| While Angola was still a Portuguese colony, Bonga was an outspoken supporter of independence. A warrant for his arrest was issued in Angola for "Mona Ki Ngi Xica" lyrics, forcing him to move nomadically between Germany, Belgium and France until Angola's independence. In this song he sings about having to leave his child behind to escape mortal danger |
| As post-colonial life in Angola disintegrated into corruption, squalor, brutality, and an interminable and bloody civil war, Bonga remained critical of the political leaders on all sides. Bonga's voice of peace and conscience continues to make him a hero to the people of Angola. He remains fiercely dedicated to the ideal of nonviolence, he states simply: "We must live without harming others." |
| In this song, Yannick Noah (Cameroon / France) sings about Angela Davis, who has been involved in the black liberation movement in the USA for over four decades. An educator and activist for civil rights, she was incarcerated for 16-month before her release on bail from county jail. Eventually an all-white jury returned a verdict of not guilty. |
| Tito Paris was born in Cape Verde to a musical family. He is a singer and musician (mainly playing guitar and bass) with a long career behind him. Tito Paris moved as a young man to Portugal. He has toured numerous nations and was awarded the rank of the Commander of the Portuguese Order of Merit by President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa. |
| Grace Jones is a multitalented Jamaican model, singer, songwriter, record producer, and actress. Born in Jamaica, she moved when she was 13, along with her siblings, to live with her parents in New York. Race is something she brushes aside in favour of “universal love”, seeing as how “we’re all human beings and that’s it, so I don’t even go there.” |
| Sade is a Nigerian-Bristish singer who was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2002 for services to music, and stated her award was "a great gesture to me and all black women in England". She was promoted to Commander of the same Order (CBE) in the 2017 Birthday Honours, also for services to music. |
| Ella Fitzgerald signed a contract making her sole manager an avid civil rights activist who fought hard for equality… police once stormed into Fitzgerald's dressing room and arrested her. She was treated as a criminal. And yet, once taken to the police station, she was asked by the police officer for her autograph. |
| Duke Ellington was born in 1899 in Washington, D.C. His black middle-class family nurtured his racial pride and shielded him from many of the difficulties of segregation. He refused to play before segregated audiences. His music fueled black pride. He referred to jazz as African-American classical music. He was a figure of an artistic and intellectual movement celebrating black identity. |
| Roberta Flack - her emergence as a different kind of soul singer was set against the turbulent backdrop of America's Civil Rights movement. She has released 19 albums and won four Grammy awards. In 2005 she founded the Roberta Flack School of Music in New York, to provide music education to underprivileged students free of charge. |
| Virginia Rodriguez, described as the new diva of Brazilian music by the Times of London, started her career by singing in church choirs. She regularly appears at music festivals throughout the world, participating in several world tours. Former U.S. president Bill Clinton once said that she was the singer who he liked best in the world and mentioned her in his memoirs. |
| Gurrumul was an indigenous Australian multi-instrumentalist musician and singer. He sang stories of his land and was the most commercially successful Aboriginal Australian musician at the time of his death. |
| Waldemar Bastos was born in Portuguese Angola from black parents who were both nurses. He started singing at a very early age using his father's instruments. After the independence of Angola in 1975, at the age of 28 he fled to Portugal in order to escape the civil war. He combines Afropop, Portuguese (fado), and Brazilian influences. |