Angélique Kidjo is a Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter, UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, and founder of the Batonga Foundation. Here she talks with GPC Member Monica Winsor.
Transcript
MONICA WINSOR: This is a thrill for me because for many years I’ve been, as many of you have been so inspired by Angelique first with her electric voice and then in getting to know her activism and her work on the ground I see how her electricity, her power is manifesting itself in Africa, and in everyone she meets in her relentless activism. So, in having a conversation let’s start at the beginning. And Angelique also just came out with a book called spirit rising, which I really recommend, which talks about her life.
ANGÉLIQUE KIDJO: You left it there.
WINSOR: I have a copy over there because you came from Benin, your home country and you are so passionate about it. Tell us a little bit about what it was like growing up in Benin. And we’ve talked a lot today. we started the day talking about our values and how they have helped us in what we do in the world. What were some of the values and experiences in Benin as a girl that have made you who you are.
KIDJO: Well, first of all, I want to thank you for giving me this opportunity to talk a little bit about what we do and where I come from. I always grew up thinking I was a boy because I have bigger brothers and I was always on their back and doing everything they do, climbing the trees, playing soccer, and I was telling my mom, “When I grow up I want to be James Brown.” And my mama used to say, “No, you can’t.” I said, “Yes, I can.” And so one of the thing that is really interesting from my background is the fact that my, my mom and dad were single kids and they were educated. And with one salary my father was able to raise ten children, as I said yesterday, sent all of us to school. And my father is a very kind of mind driven person. Everything that he can’t process he doesn’t believe it. If there’s no logic to it he’s, “Don’t play with my brain.” So my father always used to say to us, “Your brain is your ultimate weapon. Use it. And when you get yourself into physical fight you already lost the battle.”
And he also tells us, “Don’t bring guilt and fear in this house. Fear is a jail cell that you yourself lost the key and you don’t how to open that door anymore to get out of it. And guilt, guilt comes with the religion that comes with this country. So why should you be guilty, feel guilty when you do something that gave you joy? Guilt is out of the window from this house. You do wrong to somebody, stand up, take full responsibility of what you do, apologize, discuss and move on. No guilt in this house.” So those are my background. And my mom’s take on this is, “Do not envy other people. It’s good to have an ambition but if you envy somebody and you do nothing about it you end up doing bad choices.” So I grew up with mother, my grandmothers, women, and my father always on top being the role model for me. He saved manhood, I have to say, and he raised my brother the same way. “You cannot lay a hand on a woman. If you do that don’t come back here.”
My mom taught my brothers how to clean, to cook, to go to the market. My brothers still do my pants sewing because I can’t sew to save my own life. So that’s my background pretty much.
WINSOR: That’s great. You brought up fear, which has also been a kind of a current today and what we’ve been talking about. And I wanted to ask you, you have demonstrated fearlessness a lot in your life. And maybe if you could share a little bit about your decision to leave Benin, which must have been a, a really you know, after being under repressive regime and what it felt like. And then also the amazing pull to go back to Africa to bring back-, and the, and the fear that may have come up in that.
KIDJO: Oh my God. When I, I mean it took us one year to plan me escaping the Communist regime because before you leave the country you have to ask for authorization. It has to be put on your passport. And I didn’t ask for it. We have no choices because I was one of the rare artists in Benin that refused to write music to praise any political agenda. I refused because my father always used to say, “If you are linked to a political party the political party go and there goes your career.” So I did not want to use my voice to praise la revolution every day and they killed education. They bring fear home where there are no fear. I mean me, being obliged to call my father “comrade,” my mom “comrade,” they break the trust in families. And I was mad as hell and my father know the person that I am.
And he knew that at one point if I don’t leave this country I will end up in jail. That’s for sure. I’d rather go to jail than let anyone infringe on my freedom of speech. And one day I was, I had managed to escape all those organizations of the, all those gathering that the government will put together asking artists to be caution for that. One day I couldn’t escape it and I have to be part of it and I felt dirty. I felt like a piece of crap literally because all those leaders there all they look at is not you as a person, it’s not you as a woman. You’re just a prostitute out there because you’re singing. And they lead many countries in the West Coast of Africa. And I get out of there. I tell my father, “If I don’t leave this country then just put me in jail right now.”?
So it was a hard decision for my parents to make and the worries were two things-going to Europe and not having money to leave and prostituting, or getting addicted to drug or sell drug.
And I told them, “Don’t worry about that. I will work because you taught me that there’s no such shame to clean the house of somebody if you make a good living out of it.” So the day I was leaving it was the day that we choose. It was the wedding of my cousin that lived close to the airport. So we did everything for people not to think that I was leaving basically. So my mom and dad was the witness of the wedding and I was involved in giving the rings. And then we came back home and I put my gown to go to the party. And my father put his car in the house and we put my suitcase in it. And in a plastic bag I have my clothes. And we went to my cousin and I was taking the last flight of Air France that is still leave at the same time today, 11:55 PM. And it was the last one because that’s the one that businesspeople take to come to arrive early in Paris.
So I grabbed my, my clothes in the toilet, get dressed, get my suitcase. And my father told me, “Okay, I cannot bring you to the front of the airport. I will leave you a couple of miles and you have to walk with your suitcase.” So I walk in the darkness with my suitcase and I arrive at the airport. And what the Communist regime will do is that they team up. People from the southern and people from the northern part because the president was from the north. So, there’s, between the customer, and the police, and the military there’s no trust. One have to watch the other. So I walk into the airport and I saw some, the guy from southern part that, thank God, was a friend of my brother, used to do music with my brother. And he saw me and he goes, “What are you doing here?” I said, “Please, let me go.” He said, “Okay. I’ll turn my back. I won’t stamp your passport. Just run.” And I ran and ran, ran, ran, ran, checked my luggage, took my bag and walk, because we don’t have, you don’t have the, the plane linked to the airport so you gotta walk.
And now I get into the plane. I sat down in my chair, cover my head up, and was still there. I’m like, I was not afraid. I was mad as hell. I just wanted to leave. I didn’t want to stay there. So when the plane took off I say, “I gotcha. I’m outta here.”
WINSOR: Fantastic. And it’s so interesting, too, you know, your not wanting to sing for the government. And now many of your songs are about the causes that you feel are important about social justice, about women, about speaking your, your truth. It’s, it’s kind of an, a remarkable path.
KIDJO: Yes, because the people of Africa, my continent, there are many of them that have no voices and a lot of people speak on our behalf. And sometime I get at journalists. I say, “Don’t speak for me. I have a brain. I’ve been to school. I can speak for myself. Don’t make the question and the answer for me.”? And it took me a while before I got that madness out of my head. I used to be just asked the question. “Africa is not a country it’s a continent.”? So how many time I’ve said that? Um, music for me is something that the traditional musician in my country have told me that if you are gifted with a talent of art, it doesn’t matter what you do, not only you empower people but you give them voice. You represent them. You’re out there not only singing to entertain but also making a profound change in people to know that they are capable of doing things. It’s always amazed me to see how people come and say, “But I can’t do this.” Or, “How do I do this?”
I say, “Why you question your ability to do something?” From the moment you start questioning your ability to do something you already put yourself in a box of fear and not moving forward. Be bold. What you will do is what you would come up to do and do it with your heart, with your guts. And go ahead. Once you reach one person it’s better than none.
WINSOR: And I think you have inspired so many people, and particularly women and girls all over. And what is so striking to me is that you use your voice, as you’re saying to speak for the voiceless. But you also use your voice to reach people in places of power as well as places where people are really disenfranchised. Talk a little bit, if you will, about this kind of duality where you are both a great advocate on the global stage, but also your desire to go back to Africa and really get back to your roots and help people on the ground through Batonga and through your work as a social activist.
KIDJO: Well, you can’t help people if you cannot help your own people. And one of the thing that I knew before I left my country I knew where I come from. I may not know where I was going but I know where I belong, where I can come back to. And my identity has never been questionable. I have never been for sale not for my music, not for anything else. Every time I go back to Africa I’m reminded by the women of Africa that one lesson that we can teach every woman, every single human being on this planet is that we have to be open to fail to be able to prevail. You don’t fail you don’t know what life is. Well, once you fail don’t stick on the ground too long. Grab yourself back and start thinking about how you project yourself in the future not blaming anybody for the outcome of your failure but just move out of that place, and move forward and just take the world for you because you belong to the world.
And those African women are just, I wish I can bottle their energy and their smiles and give it to people around. And, when I was recording my last album the women of Benin and Kenya, they show me grace. They show me strength. They reassure me that being as strong woman is not something men should be afraid of but men love that more and more because men want women that doesn’t stay on them. They’re like, “Come on. Be partner, man. Don’t be my baby doll but just be a human being.” And during this process of recording not only the women talk about their own daughters, how they are passionate about the education of their girls, but also how they are perceived outside of Africa. And never ever no one ever talked to me like that about it.
But those women at that point, and one woman there said to me, “Can you explain to us. You live in America. You go to France. You travel all over the world. Can you tell me and explain to me why is it that the western country, the rich country want to portray us always through the lens of poverty, being naked, having fly in our eyes? Just, we are misery. We are raped. We are this. We are that. We are never positively presented on the media in your country there where you live. There are women in the country where you live, they’re all really fortunate. Nothing ever happens to them.” And it just like that took me back. I’m like, “Wow. That’s a question we can ask our self.” Why do we do that? And if we see the women, African women as victims we never can help them get out of poverty. It’s not the condition that matters. It’s the trust. We have in their ability to make choices for themselves.
And that is something I’m reminded of and that’s what I fight for. Give voices to the African women, to the African young girl, the teenagers, the woman of tomorrow, the one that will transform my continent and the world, give them the platform they need to tell you what they need to prevail.
WINSOR: Fantastic. So, as you mentioned last night, with Batonga, your organization, you are now doing a rollout in Benin where you’re targeting the most vulnerable, the most, the poorest girls with a data-driven study with Population Council. So, it’s a real sort of a heart and a head, it seems to me, coming together for you as an organization and as an individual. Tell me a little bit about some of the connections you’ve made with the girls that you have already put through school and given these, as you say, assets to help them beyond education.
KIDJO: It is a lot of work we’ve been doing since 2007 pretty much. And I think this new endeavor that we’re going to engage our self in will allow us to have data and to really go really deep one place at a time to have a model that we can transform and put it everywhere and do it really with the girls and what they need. What is important for me to tell you here is the determination of the mothers for the girls to stay in school. They will tell you, “We don’t want the life of our children like ours. We want them to go to school. We want to make choices for themselves. We want them to have a different life,”? and also the determination of the girls to stay in school. Secondary education is where we have the, a huge amount of drop out of school based on early marriage, female genital mutilation, rape, pregnancy.
I mean the number of adolescents dying giving birth is just staggering. So school, secondary education, is the key to stop that. So the girls of Batonga, for example, a lot of them suddenly last year December, I was there, before they were telling me, “Oh, I want to be a, a lawyer. I want to be a doctor. I want to be this,”? and now suddenly start changing. Lots of them are saying, “I want to be a midwife.” And one said to me, “I just don’t want to be a midwife alone. I want to be a nutritionist, too, because once the baby is born we have to teach the mother how to feed them.” Another say, “I want to be a nurse.” I say, “Why just a nurse?” She said to me, “People cut themselves far away in the villages where the hospitals are not there. Who is going to take care of it before they get tetanus? I want to do that.”
So they are really going to school thinking about their family and their community before thinking about their country because they realize that if they can achieve great health, great nutrition, great education in their villages they can take it to the national to the level of the nation and also to the world. One of them told, I’m never going to forget a young girl from the northern part of Benin, the first year we started Batonga she said to me, I ask her, “What do you want to do when you finish school and why are you so eager to say in secondary education and you want to go to university as you told me before?” She looked at me and she goes, “I want to become the first female President of Benin.” I’m like, “Huh? Come again? How old are you?” She said, “Twelve.” I said, “Why do you want to do that?” And she look at me like, “You stupid or what?”
I’m like, “Come on. Tell me your reason.” She said, “With all due respect, men have been leading this country for so long where are we What good ever come out of it for us?”? At 12 years old if you have that kind of mindset and you’re thinking like that I will support you ’til I die. So that’s what I want. That’s the leadership that I want to see the girls of Batonga have because they live another reality. I mean when you come from ex-extreme poverty background, I mean even the, the thought of dreaming of tomorrow is painful. So for them to come out of that and say to me, “Because you’re allowing us to go to secondary education we’re going to take this opportunity and we’re going to take leading our own life.” And that’s what I want them to do. I don’t want anybody to think for them. I want them to think for what they want to do and we provide what it’s needed for them to do that for the new program that we’re going to embrace.
All this information that we’re going to get from the girls going to allow us to give them what they need to really succeed. And I’m also really eager to see how we scale up the teacher training because the quality of education is as important as pitting girls in school because once you finish school and you cannot read or write that’s not working for me.
WINSOR: Right. Fantastic. So, your vision for Africa then it’s, you think a lot about a Pan-African consciousness, and you talk about it, and you sing, and you, and you really spread the message of what is important to you on the continent. What is in your heart right now, the thing that can be the most powerful on the continent and for us to be aware of?
KIDJO: Education. Education. Education and education. In 2050 we’re going to turn the population of my continent will be 2,000,000,000. Do we have the infrastructures in place? Do we have the schools in place? Do we have the hospital in place? I mean my government in Benin is talking about developing the tourism in, in Benin. Who are the service-trained personnel that going to work in hotels? We don’t have people that are trained for those kind of jobs. So there’s an opportunity for us to create job. But to create those job at least the people that work in the tourism and surrounding have to speak French, English, and some Spanish, German, a little bit something for people that come in to feel at ease. So, the question I put onto my government because my President met me when I was there in December and was really proud to tell me, “We are starting a big campaign building a huge hotel and all this for tourism and so on and so forth.”
I say, “Mr. President, who is going to lead? Who’s going to be the general manager? Who’s going to work on those fields? We don’t have anybody? Where is the school system here? I mean we have first to talk about the curriculum in this country. It has to be scaled up. It has been the same for the last 40 years. It’s not relevant anymore to the life of the children of today, to the reality of today. So with your Minister of Education we can sit down and talk about it. Until we start building from the, the ground up our house will crumble. So we need infrastructure. We need to create job. We need a better system of education where school doesn’t because hell on earth for girls. We need to bring into the curriculum gender equality. We start home and we’re continuing school for boys to make school a friendly space for the girls for them to be able to learn and to thrive. So for me, Africa, we have, we are at the turning point of becoming self-sustainable societies or always we gotta be, stay the handing out hand societies.
And also my concern about AIDS, AIDS in Africa is we failed so many, many, many years. Why, because, first of all, the money goes to the wrong hands sometimes. And secondly, we don’t involve the African in the decision making. We don’t involve them by the brain for them to tell you what they need. We come because we have the money. We think that because we bring money to the table the problem will be solved. And I remember vividly in that village woman telling me, “I’d rather die or not having food than having somebody throw me a bone like if I was a dog.”? That’s how she perceived AIDS. We are breaking people trusts. And every time I go back I spend so much time telling them, “Don’t put everybody in the same basket. There are people that will help you, will come and help you because it’s you as a human being not because they have the money.”? They say, “We’re waiting to see that.”
I say, “I know some of them.” They say, “Ah, yeah, yeah. When you bring them we trust you.” But the thing is we’ve done things out of good heart but never think about, okay, if I can put myself in the shoes of that person what would I do. The vision that we have of AIDS is just, “We’re going to do this and we’re going to walk way.” Do you relate to the people you’re helping? Do you see them as human beings? Do you give them any credit of having any brain, any intelligence, or they’re just data, they’re just statistic, they’re just numbers, and you see them and you go, “Oh, I did good here and this is the percentage of this and percentage” It’s good to have data. But after all we’re helping human beings. And if the human beings’ voice cannot come and become part of the solution that we find together we won’t do it long enough because people will turn their back. They will take the money and they go, “Okay, whatever.”
WINSOR: So we’ve also talked a lot today about mindfulness. And, and I think you were touching on this in terms of how do you maintain compassion and mindfulness in your work and how that can really have a profound effect even in development. So, if, if we have a moment I’d love to hear if you have a practice of mindfulness or if this has helped you in your life in some way both on the stage or in any other way.
KIDJO: I have my mother since I was a kid to see her because I mean raising ten children, always going to the market and cooking a lot of food for everybody. And she always managed every day to find half an hour for herself. And then you go to the room, you go, “Mom, what are you doing?” and she won’t even answer you. She said, “Don’t even talk to me. Even if you’re dying I don’t want to hear about it. I need these 30 minutes for myself.” \And when I was younger I’m like, “But what did you do the half an hour in your room and then when I’m calling you don’t answer?” And she said, “Because I need to replenish myself.” So meditation is something that I use a lot. And, sometime I do, sometime I don’t. And since two years now, almost three years I’ve been meditating twice a day. And what I see happening is the way I approach the work I do in general, the music that I do it has a direct impact on my vocal chords because I used to have pharyngitis. I don’t know how you call it.
Pharyngite. You know pharyngite we call it in French? Well, I always, the doctor always from every two month I would go back to the ten days of antibiotics, and I hate drugs. I mean I don’t like to put anything in my system. So meditation have saved me for that. I haven’t been to the doctor for my voice for the last three years. So it gives me also a way to control completely when I’m in very passionate come back, breathe, and get into myself, how to also control my frustration when I, I face injustice, when I’m like, “I want to do this. I want to do this,” and I realize that I’m only one person. There is so much I can do. So in order to be able to help other people I have to preserve myself. And it’s something that the first person that told me that was Ben Kingsley.
He came to my show in Los Angeles and saw me after the show how much time I spent with each one that comes to you, to me. So after a while he was the last person that I have. And he just stayed there and watched. And he said to me, “Angelique, I am a huge fan of your music but if you do not protect yourself as long as you give people will take.” It’s up to you to replenish yourself. So meditation have really bring that to the center of my life. And today I’m more efficient because of meditation to do more of my day. If I wake up in the morning even if I have four hours sleep I can still function because of meditation. And that is something that people have to think of. The work we do all together here to help people take a lot of tolls out of us emotionally because it’s very difficult to put a kind of a wall between you and the people because you want to preserve yourself from the pain and from the compassion and empathy that you have.
It’s good to have those. We can lose those. Those are drive us to do good, to do better. But how do we come back from those trips and keep our heart intact, our empathy intact, our compassion intact if there’s no meditation. You have to retune your brain and retune your heart. And that is the only thing that for me that work is meditation.
WINSOR: Yes. So, when you look forward in your life in your singing and in your work what’s next for you? Are you going to continue what you’re doing now or do you have any dreams that you haven’t begun to realize?
KIDJO: Well, I have a lot of dreams of a lot of stuff because my father always used to say, “Dream is for free. It has no money attached to it. Dream big. If it’s not big enough don’t tell me about it.” And I’m like, “Dad, you don’t want to hear my dreams?” “No, I don’t want to hear your small stuff. I want to hear the big stuff.”? My dream, one of my dream is coming true because when I was a little girl one day my father brought classical music home. He started playing Beethoven. I went, “What is that music? That is not music.” My father said, “Oh. It’s music.” I said, “I don’t like that.” So he, he grabbed his banjo and start playing Beethoven. “Ooh, Dad, that’s hurt. I’ll go listen to the original one.” So I went back and start listening to classical music to the point where when I arrive in France I took two years of classical vocal training. And the first time I hear the Ravel Bolero I’m like, “This is African.”Everybody said, “Ah, yeah. Shut up. Not everything is African. ’It’s African.’ Shut up.” I’m like, “Okay. One day I’ll prove you that it’s African.”
So I did my cover of the Ravel Bolero and lately I wrote three poems in Yoruba based on the mythology of the creation of the world and I gave it to Philip Glass. And it has been commissioned by the Luxembourg Philharmonic Orchestra. So we premiered that piece January last year. And, I’ve known Philip for so many years but I never knew he studied phonetics. So when I wrote my poem I translated the poem in French and in English, and I recited in my language. So what Philip did, he phonetically transcribed my language and wrote the music of it. It’s one of the most complicated piece of music I’ve ever in my entire life sung. It took me three month, two hours a day to relearn my own language through the classical length. And I’m telling you it’s something that I’m, I’m never concentrate like that because you’re telling the story.
And also it helped me listen to my voice differently because with a classical orchestra you cannot have what you call monitors on the stage. But you need to be part of the orchestra to be able to sing. So it brings me back to my beginning as a child when I was singing projecting my voice without microphone. So here I am in front of a 110 orchestra piece singing with a microphone, barely any microphone but still feeling every, every stride of violin going through my body. And you realize that the voice of a human being has the capacity of transforming so many ways. So for me this is a new journey I am taking and it’s really, really challenging. So July 10th I will be in, with the San Francisco Symphony doing this. It’s going to be the first time in America we are doing it because the first time was in Luxembourg. The second one was in Vienna that I did in March.
It’s going to be the first time that we bring Philip’s piece to the United States. And for me as a singer every day I sing it it’s different. So my next endeavor I’m going, I’m thinking about is to have a big band of jazz, too. I mean I’m doing everything, man. I’m going to do the jazz and everything. And a lot of stuff, my, my, in my mind to do because for me music is a way to build bridges. To let you understand that the music we listen to every day come from the human family that we are. We are all Africans. Our DNA have proven it that there’s not much difference that we have. We tend to find differences to feel better about ourselves. It’s harder to find what we have in common more than what we have d-, in differences. And for me I don’t see any difference in the world because as long as I can speak to you and we, you can speak back to me I’m cool. That’s all.
WINSOR: Well, your music, I think is a perfect testimony to that. You know, to have pieces where the, the language is talking about the issues that you care for, and yet some of us who can’t even understand the lyrics are feeling it, and getting it, and wanting more. So, thank you for sharing with us.
KIDJO: Thank you so much.