Viviane Ndour

• Saturday night I went to Yengoulene, a “cultural complex” in Dakar where one of my host sisters, Sophie, works. As we approached the place, the pattern for the neon lights made it look more like Chucky Cheese’s than a nightclub, or sorry “cultural complex.” I half expected to see a bunch of sugared up children playing arcade games chased by a man in a creepy-looking mouse outfit, and was disappointed that inside it just looked like a regular pretentious nightclub. We were there because Viviane Ndour performs there regularly on Saturdays. Viviane is the most famous female pop star in Senegal right now, and as you can guess is related to King of Senegalese Pop Youssou Ndour (see entry below, she recently divorced Youssou’s brother). She is like the Beyonce of Senegal. I usually hate it when people describe others as the “whatever of wherever” but in this case I think it’s apt because at least to me it is obvious that she is deliberately imitating Beyonce. She sings and dresses like American R&B singers. She wears a lot of fake hair like Beyonce, although I must admit that she had the best wig I have yet to see in Senegal, and considering that I see a good 25 wigs a day that is quite the accomplishment. Viviane has a Lebanese father and is therefore light-skinned like Beyonce. Granted she wouldn’t be light-skinned in the US but in Senegal she is positively “redbone.” She is lightest-skinned Senegalese-born woman I have seen so far. That the biggest female pop star in Senegal look nothing like the people of the country is scary, but don’t worry my fellow Dominicans our title as the “Most Self-Hating Group of Black People on the Planet” is still secure. One light-skinned female pop star in a country that is nearly uniformly black cannot beat centuries of self-hatred, anti-Haitianism and racial delusions.
• Unlike Beyonce, however, I got to see Viviane perform for US$6 (I imagine that the last time Beyonce performed for that little money it must have been a school play or something) and even got a chance to bump into her as she ran out of the restaurant after the show. The show itself consisted of the kind of pop mbalax songs that all sound the same (I don’t speak Wolof well enough yet to understand what the songs are about but they don’t sound much deeper than most of Beyonce’s catalog), only made interesting by the wildly energetic and acrobatic dancing. Viviane has a dancer that performs with her regularly, but about halfway through the show they started inviting people from the audience to come on stage and flash their stuff. There was also a brief interlude where various young women tried to sing some of Viviane’s songs, with some of them getting booed off-stage and one of them singing better than even Viviane. Check out her latest music video below.