With her latest single and video from her upcoming album, Malian singer/songwriter Oumou Sangaré is once again a champion—championing her mother’s homeland and all women with “Wassulu Don.”
The
video, shot in Ghana, was directed by Justyna Obasi, who explains: “The concept for
the video was to create different vignettes with strong female
characters and juxtapose them creating a unique visual canon about
home from a female perspective that goes beyond blood relations and
extends to friendships and community.”
With Nigerian and
Polish heritage, and now splitting her time between Berlin and Lagos,
director Obasi carefully draws on her influences. “For this video I had to
think of cultural heritage movies by Diop Mambety, Ousmane Sembene,
or Abderrahmane Sissako and how to carry those beautiful
documentations of African life and family structures into the current
visual reality and touch people in and out of Africa,” she says. “I
envisioned poetic images like memories that are not tied to a
specific time or place, but rather focus on the feeling; images that are
stripped down to the core of human emotions.”
The song’s title
pays homage to Sangaré’s maternal home region of Mali, Wassolou,
which is one of the regions that ethnomusicologists believe contain
the roots of the blues. I’d say this tune demonstrates that, however the
family tree has worked over the centuries, the influence is pretty
clearly a two-way street at this point.
The song comes from Sangaré’s album Timbuktu out April 29 via World Circuit Records.
