you believe that all life--anybody's life is valuable, and equally valuable, she doesn't have a chance. The reasons she doesn't have a chance it's because, I think I was in Togo and Benin now, I think she's probably seven years old, so hard to tell how old the kids are because they're so tiny. They don't get a chance to grow to their full potential but her life is going to be hauling water. That stone on her head, her job and her family is to haul water. Flip to the next picture--oh, go back, I'm sorry, I thought I had another
in international music today. Born in Benin to a Beninese father and a Nigerian mother, Angelique's music cross-pollinates the West African traditions of her childhood and influences with influences from America, Europe, and Latin America.
And so the storytelling started then. It's inspired by Benin caryatid shrine structures in West Africa. Why? A large part of the community comes from there.
There are a lot of them. You're both Beninese and Nigerian, which is awesome, because I'm also a Nigerian.
things are changing very rapidly what really brought home to me the power of what you're doing was I'm visiting my daughter in West Africa in Benin where she was teaching in the Peace Corp and uh seeing what was available even then in Google Books on a slow computer in a
And so we made a fiction about that time, the 14th century, what would be the great things that people would know about from west and central Africa? And they would all know about the Yoruba of Benin because they were the greatest craftsmen. They were the Greeks of Europe, so they were the Greeks of west Africa.
do because a long time ago an Egyptian Army Major stayed with h con Osama Ben Laden stayed with his leader I began to hear many stories about where Benin Laden might be where the al-Qaeda leadership might be and it always centered around the time February 6th the afan the Pakistani
There are a lot of them. And how would you-- and obviously you started singing in Beninian, but you've also, like I mentioned, you've collaborated with Nigerian artists,
So that's awesome to hear. Cool. So you moved from Benin to Paris at a very young age. And recently you had a talk with Al Jazeera, where you mentioned that a lot of times Africans, they get to Western countries, and they're
There are a lot of them. And we started it in five countries, Benin , Mali, Cameroon, Ethiopia, and Sierra Leone.
And so in a way that was very good for me, because I got to see Michael and Steve working together and could just start to plug myself into that process. Hundreds of thousands of Igbos were taken out of the Bight of Benin .
European country uh works for a very famous European organization um all of Organization in that country did a good job was eventually sent next door to Benin uh and worked in the management in
They get a terrible press from the movies, in literature, where they're always seen as the places that suck you dry and destroy your soul and turn you into a broken down alcoholic or a manic sort of Annette Bening in "American Beauty." So the suburb, then-- some we would say-- and particularly, "The Irish Times" had taken an absolute dislike and thought everyone should be living in high rise in the city center.
And then we started newspapers. Same. Nigeria. This is Benin and Togo.
He got himself hired as a senior vice president at Raytheon just as Raytheon was trying to integrate five new companies And as it turns out, I'm not just randomly juxtaposing Picasso and a mask from Benin .
If you go to Louisiana in some parts when it's really dark, they talk about voodoo. Be careful. Voodoo religion exists in Ghana, in Togo, in Benin . And so I found out that the greatest concentration of Africans was actually in the Mississippi Delta.
And then we started newspapers. Because he took it all, he went to Mali, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Benin , all the way to Nigeria to teach people.
And I thought, what's going on here? Something's very wrong. The kinds of characters that showed up to see me-- popular stars, Warren Beatty and Annette Bening and Neil Simon and Paul Thomas Anderson, movie-makers and so on.