Beni Fadi: the musician singing to save his culture
A hometown pride accompanies music of all genres. It’s a hometown pride which sees Liam Gallagher attend Manchester City games every weekend and constantly tweet about them. A hometown pride which makes Sheffield street artists don pub walls with images of Jarvis Cocker. A hometown pride which made Jamie T wear an AFC Wimbledon shirt during a headline set at Finsbury Park. But for some artists, representing where you come from isn’t important just because you want to pay homage to it. Across the ocean, in the case of Beni Fadi, he is making music in an attempt to really put his home on the map and stop his culture from disappearing entirely.
Beni belongs to the Bédik people, who are the smallest and least-known ethnic group in Senegal. The Bédik people once lived up in rocky hills, where it is said they fled fighting in other parts of the country and decided to take refuge in a more secluded area. Since then, given they live in such a hard-to-reach place, life has never been easy. There is no school, pharmacy or store, and when the water eventually ran out, life became too difficult and Beni reluctantly decided to leave.
He found himself studying English in Dakar. It was here he realised just how little everyone knew of his people and his culture. When he revealed the name of his people, nobody had any idea who he was referring to. The Bédik people’s isolation meant that, for generations, young people had left in order to live in the big cities. Traditional ceremonies, songs and dances have been forgotten, and only around 3,000 people to this day speak their language, Mënik.
Fadi decided to put his energy into preserving his people’s culture and language by applying it to one of the most universal languages that there is: music. He got instrumentals from the internet and set to work. He released a coupé-décale-style track, which made him a household name back home, but didn’t travel much further than that. He decided to try and televise his people as well in an effort to increase exposure even more.
Fadi left his English degree to pursue video production and editing, eventually getting hired as an editor by Dakar TV channel DTV before going to film a traditional Bédik ceremony called Gamond. The film was finished, broadcast on DTV, and is still available to view on YouTube.
Fadi was hired for more videography work off the back of his film. While filming a music video for singer Kalito, he met a Swiss man called Cortega, who is a DJ, producer and the founder of the ElectrAfrique collective. “I see this young guy directing a music video, and he tells me about his approach,” says Cortega, who ended up pitching a collab to Fadi which would see him work with electro producers. Cortega hoped the producers would bring “electro music to give it visibility, and he would bring his culture and language, his vision, to make a joint project.”
After a lot of hard work, the result was the Farkoko EP, a bouncy electronic EP made up of four tracks that are impossible not to nod your head to. The Bédik language, Mënik, though not well known, lends itself to electronic music incredibly well, and Fadi has a sweet-sounding voice that is incredibly easy to get along with. The success of the EP took Fadi on tour, where he did shows in Paris and Berlin. “Electro is universal,” he said, “It’s not always easy to sing Mënik to it, but it leaves no one indifferent… in Daka, Paris or Berlin, it’s extraordinary to see people moving even without understanding the lyrics.”
Beni Fadi is living proof of the accessibility of music and how it can be used as insight into other cultures. Despite not understanding the lyrics to his EP, it is clearly a celebration, one of both music and where he is proud to call home. A dwindling population have now been taken to the masses, their language danced to by people who don’t understand a word of it, and their culture celebrated worldwide, all because of Beni Fadi. His approach to music and the Farkoko EP is not only an excellent attempt to celebrate the Bédik people but also a champion of music’s power and a testament to sound itself.
