Clutching a microphone in one hand and pointing at the audience with the other, the Burkinabé poet and DJ Otemptic reeled about jihadism and women’s resilience in a patriarchal society to an audience of about 200 people at a slam at a venue in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.
“I would like to talk to you about my pain … terrorists of all colours,” recited Otemptic, who was accompanied on the stage by a guitarist, keyboardist and drummer. “Authors of barbarism, those who stop the development of my proud homeland.”
Otemptic was born Kabré Adjaratou in Yamoussoukro, the Ivorian capital, and is based in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. As she performed, poets from the host nation and other Francophone countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Algeria huddled at the side of the stage, snapping their fingers intermittently in support.
Slam culture
For centuries, troubadour-historians in west Africa called griots gave oral performances that birthed genres such as negro spirituals, hip-hop and Afro pop. In the 1980s, the tradition continued in Ivory Coast with poetry performances that helped young people in suburban areas of Abidjan vent about identity and anger over the country’s post cocoa boom recession. By the 90s, spoken word movements incorporating Ivorian nouchi slang birthed zouglou – a form of storytelling incorporating praise-singing and proverbs.
Zouglou became a commercial success, especially after the Ivorian band Magic System’s 2001 mega-hit Premier Gaou became one of Africa’s most popular songs. But poetry culture disappeared for a while and many zouglou practitioners were relegated to serenading patrons at open-air restaurants called maquis.
These days, millions of young people across west and central Africa are experiencing renewed disenchantment, their lives buffeted by a series of coups since 2020 as well as a cost of living crisis, rising unemployment, and in some countries, the ever-present threat posed by jihadist groups.
Some have turned to drugs to allay their pain and escape the pressure. Economic insecurity is also thought to be a factor behind Ivory Coast’s annual suicide rate of approximately 11 people in every 100,000, higher than the global average of 9 in every 100,000.
Recently, however, poetry has again provided succour.
“At some point, there was no space for young people to express themselves,” said Safurat Balogun, the information director at the Goethe Institut in Abidjan, one of the slam’s backers. “People needed a channel to let things out and the decision to start the poetry slam in different formats was because of these conversations that students were having with [our] staff.”
Since 2013, the organisation has been running slams in four languages across eight African countries as part of its Spoken Word Project.
In the last two years, the United Arab Emirate of Sharjah has also organised Arabic Poetry Forums in nine countries, including Mali and Niger. There is also the In the Name of Slam Collective, which organises, among other things, an inter-school league and Babi Slam. Named as a homage to Abidjan’s nickname, the latter is now in its ninth year.
Aminata “Amee Slam” Bamba, one of its founding members, said no subject was taboo. “Life is a vast collection of poems from which I simply extract a few pieces to share with the world,” she said. “We write about birth, joy, emotions … we write about absolutely everything.”
The Abidjan venue, part of the Institut Français campus in the administrative district of Plateau and next door to the long-abandoned high-rise relic La Pyramide, has become a popular arena for slams. This year, it hosted the final of a three-day slam, drawing thousands of people from across the region.
“Within the community here, when we have the slam projects happening … people actually come out for their people,” said Balogun.
‘A sign from God’
Noferima Fofana, 24, a member of the slam artists’ cohort in the Abidjan neighbourhood of Port Bouët, heavily leans into her mother tongue, Koyaga, a language from the country’s north. She often stacks proverbs from it in her compositions before translating into French, her main language of recitation.
Her story is inspiring more youngsters to use their peculiar experiences in their work. One of five siblings, she was raised by a single mother who makes and sells brooms. As of August 2021, Fofana was eloquently advertising the items on Instagram, accompanied by a spoken word performance.
Last year, she won the national slam tournament on her third try before defeating candidates from almost two dozen countries to emerge champion of the Slam World Cup in Paris.
“This prize [in Paris] … was a sign from God that gave me hope,” she said. “He knew I was sinking, and it was his way of telling me ‘no, you can do something with your life’.”
