This song by Bernard Lavilliers, Black and whiteevokes a singer, and it is full of references to Africa – Mandela, Fela Kuti, the chorus in Lingala, a language of the Congo; but Bernard Lavilliers would later say that he was also thinking of the singer Geraldo Vandré, tortured under the military dictatorship in Brazil.
And, obviously, this song resonates in the situation of the writer Boualem Sansal, arrested in Algeria. This arrest obviously outrages the world of letters – Nobel Prize winners Annie Ernaux, Jean-Marie Le Clézio, Orhan Pamuk and Wole Soyinka – hundreds of writers including Salman Rushdie, and the French Academy are demanding his release.
But dictatorships like to lock up artists, and the song often repeats this to us, as, for example, about the Argentinian pianist Miguel Angel Estrella.
In the second episode of These songs that make the news? broadcast this weekend, you hear excerpts from:
Bernard Lavilliers, Black and white, 1986
Michel Berger, Diego, free in his head, 1983
Daniel Balavoine, Strike with your head (To the Argentine writer), 1983
Johnny Hallyday, Diego, free in his head, 1991
Abd Al Malik, Césaire (Brazzaville via Oujda), 2008
Tryo, Mrs Roy, 2008
Guy Béart, The Truth, 1968
Christian Olivier, The Concert at the station, 2023
Christian Olivier, At the bottom of hell, 2023
Christian Olivier, The Hache, 2023
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