Join us at the 9th Annual Afrik Impact Community Cultural Celebration and Concert featuring Baaba Maal!
"I never thought I would stay in one place and doing one thing every day in my life. This is why music is a really good opportunity for me to go away, first, like a young person, like going on an adventure..."
- Baaba Maal to NPR about his new album "Being"
Baaba Maal is a Senegalese singer and guitarist born in Podor, on the Senegal River. The singer and guitarist belongs to the semi-nomadic Fulani people. He first left his homeland of Fouta, in the river valley region of northern Senegal, almost 40 years ago, to perform music hundreds of miles away as a teenage boy scout and he has been a wanderer ever since. “It’s part of my culture,” he says. “The songs travel from village to village, from country to country. It’s something natural to my tribe and this part of Africa.”
His most recent album The Traveller, which features the British poet Lemn Sissay and members of The Very Best and Mumford and Sons, is both a new direction and a powerful summary of his life’s work: a rich and moving celebration of seeing new places, meeting new people and making new music together. “When you travel you learn things that would have taken you years to learn in one place,” Baaba says. “You learn about the different corners of life.”
The Traveller’s themes of communication, reconciliation and responsibility chime with Baaba’s work as an activist who has campaigned for women’s rights, HIV/AIDS awareness, debt relief, climate issues and education. He is a Youth Emissary for the United Nations Development Program and a global ambassador for Oxfam. For Baaba Maal, music and activism are interwined because they are both about building bridges and encouraging mutual understanding.
