Powerful presence: Fatoumata Diawara performing at the CTIJF 2026. Photo: Armand Hough
It’s a warm Saturday afternoon in Cape Town. Music lovers are beginning to trickle into the CTICC hosting the Cape Town International Jazz Festival (CTIJF). I’m in the media centre, excited for my next interview of the day.
In walks Fatoumata Diawara, the artist I have been looking forward to speaking to.
She immediately greets everyone, then turns to look at me and says: “I love your hair.” I’m donning my Afro curled-wig. Surprised with a big smile on my face, I respond with a “Thank you!”
As the Malian singer-songwriter and actress takes a seat, I notice the four traditional white dots painted down her forehead. She is wearing traditional beads around her neck. I notice the white bead headpiece beginning from her forehead to the top of her head.
I notice that her hands and fingers are a different colour than that of her skin tone. They seem to be painted in a brownish/maroonish colour.
Diawara is in tune with her Malian heritage, so she is known to use artistic, visual and symbolic elements on her body.
The artist deeply connects with ancestral energy. This is evident in the type of music she makes — one that blends traditional Malian sounds.
Arriving in South Africa for the second time, the musician felt a powerful ancestral presence. As she set out to perform for the first time in the Mother City at CTIJF, for her, the ancestral energy was palpable.
“Being here, the energy is so strong in a good way. And the first thing that I really feel. It’s my second time now in South Africa, I feel the ancestors. That’s strange. In the hotel, I feel a lot of dead people,” she says.
“Sorry for telling you about the crazy part of my life,” she giggles.
“It happens to me only in South Africa, not even in Mali, so strongly, I don’t know. When I get out, I wonder if people in here feel the same energy. That’s my questioning.
“It’s like I look at people and say: ‘Okay, they know about this, that it’s so strong, you know, and that the ancestors are still with us, even if they’re from a different period of time.’ And that’s one thing.
“And the second thing is that I feel people are very calm and very peaceful. You see a lot of love coming from them. You know, you get this connection with people that is incredible. I feel at home.”
Remaining rooted in her African musical identity while speaking to an international audience is effortless for the artist. She makes the balance look easy, maintaining a fierce loyalty to her Malian roots.
“How to be still in touch with our connection, between us and our ancestors and our roots? It’s quite easy in Mali because there we have many artists before me, like Toumani Diabaté, Salif Keita, Ali Farka Touré,” she explains.
“They won the Grammy as traditional artists. So for us, they are our example. We don’t see other people as an example. So we start with the experience first, then we open the same experience to the rest of
the world.
“But we can always combine the traditional with the modern, you know, contemporary music. But we need to keep their roots because in Mali it’s the way it is and we grew up like that. They did it all. They’ve been famous for being themselves.
“For us, it’s totally normal to sing in our native language. There is no doubt. For me, it’s normal because the native language has a lot of energies that the world needs to feel.
“Every word that I will be speaking tonight to my audience, for sure, it will take them, their soul to another place. And that’s what music’s about also. The diversity. The native language is stronger and beautiful.”
During her energetic performance at the CTIJF, filled with high-notes and dancing, Diawara honoured her ancestral roots.
She donned a mask which she typically wears when performing. The mask-wearing segment of her performances has become a much-anticipated moment for her fans. The singer wears the mask towards the end of her performances, specifically the Gouro Zaouli mask from Côte d’Ivoire, as a way to embody her African artistic expression while celebrating ancestral history.
The mask also serves as a way in which she merges West African tradition with an electric, contemporary edge.
At the heart of Diawara’s craft is a commitment to storytelling and activism.
She is intentional in using her platform as a form of activism and her work often carries strong messages around identity, women’s rights and social justice.
Diawara is a prominent activist against female genital mutilation (FGM). Having survived the procedure herself as a child, she uses her music to shed light on the inhumane and harmful practice.
“Being this way is like … that was normal. When I started to sing, I decided to share my own story,” she says. “And it wasn’t that easy. It’s never easy. You live with your past. It will stay. You adapt yourself on how to live with it.
“My aim … the fact that I was an actress at the beginning and when I started to introduce myself to the music industry, I said: ‘Okay, you come with your truth, then you will save time. Don’t try to pretend. Be yourself. Then you will catch up with people right away.’ And the best way for me to be myself was to open my spirit to the people.”
The musician addresses the harms of FGM in her music. Her song Sete and its accompanying video serve as a stark, necessary indictment of FGM, emphasising her belief that breaking the silence is the first step towards healing and reform.
For Diawara, storytelling is not just an artistic choice but a lifelong process of reckoning. She speaks about her experiences with a quiet resolve, framing them as fragments of a much larger narrative unfolding.
“The best way was to tell my little experience as a woman from Africa coming from a very strong tradition and how I could struggle,” she says, situating her journey alongside those of other FGM survivors.
It is not a story she treats as finite or resolved but one that continues to evolve in real time. “Like tonight, I’m still fighting … It’s like telling my story. It’s gonna be forever because every year is a new story to share.”
She likens this process to writing a book. Each performance, each song adding another page. Through that lens, her music becomes both archive and testimony, a space where personal memory meets collective experience.
When she turns to the issue of FGM, her tone sharpens. She challenges the framing of the practice as inherently African, pushing back against narratives that obscure its complexity and origins. For Diawara, confronting FGM through music is not optional; it’s a responsibility.
“Those kinds of sensitisations … through the music, I think it is our duty to bring the change,” she says, positioning art as both a cultural mirror and a tool for reform.
That sense of purpose extends to how she understands music. For Diawara, it exists far beyond entertainment. It is spiritual, communal and deeply political. She speaks of it as “the voice of God”, a universal language capable of carrying difficult truths across borders
and generations.
In her view, the weight of the stories she tells is not an act of complaint but of affirmation. By sharing them, she hopes to reframe how African narratives are understood, not as deficit but as depth and richness. “We are not poor people … we are even too rich,” she says, reframing struggle within a broader context of cultural abundance.
Ultimately, her work circles back to a call for dialogue. One that is both introspective and collective.
She advocates for a careful balance: preserving what is meaningful within tradition while interrogating what is harmful.
“It’s good to keep some stuff … the respect between each other and many things that our ancestors have been building for us,” she reflects.
She is equally clear about what must be left behind. Practices such as FGM, violence against women
and arranged marriages, she insists, have no place in the future she is helping to shape.
“Those kinds of things that our generation doesn’t name,” she says. “We don’t need those things.”