Thionne Seck—perhaps the purist vocal talent in an extraordinary cohort of male Senegalese singers that includes Youssou N’Dour, Baaba Maal, Omar Pene and Ismael Lo—died on March 14th. Seck first took it to the stage with Orchestra Baobab. After Baobab faded in the early 80s, Seck formed his band Le Raam Daan, which enabled him to compete (not always in a spirit of perfect amity) with Youssou N’Dour. (SenTv made much of N’Dour’s visit to Seck’s grieving family.)
Seck and N’Dour shared a reverence for Cheikh Amadou Bamba, founder of Mouridism, a West African Sufi sect. Mourides were (and continue to be) defenders of difference. Born out of conflict with imperial France and imperial Islam, the sect refused to disown West-African traditions. Instead of submitting to hegemonic cultures, they invented their own version of Islam, which is manifest every year at the Grand Magal of Touba—an annual pilgrimage to a city with a grand mosque that offers Mourides a homegrown alternative to the Hajj.
Bamba was a true Sufi. Allah meant everything to him. His Islam contained multitudes. It was marked by synchronic Christian moves (as well as proto-Rastafarian turns)—Bamba was rumored to have prayed on water, etc. During a generation of struggle with French colonialists that started during the last decade of the 19th C., he provided a model of non-violent resistance (though he was more of a cultural radical than a political one). The French finally realized it made sense to accommodate Mouridism since Bamba wasn’t asking his followers to throw out the colonialists. (The French even tried to give him a Legion d’honneur in 1917, but he refused it.)
In the wake of 9/11 and the (ongoing) upsurge of Islamist terror in this century, Mourides realized Bamba’s life lessons had a new resonance in a world that needed to hear about an exemplary Muslim who embodied anti-colonialism, religious tolerance and non-violence. Both N’Dour and Seck made Mouride-y CDs in the oughts that were meant to reach international audiences. Long before that, though, Seck sang lead on Orchestra Baobab’s “Mouhamadou Bamba.” (Listen below.) That praise-song is for the ages but it’s also of its time. The band had surely heard “Hotel California.” (Not that Senegalese tend to bow to the West. I’m thinking just now of a Sen in exile who fell in love with Ritchie Valens’ “La Bamba” after hearing it on a NYC Oldies station; she assumed Valens was calling out to the founder of Mouridism!)
Thionne Seck is survived by, among others, his son Wally Seck—a popular singer whose voice sounds a lot like his pop’s, though (from this distance) it seems smaller. I once saw Pop Seck sing at S.O.B.’s—a mid-sized club in the Village. Seck’s music was made for dancers but he rarely moved when he was on stage. (Youssou N’Dour, by contrast, often dances though his steps seem forced compared to those of natural groovers in his band or in the second line of any crowd with a Senegalese tinge.) When I heard Seck at S.O.B.’s, the power of his voice and his stillness on stage reminded me of that biblical line from an American gospel song: “Stand still and know.” B.D.