Wassoulou Music and Oumou Sangaré, the "Songbird" Who Sang for Women

A bright, rippling melody on a small harp-like instrument; a rattling calabash; a driving beat; and then a voice — powerful, raw, and unmistakably confident — singing in Bambara about love, marriage and the lives of women. This is Wassoulou music, from southern Mali, and the voice most likely belongs to Oumou Sangaré, one of Africa's most celebrated singers.

The Wassoulou region

Wassoulou (also spelled Wasulu) is a region of southern Mali, extending into Guinea and Côte d'Ivoire, a land of savanna and forest. Its people, largely of Fula (Fulani) and Bamana heritage, developed their own musical traditions.

Unlike much of the music of Mali's Mande world, which is the hereditary art of the griots (jeli), Wassoulou music has traditionally been open to anyone. Singers do not need to be born into a musician caste. That openness, many scholars note, gave Wassoulou singers more freedom to express personal opinions — including criticism of social customs.

The hunters' harp

Wassoulou music draws on the sound of the donso ngoni, the large harp played by hunters' societies in the region, whose songs praise great hunters and carry spiritual power. In the mid-20th century, young musicians developed a smaller version, the kamalen ngoni — "young man's harp" — with six or more strings, tuned higher, and played with fast, rippling patterns. The kamalen ngoni became the signature instrument of Wassoulou music, accompanied by the karignan (a scraped metal tube), calabash percussion, and later bass, guitar, violin and keyboards.

Oumou Sangaré

Oumou Sangaré was born in 1968 in Bamako, to a family from the Wassoulou region. Her father left the family when she was a child, and her mother struggled to raise the children alone — an experience that would shape her songs. She began singing young, at weddings and naming ceremonies, to help support the family.

In 1989, at the age of 21, she released the album Moussolou ("Women"). It was an enormous success across West Africa, selling hundreds of thousands of cassettes. Its songs spoke openly about:

• Forced and arranged marriages, especially of young girls.
• Polygamy and its effects on women.
• Women's freedom, dignity and right to choose.

Such topics were rarely sung about so directly, and Oumou Sangaré became a symbol of women's voices in Mali. She became known as the "Songbird of Wassoulou." Her international albums, released from the 1990s onward, brought her fame in Europe and North America, and she has collaborated with musicians across the world.

Beyond music, she has been an entrepreneur — running a hotel in Bamako and other businesses — and an advocate for women's rights and development causes.

Other Wassoulou voices

Wassoulou music has produced many other important singers, especially women, including Nahawa Doumbia, Coumba Sidibé and Sali Sidibé, as well as male artists. The style also influenced Malian pop and rock.

Why it matters

Wassoulou music shows how a musical tradition can become a platform for change. Free from the hereditary rules of the griots, its singers — like Mali's griots and kora players in their own way — spoke to their society. Oumou Sangaré took the hunters' harp, gave it a woman's voice, and used it to say what many women felt but could not say. Her songs are still sung at weddings across Mali — sometimes, pointedly, at the very celebrations they question.

Further reading

• Lucy Durán, "Birds of Wasulu: Freedom of Expression and Expressions of Freedom in the Popular Music of Southern Mali," British Journal of Ethnomusicology 4 (1995)
• Eric Charry, Mande Music (University of Chicago Press, 2000)
• World Circuit Records — Oumou Sangaré