“You have to twirl your tongue twice before you say anything,” says Fadda Freddy.

Sounds strange coming from a rising star in rap and hip-hop, where spontaneous, frenzied rhyme-spouting is the norm. But Freddy and his two partners, Aladji Man and N’Dango D, choose their words carefully to promote change in their native Africa.

Their song “Exodus” points to the depletion of young talent in their homeland. Other tracks speak out against rampant corruption and poverty, but without the gansta lyrics most Americans are accustomed to in rap.

“We realized it was not our reality, trying to use a gangster model in a country where, first of all, people need to eat.”

They come from Dakar, the capital of Senegal, and call themselves Daara J, which means “school of life.” Freddy and D started jamming together as classmates and later met Man in a Sengalese club as American hip-hop was booming there in the early ‘90s. Each is in his early 30s and married with children.

Their appearance at the Lincoln Center Festival is the group’s first major one in the United States. They will perform with Grammy-nominated Haitian-American hip-hop artist Wyclef Jean. While in the city, the group intends to collaborate with other artists, such as Lauryn Hill, on their next album, already in the works.

Their latest, “Boomerang” (2003), has topped charts in Europe. The songs move to the furious tempo of rap, mixed with reggae and African drum beats. You can easily tap your feet to “Bopp sa Bopp” or shake your head to “Hip Hop Civilization.” You may not always understand the lingo, since the bulk of the songs’ lyrics are in French or African dialects, but you can still sense, for example, the hope expressed in “Esperanza.”

As a child, Freddy says, he listened to hip-hop from America, where the style, he says, “grew up.” But, he says, hip-hop was born in Africa, with traditional rhythms such as tasso, and the slave trade brought it to America. It has come full circle and returned home, like a boomerang – hence the album title.

Now that the music’s matured, where to take it next?

“Hip-hop can choose where to go and what to be. We are in the era of freedom,” he says

Onstage, the members of Daara J dance as much as they sing, especially to the title track, “Boomerang.”

“We dance just like crazy people, jump upside down, fall to the crowd, that’s the vibe,” Freddy says.

The trio is now based in Paris, where they feel closer to the hip-hop industry but can return often to their homeland “to recharge our batteries,” Freddy says. “All the energy we got, we got from Africa.”

-Margaret K. Collins