A Massive Festival in Côte d’Ivoire Has Become a Vehicle for Social Action

It’s a rare thing for a music festival to operate as a force for social change. While we deify Woodstock and wring our hands at the conservative backers of Coachella, largely the music festival, artistic merits aside, serves as community at best and spectacle at worst. And that’s fine; music serves a function not dependent on its end result. But even if we have no moral expectations for thousands of people converging in the open air to get whatever they want or need, it’s a very fine thing indeed when a festival does more. It’s a very fine thing when, through calling artists of all nations to perform, allowing free entry to the poorest neighborhoods, showcasing stars both rising and long enshrined, a festival, every year, builds schools and hospitals. The Festival of Urban Music of Anoumabo (FEMUA), held every year in the Anoumabo section of Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, is such a festival.

The festival—the 11th year of which will go down April 17 to 22—was started by one Salif "Asalfo" Traoré, singer of the platinum-selling band, Magic System. Magic System play Zouglou, a homegrown dance music that is a potent amalgamation of Caribbean and West African rhythms and dancehall, started by Ivorian students in the ‘90s. Magic System is the music’s chief ambassadors. If you’ve been to any club/dance party populated by West African or Belgian ex-pats, you’ve heard their 1999 hit ode to not being taken in by exes with bad intentions, “1er Gaou,” blasting. After achieving international success, the members decided to give back to the working class neighborhood that gave them their first support, Anoumabo.

“At the beginning, it wasn’t something important,” Asalfo told me when I visited him last year for the tenth anniversary of the festival. “It started as just a way to give parents, relatives, the children of the neighborhood presents… some t-shirts. Over time, social action comes into play. Instead of t-shirts, we build schools.”

It’s easy to think of New York City as the most bustling place on earth, especially if your inclination is, as is mine, is to rarely leave. But New York City is not bustling. With its fines for honking and just being alive in a park after dark, sometimes it hardly even feels like a city. Abidjan, the capital of Côte d'Ivoire, that’s a bustling city. Industry, on the micro and macro scale, is king and the wide roads are thick with traffic that seems to obey its own laws, though the hundreds of kids selling water and toys from the barely discernible lane demarcations seem completely at ease. It’s hot a dusty and, once the traffic gets actually moving, thrilling. But the idea of offering a free festival, one that draws over 100,000 music fans, on the outskirts of a sprawling, vibrant to the point of entropy, city that doesn’t really appear to have any defined ending at all, at least not one that traffic will allow you to reach, seems logistically daunting to the point of impossible. Yet, since 2008, FEMUA not only occurs, it thrives, serving as entertainment, charity, and tool for education.

Every year, besides providing music by the likes of West African griot Afro-pop legend Salif Keïta and access to bouncy castles for the very young, FEMUA has a theme pushed over the entire event. Last year, the theme was climate change (largely focused on informing people what they could do to help individual situations made environmentally precarious through forces admittedly largely out of their control) and this year’s is “African Youth and Illegal Immigration.”

Executive Director of Magic System Foundation (the charitable foundation under which FEMUA operates), Jean-Louis Boua, is forthright about the festival’s capabilities telling me, in regards to last year’s theme, “We can’t impose. We provide awareness. We organize conferences on the themes and everybody is invited to contribute to the effort to help the environment, we invite the kids to take action.” Surrounded by fatuously pontificating pop stars in America, it’s easy to be cynical about “raising awareness” but for communities rarely invited to the table, it’s no small thing.

Boua says that “the DNA of this festival is the social aspect.” The fest operates with partners both private and governmental to build schools (kindergarten and primary, 300 students a school) that they then hand over the government to run, with later monitoring by the fest. But if the festival was just its good works, it would be nothing more than good intentions. What matters equally and draws the throngs to a dusty, fenced in enclosure in the center of Anoumabo, is the music. The music that—festival time running along the same principles as punk time—starts late and runs till 5 in the morning, without the slightest discernable dip in attendance.

Music fandom in Côte d’Ivoire runs the gamut from homegrown pop like Afro-Zouk (a sped-up carnival genre exemplified by smooth and soulful diva, Monique Seka) and the aforementioned Zouglou of Magic System, to exports like French hip hop and reggae. FEMUA takes pains to span every generations’ taste, while keeping it pan-African. Having heard complaints about Western radio hegemony from just about every international artist or DJ I’ve ever encountered, and being startled to hear Ed Sheeran and Migos in a side-alley maki (bar/club), I expected the same concerns from the artists performing last year.

But they all, with both Asalfo and Monique Seka using the exact phrasing, said that they don’t “fear another kind of music” and that all Western music was ultimately from Africa so why should they be concerned. Seka laughed and, the one part of the interview for which I needed no translation, sang, “mama-say-mama-sa-mama-coosa.” So the lineups are built upon the quality and popularity of the artist rather than any worry about rap or “authenticity” fetishizing. Last year, I heard the Tracy Chapman-esque strumming of Senegal’s Marema Fall and I heard the hard contemporary R&B of Ghana’s Bisa K Dei, both surrounded by hip-hop synchronized dance acts and classic Afro-Pop. The audience, while often holding signs announcing their personal favorites, surged and chanted for all of them.

Asalfo is a hero in Côte d’Ivoire, a country that, has been undergoing a rebuilding process since a civil war in 2011. Seen as more than a pop star, Asalfo commands respect from the government and general population, while being especially beloved by the poor and working classes. At last year’s festival, a combination of crowding and a pressing heat, violence broke out in the audience, with teens throwing handfuls of dirt at police as they pushed into the crowd, swinging rubber batons. A potential tragedy was only averted by Asalfo leaving the stage, and wading into the crowd, slowly walking the entire expanse of festival pleading for calm. While occasional skirmishes still broke out, he (almost single handedly—there was still a number of expulsions of attendees) transformed a growing riot back into the celebration that it had been the majority of the festival.

FEMUA has to walk a number of fine lines itself. To operate as both charity and entertainment, in a diverse country, politics of a sectarian nature must be avoided, but neither the crowd nor the artists are willfully naive. “We work for everybody,” Boua says. “We avoid politics because everybody (from all ethnicities and religions) attends the schools we build”

Tiken Jah Fakoly, an Ivorian reggae star who has collaborated with multiple Jamaican pioneers of the form such as U Roy and Max Romeo, and who closed out one of the nights, leading singalongs of rebel music to Rastafarians and small children alike, raised the point of the inherent positive radicalism of FEMUA to me. “Building schools is important in Africa because schools will help Africa to wake up,” he says. “When you hear Trump saying ’America first,’ we must go to school, not to make Africa first but to protect ourselves.” He further points out, when I asked if he saw himself as more an activist than a musician, that “every fighter for dignity needs music to be encouraged.”

“We are the people to do the music to encourage,” he says. “We are that division in that army.”

The 2018 FEMUA lineup is announced today. Attending last year was one of the musical highlights of my life. Being able to experience the wild grace of some of the world’s finest musicians playing at 3 AM in the morning, under oppressive heat, surrounded by thousands of euphoric music fans; I imagine it’s what raves feel like to be those not repulsed by raves. I don’t imagine you finds yourself in the neighborhood too often, which is pity, as FEMUA is a music festival like no other—a movement with results both tangible and joyfully abstract.

FEMUA 2018 Lineup:

Côte d'Ivoire Artists

MAGIC SYSTEM

DOBET GNAHORE

KEDJEVARA DJ

LES LEADERS

GUY CHRIST ISRAEL

LA TIGRESSE SIDONIE

LUCKSON PADAUD

International Artists

SOPRANO (France)

LOKUA KANZA (R.D.Congo)

SIDIKI DIABATE (Mali)

YEMI ALADE (Nigeria)

DUB INC (France)

BIL AKA KORA (Burkina Faso)

ZEYNAB (Bénin)

M'BOUILLÉ KOITÉ (Mali)