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MANTHIA DIAWARA The 1960s in Bamako Malick Sidibé and James Brown I was looking at a book of Malick Sidibé’s photographs, put together by André Magnin, with my friend Diafode, who has been living in France since 1979. As we ›ipped through the black-and-white photos of our teenage years in Bamako, Diafode’s attention was suddenly drawn to a photo of a group of boys entitled Friends, 1969. “Les Beatles!” he exclaimed, and added, putting his index ‹nger on the photo, “voilà les Beatles.” I looked closely at it, and before I could even say a word, Diafode started identifying them one by one: there was John Lennon, Ringo Starr, and all the other members of the Beatles of Medina-Coura, one of the hip neighborhoods of Bamako in those days. Diafode and I spent that evening in my Paris apartment, looking at the Beatles of Medina-Coura and reminiscing about our youth in Bamako. Sure enough, I now could see Nuhun, aka John Lennon. He’s wearing a “Col Mao” jacket with six buttons, just like the one John Lennon wore on the cover of one of the Beatles’ albums. Nuhun now lives in Canada. And there’s Cissé, with his arm on Nuhun’s shoulder. He’s wearing a tight- ‹tting shirt, with a scarf à la Elvis Presley, a large belt, and bell-bottom pants. We used to call him “Paris” because he was so elegant and smooth. When he lived in Bamako-Coura, a neighborhood on the southern tip of the commercial center, and did not have a motorcycle to come to Medina -Coura on the north side, he would walk for forty-‹ve minutes to cross the busy commercial center—under the hot sun at two o’clock—to join the group at Nuhun’s house listening to music, playing cards, and drinking tea. The elegance of Paris’s style was also marked by a pack of “Craven A” cigarettes, which he placed in his shirt pocket while holding one unlit cig242 arette between his lips. He walked slowly through the busy crowd of the market and across the railway, without losing his rhythm and without sweating a drop. When he arrived at Nuhun’s place, his shoes were always shiny and his face was as fresh as ever. He would always say, “Salut, les copains” before taking a napkin out of his pocket, wiping off a chair, and sitting down. We used to say that one day, Paris would surely leave Bamako for Europe. With his Craven A cigarettes and tailored shirts, he looked like the actors from the Italian photo-novellas. Cissé, aka Paris, now lives in Canada too. Other guys in the photo reminded Diafode and me of more Bamako stories. There is Addy, who went to Switzerland to study hotel management and returned to Bamako in 1970 with the ‹rst copy of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s Four-Way Street. We had organized “Woodstock in Bamako” with Addy’s record collection. Since then, Addy has worked for hotels in Abidjan and Bamako before opening his own business in Bamako. Niare, who’s sitting on the ›oor and holding the album by Sly and the Family Stone that contains “I Wanna Take You Higher,” now works for the Malian government as an accountant. In the back, Amara, aka “Harley-Davidson,” is wearing a ›owered shirt. In those days, everybody had to have a ›owered shirt to feel part of the youth culture—not only in Bamako, but also in Paris, London, and Amsterdam. Harley is now an abstract painter and conceptual artist in Bamako. He was always a dreamer; in those days, he was convinced that he would seize history one day and become the center of it. Malick Sidibé’s photographs enable us to revisit the youth culture of the 1960s and our teenage years in Bamako. They show exactly how the young people in Bamako had embraced rock and roll as a liberation movement, adopted the consumer habits of an international youth culture, and developed a rebellious attitude toward all forms of established authority. The black-and-white photographs re›ect how far the youth in Bamako had gone in their imitation of the worldview and dress style of popular music stars, and how Malick Sidibé’s photographic art was in conversation with the design of popular magazines, album covers, and movie posters of the time. To say that Bamako’s youth was on the same page...

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