Baba Salah: A Malian Musician Speaks To His Nation's Displaced

"I ask myself if Mali can exist without music," Salah says. "Everything important in Mali is linked to music. Where I come from in the north, in our society, births, baptisms, naming and circumcision ceremonies, marriages — all are accompanied by music."
Baba Salah was in the studio, putting the finishing touches on his latest album, when Mali fell apart last year. He decided to call the new recording Dangay, which means "the north" in his Songhai language. The album, in part, sounds the alarm about the problems in his northern home region and what Salah describes as human-rights violations by the Islamist fighters who occupied a desert zone, the size of Texas, a year ago. More