Coumba Gawlo: still here!
What do we know about the ‘Diva with the golden voice’ from Senegal? Born into a family of griots, she won a national competition at 14 years of age with ‘Soweto’, a song written by her father. In 1990, at the age of 18, she released her first cassette, Seytane. It was a great success and enabled Senegal teenagers to finally claim a star of their own. The French singer Patrick Bruel spotted her and in 1998 produced her album Pata Pata from the name of that legendary work by Miriam Makeba, whose revival earned her a gold disc in Belgium and another in platinum in France. It was a springboard to launch her label Sabar, which employs around ten people in their offices and studio, located on three floors in the Dakar district of Sacré-Coeur, not counting the ten musicians in her orchestra led by Laye Diagne, an experienced guitarist. She won the Kora Awards in 1999 as best ‘newcomer’ and again in 2001, as best artist in West Africa. Since then she has been performing concert tours, and enjoying success with new records across West Africa. She has also been at the head of the Lumière foundation for Children for twenty years, with nine permanent staff hired for the education and rights of girls and women, against early marriage, sexual violence and FGM. This fight is very close to her heart, as she herself had a difficult adolescence. When she was younger, she sold donuts in the streets of the working-class district of Colobane early in the morning before going to school, for the aunt who gave her a home in Dakar. ‘I started my foundation at 22 years of age’, she says, ‘given the amount of work to be done for women and children...but by talking to them, we’ll get there!’
In March 2010, she brought together the cream of African music for a benefit concert in Dakar on behalf of earthquake victims in Haiti. Today, she is getting reading to set up her media group beginning with a general-interest radio station, which will broadcast a lot of music, news bulletins, discussions and also programmes focused on women and children. A superstar at home, like her cousin Youssou Ndour, who is a big media owner, she causes quite a stir and a lot of smiles when she sets foot in a supermarket. ‘Coumba, it’s thanks to you that I stayed black!’ a cashier tells her, letting her know that, like her, she refused to give into the fashion for using ‘khessal’ – a chemical skin bleaching agent that takes its cruel toll on so many faces...
Professionally she would like to teach her employees the benefits of punctuality and the spirit of initiative, and sets herself the task of ‘training’, even if she hires people at Master’s level. She drives a car with tinted windows and lives on the Dakar coast in a beautiful, cubic villa she designed herself, whose large bay windows plunge over the Atlantic. In her living room hang portraits of Marilyn Monroe and a photo of Katoucha Niane, the international model who was a great friend and her protégé, and who starred in Ramata, a feature film by Léandre-Alain Baker, shot in Senegal, before her disappearance in 2008 under mysterious and tragic circumstances, drowned in the Seine, in Paris. Coumba Gawlo holds back her sadness, and does not want to expand further. She jealously guards her image and private life. ‘My life is too orderly to be of any interest to the tabloids’, says this single lady, with a smile, who all her compatriots would like to see married. She plays with this in her songs: ‘Who’s knocking at my door?’ is one of her latest titles... On stage, she dismisses the numerous suitors who spontaneously appear before her when she sings this refrain!
Sophisticated in the city, at home she reveals her true, much more natural colours: makeup-free, no high heels, in traditional costume or simple jeans, she becomes that almost ordinary woman from Senegal again, who tells us she is ‘waiting for the love of her life’.
So, she’s a diva and a demanding entrepreneur but one who likes to have a laugh with her mother, excuses herself for a few moments at prayer time, has ‘tiep bou dien’ for lunch and closely follows the education of her three adopted daughters: Rokhaya, Dior and Perle, a student, university student and schoolgirl, respectively.
By SABINE CESSOU