Fatoumata Diawara is a Malian singer-songwriter currently living in France. Diawara was born in 1982 in the Ivory Coast to Malian parents. As an adolescent, she was sent back to their native Bamako in Mali to be raised by an aunt. When she was eighteen, Diawara moved to France to pursue acting. She briefly returned to Mali for a film role, but fled back to Paris to avoid being coerced into marriage by her family.
After moving to France, Diawara appeared in the 1999 feature film Genesis and in 2001Sia, ‘le reve du python’, and in the internationally renowned street theatre troupe Royal de Luxe. She also played a leading role in the musical Kirikou et Karaba. Simultaneously with pursuing her musical career, Diawara has continued her cinematic activities, with numerous roles, appearances, and musical input in multiple feature films, including in Timbuktu, which won seven Cesar Award nods and an Academy Award nomination in 2014.
Diawara took up the guitar and began composing her own material, writing songs that blend Wassoulou traditions of southern Mali with international influences. She has said that she is “the first female solo electric guitar player in Mali”. The EP Kanou was released in May 2011. She wrote every song on her debut album Fatou that released in September 2011. In September 2012, Diawara was featured in a campaign called “30 Songs / 30 Days” to support ‘Half the Sky’, a multi-platform media project inspired by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s book. September 2012 also saw her board the Africa Express Train with Damon Albarn, amongst many others. The show culminated in a 4.5k venue in Kings Cross where Fatoumata performed with Paul McCartney.
Diawara has spent recent years touring the world, with a landmark performance at the 2013 Glastonbury Festival. Alongside many European gigs, her schedule has taken her to South America, Asia and Australia, as well as on multiple trips to the US, where in September 2013 she performed as part of the Clinton Global Initiative in New York. Since mid-2014 she has collaborated with Roberto Fonseca, with numerous live performances and a joint live album, At Home – Live in Marciac, along the way. In 2014 she also performed with Mayra Andrade and Omara Portuondo. February 2015 saw her first live concert as an established international star in Mali, her home country, Festival sur le Niger in Segou, where she shared the stage once again with her long-time friend and mentor, Oumou Sangaré, and many other domestic Malian acts.
Diawara was featured in the 2020 Gorillaz single “Desole”, which later appeared on their album Song Machine, Season One:Strange Timez. She performed a Tiny Desk home concert in February 2022. Later that year, she published the album Maliba, created as a soundtrack for a Google Arts and Culture project to digitise manuscripts held in Timbuktu. The album was characterised by The Economist as “a wondrous work of cultural preservation from one of the biggest names in contemporary African music”.
I have decide to feature a recent concert by Fatoumata because it was what introduced her to me but also because I fell it provides a better representation of her current work than the short single releases.
