Music, art and sport: what you’re missing in Senegal

Fresh from releasing his 41st album this spring, Senegalese music legend Youssou N’Dour is once again ­touring the world. Last week, he lit up the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and Brooklyn’s Kings Theatre. Before that, he appeared at Burna Boy’s concert at the Stade de France in Paris.

N’Dour pioneered Mbalax, a dance music genre that fuses West African musical traditions with jazz, soul and Latin pop. It’s heavy on drums and has rich vocals, drawing on the region’s griots (storytellers).

N’Dour has won several major awards in a career spanning five decades and is probably Senegal’s biggest export. His foray into ­politics was less successful though – he hoped to run for president in 2012 but was blocked on a technicality; when the opposition leader Macky Sall won, he briefly made N’Dour his tourism minister.

Another son of Senegal making waves internationally is Alioune Diagne, who has held his US debut show in New York after becoming the first Senegalese artist to show at the Venice Biennale last year.

Titled Jokko (“connection” in the Wolof language), the exhibition tackles an issue that has come to dominate the lives of young Senegalese: migration. The paintings juxtapose scenes of life in Senegal with New York’s cityscape. Markets, fishing boats and Senegalese wrestlers appear alongside skyscrapers and Black Lives Matter protests.

It aims to inspire young Africans who gaze across the Atlantic. “I want to show them that there is a future for them on the African continent,” said Diagne.

Basketball is growing in ­popularity across football-obsessed Africa. The US National Basketball Association has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into developing a fan base on the continent.

This month, the Dakar Arena is hosting the Sahara Conference stage of the relatively new Basketball Africa League, with four teams – from Senegal, Cape Verde, Tunisia and Angola – vying for two spots in June’s play-offs in Pretoria, South Africa.

“More Senegalese are beginning to love basketball,” one attendee of the Basket Africa League in Dakar told France 24. “The atmosphere here is exceptional.”