African musicians do not readily come to mind when you think of rock or punk music. Yet, music styles such as the blues and its rock and roll successor trace their origins to West Africa. Challenging this limited perception, AMAKA is showcasing four African female musical acts putting their homegrown twist on the mainstream Western punk and rock music genres. These artists and groups – from Benin, Gambia, Morocco and the Sahara – are reinventing the African music landscape and, in so doing, disrupting the typical male and Western dominance of these genres.  

Star Feminine Band

Star Feminine Band was founded in the small town of Natitingou in Benin, West Africa and consists of seven girls aged between 11-18. The group infuses a unique blend of calypso-style polyrhythms, electric guitars, and high-energy youthful vocals into a contemporary punk-rock sound. Even so, this description fails to fully encapsulate the multilayered listening experience delivered by Star Feminine Band. Not only do they reimagine punk rock in their output, but they also mix and match funk, Congolese rumba and highlife genres, overlaid by lyricism in their native Beninese languages (Bariba, Fon and Peul) and French.

A focal point of Star Feminine Band's music is its social discourse on issues affecting local women, such as FGM and domestic violence. For instance, "Femme Africaine", taken from their debut eponymous album, urges African women to pursue education, careers and ultimately dream big. Hence, Star Feminine Band are playing an important role in championing the rights of Beninese women and girls in a country where teen pregnancy and forced marriage are commonplace. In fact, the impetus behind the band's creation was to counteract this reality. The founder, Beninese musician André Baleguemon, made a call-out to a local radio station offering free musician tuition to girls in the area via the formation of an all-girl music group. Coupled with a strong impulse to ensure the girls' independence, Baleguemon additionally created contracts for their parents, stipulating that they remain in school and not be forced into marriage.

Essential listens: “Rew Be Me”, “Femme Africaine” and “La Musique” 

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Les Filles de Illighadad

Saharan rock, also known as desert blues or Tuareg rock, emerged from Tuareg men exiled in Libya and Algeria during the 1970s, incorporating the guitar into their music. The Tuareg are nomadic peoples scattered across Niger, Libya, Algeria, Mali, and Burkina Faso. Pioneers of the desert blues movement were also said to draw inspiration from American blues and rock music, including rock and roll legend Jimi Hendrix. The initial drive behind the use of the guitar was to, in the absence of women, replace the female-led Tuareg folk music, known as tende. In tende music, women, with the aid of a goatskin drum, provide vocals lamenting nomadic life and its hardships.

Les Filles de Illighadad, named after the small village in Niger from which they hail, have forged a name for themselves as the only majority-woman band in the Saharan rock genre. Les Filles de Illighadad sings their hypnotic and meditative tunes in their native language of Tamasheq. Their occupation in this space subverts expectations of a historically male domain, as guitar playing is traditionally reserved for men. Their musical output can be considered a reinvention of the wheel of sorts, in that we witness a return to classic tende melodies, roused by guitar riffs, to form a fully tende-informed Saharan rock.

Les Filles de Illighadad's founder and frontwoman, Fatou Seidi Ghali, is the first female Tuareg guitarist. She self-taught the guitar by secretly practising on her brother's and resisting her father's pessimism, who, as she reported to the Guardian in 2019, told her she was wasting her time and should focus on looking after cows. Ghali's desire to go against the norm also extends to her community. Speaking to SheShreds magazine in 2017, Ghali expressed her wish for more women from her community to learn to play the guitar and create music.

Essential listens: "Imigradan", "Tihilehe" and "Jori" 

Bab L'Bluz

Bab L'Bluz is notably fronted by a female singer and percussionist, Yousra Mansour. The group was formed in 2018, drawing its influence from Morocco's Nayda youth movement. The Nayda movement sees artists honouring their heritage by using the Moroccan-Arabic dialect of Darija to emanate lyrics of freedom and create a form of Maghreb blues. Their drive for freedom comes with a Pan-African focus, demonstrated best in the song, "Africa Manayo". In it, they express indignance at the rampant poverty on the continent, calling on Africans to rise against the pillaging of wealth and resources.

Bab L'Bluz replaces the western guitar and bass present in mainstream blues with the Moroccan guembri, a three-stringed lute, and bass-heavy Gnawa music — an amalgamation of West African religious music with Berber and Arab influences. With their mix of Moroccan poetry, Gnawa music and psychedelic funk and rock, Bab L'Bluz presents a unique and contemporary take on blues music. 

Essential listens: “El Watane”, “Africa Manayo” and “Waylalah”  

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Sona Jobarteh

Sona Jobarteh is the first professional female kora player and comes from one of The Gambia's five principal griot, kora-playing families. The griot tradition dates back to the Mande empire of Mali. Griots form part of the Mandinka, a subgroup of the Mandé peoples. Modern-day large populations of the Mandinka live in The Gambia, Guinea-Bissau and Senegal. The role of griots is etched in the social caste, which keeps the number of griot families small (five). Griots have historically played a critical role in their distinct communities by preserving their cultural history - recording births, marriages and deaths - in the absence of bountiful written documentation. Thus, griots were traditionally oral historians, storytellers, poets, and multi-instrumentalists. The kora is their primary instrument and has a sound similar to the Western Harp.

Jobarteh's development into a professional griot player is remarkable, given that kora-playing skills usually pass patrilineally. Usually, the tradition sees young males master the skills through memorisation and learning from older teachers. Despite this, Jobarteh began playing the kora at age three, thanks to her older brother, Tunde Jegede, a fellow musician. Jobarteh later became well versed in additional instruments, including the piano and cello at London's Royal College of Music. With the kora forming its backbone, Jobarteh's music is melodic, velvety and soothing to the soul.

Jobarteh's accolades also extend to her social activism. With a passion for education and a desire to keep the kora-playing tradition alive, she founded an academy in The Gambia in 2015. The academy's ethos is to educate young Africans from an African perspective within their homeland and cultural makeup, a long-awaited welcome development to the continent.

Essential listens: "Gambia", "Jarabi" and "Saya”