Abstract: I have been fascinated with griots and the power of song since I was young. In high school in Mali, I had a friend named Seydou Ly. We used to call him Sly, because of his Afro hairdo and because he loved the blues. In high school, our group-we called ourselves the Rockers-would meet at his house for tea, grilled meat, and music. Some of us would play guitar, and there was a turntable with piles of blues and RB we smoked kampe; we supported black power, the Black Panthers, and the Black Muslims in America; we were against the war in Vietnam and apartheid in South Africa. Sly and I thought our Afros were powerful enough to set us apart from our peers in Bamako and transform us into the black Americans we admired so much. We used to spend hours on our hair, washing it with special shampoos and combing it. Our imagination was captured by defiant images of George Jackson, Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali, Eldridge Cleaver, Malcolm X, and James Brown. We tried to look like our black American heroes. We walked tall, in packs, and pretended we couldn't speak French.We called one another by American nicknames. Slowly, we became aware of race in our daily relations with French people. We began to see racism where others before us had seen colonialism or class exploitation. We felt that we were immersed in an international youth culture, far ahead of our peers, who did not listen to Jimi Hendrix, who did not even know about Woodstock. To educate them, we de-
Publication Year: 1997
Publication Date: 1997-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 23
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