The Mali-Cuba Connection/Africa Mia
By GL Harris
The Mali-Cuba Connection opens with an elderly man on a rooftop. He looks out over the city below. We can see in his eyes, he is remembering—the Havana, Cuba from when he was young.
The Mali Independence, September 22, 1960, was remembered by Boncana Maïga as the most important day of his life. The freedom from France and end of colonialism ushered in an era of openness. Modibo Keïta was elected the first president. Four years later Cuba invited African nations to send their students for learning and cultural exchange.
Mali sent 10 young men to play in an orchestra and receive training, and then to return to become school teachers.
“Cuba offered scholarships,” remembered Mäiga.
The talent of these young men would allow them to develop in ways unimagined by the students or their hosts. The rest, as they say, is history.
It was New Year’s Eve 2000, French music composer and producer Richard Miner had the good fortune to meet one of these alumni in Bamako, Mali. He struck up a conversation after hearing Dramane Coulibaly play at a café. He tracked him down and began to learn the story of the Mali musicians.
The former students now in their 70s recalled Fidel Castro and Che Guevara coming by their room at 2 am. The next day they had tutors to learn Spanish and music instructors. Not before long they began performing and people began to dance. Cuban musicians joined them. The apprentice musicians had discovered the local island music, Cha Cha Cha, the Mambo, and the Boléro.
The group decided to form their own band and became The Maravillas de Mali, or The Wonders of Mali. The style became identified as part of Afro-Cuban music.
In 1968, they recorded one self-titled album that included the song that became one of the greatest hits in this revolutionary era: “Rendez-Vous Chez Fatimata,” combining Cuban influences with traditional Malian music.
“The group became the emblem of Afro-Cuban relations,” said the film narrator. But the impact they had left an impression of the Cuban musicians they met.
The fall of the Këita government required the musicians to return home. Mäiga is approached to come to Côte d’Ivoire. He tries to get the band together again.
Rather than to accept an offer to leave Mali and become professional musicians, the other men decided to remain as teachers and professors and help their country.
As the band’s surviving member, Maïga with Minier, returns to Havana to re-record new versions of their music in the famous Egrem studios. It is a homecoming of sorts for this iconic composer who became famous all over the African continent and internationally as an artist, producer, composer, arranger, and on television.
Minier beautifully pieces together the lives of these men. Many members were deceased. But he found widows, families, photos and stories. The surviving members had lots of stories.
For the film, Minier interviewed the remaining members: Dramane Coulibaly, Khalil Traoré, Bah Tapo, Aliou Traoré, Moustapha Sakho, Salif Traoré and Boncana Maïga.
“This story is 18 years of investigation, 18 years of searching that ends here at the Hotel l’Amitié where everything began,” Minier says in the last scene.
It is Minier’s passion, along with his team, that enabled this improbable project to have its incredible conclusion—the reissuance of the music from that fabled time. And one final trip to Havana.
Directed by Edouard Salier & Richard Minier, Mali/Cuba, 2020, 81 minutes, documentary, French, Spanish with English subtitles