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Portrait of Mauritanian musician Noura Mint Seymali
Jacob Crawfurd
Design Indaba
Cape Town, South Africa
Mauritanian musician and singer Noura Mint Seymali, was selected by Design Indaba to take part in our collaborative initiative with Google Arts & Culture, titled Colours of Africa.
Africa is known for its bold, unapologetic use of colour. Stories are told in pigments, tones and hues; a kaleidoscope as diverse as the cultures and peoples of the continent. For the initiative, we asked 60 African creatives to capture the unique spirit of their country in a colour which represents home to them.
The projects they have created are personal and distinct stories of Africa, put into images, videos, texts and illustrations. Each artist has also attempted to articulate what being African means to their identity and view of the world.
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- Title: Portrait of Mauritanian musician Noura Mint Seymali
- Creator: Jacob Crawfurd
- What it Means to be African: When we were born we opened our eyes to Africa and naturally we love the place of our birth. We were born as members of a family, a family integrated into a larger community. To be African is to be connected to the continent, its land and its people.
- Subject: Noura Mint Seymali
- Rationale: Mauritania is at its essence a transitive zone. Geographically it’s where North Africa and Sub-Saharan West Africa merge, belonging simultaneously to both and to neither. On a horizontal plane, it lies at the convergence of two unfathomably vast expanses, where the great Sahara desert runs clear into the Atlantic ocean. Mauritania bonds absolutes. As such, to choose a colour that may convey its spirit we looked at the merging of primary colours into secondary colours. And sure enough, the natural result of overlaying blue Atlantic waves and golden Saharan dunes is indeed a colour that aptly captures a broader feeling of life in Mauritania: Green. Iconographic manifestations of the colour green abound in Mauritanian street culture as the colour of the national flag, the Mouribitounes football jersey, the Mauritania Airlines logo, the Mauritanian passport, etc. Yet beyond the obvious nationalistic valences, green also carries a certain spiritual resonance as a principle colour in Islam. Mosque walls, prayer mats, book bindings may all be found in green, material artifacts that compose a motif in parallel to the more abstract, symbolic nature of the green earth as divine creation. While green may not be a colour that immediately comes to mind when thinking of a desert climate, the natural world abounds with green in Mauritania, imagine the shimmering green leaves of date palms in a desert oasis, perhaps in Terjit, beckoning centuries of nomads, their tired eyes blurring the blue skies and yellow sands on the horizon into green. As a country of the Sahel, the Southern edge of the Sahara where desert transitions to Savannah, Mauritania’s Southern border with Senegal and Mali runs along the Senegal river and is a green agricultural region and population center. In towns like Kaedi and Boghé, millet and rice plants colour the banks of the Senegal river and green topped trees provide shade from the intense sun. The song we have submitted is entitled “Ghizlane”. It is an old song, sung from the perspective of a hunter who has become mesmerized by a giraffe grazing in a green oasis. He admires the beauty of the animal, reveres its grace and allows his mind to wander wistfully in the oasis in a mixture of longing and restorative dreaming in the shade. The song seeds a green vision in the mind of the listener and narratively, perhaps even chromesthesically, transports to this green moment from long ago. A hunter’s private moment of respite in a green oasis is conjured and regenerated like the branches of the shady trees populating the vision by the intergenerational song of the griot. Song Lyrics: Ghizlane: Just now I visited the oasis, Where there were tall ghouane trees, There I saw many giraffes standing among the nomads. Water ran through the pastures, And I saw the giraffes running. Oh, if only I could run behind the herd without being detected, The giraffe is light on its feet, but I am slow and heavy. I cannot even pivot with ease. Yet life is long and one day I will catch this magnificent animal. Life is long, but one day I will catch him. I’m following these impossible footsteps, The giraffe is light, but I am heavy. I follow the footsteps to an impossible end.
- Project: Colors of Africa
- Location: Mauritania
- Lead Quote: The natural result of overlaying blue Atlantic waves and golden Saharan dunes is indeed a colour that aptly captures a broader feeling of life in Mauritania: Green.
- Hex Code: 5DBC8A
- Colour Choice: Ghizlane Green
- Biography: Musician and singer Noura Mint Seymali is the Islamic Republic of Mauritania's most prominent performing artist. Drawing deep on the timeless repertoire of the Moorish griots (storytellers and musical poets of old West Africa), her music has been described as a "a full blown sandstorm of hypnotic grooves, melding traditional Mauritanian instruments, like the ardine and tidinite, within an electrified psychedelic rock band” by the UK-based Quietus website. Hers is a powerful voice of a changing Africa. Seymali and her band’s debut album Tzenni (2014) was hailed as "arguably the best psych/blues album of the year" and it's follow up album, Arbina (2016), was described as "the best album in the universe" by Vice/Noisey. Expanding a sound born of Arab and Sub-Saharan roots, Seymali bends the arc of Moorish musical tradition to fit our contemporary era, almost creating a genre of her own. At the African Union's first-ever AFRIMA awards, Seymali was named Best Female Artist from North Africa. Though performances at major venues like globalFEST (USA), Festival-au-Desert (Mali), Roskilde (Denmark), The Barbican (UK), Summerstage-Central Park (NYC), The Kennedy Center (DC), WOMEX (Spain) and Lowlands (Netherlands) and collaborations with artists like Damon Albarn, Baaba Maal, Tinariwen, Spoek Mathambo, Oumou Sangare and Shabazz Palaces the band is actively exposing Mauritanian roots music to the world.
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