Didier Awadi

Awadi is one of the most visible figures of African francophone rap. Laureate of the 2003 RFI Musiques du Monde (World Music) prize, he has had the path of a pioneer and trailblazer in a genre that has in recent years come to dominate amongst young people in Africa and across the planet. With his group Positive Black Soul he has produced several albums distributed in Europe and the United States. At once an artist and entrepreneur, Didier Awadi is an excellent example of this generation who astutely creates, takes up and uses the technological possibilities of the modern world as well as the long-standing cultural knowledge of the continent. He places all of this at the service of a music that is always conscious, a music of roots and of messages through which he addresses the world, because he has things to say. In his first solo album, Parole d’honneur (“Word of Honour”), released in 2001 uniquely in Senegal, Awadi displayed his judicious pan-Africanism, dealing with a multitude of crucial matters such as debt, squandered cultural heritage and political tensions. In Un autre monde est possible (“Another World is Possible”), Awadi engaged once again with the multiple musical sounds of the world, woven with intelligent texts for a large-scale awakening of consciousness so that all together we can be certain that another world is possible. Awadi is also the founder of Studio Sankara, an agency working in audiovisual production and events management where he has trained large numbers of young artists in the neighbourhood of his childhood.