Sia’s Tolno’s infectious laugh and relaxed “vibe” do
not immediately convey the message that this Guinean artist is a fighter. But
once you hear her story and listen to her music, you realize that Tolno is on a
serious mission to change attitudes - towards war, gender and parenting, just
to name a few issues.
Her latest album African
Woman, with the single Rebel Leader,
is a blistering critique of those who ravage and destroy countries with incomprehensible
wars and of leaders who do nothing for their populations.
Set to Afrobeat
music, the lyrics of Rebel Leader are
addressed to warlords in general, and to Liberia's Charles Taylor in particular.
“Mr. Rebel Leader, tell me who you fighting for, tell
me why this massacre,” Tolno sings with palpable anger and urgency. “How do you
feel inside when you see children die?”
The 39-year-old singer says she has no interest in
being a heroine, but she wants to use her music to bring about change.
“I know what it means to be a refugee in other people’s
countries because of war,” Tolno told SWAN in an interview in Paris, where she
now lives. “And I wonder about the mentality of people who create war, beating
people who are already down. So when I’m alone, this is what I write about. I
decided to use this album to speak about these things.”
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| Sia Tolno in Paris |
Tolno’s empathy and drive owe something to her own
rough childhood in Freetown, Sierra Leone, where she lived with her father who had
relocated from Guinea to work as a teacher.
Her father used corporal punishment as a constant form
of discipline, she says, and she can still remember being hit just because she
had been seen walking home with a friend after school.
“He thought that beating was for a child’s own good,”
she says. “Some parents don’t know the long-term repercussions that this can
have. But I have to say that he was always there, and made sure I went to school,
but he was not a mother.”
Her mother lived in Sierra Leone as well, but Tolno
had little contact with her. Along with the feeling of isolation within her own
family, Tolno suffered from the conflicts created by warlords fighting over the
region’s “blood diamonds”, and she took refuge in writing and poetry.
“There are so many people who manipulate us because of
our poverty, and nobody is there to help us,” she recalls of those days.
When she was 20 years old, and wondering whether to
study drama or information technology, Charles Taylor’s forces once more plunged
Liberia and the region into bloody warfare, and Tolno had to flee to Guinea,
although she hardly knew the members of her family there.
“I can see nothing good about war, nothing,” she says.
“It’s like a disease. What can you do if you’re not sure you’ll still be alive
at the end of the day?”
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| Music was a means out. Photo by N. Lawson-Daku / Lusafrica |
Music provided a way out of the feeling of desolation,
and in the mid-Nineties Tolno began performing at a club called “Copains d’abord”,
operated by a Lebanese businessman named Mustapha, who she says was kind and
helpful to the people working for him.
As a member of the conservative, “forest-based” Kissi
ethnic group, Tolno could not draw on any griot troubadour tradition, and she
says her family found it unimaginable that she had decided to be a singer.
But
her powerful voice and her choice of material - popular songs by Western
singers such as Edith Piaf, Nina Simone and Whitney Houston - soon won her many
fans.
She represented Guinea in the first series of the “Africa
Star” music show held in Gabon in 2008 and particularly impressed two of the
judges: Gabonese musician and composer Pierre Akendengue and record producer
Jose Da Silva (the CEO of the Paris-based Lusafrica label and the person who
first recorded the late great Cesaria Evora).
Although Tolno didn’t win, Da Silva invited her to
join his label, and her first international album Eh Sanga was released in 2009. That was the year more civil unrest
broke out in Guinea, with security forces opening fire on a crowd and sexually
assaulting women in the streets.
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| Pierre Akendengue, a mentor. |
Living in countries where such atrocities have
occurred has had an impact on Tolno’s writing and singing. She has now set her
powerful voice and lyrics to Afrobeat, the rough and angry fusion of Ghanaian-Nigerian
funk, jazz and highlife made popular by music legend Fela Kuti.
African Woman, her third international release, comes
with notable contributions from Tony Allen, who was Fela’s drummer and artistic
director for more than 10 years until they had a political falling out. But here
there’s a difference: while the music is still “angry” and explosive, Tolno’s songs
take aim at machismo, gender inequality, Africa’s inadequate children’s rights and the
culture of warmongering.
African Woman also
condemns female genital mutilation (in Kekeleh)
and the treatment of migrants (Yaguine et
Fodé). The latter song is perhaps the most moving on the album, as it focuses
on the tragic story of two teenagers from Guinea, Yaguina Koïta and Fodé Tounkara, who set out for a better life in
Europe but who froze to death as stowaways in the undercarriage of a Belgian
airliner in 1999.
Their bodies were discovered on the plane at Brussels
International Airport after the aircraft had reportedly made at least three
return flights between the Belgian capital and Conakry. If they had lived, the
young men would have been 30 and 29 years old respectively in 2014.
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| Sia Tolno, before a portrait of Cesaria. |
“We have to do more for our young people who must cope with
so much frustration,” she says. “You always hear that Africa is the richest continent in terms of resources, but what are the resources being used for?”
Despite such heartfelt words, there’s a small problem
with the album: people may find themselves too busy dancing to the catchy rhythms
to fully consider the urgent message.
But
one can only hope that at least some of Africa’s government leaders and
warlords will hear the appeal from this African artist.
Watch the video of Rebel
Leader here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUP2BHF__ao
