Still from Africa Mia.
The film "Africa Mia” (2019), directed by Richard Minier and Edouard Salier, explores the musical connections between Cuba and Mali.
In 1963, ten young aspiring musicians (all men and just barely out of their teenage years) are selected to represent their country—the Republic of Mali—as exchange students at the prestigious Alejandro García Caturla Conservatory in Havana, Cuba. Their studies are supported by full scholarships from the Cuban government, a generous provision that covers the cost of travel, room, board, and advanced musical study over several years.
For the Cuban sponsors of these African scholars, the investment reflects a desire to support and strengthen ties among newly independent socialist states within a postcolonial world cleaved by the Cold War. Just three years earlier, on September 22nd, 1960, Mali had declared its full independence from French colonial rule, aligning itself with the communist bloc. Cuba’s socialist state isn’t much older, seizing power from the defeated Batista regime on January 1st, 1959. In 1963, both countries are still full of the fervor of anti-imperial struggle, and both perceive the promise—but also the pitfalls—of a nascent and precarious independence.
For Cuba, transnational solidarity is key to sustaining these vanguard socialist revolutions. For Mali, nation-building (
fasobaara in Bamana, Mali’s lingua franca) is a paramount and pressing concern. In both countries, “culture” is considered essential to accomplishing these distinct but related goals. Cultivating and mobilizing the performing and visual arts, their leaders argue, fosters and strengthens a sense of belonging, trust, and common purpose both within and beyond the nation.
In this way, ten aspiring Malian musicians travel from Bamako to Havana on January 10th, 1964 as cultural ambassadors and civil servants: hopeful embodiments of Afro-Cuban solidarity and youthful harbingers of a much-anticipated Malian modernity.
The orchestra born of their studies, Las Maravillas de Mali, provides the inspired soundtrack of these postcolonial dreams and desires, of transnational unity and national uplift. (...)
A generation later, the story of these artists—their journey, their mission, and their music—has been largely forgotten. The memory of their adventures and exploits gather dust on the shelves of archives, in half-forgotten boxes of personal souvenirs, or just lie fallow in the minds of aging men too seldomly asked to tell their tale.
This is where French music producer and documentary filmmaker Richard Minier arrives on the scene, a bit clumsily and somewhat by chance. On vacation in Mali, Minier and a friend find themselves bored and hungry at the Hotel de l’Amitié (a towering staple of the Bamako skyline) on New Year’s Day, 2000. Following a tip from a musician friend in the hotel lounge and armed with a camcorder, they make their way to Akwaba, a local nightclub where an Afro-Cuban band is holding court. Struck by the charismatic and peculiar style of the group’s flutist, the late Dramane Coulibaly (1943–2010), Minier starts asking questions. And, just like that, the story of Las Maravillas de Mali begins to unfold. (...)
When the Las Maravillas members were called home to Mali in the early 1970s, they returned to a country transformed by a coup d’état (November 19th, 1968), with a young and zealous military leadership eager to break ranks with the previous regime and its “communist” sympathies. The Malian arts sector, built up by and still closely aligned with the First Republic’s nation-building project, suffered mightily.
“They killed the arts,”
legendary Malian singer Salif Keita, an elder of this era, explains in the film. For Keita, the junta’s motivations were as crassly political as they were crudely personal. “The President hated music!” says Keita. “His wife, too!” Trained to be conservatory professors, with advanced degrees in music theory, composition, and performance, the members of Las Maravillas felt this hatred acutely, alternately ignored and abused by their new statist patrons. For Maravillas bandleader Boncana Maiga, it was a bridge too far.
Sensing an opportunity in neighboring Côte d’Ivoire,
where a burgeoning commercial music scene was taking shape (in stark contrast to
the situation in Mali), Maiga made the difficult choice to leave his home country to find his fortune abroad. Many other Malian artists would follow suit, including Salif Keita (but
that’s another story). Resisting this urge, the remaining members of Las Maravillas de Mali decided to stay home, hoping that things would change for the better in their native land—but also wary of Ivorian claims to their musical output.
Boncana Maiga’s departure in 1973 not only broke up the band, but his subsequent success in Abidjan, becoming one of West Africa’s most sought-after professional musicians, kindled both regret and more than a little jealousy among his former comrades in Mali.
Resonant music
