On The Cover:Salif Keita

Keita was born in the city of Djoliba in 1949. He was cast out by his family and ostracized by the community because of his albinism, a sign of bad luck in Mandinka culture. Keita is a direct descendent of Sundiata Keita, the Mandinka warrior king who founded the Malian empire in the 13th century. He left Djoliba for Bamako in 1967, where he joined the government sponsored Super Rail Band de Bamako. In 1973 Keita joined the group, Les Ambassadeurs. Keita and Les Ambassadeurs fled political unrest in Mali during the mid-1970s for Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire and subsequently changed the group’s name to Les Ambassadeurs Internationaux. The reputation of Les Ambassadeurs Internationaux rose to the international level in the 1970s and in 1977, Keita received a National Order award from the president of Guinea, Sékou Touré. Due to increasing political unrest, Keita left Mali. By 1984 Keita had relocated to Paris in order to reach a wider, more European audience, where he joined other African stars like Mory Kante, Tabu Ley Rochereau, Ray Lema, PaPa Wemba, and Manu Dibango among many others. He now lives in the Montreuil section of Paris among the some 15,000 Malians there. Keita’s music blends together the traditional griot music of his Malian childhood with other West African influences from Guinea, the Ivory Coast, and Senegal, along with influences from Cuba, Spain, and Portugal, and an unmistakably overall Islamic sound. Besides the aforementioned guitar, organ, and sax, Keita’s sound also includes traditional African instruments such as the kora, balafon, and djembe, often synthesized and sampled. Keita’s latest album, La Différence, was produced around the end of 2009. The work is dedicated to the struggle of the world albino community (victims of human sacrifice), for which Keita has been crusading all his life. In one of the album’s tracks, the singer calls others to understand that “difference” does not mean “bad” and to show love and compassion towards albinos Ends