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Feature: Student Groups Help Malian Musician Fight Malaria
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The Canadian Jewish News, Feature: Student Groups Help Malian Musician Fight Malaria >>
By: ZIONA EYOB
Special to The CJN
Vieux Farka Touré, the 25-year-old son of the the late two-time Grammy Award-winning Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, performed at LaTulipe two weeks ago.
The event was organized by several student groups including Hillel Montreal at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and the Université de Montréal, as well as Students Helping Others Understand Tolerance (SHOUT) and Africa is Real.
Touré’s tour manager, James Brenner, 25, says Hillel “just kind of stepped up and had this great idea about bringing all these groups together and helping us promote the malaria awareness campaign we’re currently executing on this tour.”
As a part of Touré’s Fight Malaria campaign, 10 percent of the proceeds from his self-titled debut album benefit malaria relief in Mali.
Brenner, who founded Touré’s record label, Modiba Productions, with Eric Herman, 23, says that “malaria kills more people than AIDS does in Africa overall.”
Brenner adds that the two epidemics are inter-related as people with AIDS are much more susceptible to getting malaria because of the depression of the immune system.
Brenner and Herman are Jewish (Touré is Muslim). “We both have a strong cultural background in Judaism, which has informed a lot of our ethical stances,” Brenner says. “We were certainly happy to work with the Jewish groups here.”
Brenner says that though Touré’s music is clearly influenced by his father’s “desert blues of Mali,” his talents remain distinct from his father’s music.
Touré’s La Tulipe show has launched a series of Hillel programs.
“These programs are based on causes that we think unite a lot more than the Jewish community, causes that are pertinent and taken to heart by a lot of people, such as AIDS, genocide and malaria,” says Dan Hadad, director of Public Affairs at Centre Hillel.
“We felt that by bringing a program like that we could build bridges with other student associations such as the African Students Association of Concordia and UQAM, Amnesty International at both UQAM and Université de Montréal, the Black Student Network from McGill.
“We hope [the new program] is going to be a success. What we do know is that these relationships that we’ve built are really going to last for the long term and that events like this will happen more often because it’s more important to build bridges and have relationships outside of the community,” Hadad says. 03/22/07 >> go there
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