhlongo’s performances anywhere in the world, Buika and now recently Diawara, symbolise the principal elements of life itself: air, fire and water. Often the three commingle in ways ordinary humans cannot comprehend.

I do not wish to render the experience any more incomprehendo and far-out surreal than it actually was. Safe to say that on that distinct Johannesburg evening, music lovers experienced a cultural meteor-rising act we might not have the opportunity of repeating any time soon, and for a reason: because we, too, were drafted, in real-time and shot into the African-transnational ritual up and out in space.

Sense of magic

I have witnessed, in my three decades as a traveller, in real and sur-reality, fashion, and in my occupation as a music critic and occasionally music label adviser, this sense of magic. Often, as is the case with metaphysical sensations, not entirely sure of what I was witnessing that time. One is never really solid on their feet in the period one is enshrouded within.

From that day I first saw my township’s band The Giggies Band of Temba Town as a greenhorn of 10, Brenda & The Big Dudes at the pimply age of 13, The Fugees live with Nas at The Forum, London, as a young man in his twenties, I have experienced the illogical sensation of live music’s profundity, as I have the enchantment of static art.

I’m not even a huge fan of live music, because of its propensity and vulnerability to gear and techno-glitches. And there were those Mhlongo rituals that proved the inadequacy of words’ description. Busi Mhlongo and Twasa’s launch of Babhemu, at which, not believing what had just hit them, Hugh Masekela and Bheki Mseleku started throwing R100 notes at her feet.

Mhlongo at the Bat Centre in Durban with the Mahotella Queens, in which the Queens refused to go backstage and stood agape at the Mami Wata (mermaid) turning into snake and human forms on stage. What about the launch of Urban Zulu at Music Africa in Johannesburg, where my eyes followed the movements of a young man who’d pushed his way through a forest of revellers, right to the front of the stage, upper body shaking in a robotic dance, as though dismembering his own body parts, and then jumping one beat per second for a good 30 minutes?

This is the same show the photographer Ruth Motau later confessed to me that she could not photograph. Why?

Fatoumata Diawara at the the Joy of Jazz concert. (Photo: Vuyo Giba)

“That lady contorts herself into too many forms on stage and the whole thing is just, you know, indescribable.”

Fatoumata Diawara is not Busi Mhlongo. Neither is she Concha Buika. She need not be.

The wickedly delightful wizard who steps out of a long line of ghost whisperers of no lesser gifts, Wassoulou women such as Coumba Sidibe, Oumou Sangaré, Bako Dagnon, and the electrifying voice of Naïny Diabaté, from the embarrassment of riches Mali continues to leak into Middle Earth, is a wonder all her own.

That evening at the Sandton Convention Centre, one felt the floor rising, the venue rising, and for once the cliché, Africa Rising, had a ring of believability to it. If there is anything Vuyo Giba’s photos revealed, at least to me, and if there’s anything we can decrypt from the artist’s heady cypher, when Toni Morrison exulted us to hear art as “God’s language”, is that magic, far more believable than fantasy, might be our last salvation. DM

Bongani Madondo writes on photography, poetry and politics.

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.

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“My life is strange. I started speaking early. I had so much energy. I wanted to say something through dance. I danced all the time. I couldn’t hold back. I danced in the streets. I danced everywhere.” (Fatoumata Diawara, Songlines, October 2011)

Psychedelic rock dervish

Metaphysical concerns

Denke Denke

Sense of magic