SALIF KEÏTA BATTLED VIOLENT PREJUDICE AGAINST HIS PIGMENTATION TO BECOME AFRICA'S BIGGEST POP STAR, INSPIRED BY HIS NOBLE LINEAGE AND THE DEFIANT EXAMPLE OF FELA KUTI. IN 2018, HE LOOKED READY TO REST ON HIS CONSIDERABLE LAURELS, BUT A NEW ALBUM FINDS HIS GOLDEN VOICE STILL A SHINING BEACON. "A MUSICIAN IS NEVER IN RETIREMENT,"

HE TELLS ANDREW PERRY.

PORTRAIT BY LUCILLE REYBOZ.

Lucille Reyboz

AT A CONCERT IN HIS HOME NATION OF MALI ON NOVEMBER 17, 2018, the aptly revered “Golden Voice of Africa”, Salif Keïta, announced that he was retiring from music. Keïta, one of the African continent’s pioneering stars, then 69, was performing to a packed football stadium in Fana, 80 miles west of the Malian capital, Bamako. The occasion was both an album launch, and a tribute to a five-year-old albino girl named Ramata Diarra, who’d been ritually killed and beheaded in Fana a few months earlier.

Keïta, too, was born to black parents with the same condition which made his skin appear white, and has used his phenomenal vocal talent to raise awareness of what he calls “albinism”. Across Africa, that absence of pigmentation in the skin, eyes and hair is widely regarded as a bad omen, and for much of his early life, Keïta was ostracised and bullied, even by his own father.

After a career of activism and music-making all over the globe, that night Keïta announced from the stage that his latest album, proudly entitled Un Autre Blanc, would be his last – “My way of saying goodbye”. In an interview in Paris in February 2019, he clarified that he would “do some concerts and perhaps some tours. Nothing major, and not another album. Too much work.”

If the implication was that his creative batteries were spent, they have since recharged. For here he is, sportily dressed in a green shell suit and tinted glasses in a hotel suite near London’s Barbican Centre, touting an all-new album, So Kono. “A musician is never in retirement, he can only rest,” he explains with a playful smile.

Five decades of stardom have lent Keïta an unrufflable aura. In the ’80s, his extraordinary singing voice – a masterfully wielded power tool to rival James Brown or Otis Redding – saw him groomed for international success by Island Records’ Chris Blackwell, Bob Marley’s crossover facilitator, with established stars including Carlos Santana and Grace Jones guesting on his records. But his reputation has been built in spite of the bitter prejudice he experienced at home.